Note to Any Readers I Might Still Have

I was washing the dishes tonight and plotting out another classical post and feeling sort of sorry for my readers, if any still remain. In many ways I am enjoying this new blog where I can combine all the things I used to compartmentalize into three or four blogs. After all, the philosophical ramblings, unschooly journaling, homeschool organization and health/household strategies are all ME. If I have reached 2 score and a half dozen years and still have trouble integrating it, maybe it's time to start working on that.

However, the challenge, of course, is that anyone who has followed me from one of my old blogs is probably getting whiplash ... one topic to another, most of them sort of demanding in different ways. I feel bad about that. It doesn't feel like altogether good hospitality.

I decided not to keep a statcounter on this blog because I like picturing to myself that SOME people read it but that it's a bit hidden too. That's my comfort zone. If I thought that hundreds read it I would get a strange creeped-out feeling about that. If I thought no one really read it, well, why even blog? So I'm picturing the middle zone and taking precautions to avoid disillusionment. A great way to live life, huh? ;-).

When I get immersed in a subject, particularly when I have extra leisure time as I do during the summer, it can become the filter through which I see the world. I know that recently I've been all about classical education on here. And I've been restraining myself!!! I worry it might just seem very alienating to more unschooly readers or my IRL friends and relatives who want to hear about what we're doing with ourselves, NOT find out about Quintilian or Ignatius.

A bit off the topic, but reading Tony Attwood's book on Asperger's just recently I was reminded a bit of myself and several people related to me (as I read, I kept coming across the descriptions of AS traits and thinking, "So what's supposed to be wrong with that?? sounds pretty normal to me! hey, I can relate! You know, if everyone was like that the world wouldn't be such a bad place!" I don't think I'm diagnosable but I do think there's probably an "outer edge of normal" as Steph once titled a blog and I'm probably spinning in a solar system somewhere in that territory. But there's good things about that margin -- you get a good view sometimes, for one thing).

So I was thinking that I would ask a question that Amy-who-may-be-switching-blogs-again asked once of her readers (in my case, all five of you, maybe?)

Is there anything you'd like me to blog about?

• A specific thing?
• A "type" of thing? that you miss seeing perhaps, or would like to see more of?

Now, I will let you off the hook by saying that you don't have to respond if you are just being nice and polite. I will take the intention for the deed. If I don't get any responses I won't even entertain the suspicion that no one reads here. I'll just figure people are busy with summer things.

I started calculating while I was rinsing pots, which is another geeky thing I do, and I realized that if you totalled it up like man-hours (ie, 4 people working 3 hours each = 12 man-hours), I have LOTS of individualized educational- experience-years. I have 17 school years of my own; 11 years homeschooling my oldest; 12 hsing my second; 12 years hsing my daughter; 9 years with my 4th; 7 years with my 5th; 5 years with my 6th; and 1 year with the youngest. Total: 74 educational-years if you don't count the early years through kindergarten. Wow. Do I feel old now!

Plus in a slightly passive way I've had LOTS of variety in my life -- grew up in Alaska, spent 3 years in Europe as a teen, went through complicated and rare medical crises with two kids, had 9 pregnancies and have 7 living children, constantly try to hit the happy medium between unschooling and classical homeschooling, converted to Catholicism, had an unusual set of parents who met in a hospital in Montreal and worked in Labrador after their marriage before going to Alaska, moved from reservation to reservation during my young years... and so on. I even almost got chewed up by sled dogs once, though I can't tell you much about that since I don't remember it!

Experience doesn't count for everything (Aristotle wrote to the effect that it partly depends on whether you actually LEARN from the experience) but it does seem like just by the law of averages I probably have gotten something out of all those years and all those different places.

So if you think of something that would make this blog more interesting or instructive to you, or something you like that you would like to continue to see, please feel free to leave a comment mentioning it. I'll try to incorporate it in for a change of pace, at least. And if you want to say something but don't like to leave comments or are having trouble with blogger like some have reported, you can email -- if you click through the profile on the sidebar you'll see a link to my email address, or just try highsierra12ATgmail.com (but replace the AT).