Capital Community College Foundation offers a sentence diagramming tutorial on its website, including an extremely cool Power Point presentation you can download. For free. Diagramming never made my heart go pitty-pat before, but I think I’ve just been swept off my feet.
Jane just hunted up all the historical-fiction-set-in-America she could find on our shelves. The girls’ bedroom, my bedroom, Wonderboy’s bedroom, the sewing room…it’s amazing how books migrate around the house. We shoved and shifted and managed to clear out one big shelf in the living room where all these great stories about American history could squeeze in together. Now Honest Abe can rub shoulders with Mr. I Forget His First Name Ferris, the “Really Big Wheel You Sit in and Get Kind of Queasy at the Top” guy.
Rose hasn’t read many of these books, so she was enchanted by the sight of a nice neat row of new stuff to read. Rose is a big fan of nice neat rows of anything, except cauliflower. I’ve put Jane to work arranging the books chronologically, because Rose insists upon reading them “in order.”
Since I proved a miserable failure at keeping up with the kids’ reading logs (you may have noticed their disappearance from the sidebar—I gave up the ghost a month ago), I thought I’d try a more focused kind of list. So I’m adding “Rose’s American history reading list” to the sidebar. We’ll see how it goes…
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EGGS.—To prove whether they are good or bad, hold the large end of the egg to your tongue; if it feels warm, it is new; but if cold, it is bad. In proportion to the heat or cold, is the goodness of the egg. Another way to know is to put the egg in a pan of cold water; the fresher the egg, the sooner it will fall to the bottom; if rotten, it will swim. If you keep your eggs in ashes, salt or bran, put the small end downwards; if you turn them endways once a week, they will keep some months.
—from The American Frugal Housewife
by Lydia Maria Child
