Vignette of a Day

I retired late yesterday evening, so this morning I had to content myself with rising at the modest hour of eight to avoid the consequences of sleep deprivation. I spent the first waking half hour in bed, puzzling over the dream in which my complicity was requested in the mass execution of a number of my friends, I declined direct involvement but stood placidly by as their demise was plotted, and at the last minute roused myself to warn one of the wiser friends of the scheme via Facebook. Despite the morbid nature of the dream (or perhaps because of it?) I relished its memory as I would a poignant novel, turning it over on my tongue like hard candy until the potency of the feelings dissolved and their lingering tang faded away. I haven't remembered my dreams lately, or else they haven't been so interesting, so it was a treat to have such a meaty one to mull over. And at any rate, the darkness of that dream was countered by bright giddiness of the night's other dream in which some other of my friends moved to my street, and I delightedly declared that I should have to introduce them to my other neighbor-friends.

I dream a lot about my friends.

Once I'd pondered these things my thoughts began to descend into inane things, so I forced myself from bed and turned off my iPod-alarm, set to play my 'lively strings' playlist. I paused just after a stirring opera selection of Puccini's (I'm not quite sure why I put that one on the list, but I suppose it does feature strings). Stretching, I uncovered my bird, read the analogy of the hard-working farmer from Second Timothy, and set about to make tea. I realized after I returned to my room to practice piano I hadn't stirred in quite enough honey, but drank the tea anyhow between Reverie, Rondo Alla Turca, and a somewhat charming though inane little modern piece. (And now I've used the word twice in one paragraph. Oh well.)

When I'd practiced an hour the clock struck ten and my family was just rousing themselves. It was too late and the sun too strong to embark on my custom morning walk, so I settled down in the sunroom to chemistry, propping open eight of the fourteen windows round me to let in the morning breeze and wren's song. At some point I remembered to open the garage door for the wren family who undertook to nest in a basket perched atop a stack of boxes inside. The fledglings scurried away from the opening door.

The afternoon passed in a pleasant blur of studying and chores. I read selections from a missionary diary, an apologist text, a defense of the under-credited scientific advancements of the middle ages, and meditated on my Old Testament reading. At three-thirty, after we hastily tidied the house, a nice lady stopped by to purchase the remaining two chicks of the clutch I inadvertently allowed the silkie hens to brood. When it was ascertained the king snake or like creature who greeted them had vacated the driveway, her three-year-old son came out to play with Christian.

As the evening shadows lengthened I picnicked cross-legged on the front lawn with a biography and some celery sticks. Then finally I walked--walked down the meandering country lane laced with wild roses and Queen Anne's Lace and irises and aster and creeping purple vines and a profusion of dandelions spangling the countryside like stars in the sky--and let my mind wander.

I returned, refreshed, to finish chores, surf the web, and write a blog post. And remembered, yawning, I completely forgot to get around to math and music theory today.

And now I've described the stereotypical day in the life of a homeschooled girl.

(Unfortunately such a degree of productivity is not yet typical for me--don't think all my days have been like this! especially of late--but I'm working diligently to change that.)

I'm not really sure why I wrote all that, but some of my loyal readers (coughDonnycough) have prodded me to post for the past year and a half, and, when put to it, it's hard to think of something interesting to say.

And now the hour grows late, so I leave you with a cursorily edited blog post and a random picture of a chicken.

This is my pet rooster, Blue. He follows me everywhere and likes to be held.

Olivia Junior

“I was with book, as a woman is with child.”

- C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces

This is a pretty accurate analogy of writing. First you conceive the idea. Then it grows and grows inside of you until the bulge of it is hanging there right in front of you whatever you do. You experience strange cravings and sensations. It keeps you up at night. Then the birth pangs come, and there's nothing you can do--you just have to sit and write and write and write and write, all the while wondering if you're going to survive this--until finally, the whole thing is out of you. And when everything is through and you cradle your creation--your own flesh and blood and tears and sweat--in your arms, you forget the past hours and days and weeks and months of pain, and all you know is joy...

Okay, so it's not quite as great as that, because the next morning when you read over what you've written you often realize it's a whole lot more terrible than you remembered. I hope a mother doesn't do that.

Anyway, you witnessed the childbirth process a month ago in my post Stages of an Essay (don't worry--it's nothing graphic) and now I'm following up with the result.

I'm applying for a camp this summer held by a vet school for incoming juniors and seniors interested in the veterinary field. As part of the application students had to write an essay five hundred words or less about what area(s) of veterinary medicine they were interested in and why.

So here is my child. 499 words. And my firstborn essay*.

Unfortunately, they aren't interested in artwork, so my little masterpiece was not included.

***

     When we were young children, my friends and I had a vast array of plastic and plush horses. We formed racing stables and cattle ranches and wild horse herds, and whenever a horse fell ill or hurt itself,  I was the one to prescribe various cough syrups and poultices, or experiment with some innovative procedure made up on the spot. Over time I acquired a small library of books like The Complete Equine Veterinary Manual, The Horseman’s Veterinary Encyclopedia, and The Comprehensive Guide to Equine Veterinary Medicine. I lugged these volumes to our play dates and referenced them to give more accurate treatments to my plastic patients.

    I was unperturbed by the graphic images in those manuals of festering wounds and animals mid-operation with their bowels splayed across the table. Each morning I poured my cereal in a rush to make it to the TV in time for that day’s episode of Emergency Vets, and happily munched Cheerios while watching a cesarean section performed on a Labrador Retriever. I failed to understand why my mother was so disturbed by this.

     When I was eight or nine, I was given a little money to spend at a used book sale held by our homeschool group. As I browsed one of the tables, my eyes fell upon the heftiest volume: a tenth grade biology textbook. It was love at first sight. The best part? It was just fifty cents, perfectly within my limited budget. Passersby grinned as I proudly staggered off under its weight.

     Over the years, little has changed. My vision of an ideal Friday night still involves curling up on the sofa with a science textbook. To my parents’ dismay—and that of their wallet—my love of horses didn’t wane either. At the age of eleven, after years of riding lessons and horse camp, I adopted the pony I had gentled at a local horse rescue. She was a spooky mare that had run feral on a mountainside for nearly a decade. Over time I had earned her trust, and I taught her a number of tricks, including giving kisses, swishing her tail on command, answering “yes” and “no” to questions, and dancing the hokey pokey. The two horses I’ve acquired since then have learned a few things watching her, but so far they haven’t quite figured out the hokey pokey.

     The veterinarians around me have been very supportive, perhaps empathetic to what others see as a  slightly disturbing fascination with animal innards. I was invited to sit by and watch a foal at a nearby riding stable undergo surgery to repair an umbilical hernia, following step-by-step in a surgery manual. When it was time for my own colt to be gelded, our veterinarian handed me the emasculator and allowed me to perform one half of the operation myself. My horse still hasn’t forgiven me for it.

    I would be happy in any field of veterinary medicine, but I feel equine practice is what I’m meant to do.

***

Yep. I'm a homeschooler.

*That's right, I never had to write a formal essay before this. Aren't I lucky? I did write other scholarly stuff, but I wrote those of my own accord, which made them nerdy.

Where Has Olivia Been?

And why hasn't she been posting?

Besides the obvious--right here--and the usual--she's been too lazy busy--Olivia actually has some pretty good reasons for sealing herself from the world.

Exhibit A:

Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus.

That's right, Olivia had MRSA.

That--that purple thing was inside of her!

It's kind of paradoxical, really, that something such a pretty shade of purple could be so wicked, and in the wicked-bad kind of way rather than the wicked-good or wicked-cold kind of way.

"Um, Olivia," you say, "it's not really purple. It's only purple because smart scientist people dyed it that way so you could see it better."

"Oh, yeah, um, right. I knew that." She tugs on her blonde hair. "I just forget things sometimes!"

Still, it's a blasphemous usage of the color purple!

You might be wondering now what having MRSA entails. (And what it means: it is a staph bacterium that has mutated to be resistant to a number of antibiotics, which makes it doubly nasty.)

Well, to abridge this story, Olivia got a small pump on her leg which was very sore, and then it got very, VERY sore, and then she got more very, VERY sore sores on her legs which then burst and gushed blood and pus everywhere (it's a very, VERY good thing that Olivia takes a fascination to these things and is not easily disgusted by blood and pus, because if she were, she would have retched on top of it all). On Monday Olivia had a doctor's appointment already scheduled, and when the doctor took one look at the worst of the sores, she told Olivia's mother to take her to the ER and get admitted to the hospital.

Olivia was rather angry when she heard this. Olivia, you see, HATES hospitals. This is also a little paradoxical, because Olivia is quite fond of science and especially of medical-related things, but she LOATHES medical environments with every fiber of her being. (Her mother wants her to be a pediatrician, but Olivia says she would die to spend any more of her life in a clinical setting than she already does, and instead desires to become a large animal veterinarian, so she can largely work outdoors.) 

She also learned she has a good deal of depression which she keeps at bay by staying insanely busy, but being idle in the hospital, which is an exceedingly dark and gloomy place to begin with, put her over the edge, and she sobbed, inconsolable, for hours, even though she was responding very well to the treatment and knew she would probably get to go home very soon.

Overall, her two nights (and threeish days combined) in the hospital were a very dark and slightly traumatizing time she prefers not to think about, but she survived emotionally by reading Job (and especially 6:10) and praying (for herself and others) and reading some Hamlet (which is NOT what you should read when you need a pick-me-upper, though it is very well written), and she has a large group of truly amazing friends (and family) who prayed for her, and she responded amazingly well to the antibiotics and got to go home Wednesday, and was well enough with the doctor's permission to go to homeschool co-op Thursday, a piano lesson Friday, work on the ongoing project of revamping her room Saturday, and go antiquing and bookshopping* (you can save that footnote till you get to the end of this sentence, because that footnote is long, but you probably already read that footnote anyway, so sorry, and I'm just stretching out this paragraph now) with her mom Sunday, and resume run-on-sentencing on Monday, though the people she came into contact with treated her a bit like a leper, for which she can't really blame them, because MRSA is nasty and nobody wants it.

(And yes, she might have made that sentence super long just for the sake of it and to show you that she is much better now.)

She shall continue her antibiotics course till Thursday, and while her wounds are still a bit sore when she moves in a certain way, they are much, much improved. (She was in so much pain in the hospital, the nurses wanted her to take narcotics, but Olivia does not like feeling loopy, so she only took Tylenol, and dealt with the pain.)

Well, and there you have it: the tale of Olivia's hospital trauma experience, which turned out to be augmented rather than abridged. To (badly) paraphrase Mark Twain, she doesn't have the time to write a short post.

So hopefully now you understand why Olivia has not been up to blogging lately. Hopefully, she will blog a bit more if she finds the time once she makes up for a week unproductivity, though she doesn't really NEED to make up for it, because no one forces a school or any other schedule upon her but herself, and she was so immensely productive last semester she kind of needed a break; she just feels slightly panicky when she is not intensely productive (it probably goes back to keeping that depression at bay).


*She met two pretty cool people at Barnes & Noble. The first showed her to the Shakespeare section, and she had recently played Olivia in a production of Twelfth Night. Then, as Olivia was checking out (well, really her mother was doing the checking out, but anyway) with a rather nerdy stack of books (Twelfth Night, The Tempest, a nonfiction book on Shakespeare, Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, and Tennessee William's The Glass Menagerie) (yes, Olivia is doing a self-conducted study of drama), the woman checking them out asked which class she was in, for two classes at a nearby university were reading the latter two plays. When Olivia's mother told her that Olivia was, in fact, reading them purely for fun, and that she was a tenth grade homeschooler, the lady didn't even bat an eye, for she too had been homeschooled, and therefore understood these things.

That was almost as long as some of the footnotes in some of the editions of Shakespeare Olivia looked at. She is leaving it in a large font, to spare your eyes.

Stages of an Essay

1. Think. 

And think.

And think.

And think.

2. Write.

And write.

And write.

And write.

3. Read what has been written.

"I seriously wrote that?"

"That will never do."

4. Despair.

5. Regroup.

6. Employ Little Brother's hair-plucking services.

7. Practice aim.

8. Refocus self on task at hand.

9. Blog about it.

Well, now you know what's been holding me up lately. Maybe if I ever get this thing finished I'll start posting again.

It's times like these I'm glad I'm a self-directed learner and I never was forced to write papers of any sort. I wrote so much on my own about what I was learning my mother saw no need to constrain me to assigned essays and thereby squelch my creativity. In fact, as a child I compiled books about my studies, so why should I have been limited to mere essays?

But now I am applying for a camp, and I must write an essay to turn in with the application.

Woe is me.

Those Items which Occupy My Desk at Present

On a normal day, my desk area is neat and tidy, because I cannot work in chaos. However, my desk items are revolting, and now crowd its entire surface in protest, crying, "5% of the desktop occupies 93% of the office accessories!"

I thought I would seize this pivotal moment in history to describe my desk's contents to you, because never before has such equality in the distribution of office supplies been seen on the face of my desk.

• My Bible (most importantly!), neatly tucked in an Amish-made bookcover to protect its paperback...ness.
• Two notebooks, one containing ponderings on various theological and philosophical subjects, another some rather pitiful poetry, and the last some attempts at Venn diagrams.
• Four mugs used as penholders depicting paintings by Mary Cassatt and... some other person whose name escapes me. One contains pencils, mostly mechanical; one Sarasa gel pens; another Papermate gel pens; and the last, other brands of gel pens. (I like gel pens.)
• Several pens and pencils scattered about the desktop, protesting segregation of utensils.
• A hymnal open to Be Still My Soul. Yes, with music by Jean Sibelius!
• Two long rope-like erasers.
• The score to Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 in C Minor, Op. 67.
• Some Post-It notes containing jottings of a story idea that seized my mind late one night.
• An iPod USB cord... thing.
• Another notebook with musical staves on the sheets in which I've learned composition is not my forte.
• A hair elastic.
• A Kindle.
• A copy of Macbeth.
• A calculator, for I am a calculator addict. But I usually use the app on my iPod, so the real one's rather dusty.
• The Oxford Latin Desk Dictionary.
• Quite an assortment of postcards to be sent to friends, as well as a letter or two to which replies need to be sent.
• A wooden icthys engraved with the words Rejoice in the Lord.
• A Lennox lamb.
• A miniature of Monet's Houses of Parliament in the Fog, the original of which was painted in 1903.
• A tag to something that fell off.
• The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci.
• And lastly, William Shakespeare.

Not to mention the other books and items in the hutch above my desk, which are numerous enough for another posting. Anticipate one in the near future. Or don't, considering my countless unfilled promises of posts to come. I'm prophetically challenged, it would seem.

Counting Blessings

I will give thanks to You, O Lord my God, with all my heart,
And will glorify Your name forever.

Psalm 86:12

and He took the seven loaves and the fish; and giving thanks, He broke them and started giving them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the people. 

Matthew 15:36

always giving thanks for all things in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ to God, even the Father;

Ephesians 5:20

There is just one little problem with counting your blessings.

I can't count that high!

So here are just a few of the things I have to be thankful for.

***

A God who loves, protects, guides, frees.

A family that is stable, and parents who are willing to sacrifice for my education.

A little brother who smiles when I wake up each morning.

The wonderful, godly friends God has given me, who encourage, support, and uplift me.

The older friends, from whom I draw wisdom and guidance, and the younger friends, who are a delight and keep me young.

The internet, telephone, and post, which allow us to keep in touch though distance may separate us.

For sunshine, and for rain, both metaphorically and physically.

For the details which prove God lovingly and thoughtfully fashioned every facet of Creation.

For the hardships that strengthen us and teach us to give thanks, if we let them.

For a warm home and plentiful food and clean water. It's cliche and often spoken without real meaning, but it is truer than I can begin to comprehend.

Being homeschooled.

Pianos, and the knowledge and skill to play them.

For language, for words and their power, and the ability to use them.

For horses.

Wind in my face.

Sunlight seeping through the treetops.

The gift of modern medicine.

Books!

And a thousand other things for which I will spend the rest of my life giving thanks.

I hope each of you has a blessed day spending time with your loved ones.

Happy Thanksgiving!

I Have Sat Here For Several Minutes Pondering Titles. So Here's One.

A. My. It's Friday and I haven't posted since Tuesday, when I left you with promises of many posts to come?

But knowing me, that's really not surprising.

B. Blogger. Is. Driving. Me. Insane. I try to respond to your comments, and it eats me! So. This is what I tried to write in response to the comments on my last post.

Mercy--It's a masterpiece! That's what!
Specifically, a scrap of fabric folded in half and sewn in straight lines over and over and over.
Thomas--Thing. Only thing.
What is it called, anyway? I guess I'd know if I actually looked at the thing.
There I go again. Thing. Thing, thing, thing, thing.

Of course, I couldn't leave you wondering what I'd say in response, because everything I write is so profound.

Like thing. Bask in awe of the poeticness.

C. I had a lovely afternoon admiring the underbelly of a tree. I picnicked in the woods in my backyard and did a bit of schoolwork. (The many wonderful things about homeschooling!)  Littlest Horsie nibbled on my blanket. Squirrels chattered at me. Fire ants found their way up my pants.

From the outside, luckily.

D. The first time I wrote this paragraph, I made such a horrible error I fear I shall never forgive myself. I don't trust myself grammatically to go on at this hour. But it's Friday, and I have a duty to provide geekiness to my readers... although most won't see it earlier than Saturday.

E. I'm stalling.

F. The longer I keep you waiting, the more time I have to find something for Geeky Friday. 'Cause I forgot to plan ahead this week.

G. Why is it that I forget the many other things I have to do when I am idle, and suddenly they come back to me when I'm in the middle of something?

H. When I pause, I have to sing through the alphabet again to remember what letter comes next.

I. I've always found it amusing that the alphabet spells "Hi!".

J. Perhaps I should actually go look for something to post now.

K. Aha!

L. Khan Academy is awesome.

M. I could easily spend all day watching his videos.

N. In fact, I might spend the rest of the night doing that.

O. It's Friday night, after all.

P. The night of nerdiness.

Q. Now I feel obligated to finished the alphabet, even though I really have nothing left to say.

R. Waking to Bach is a lovely thing. I've set my alarm to play his organ music at seven-thirty each morning. (I'd set it earlier if I managed to get to bed at a human hour.) If ever you need a boost in the mornings, I prescribe Bach. 

S. I have no idea what movie my father is watching right now, but it looks... really rather horrible.

T. I'm rather tired tonight, so it will be amusing tomorrow to see what typos I didn't catch before posting.

Translation: Please don't burn me at the stake if you find an error, because I'll do it myself.

U. It's a strange letter.

V. I need to read. Eh. You know something's wrong when I'm not looking forward to reading.

W. This information is all quite useless and nothing you were really interested in knowing, save for K.

X. Xylophones.

Y. Yaks.

Z. Zebras!

Next time won't you sing with me?

Geeky Friday: Wear Your Geekiness on Your Sleeves

The other night, good bloggist that I am and always thinking ahead (*coughnotcoughthiswasaveryrareoccurrencecoughcough*), I asked my mother for ideas to post on Friday. While searching for "geeky site" or something of that nature, she came across thinkgeek.com, and looked at the apparel. While a number of the jokes were lost on me (mostly the sci-fi and tech references, for those are not my geek niche), the rest... the rest! They were so geeky! I was so giddy reading them!

These are some of the best.

This shirt is rather nerdy.

But not as nerdy as this one.

I breathe geek.

Just add photons.

No, I did not just fall. I was obeying the law.

Now these are some metal groups I can enjoy.

I find this amusing, even though the very odor of bacon makes me quite nauseated.

This, my friends, is a caffeine molecule.

This is so not tr

I feel like such a geek for getting this.

This... is very true.

But don't stop there! How about an anatomically correct heart?

P.S. This post was posted on the very first minute of autumn.

P.P.S. Blogger is driving me batty.

The Woes of Mathematics

As a warning, I am tired and quite incapable of thinking clearly at the moment. This post is going to be a jumbled mess. I am going to regret posting this at such a late hour. I am going to wish I had never posted this when I am in such a state of mind. But it's Geeky Friday, and I must post something.

It may seem quite shocking that I would write a whole post all about the dreaded math.

On the other hand, it's quite shocking that I don't like it. After all, all life is biology*, all biology is physiology, all physiology is chemistry, all chemistry is physics, and all physics is math (or however the saying goes). And I'm all about learning how and why things work.

For while I didn't know why I disliked math, other than that I did. But I think I've finally pinned down my main objections to it.

Force. I was a nerd from the very start, and avidly pursued my studies beyond what was required. But all the other subjects were so interesting and exciting to me, math tended to get neglected. My mother, therefore, had to make me sit down and do my addition and subtraction.

That brought my enthusiasm to a screeching halt.

I have the unfortunate tendency to despise anything that I feel forced to do. This is, in fact, likely the primary reason I don't drive: I was forced behind the wheel a few years ago, and I think I'm about to be forced to get my permit. I have a natural response to resist pressure.

I suppose this makes me sound like a wayward, rebellious child, but I don't think this reaction is at its root necessarily a bad thing. This is the same reflex that causes me to resist societal influences.** It's just, perhaps, taken a bit too far here.

Still, coercion is an ineffective method of imparting knowledge. As Plato said, All learning which is acquired under compulsion has no hold upon the mind.

Method of problem solving. In most cases, I'd rather toil for hours until, by trial and error, I discover the solution on my very own, than read how to solve the problem their way step by step in boring detail. I skip over bits of the process, working it out in my head, and scribble out others. (This means when I am interrupted and look down at the paper again I have no idea what I was doing or how I got there.) I attempt to forge short cuts; many don't work, but some do.

This makes me wonder what people like Einstein or Stephen Hawking thought about their schooling. Not that I am anything like them, but I suspect I am better at math than standard teaching methods allow me to realize.

Of course, this is coming from someone who feels like a mathematical genius when she correctly adds two single-digit numbers on the first try. So then again, maybe not.

Lack of science. Math is fascinating as it applies to the world. But when all I'm doing is empty equations on the paper, and solving the problems brings about no scientific revelation, it feels like my time should be better spent. Math that does nothing is boring. It is intangible and pointless and dull and if ever I could find a program that taught it as it applies practically, to science, to something, oh, I would be so happy!

Lack of milkshakes. As I was pondering all this, I suddenly remembered a long-forgotten part of my life, a time in which math was a happy event. My father used to write two very large numbers (at least, they seemed impossibly long sums at the time) and ask me to add them. When I did several of these, he made me a milkshake. I had so much fun doing that. I don't remember why that stopped.


Can't someone out there write a curriculum that teaches math in a sensible way and that puts knowledge gained to use?

Anyway, what got me thinking about all of this was The Official SAT Question of the Day, which I suppose was the ultimate purpose of this post. So there you go. Have fun. Be nerdy. I really should go to bed.

*The very best subject ever.
**Besides, of course, the conscious realization that society has issues.

Gasp! Is It True? Could It Be?

Christian has grown a bit since my last post,
and even this photo is old.

Yes. You are looking at a post. A brand new post.

If you're a follower, odds are when this post showed up on your Blogger Dashboard you stared at it for a minute trying to make The House on the Rock ring a bell. It has, after all, been four months since that name has shown its face in your Reading List.

I'm a sorry excuse for a blogger. This is, what, the fourth or fifth time I've posted after a long absence?

At least I can say that I've fulfilled (most of) what I said in my last post. I said I was going to manage my time better to increase my productivity, and I daresay I have. Since my last post, I've read the Bible cover-to-cover in eighty-nine days, finished the first level of Latin, completed my highschool biology course in nine and half weeks and begun chemistry, scored a nice grade under a tough judge in a piano festival, entertained my baby brother countless times while my mom was on the phone or cooking dinner, and kept in touch with long-time friends.

Unfortunately, with all that busyness some things had to be neglected, and blogging was one of them. I need to take a breather now, however, especially seeing as I've caught a cold, which is a perfect excuse to spend more time blogging. I've already tweaked the layout a bit, and that new header is a very simplified representation of Portland Headlight I made in Paint.

Another area that's received far too little attention is reading and writing, which is excellent timing with Script Frenzy starting tomorrow! NaNoWriMo's sister event, "Screnzy" is a challenge to write 100 pages of script in the thirty days of April. It can be any sort of script--screenplay, stage play, TV or radio script, graphic novel, you name it. This is my third year, hopefully my third win, and also my third time adapting.

So tell me, are you doing Script Frenzy? Why or why not? If so, what are you writing?

And is the blog just too busy?

Welcome, 2011



Photo courtesy the Associated Press... I think.

So, it's 2011.

First off, the glasses just aren't the same. If the year doesn't have two zeroes, it's just not right.

Second, Happy New Year, everyone!

Third, I have nothing intelligent to say. Every lovely blogger I follow has posted a poignant, eloquent essay reflecting the highs and lows the of past year, or listing ambitions for the year to come, or leaving the past behind to experience 2011 free of nostalgia and regret for what cannot be undone.

This post is neither poignant, nor eloquent, nor to any degree coherent. Kind of like all my posts. So if you'd rather spend your time reading a coherent post, check out any of the blogs listed on the right.

Meanwhile, I'll ramble on about whatever comes to mind as my readers trot off to more interesting, purposeful, [insert suiting adjective denoting worthwhileness] pursuits.

The highlight of the past year was certainly the birth of my baby brother. (And pie. But mostly my brother. Okay, the true highlight was my brother. Though the pie was good too.)

The worst thing of the year was not anything that actually took place, but all those things that didn't happen, everything I could have said and done and did not. Many of those things were reasonably within my grasp, yet I did not exert myself to attain them out of ignorance, out of uncertainty, and often, out of mismanaged time.

I cannot bear to let that happen again.

I don't believe in New Year's resolutions, per se (if you think of a way to better yourself, why not start right then and there? why wait till January 1?), but the birth of the new calendar year does cause one to reflect on one's priorities, to sort out what truly must be done and what can wait till another time or needn't be done at all. (I don't know about you, but the beginning of the school year has the same effect on me.)

I feel so sage as I sit here listening to the patter of rain on the roof, sipping tea. Sometime in the future I'll unbury this post and laugh at my youth and naivety. But I suppose it will always be like that, won't it? When I'm a hundred years old I'll find something I wrote when I was ninety and marvel at how much I've grown since. I will never achieve an infinite amount of wisdom. I will never finish learning, growing in love and knowledge.

And I have some goals for the not-so-distant future to help me as I grow and learn.

My main goal is to read the Bible.

In ninety days.

Yes, the whole Bible! Meditations of His Love has set up a wonderful program called the Bible Blast, with two different reading plans, one chronological and one in the traditional biblical order, and some great tips for keeping up with the challenge.

It officially starts today and ends March 31, but if you stumble on the link a bit late, don't worry! It's set up so it can be started any time.

I'm keeping a notebook to record inspiring passages, things I'm learning, questions for which to seek answers when I have the time. By the time I'd gotten three chapters into Genesis I'd filled a page of thoughts and things to ponder.

I will also continue my nonbiblical studies. I will explore science, read as much classic literature as I can, study history, (attempt to) learn Latin and whatever other languages I take a fancy to, practice piano, take up another instrument if I can possibly find the time, and even (most likely futilely) attempt to wrap my mind around the dreaded... math. I've always adored learning (other than the dreaded math) and considered my schooling a top priority, but with college fast approaching it's more important than ever.

Another activity to which more time must be devoted is writing. With everything else in life devouring my time and energy I've written very little the past few years. This needs to change. So many stories are begging to be told I fear I will go mad if I don't start carving an hour or two out of each day to write, or revise, or plot, or revise some more.

And friends. I've wonderful friends I've scarcely spoken or written to lately with everything else going on. I miss them. I need to catch up with them.

I've realized I need to be more helpful to others, as well. I am trying to be more attentive to others' needs, to recognize the appropriate times to assist them in whatever I can.

But my absolute number one priority above all this?

God.

With that, I bring this rambling post to a close. I've Genesis chapter eleven to read!

I pray the new year brings blessings and joy to all of you.

(And a slice of pie to whoever can make any sense of this post.)