The things I think of...

At about 1am last night, when I wasn't yet remotely sleepy but couldn't keep working, I did this...

I made a spindle from desk items.A CD sits perfectly held tight between a highlighter and its lid, I discovered.  A large paper clip sufficed as a hook and another lid at the base of the highlighter held down the starting thread.
It worked. I spun yarn. I had to knit it.  It was like thin lopi yarn - single ply. (I think I turned around when I stopped, thus it is lopsided)
Abi woke at 2 and I went to bed, so that's the end of that story.

Pre-Halloween Fun

With Halloween falling on a Sunday this year, everyone's been celebrating early - a sort of long weekend of Halloween.  At work, Robin dressed as Robin Hood and his team decorated their space as Sherwood Forest with Nottingham Castle in the corner (at the boss's desk).  They won the office contest for best themed decoration.  The other teams had more traditional "Halloween" themes - and I saw some cool setups in photos. But Robin's team was the most innovative.

 Today Robin, Abi and Grandpa are off to market in St. Jacob's, and then planning to find some geocaches.  Abi's wearing her Princess dress.  I suggested she might want to dress up since when we attended the local Market activities for kids on Thursday many of the kids were dressed up. 
This is how she decided to pose for a picture... 

Abi's been having great fun with her grandpa all week. 

Later today, or perhaps tomorrow, we'll finish decorating outside (it's been too windy to consider decorating early), carve a pumpkin (I already nominated grandpa and Abi for the job), and maybe decide what costume Abi will wear tomorrow.  She has three options: the Princess dress above, a witch dress (that she wore to the Medieval Faire), and a unicorn costume.  Or I might suggest the Princess dress OVER the unicorn costume ;)

I suppose I should also decide what I am going to wear tomorrow.  So far the plan is I'll stay home to hand out treats while Abi goes out with dad and grandpa.  I've got stickers ready to hand out, and a pile of stickers ready to trade with Abi - stickers for candy.  This year should be interesting as I think she's more aware of what candy is. Last year I pretty much could just take the candy and she didn't miss it.  She didn't know what she was missing.  In the last year, however, she'll have witnessed more kids eating candy... thus I am prepared to trade/bribe her candy away from her.  Not because I want it, but because I don't think it's right for a two year old to eat candy. 
So why trick or treat? Because she LOVES going door to door and getting stuff. She loves the decorations and the other kids in costume.  She loves getting dressed up.  It's all great fun.

Not much else of interest to write about. Well, not related to Halloween.

I am not looking...

"doing my dreams" does not include cleaning my office.

critters

It seems we have more than one stow-away snail in the tank.  We've been watching this one grow from a clear blob-thing, to something with a shell. And it continues to grow.  I assume it's an Apple Snail. It's pretty cute, but I hope it focuses on dining on the excess dead stuff rather than the plants.

Here you can see both snails on the tank wall.  There's also a third baby (itty-bitty) in the tank, but not pictured here. I can't tell yet whether the third snail will be a trumpet snail (like the black snail at top) or an apple snail.  So far they are not a problem, but if the snails continue to reproduce at a snail's rate (which is more like bunny-speed), I'll have to take measures to thin the herd.

And here's the spider that was crawling up my office wall yesterday.  I managed to trap it and put it out in the rain - I don't think the spider was impressed. One minute it's in a nice warm, dry house, the next it's out in the cold and rain.

children and social capital

I've read the sociological lit. on children as social capital, but it's pretty boring to read. Not nearly as interesting as experiencing it. I was thinking on it today after passing someone that Abi sees daily. This person always waves at me. But I don't know this person, not really. Basically, I would be "Abi's mom" to this person, but that's not insignificant socially speaking. This person knows I'm a grad student (we've talked once at the park) and what I study. Maybe one day this person, or another of Abi's acquaintances, will think to introduce me to someone who can get me a job! (Ah, wouldn't that be nice.) Not that I'm relying on something like that, but the point is, Abi is the link and her ability to create and foster relationships with other people in society means that, sociologically speaking, she is a form of social capital. She's a rather rich source actually. As you know by now, she's pretty darn cute. I couldn't deny it if I wanted to, it's a matter of fact. She's also very smiley and incredibly social. She lures strangers in with a smile and hooks them with a simple exchange of words (it helps now that she is also intelligent and talkative).
Who knows what random people she will facilitate introductions with over the next few years... it should be interesting.
I don't mind being Abi's mom. Not at all.
Being a parent is always interesting.
At the very minimum, Abi supports me by encouraging me to "do my dreams".

As a reward for having to read the above, you can watch a few silly clips of Abi talking (which you may have already seen yesterday)


[video of Abi]

an every-other-Saturday religion?

Wait a minute... I'm accustomed to hearing Pagans complain that certain other religious practitioners are "Sunday only" practitioners, whereas Pagans pride themselves on having a "lived religion".
So why am I reading this:

All of these trainings require a high degree of motivation and self-discipline as well as a certain ability to work under authority. As Jenny, a Wiccan high priestess, put it when talking about her coven: “You have to give up two Saturdays a month for four years. You have to really want something to give up half of your Saturdays for
four years. And you have to really like it.”(Balfer 2009, 38)

Yep, this says a lot about modern Western culture, not just the Wiccan quoted. I was surprised that the author made no commentary.
I suppose every other Saturday is a better commitment than 8 times a year (at the Sabbats). Maybe an addition 13 times if you celebrate the Esbats. That's still only 21 days a year you have to -
wait, these usually involve staying up late for a party, not getting up early to attend church. Where's the downside to a late-night (or early evening, followed by a potluck) celebration? Well, except for those equinoxes you might feel "crazy" and wake before sunrise to drive to the edge of the world and watch the sun come up over the ocean, then catch the bakery as it opens and dine on fresh bread.

In all seriousness, I don't understand on a personal level (on a social-psychological level of analysis I get it) why someone would declare that taking time from your life every other Saturday for a few years (and what's a few years compared with a lifetime?) is a sign of true dedication. OTOH, if we're talking about the fact that maybe you don't like the authority system of that Wiccan training (in the example above), but you decide to push through to get your initiated degrees so you can move on and hive off...
Meh, there's good reason I'm not a Wiccan. I still can't personally understand why one should take pride in giving up 2 days a month. I realize in reality that training actually requires much more than two days a month, but the above quote implies otherwise. Or at least it implies that two of the BEST days of the month must be sacrificed to religious activity. Why is religious activity even being treated as requiring "giving up" days. Isn't the whole point of a lived religion supposed to be that it is integrated in your life? Essentially you "give up" all your days.
This applies to far more than Pagans (and apparently not to all Pagans).

Okay, minor rant over now. Back to... oh, crap, not back to work. Time to get Abi.

Balfer, Maria. 2009. Three degrees of openness in London's Pagan scene. The Pomegranate 11(1): 29-43.

research that frustrates me

Much better than the alternative rant I could have made about a particular dissertation I was reading yesterday - the kind that makes me think the granting institution must be one of those "buy your degree online" kind of institutions, even if they claim to have status recognition by the APA and multiple campuses. And if the writing of the dissertation author itself isn't bad enough, there's content in there - quotes from the participant parents that were even approved by the participants - that make me cringe. Such as a father who tells his young teenaged daughter that if she goes out wearing provocative clothing that there is a 98% chance something will happen to her. (But, of course, it's still her choice...) Does that mean that he will direct blame at her if something does happen (even though the implied chance of molestation is far less than 98%)? And this is a family that prides themselves on having a healthy view of sexuality. One that proudly reports they provided their son with lubrication and hand towels when he reached puberty. Hunh. There's no mention of supporting their daughter's sexuality. Nope, instead they tell her that if she wears the clothes she wants to wear "something" (bad) will happen to her - and thus she is not free to engage her own sexuality.

I'm not endorsing common fashions for girls (alas, younger and younger...) that I find inappropriate and would never allow my own daughter to have in her wardrobe. But neither would I tell her it's her choice to wear them and state that if something bad happens to her it's a result of that choice. Granted, I also know from experience that you don't have to wear provocative clothing as a teen-aged female to be the object of sexual harassment. When it comes from classmates, putting them in their place and reporting it to authorities ends it pretty darn quickly.

Another father (or was it the same? it's hard to tell in this dissertation, despite only interviewing 3 couples she continues to generalize them and use vague descriptions such as "some of them") supposedly seeks to encourage tolerance (in the face of potential religious discrimination) by telling his kids that other people are small-minded and the kids/they are not. Wow.
And perhaps what is worse, in this dissertation, is that the psychology major ignores all of this stuff that she has transcribed and included in her dissertation to illustrate other things (such as how parents front-load kids in preparation of potential discrimination) and instead pushes her own analysis of discrimination even after she admits that the parents insisted religious discrimination wasn't a significant factor in their lives and the researcher similarly found little evidence of it affecting them.
And might I add, interviewing 3 couples for 2 hours, especially without any additional fieldwork and clear ignorance about relevant publications from Pagan Studies, should never ever be worthy of a doctorate degree! I'm pretty sure my undergrad students could write the same or better papers! Oh, and this was a new dissertation from 2010.

Oh well. It's not as if I could ignore it. It is related to my own research insofar as it is about Pagan parents, so to ignore it (ie, not have read it) would be poor research on my part (in my opinion) even though I now know it's not worthy of my time. I'll still make mention of it if only to say there have been others interested in this field of late - even if it's crap research. The fact that she didn't find religious discrimination to be a significant factor is inline with my own findings and does help to dispel common perceptions within the Pagan community that potential and real discrimination is of great concern. Of course, the researcher draws upon this same common perception (I should add she's a practitioner, although clearly not a well-educated one as she spells Samhain as Samhein and altar as alter) of discrimination that compelled her to speak with parents about how they deal with discrimination. Even after completing her interviews and finding that the parents had not experienced discrimination, she proceeds with writing her dissertation on the topic and trying to force it into one model - that it doesn't fit. Anyhow, despite her poor analysis, the fact that discrimination wasn't significant to these parents and the long quotes she includes from the parents discussing how they prepare (or not) their kids for misunderstandings about the religion does have some interest to me.

In other research, I was reading a different recent paper that, much to my frustration, references another thesis about second generation Pagans without challenging the (poorly conceived) conclusions of that thesis and instead using it to support the idea (desirable to the Pagan community) that the second generation of Pagans is growing significantly.

It is evident that I will be ruffling some feather with my dissertation and publications. There are a lot of people who will not like my challenges to this assumption. Certainly the researchers will not like that I take them to task on their faulty conclusions and Pagan leaders who will not like it. On the other hand, I imagine there are plenty of other researchers who will be glad to see it.

So, I suppose I should get back to that writing...

Pink socks

There was something I was intending to post, but now I forget what that was. Something Abi-related...
Maybe I was going to tell you that Abi has her own pair of knitted socks in pink. She watches me knit socks for others and has been requesting a pair for herself. It's not as if they are difficult to make in her size, but I always tend to put it off. Eventually I did cast on a pair as my simple project - the one that I can carry around and add a row here and there. You know, waiting for Robin to get out of work if we're picking him up. Walking to and from the grocery store in the evening the night before Thanksgiving dinner when Robin realizes we don't have any RobinHood pasty mix at home to prepare the crust for the pie he's promised my family he'll make for tomorrow's dinner. We get there only to find they no longer carry the product (no local stores seem to! yikes). Then we get half-way home and realize that we forgot Abi's purse on the bench I was sitting on, waiting with Darla while Abi and Robin shopped. So I had to turn around alone while Abi, Robin, and Darla continued home. Good thing I had that knitting with me - the kind that I can do while I'm walking in the dark (or as dark as it gets in the city).


But that can't have been it, because I was thinking of posting yesterday and I only finished these this morning while encouraging Abi to eat her oats and sit still (hahahahahaha).

It was going to be a brilliant commentary too... ;P

Oh well. Abi's next request is for a pink scarf. Why does she hate me? lol Pink? pink!
....pink.

Thanksgiving

We enjoyed a delicious thanksgiving dinner with my grandma, aunt and cousin. Full of turkey, stuffing... and pumpkin pie! Seeing as how we left the second pie with grandma, I think Robin should bake another one (or two). Yep.
Not much else around here to report. Same ol' working and home stuff.
Let's see, Abi's getting bigger, her vocabulary grows in leaps and bounds, she's increasingly daring in climbing EVERYTHING... all things to be expected. I have mentioned she's independent right? Yeah, well, she's also two and a half... enough said.
She's already planning her own third birthday. To hear her tell it, it's next week. "I'm going to be three" she tells everyone. "But I'm still just two" she adds. At first she was getting two cakes, and now it's three (according to her). We'll see what proportions this grows to in the next 6 months... She also has many ideas of what gifts she wants. "I'm getting two bears for my birthday" oh, really? She doesn't need more! I think I should be blaming Ericka for sending a belated gift package in September. Now she's expecting more gifts! :P
Yule should be very exciting this year for her. Last year she was overwhelmed and I think having my even-more-excited parents there didn't help. Plus another excited toddler. This year should be a little quieter since we'll be staying in Ontario. We can take things a little slower. But why am I even talking about Yule already? Yuck! Stop that Mandy!!
I haven't even made plans for Samhain yet, let alone plan for Yule.
What's Abi going to wear for Halloween trick or treating (wherein she will gather candy for ME)? People keep asking. I figure she can wear the green spider web dress she already loves that has a matching witch hat. Hey, she loves it. She already wore it to the local medieval faire and then again the next day to a birthday party (at her insistence) and she might just wear it every day if I let her. Really innovative, I know. Witch and witchling dressing up as witch and witchling for Halloween :P It's the only day I can get away with wearing my collection of fabulous-fun witch hats in public - without weird looks.

Photos? yeah, I'll get you some. I just found the camera after looking for days... somehow it ended up in the bottom of my PJ drawer. I knew I'd seen it last in a 'basket' of clothing (apparently that basket was a drawer - I was close).

Pagan studies rant - please excuse :P

In preparation for finishing this next chapter about the Pagan movement I have been entering my ridiculously-huge collection of articles, chapters, theses, books, etc into Zotero for easy reference and as a review of what I have. As a habit, whenever I encounter an article or such that I might potentially find useful "one day" I used to save it. (That was before Zotero. Now I could just save the data about the article if it seemed peripheral and less likely I'd ever read it.) Consequently, I have a huge collection of articles in both print and electronic format. How huge? So far I'm at 90 items tagged with "Paganism" in my Zotero files and I'm not done entering data.
Of these, 26 are graduate thesis documents (which reminds me I've not entered my own thesis yet).
I'd like to send out a notice to all graduate students (especially at the Masters level) considering a study of Paganism - the ethnography of Paganism/Wicca/Witchcraft has been done! Honest, you really don't need to write the same thing about modernity/postmodernity, institutionalization, identity issues, nature religion, ecology... can we please try for something insightful?
Some of the works are good. There is one in particular that I really wish the author would have pushed for publication. But most of it makes me want to pull my hair out. I realize much of this comes from shared conversations that were being engaged in the field of Pagan Studies as it developed. Thus I understand the multiplicity of research on a given topic. I also know I have the benefit of hindsight to observe many papers over a long period of time. What irks me are the papers that were published well after the original discussion - papers that don't contribute anything new. These are old theses - they're new (recent), well, except that their content isn't new in the least. In particular though, I'm appalled at what passes for acceptable research at the graduate level...
Are my standards too high? Am I pushing myself too hard to develop a meaningful, insightful dissertation? Probably. That is, upon reading other PhD level theses I'm quite certain I could get away with less. I could have simply written up the results of my fieldwork even though by my own standards (and those of my supervisors) the sample was fairly small. However, comparing my sample with equivalent works I realized my sample is above-average in size. Instead, dissatisfied by the sample size I sought to redirect my energies into greater theory analysis, using my fieldwork even more so as an illustrative case study (which it already was) and less as the focus of the dissertation. That involved an entirely new and involved immersion in research from the entire range of the social sciences (anthro, psych, soc, and other multi-disciplinary fields). Now I wonder, on a practical level, if I was "wasting" time - not that I truly believe it was a waste. But if I'd just been allowed to accept what research I had gathered as being sufficient to secure my PhD a year ago, well I could have. Looking at other similar works, I realize now I could have done it.
Ah, but that was a year ago. And I could never be satisfied with less than the best from myself. Thus, here I am still wanting to make sure I've covered every angle; making sure I'm aware of all the relevant discussions about the Pagan movement as I finish the chapter on the topic.

And, in the end, I'll know "I did it!"

Why the reflection? I've been doing it a lot lately. But last night I was reading an interesting article in the Chronicles of Higher Education about incomplete PhDs. The author encourages supervisors to have meaningful discussions with their students to make sure the students actually want to complete the program - and to realize that ABD doesn't have to mean that your life is incomplete.
Which isn't to say I'm giving up on my completed PhD! There's no way I'm giving up the work I love. Even though it's slowed by the child I love more. And even though the job market is crap and I know it. I'll figure something out... I'm pretty darn innovative. And determined when I set my mind to it. (I heard that! Yes, I can be stubborn.)

Anyhow, my work on religious socialization and revising how this is approached and studied, I believe, will give me plenty to work with in the coming years.

Beard

Here you go, the BEARD that was:

Furry Family

If you didn't see Robin while his beard was growing out - quite long - you've missed your opportunity. He recently shaved it off. But he may yet grow it out again for the winter. I've seen a few photos that others took in Mexico and I'll try to get Robin to share them here.
In the meantime, here's a photo of my beloved family this morning.

(don't mind the mess of toys piled in the background. such are the joys of your living room doubling as the play room when space is limited. ps - since Yule is approaching, Abi really doesn't need more toys!)

With the camera out and the animals lazing in the sun, I realized it's been a while since I photographed them or shared photos of the rest of the family.

George


Fenwick


Fenwick and George


Darla