Nesting

It's still way too cold to anything worthwhile, and we're both miserable with colds, so Oboy and I have spent the last few days wrapped up in blankets on the couch, taking turns being petty and demanding. All in all it's been fun, if not terribly educational.

Got my latest homeschool purchase in the mail yesterday. I'm so addicted to Paypal shopping now. It's just too easy, and if it's "educational", it's totally excusable, right? Latest purchase was a series of high school history project books from History Scribe. It's a fundamentalist Christian company, but I've gone through all the books we've gotten, and the bias is (mostly) tolerable. Even where they've gone over the edge, the questions are still interesting, and I can't wait to here Oboy answer them from the standpoint of a born atheist. We were reminiscing today of the time I had to carry 6 year old Oboy out of a Catholic church, crying and wailing "It hurts, Mommy, religion huuuuurts!" Got some interesting looks that day. The incense was bugging him, but it was riotously funny (to me at least)

Oboy is looking forward to doing the Age of Exploration book. I don't know how the drawing portion will go over with Oboy, but the small area for essays is a big hit. Oboy usually has so much information about a topic he doesn't know where to start to write about it, and just gives up, overwhelmed. He's quite happy to see how little is actually expected out of an academic essay for a grade 8 student. We both read through all the topics and essay questions last night, and spent a few hours debating cultural expropriation (started with a question on how the ancient Greeks might have felt about Rome adopting and adapting their religion and culture, but we wound up talking about the current European fad for "Indian" camps and aboriginal culture in general, and how a repressed culture can wind up as a fashionable hobby, and how freaking annoying that must be.

We've been listening to Richard Dawkin's newest book "The God Delusion" on Stimulated Boredom http://www.stimulatedboredom.com, an interesting listen, don't agree with everything he has to say, though, I don't think that fundamentalist atheism is any better than fundamentalist anything else, and any belief system that presents itself as the only answer has to be questioned and challenged. Anyway, been listening to the book on Stimulated Boredom's Live365 feed http://www.live365.com, but mostly I've been listening to great alternative stations, after my blues and funk binge last month, I'm enjoying some punk again. Oboy has discovered a love for The Decemberists http://www.decemberists.com/, while I've been obsessively listening to the Mountain Goats No Children over and over again, especially after I found this video on YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXrDIBl0CUI, despite the Lego, it's not for little kids.