Mike and Antonia returned from a 24 hour excursion to a high mountain refuge, followed by lunch at a friend’s on the way back. I had my reasons for not going, but the main one was that I wanted to get some work finished. Antonia returned full of vulgar jokes, barbaric markings (felt-tip pen), and tall traveler’s tales.

She had seen many things she half understood: a cannon at the top of a mountain with a man standing beside it… she saw this through binoculars, but nobody else saw it… her friend M. was to attend a ceremony where he was to give everyone bread and say something she couldn’t quite remember about bodies … (First communion. She was heartily shocked when I told her her friend was a Christian! It’s not as if we keep her in a box or anything, but she hadn’t put all the bits of information together)…

… She had the judgment of character and the temerity to ask the Master of the House what kind of child he liked least. He replied, “The kind that tears the House apart.” … She had enough experience of her nearest and dearest to drag her father through the door of the House before his parting remarks on WiFi were concluded, lest they miss lunch … She made some accurate observations on the behaviour of dogs, especially young partially trained ones … Her remarks on natural history were detailed, but astonishing: she saw foxgloves of every colour of the rainbow, or was it bluebells? She saw a multi-coloured spider, the size of my big toe, which shot liquid at them from its bottom (spinnarets?) She was able to assure everyone it was venomous, which she had on the authority of all of her grandparents. (One of these experts is more than usually ignorant of nature, and they all live 6000 miles apart, so I don’t know how they came to know the same kinds of spider) … Oh! and by the way, she saw a marmot from the window of the refuge in the morning. Now that does sound accurate, and even exciting, as they are shy.

I was completely fascinated. If a child’s willingness to tell you everything they have been doing and seeing is an indicator of a good relationship, then there is nothing wrong with ours. True, we fell out only ten minutes later, over the question of whether I would hang around acting as her lady-in-waiting while she teased me incessantly with names I dislike, or whether I would, instead, go and chat with my husband. But, she didn’t exactly clam up on me then either.

I went downstairs to chat with my husband. I told him it was lucky we had a dentist appointment for Monday, since the main part of my crown (of which I lost a chunk about 2 months ago) came out last night, and was now sitting in our house museum. He said, “I told you so! Didn’t I tell you so? Well it’s no good expecting me to do anything about it now!”. I replied that I hadn’t asked him to do any thing about it, and he said: “Of course you didn’t…. BUT, if you HAD, I wouldn’t have been able to.”

So there.

With my translation project slowly drawing to a close, nothing would do but I must sign up with the Open University again.  I was missing it!  And as Antonia becomes more independent I am starting to look towards my plan for a Masters degree and eventually perhaps a doctorate.  Starting in September I will be taking a course in archaeology.  I have lots of other plans and my dear husband is quaking in his boots, in fear of their cost.  I don’t blame him either, it’s appalling how much extra I have to pay by living in Europe.

I don’t think my next course will qualify me to work on digs or anything like that, but I hope I’ll have the background to understand archaeology as it applies to areas of art history I’m interested in.  In the meantime, I’ve realised that I’m not going to be able to approach future study in the same leisurely manner I adopted in the past.  I’m going to have to squeeze my reading, and writing too, into short, intensive bursts, surrounded by periods of interruption.  These are not my best working conditions.

So… I’m developing a new method of note-taking, that involves taking the notes before reading the book.  (I love typing that with a straight face).  Seriously, though, I’ve decided it will make my life easier if my notes are based on the expanded book structure, and I can get the first part of that from the table of contents and headings.  I insert extra parts that might have been subheadings if the authors had chosen to go wild in that particular direction. Then I can quickly scan it and markup any parts that are likely to be relevant for particular questions, and include any further research or action items I need to do in separate headings.  I use a mindmapping software called FreeMind for this.  So far it seems to be working quite well.  I am finally working on reading my way properly through Archaeology: Theories, Methods and Practice as an introduction to the course which I think may be more content based.  It is a thick tome full of useful, well, theories, methods and practices many of which are more applicable to some interests than others.  So far I am getting through it pretty quick so maybe my method works!

I’ve done huge amounts of reading this week.  The hard thing is going to be finding the right balance.

Mike claims that Carpe Diem means ‘seize the carp’!

We all know perfectly well that this is not the case.  But today we seized the one day in the foreseeable past and future when it was not raining and we did not have some prior engagement, and took off to a water garden not too far from where we live.  It was beautiful and interesting, with plants in flower, petrifying fountains, insects, sculptures, water chimes, … and coach-loads of school kids getting their education.

I was able to observe that Antonia’s allergy to school has not decreased one little bit.  Whenever she saw them, she headed determinedly in the opposite direction.  We still got close enough to see that they spent their time being herded around in crocodile formation, getting told off for taking up space and making noise and being lectured about plant types.  I’m still kind of wondering if they actually learned more from this experience than my kid did.  I half suspect that neither the school-kids nor Antonia actually ingested that much new information.  What I do know is that she had a lovely time appreciating and observing everything the garden had to offer.

I think the school kids were mostly bored.  The other interesting thing that happened is that as the garden was fairly small and closed, we told Antonia she could go where she liked as long as she was on the paths.  Practically as soon as she was out of our sight, one of the gardeners assumed that she was with a school party and either lost or playing truant and ordered her back to her guardians.  That was kind of strange!

All in all we had a nice time, and as I type the rain has set back in again.

We’re having a bit of a lull from anything in the way of nice homeschool/learning experiences, because Antonia is in the grip of hay fever.  But on Saturday it rained hard and on Sunday she was able to go to the village fair.  Here is the coolest thing she got up to:

Of course, she had put on her long and pretty summer dress, just in case any of her little boyfriends should be there… as they were!  I never saw a climbing wall like this before.  It comes all folded up on a van which tips on its end and unwraps the side walls.  Apparently she made it all the way to the top, at 2 Euros a throw (that’s nearly 3 dollars in today’s money).

And she’s been saving up her pocket money so that she could buy this swing chair she really wanted:

We agreed to pay for half of it when she had saved up the other half. That meant she had to save the equivalent of $31, which took her two and a half months.  Of course, after all that effort her Daddy had to hang it up immediately, no matter how tired he might be… otherwise… it’s the screwdriver treatment.  I must say I think we adults got our money’s worth on this chair as well.  It is very nice and cosy to rock in and read stories to her.  Now all we need is for her to remove some of those obstacles from the floor, so we don’t hurt our feet.

One of the few ways in which I follow my parent’s method of bringing up children is in training Little Miss to notice that not everything I say to her is necessarily true.  She has become quite good at noticing some of my more outrageous remarks, and her motto is “Never Trust a Mummy!”  There is supposed to be an “…or anyone else for that matter”, on the end of that, but we’re still working on it. Anyway, just lately, she has started to overcompensate. She did not believe my statements that the universe would take at least a few billion years to cross in a rocket ship, or the one about the oysters making pearls.  I’m actually quite pleased with this development.

So, she’s started to crosscheck things with her Daddy, which is so/so.  When I suggested she might have to look things up on the Internet to see if I was telling the truth, she said “but the Internet might be wrong”.  Actually, I’m very, very pleased.

One week down, and I think tonight’s the night we beat the jetlag.  She didn’t get to sleep till 11.00 the last several nights, but this morning she forced herself up before 7.00.  So far she’s been in tears over nothing at least 8 times and it’s only lunch time.  She still has a dance class to get through, but I think she’ll sleep tonight!  A week is a long time to be this subdued. Jetlag is not good for kids or anyone, and if she were not homeschooled, she would have been wasting her time showing up in class this week.  Jetlag is one of those regular features of her life that I can’t do much to prevent.

Sure enough, things are thoroughly back to normal here.  The jet-lagees ended up bouncing me from my bed for the second night in a row.  It was just simpler to go and sleep in Antonia’s room.  I was bounced from her bed at an early hour of the morning, supposedly to go and pick up a car from the garage and do various other essential errands.  By the time we reached town we noticed it was a bank holiday, so the errands were canceled.  We’ll have to do them tomorrow instead of going for a walk.  It turned out the garage man was joking when he said our car would be ready for us.  So I might as well have stayed in bed.

We did go for a nice lunch in town, in any case, there was nothing to eat in the house.  Then we got home and since Mike is back the phone started ringing like crazy and hasn’t really stopped since, which drives me crazy. Then we got involved in some long and tangled attempt to reorganise a social plan that was made a month ago, which has numerous knock on consequences, potential for hurt feelings, and just generally leaves you feeling that the best solution is to fold at this point and forget it.

I got nothing whatsoever of any consequence done today, and I enjoyed about one and a half hours of it.  I’m feeling a bit down.

My three weeks of holiday end tomorrow.  Little Miss and Big Mister will be back and we’ll be back to full-time homeschooling!  I thought I would take stock of what I did and didn’t do for the last three weeks.  Did I claw my way back into a healthy, normal adult life?

1. I did meaningful work other than parenting and educating a child.  Paid, too…
2. I spent an average of 15 minutes a day on housework and errands instead of well over an hour.
3. I stopped reading books as a kind of mental pacifier and began reading them for interesting content again.
4. I got to the gym for an average of 1.5 hours every day.  The part I needed most was the stretching.  I seize up completely if I don’t stretch.
5. I got to hang out with some friends as an individual instead of one of the family group.

On the other hand….

1. I did not really recover anything resembling a sense of self.  This is bad news, as I’d always manged to do this on my little holidays before.  On the other hand, I did stop feeling completely obliterated.
2. I did not become wildly enthusiastic about any new projects, or even about the various events that are already scheduled in my next few months.  That’s also bad news, and I always had before.  Yesterday, I toyed with the idea of beginning to investigate ways in which I could pursue my art history research interests at some time in the future… right!  Beginning to investigate future pursuits is an activity I know I’ll be giving up starting tomorrow.
3. I totally failed to make headway on any significant tasks other than the paid work project.
4. Not only did I leave my existent bad habits right where they were, I even gravitated to my natural student-like lifestyle again, which in my case means dining on pizza while watching Red Dwarf at 3am, then getting up at about 11am.  Actually, I might transfer that to the positive side of this little assessment.

I’m not sure if I’m quite breaking even, but what can I do?  I’m looking forward to seeing my two kids again, anyway.  Three weeks is a long time without them.  I just wish they were a bit more autonomous.  And I do mean both of them!

I have come to the conclusion that I’m 85% certain that a certain Expelled movie is one big hoax and joke, admittedly in rather bad taste, what with the whole Holocaust thing. I want to be the first to rumble them. I have several arguments in favour of my theory. Argument one is the Argument from Authority and the Argument from Generalising from Anecdote combined. I am an expert on American humour. After all, I’m married* to an American. American humour goes like this:

During the first, lengthy stage, the American will try to unnerve you by treating your sparkling wit and brilliant repartee to dirty looks. During this phase they will also utter a number of ‘ideas’ which… well… how can I put this politely? I can’t. But they will appear to be taking themselves seriously. (viz. normal behaviour of creationists and ID-ers)

In the second stage, when you are least expecting it, the American will fire off an ‘idea’, but this time it’s a false one, almost completely indistinguishable from the real ones, but specifically designed to let them have a good laugh while you’re figuring it out. (viz. Expelled)

Finally, the American will be overcome by his own hilarity and collapse on the floor guffawing, leaving you to feel like a fool for ever believing that anyone could seriously put forward such nonsense.

Viz. just you wait! – it seems clear to me that the Expelled crew must be rapidly approaching the third stage.

My second argument is the Argument from Faith. It is simply impossible that human beings acting in good faith could be as incompetent, ignorant and stupid as these people appear to be. That sort of thing comes from an attitude of “let’s see how far we can push it before someone clicks”.

My third argument is the Argument from Symbolic Coincidence. Their film was released within three weeks of April Fool’s Day. Clearly, a release on the first would have been too obvious. Clearly, they’re thinking April Fool.

***** quick addition: President Nixon’s court jester camping around in his short trousers is a bit of a give away, as well!

Conclusion: any minute now they’re going to start laughing and shrieking “got y’all jumping up and down, didn’t we!”

No amount of contrary evidence will sway me from my conclusion, of course. We all know that evidence is completely out of fashion, so there’s no point even bothering.

If anyone happens here who hasn’t heard of Expelled, consider yourself fortunate, you’re missing the laugh of the decade. If you want to know, check out Expelled Exposed or almost any blogger on ScienceBlogs.

* happily, though I’m expecting a few dirty looks for this piece of work.

Phew! My little translation job is taking more out of me than I had imagined. I am really, really glad to have these three weeks on my own, because it’s taking an awful lot of concentration. I don’t think it was really going to be compatible to be actively homeschooling a six-year old and doing this at the same time. Not for me anyhow, but I do tend to be a bit distractible. My bonus for all this work is that I’ve found out a whole bunch of things about Tibetan Buddhism that I didn’t know before. Very interesting.

This is one of the places in the book, Phuktal (or Phugtal) Gompa. Wow!

At the start of the translation process, my colleague and I just read the book to see what was in it. I needed to get a feel for the structure, the ambience and so on. We both felt that the grammatical structure was not very appropriate for English. I’ll leave out the grammatical details, but we decided to shift the whole tense structure and that has quite a lot of repercussions. It’s hard to keep track of when I’m dealing with it, but when I read it through, it seems to work just fine. I hope we are doing the right thing. I really think we are, but it’s right on the edge of what I would consider to be within the scope of a translation.

Anyway, the next step is to translate the French very roughly into English. This is a singe. I wouldn’t say a monkey could do it, but there a plenty of translation machines that can. In this case it’s important that I do it myself because I learn the detail of what the book is saying in the process. It doesn’t really take too long anyway. Just like the stupid machines, if I get to a word I’m stuck on, I leave it in French. At the end of this, I have a monstrosity of a text that is at least mostly in English, and preserves the content of the original. It has the wrong words, the wrong sentence structure, everything is wrong, but it helps me remember what was intended in the original, and above all, it’s no longer in French. It’s important to get away from the original language because it’s amazing the linguistic pull it can have on the mind, tricking me into using turns of phrase or words that I wouldn’t normally consider. Whereas bad English is just bad English and gets fixed.

So now I have the hardest part. I have to make the author’s experience mine and completely redraft his work in English. It bears some resemblance to acting. My rotten draft has become the script and the basis for interpretation. If I can’t understand the script, I refer back to the original briefly. My author’s experiences were pretty intense and he was a very young man when he was living these events. As a good ‘actress’, I have to take all that in my stride, in fact I have to become it to some extent. It would be difficult to immerse myself properly with someone constantly asking me if it’s snack time yet, and can the snack be chocolate? I’m writing about a place where the total nutritional variety consists of about 5 items – and that’s just the cosiest part. Also, it wouldn’t necessarily be accurate to say that I’m enjoying it. I value the experience very much, but it’s quite a difficult one. Some of the events and emotions I have to describe are quite extreme, in all directions, good and bad. I catch myself wanting to put off certain sections, because I don’t really feel like processing all the emotions in them. But I have to do them anyway, because it’s not going to get any easier once these three weeks are up. Some parts are lighter and even funny. Then there are the technical linguistic difficulties, but they are par for the course. I’ve spent quite a bit of time with the thesaurus and haven’t always found the solutions I was hoping for – yet. So, I have to get all this part done before my family get back, or it will go hard with me. On top of all the emotional upheaval, I have this huge sense of responsibility for producing something of good literary quality. In the space of three weeks.

After that, there’s several phases of rereading, spell-and-grammar-checking, making sure nothing got left out, that the content came through unmangled, and that none of the presentation got screwed up, then rereading again to convince myself that I’m as happy with it as I’m going to be. But all that should be less intense.

I hope it will be OK.