Lorehouse

Since Christmas is always here too quickly, I'm deep into Advent planning. Because I am homeschooling my oldest two, it feels possible to truly embrace and dwell in the Advent season. We are setting aside our Old Testament study just for the Advent season to do an Advent study, though I will be doing it when my daughter is out of school as well because this is important for the whole family.

It has been more than a week since the last update. Last Saturday (the 8th) my kids and I went to a friend's house to pack meals for the homeless. There is a wonderful organization in Des Moines that delivers hot meals all over the city to homeless encampments and people on Sundays. Numerous families all over the city take a weekend and make 40 meals (there are maybe 5 families per weekend). The rest of the week, the soup kitchen is open, but on Sundays the meals come to the people. We used to help my sister-in-law every month with this, even after we moved away from Des Moines, but once she got married, and I had a fourth kid, we stopped doing it so often. It was a special feeling to be back and working again.

Tintin comic incoming:

November gets a lot of weight put on it besides the impending Thanksgiving feast and Black Friday consume-a-thon. There's the recently-defunct NaNoWriMo, where people were challenged to write 50,000 words in a single month (something I'd often hoped to do but never really had time for). Then there's the weird "No-{blank} November", in which the blank could be filled with many other things like shaving. My former church used No-Shave November to raise money for adoption funds, for instance. So with this theme in mind, I was feeling severely unchill about the state of the world at the beginning of October and picked "No-Chill November" for my personal theme.

I had intended to start a new project in my Old English work. After making some progress toward it that I could show off in style, I'd then tell everyone about it. When my thesis theatre was new and fresh, I had told people I'd do something in the "poetry everybody knows and loves for the extremely specific value of everyone that includes Old English poetry enthusiasts" genre. Maybe "The Seafarer" or "The Wanderer" or "The Ruin". They're loved for a reason. Of course this also means they're pretty thoroughly researched and widely available, but I'm not trying to break fabulous new ground here, I'm trying to make things accessible in an enjoyable way.

I don't remember how old I was when I realized I was just like everyone else, but it must have been very young. I was a bookish child, and A Little Princess was my favorite book for a long time, but really I'd read anything easier than Jane Austen (I tried, I really did) until I was probably 11. Then I discovered audiobooks and it broke the wall between my brain and harder books (...like Jane Austen).

Grief is a strange acquaintance, like a ne'er-do-well cousin who turns up unexpectedly or a stray cat that wanders in and out at will. There seems no rhyme or reason to when Grief pays a visit, and you can never know how long it will stay.

Today is the autumn equinox, which Old English speakers called emniht. Emniht is itself a shortening of the longer form, efennihte, though I am only aware of one instance of the longer form (in an Anglo-Saxon abridgement of De Natura Rerum by the venerable Bede). This is the official shift from the long days and short nights of summer to the approach of winter. From there will be more dark than light, and more night that day, until the solstice, or sunn-stede.

Two days before the turning of the seasons from summer to autumn, I am building this blog.