Not Keen on Harry Potter?

Well, then, maybe you will prefer this video. I dare you to watch it without crying.


In case you're like me, and find yourself wondering if this is real, check it out at Snopes.
Hat Tip: Janet, a friend and Hiraeth reader

Have you seen it?

In honor of the release of the first trailer for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, I'm sharing one of Sam's comics. We're conflicted; we're not sure which one we want to see more--the new Harry Potter movie or The Hobbit.

July for one.more.day

Today is still July.  Tomorrow it is August.

In August, I prepare for another year of home school.  The boxes of books arrived weeks ago and have been stacked in a corner, unopened.  This year, I seem to have an aversion to opening them.  Normally, I open them up as soon as they land on the front steps and begin to pore over them.  But this year will be our last year and opening those boxes feels like the beginning of the end. 

You see, Sam will be a senior.  All those years ago when we first sat down with home school catalogs and the boxes of Saxon Math and Phonics arrived on our porch in Kentucky, we never saw this day coming.  Never.  Ever.

I wish it could stay July forever.  Or at least a little while longer. . .

100 Books Wordle

Click to enlarge

Quietly Climbing

I posted this picture of my grape ivy a few weeks ago.  Looking back, I can see now that I should have noticed this:

It's climbing right up the cords of the blinds!

It's going to get into the upper 90's this weekend, and I usually pull the blinds down on super hot days to help keep the house cool.  I'll have a job pulling this blind! 

Dictionary Word of the Day: Sesquipedalian

sesquipedalian \ses-kwuh-puh-DAYL-yuhn\, adjective:
1. Given to or characterized by the use of long words.
2. Long and ponderous; having many syllables.

noun:
1. A long word.

I like this word.  It is fun.  Do you like it, too?

Long words are fun.  They are good to use when you write.

And it is hard to write and not use one.  Don't you think?

A Letter a Week 'B'

You can find more 'B' posts at the ABC Wednesday Blog.

I'll be gathering the whole alphabet together as I go, so if you missed letter 'A', you can find it by clicking on "This Week's Letter" or the image in the sidebar.

(I already have 'C' done for next week, but I need some suggestions for 'D'. If you have any ideas, leave them in the comments of this post!)

UPDATE: You can see the entire alphabet by clicking A Letter a Week at the bottom of each post.

My Sister's List

My sister, Kathy, sent me her BBC 100 list.  It was fun for me to read through her list because our lists are very similar and we have discussed many of these books already!

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 The Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare ( I think)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame 

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma- Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding (why is this on the list?)
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Kathy says:

Lots of my favorites didn't make the list,

the H. Rider Haggard books, Forrest Gump (yes, that's what I said!), The Stand (only the abridged-they were right to cut what they did!), all of Rudyard Kipling, or Jules Verne, Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand), Passage to India (EM Forster), Somerset Maughaum's The Moon & Sixpense & Of Human Bondage, Friendly Persuasion (Jessamyn West), Snow Goose (Paul Gallico), Heidi (Johann Spyri), Twain's Huck Finn....These pop in my brain without thinking; there are more!  Although I didn't mark them as hated, there are quite a few on this list that were disappointing to me when I read them and are NOT on my re-read list!

Here are some I (Kim) thought were conspicuous by their absence:  Pilgrim's Progress, The Yearling, Ivanhoe, Gulliver's Travels, The Confessions by Augustine, Walden. . .

What books are YOU surprised by their absence?

Finally!

I've been waiting for my lilies to bloom.  They've been threatening to do so for well over a week.  This morning, they decided to start opening!   

A Corporate Confession

My Father, if Thy mercy had bounds, where would be my refuge from just wrath? But thy love in Christ is without measure. Thus, I present myself to Thee with sins of commission and omission, against Thee, my Father, against Thee, adorable redeemer, against Thee and Thy strivings, O Holy Spirit, against the dictates of my conscience, against the precepts of Thy Word, against my neighbors and myself. Enter not into judgment with me, for I plead no righteousness of my own, and have no cloak for iniquity. Pardon my day dark with evil.

Every morning I vow to love Thee more fervently, to serve Thee more sincerely, to be more devoted in my life, to be wholly Thine; yet I soon stumble, backslide, and have to confess my weakness, misery and sin. But I bless Thee that the finished work of Jesus needs no addition from my doings, that His oblation is sufficient satisfaction for my sins. If future days be mine, help me to amend my life, to hate and abhor evil, to flee the sins I confess. Make me more resolute, more watchful, more prayerful. Let no evil fruit spring from evil seeds my hands have sown; Let no neighbor be hardened in vanity and folly by my want of circumspection. If this day I have been ashamed of Christ and His Word, or have shown unkindness, malice, envy, lack of love, unadvised speech, hasty temper, let it be no stumbling block to others, or dishonor to Thy name. O help me to set an upright example that will ever rebuke vice, allure to goodness, and evidence that lovely are the ways of Christ.

(This corporate confession came from our order of service this morning)

Quote of the Week: Jonathan Edwards

They who are truly converted are new men, new, creatures; new, not within, but without; they are sanctified throughout, in spirit, soul and body; old things are passed away, all things are become new; they have new hearts, new ears, new tongues, new hands, new feet; i.e., a new conversation and practice; they walk in newness of life, and continue to do so to the end of life.

J. Edwards, On Religious Affections

Sunday Hymn: Ye Holy Angels Bright

Ye Holy Angels Bright

Ye holy angels bright,
Who wait at God's right hand,
Or through the realms of light
Fly at your Lord's command,
Assist our song,
For else the theme
Too high doth seem
For mortal tongue.

Ye blessed souls at rest,
Who ran this earthly race,
And now, from sin released,
Behold the Saviour's face,
God's praises sound,
As in his sight
With sweet delight
Ye do abound.

All nations of the earth,
Extol the world's great King;
With melody and mirth
His glorious praises sing;
For he still reigns,
And will bring low
The proudest foe
That him disdains.

Sing forth Jehovah's praise,
Ye saints, that on him call!
Him magnify always
His holy churches all!
In him rejoice,
And there proclaim
His holy name
With sounding voice.

My soul, bear thou thy part,
Triumph in God above;
With a well-tuned heart
Sing thou the songs of love;
Thou art his own,
Who precious blood
Shed for thy good
His love made known.

Away, distrustful care!
I have thy promise, Lord:
To banish all despair,
I have thine oath and word:
And therefore I
Shall see thy face
And there thy grace
Shall magnify.

With thy triumphant flock,
Then I shall numbered be;
Built on th'eternal rock,
His glory we shall see.
The heavens so high
With praise shall ring
And all shall sing
In harmony.

Richard Baxter

Blue Trinity Hymnal #17

Jack by Sam

I love this picture.

: D

A Call to Prayer: Particularity in Prayer

I commend to you the importance of particularity in prayer. We ought not to be content with general petitions. We ought to specify our wants before the throne of grace. It should not be enough to confess we are sinners; we should name the sins of which our conscience tells us we are most guilty. It should not be enough to ask for holiness; we should name the graces in which we fell most deficient. It should not be enough to tell the Lord we are in trouble; we should describe our trouble and all its peculiarities. This is what Jacob did when he feared his brother Esau. He tells God exactly what it is that he fears. Genesis 32:11. This is what Eliezer did, when he sought a wife for his master's son. He spreads before God precisely what he wants. Genesis 24:12. This is what Paul did when he had a thorn in the flesh. He besought the Lord. 2 Corinthians 12:8. This is true faith and confidence. We should believe that nothing is too small to be named before God. What should we think of the patient who told his doctor he was ill, but never went into particulars? What should we think of the wife who told her husband she was unhappy, but did not specify the cause? What should we think of the child who told their father that they were in trouble, but nothing more? Christ is the true bridegroom of the soul, the true physician of the heart, the real father of all his people. Let us show that we believe this by being unreserved in our communications with Him. Let us hide no secrets from Him. Let us tell Him all our hearts.

J. C. Ryle,

A Call to Prayer 

BBC Top 100 books survey

Saw this at Suzanne's and thought it would be a fast, fun entry for a Saturday.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you love.
4) Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading, or were forced to read at school and hated.
5) Reprint this list in your own blog.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 The Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier*
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma- Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding (why is this on the list?)
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker**
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo***

* listened to it on CD
**never finished it; seriously creeped me out
***my favorite novel.  You should read it.  I have one question for the BBC:  What are you playing at?  100??  Les Mis should be #1!!

Leave me a note in the comments if you do this (Kim, you KNOW you want to!!!) and I'll come read your list!

  (Kathy, if you're reading, send me your's via email and I'll post it here.)

Oh, and if you copy the list into NOTEPAD, it'll get rid of all my html so you can start with a clean list.

Update on Monday, July 28, 2008 at 08:11AM by Kim from Hiraeth

Just to clarify: 

For anyone who wondered why I, as a Christian, didn't put the Bible at #1 instead of Les Miserables. . .

The Bible does not belong on this list to begin with.  It is not a book in the regular sense of the word.  It is the revelation of God Himself and, as such, does not belong on a list of books written by mere men.

Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter I

This One is for Me

This is a little something I made for myself.  I took the photo a couple of years ago when we were on vacation at Big Crooked Lake.  The quote, of course, is from Tolkien--my favorite.

I found the quote at the bottom of an email and I have no idea where it is to be found in Tolkien's writings.  It may even be a true quote from an interview.  I liked it.

The whole idea for this piece came from my friend Donna, at Quiet Life.  She asked a question this morning about moccasins and, well, one thing led to another. . .

Some flowers

For some reason, I love the flowers in this planter this year. 

Dictionary Word of the Day: Sempiternal

sempiternal \sem-pih-TUR-nuhl\, adjective:
Of never ending duration; having beginning but no end; everlasting; endless.

If I had been introduced to this word in any other way than seeing it in my Dictionary Word of the Day feed, I'd've thought someone made it up.  I make up words like that sometimes.  Like purr-puppy.  I've always called my cats purr-puppies.

I wonder why no one seems to use this word to describe the eternality of God?  In all the theological books and systematic theologies I've read, I've never come across this word being used in a theological setting.

Hmmm.  Wonder why.  It seems a perfectly wonderful word to me.

Maybe it's just because our Bible study discussed Melchizadek yesterday. . .

UPDATE:  With my second cup of coffee, I can see why it's not used to describe God.  These words:  HAVING BEGINNING.  That's why!  I mentally added a 'no' before beginning.  Too much Melchizadek on the brain, I guess. . .

After trying for 30 years. . .

 . . .and after poking countless avocado seeds with toothpicks and suspending them over little cups of water on the kitchen window, I have finally managed to sprout one!

Lucky for me (and lucky for the sprout!) I noticed it just as I was preparing to toss it into the waste basket.

Now, what do I need with an avocado tree?  I don't know, but I sure hope I can keep it going to find out! 

In 15 Words or Less

History's Path

The luminescent past, borne upon the morning ray;

history's path scattered with seeds of the future.

You can find more In 15 Words or Less Poems at Laura Salas.