Old bottle

The guys went outside to shoot a new crossbow they built. I say that with heavy laden despair. Wow, I've been so so so so bored lately but building a crossbow is not what this "only girl in the house" mama has in mind. Oh well. I don't really know what I have in mind. My shoulder hurts too badly to knit. Darn physical therapy. I've eaten everything under the sun and now my pants don't fit.
Ugh.
Ever just have the "can't help it's"?
So anyway.... on with the crossbow. They were shooting arrows into the hillside. They went over to retrieve one and found this bottle! Pretty cool huh? It's a Whistle Soda bottle from 1947. Want a great tasting drink? Just Whistle!
Here's a better picture from a collector.
http://www.angelfire.com/tn/traderz/whistle.html





It's in pretty bad shape but man,, it's been outside for 60 years! You would be too! I'm surprised that there is any paint left on it at all! I'm kinda fascinated by old bottles and such. This one is nice and heavy. It doesn't have any knicks or cracks in it either!
It's interesting what can be lurking in your own yard and you not even know it! It's not surprising that the house in front of us was built in 1947. We found some neat stuff when they dug the foundation for our addition. Nothing that was in as good shape as this bottle though. A few crumpled steel beer cans and some bottle bottoms with dates.


The best part about it is the "WHISTLE BOTTLING CO. HUNTINGTON, W. VA." part is still very visible. Very cool.
This kinda sparks my interest because I've had many family members who've worked in the glass packing industry. I wonder what the Whistle Bottle Co. Was like? I wonder where it was?
Ahh,, a mystery indeed!




Here you can see the bottom. Not very interesting but it does reveal the date and the bottlers symbol.

On other fronts. We tried to do school all week this week and we were mostly successful. Dad was home this past week and there were many distractions.
We had an interesting math question:
If the perimeter of a room is 80ft, what is the area?
Easy right?
uh,, it SHOULD be but think about it!
If the room is square then the area is 400 sq. ft. (i.e. each wall is 20ft)
If the room is 10 by 30ft. then the area changes to 300 sq. ft.
If the room is 5 by 35ft. then the area changes to 175 sq. ft.
So on and so forth!
Interesting huh? We concluded that even Saxon math would not expect a 6-7th grader to wrap their mind around a concept so organic and it must be a typo but it really threw us for a loop.
In my mind, it shouldn't matter how short 2 of the walls are,, the shape should contain the same amount of room but it's just not so. It's a ratio thing. I still don't fully understand it.

The kids have been fighting like cats and dogs. It's a good thing they still have separate corners to go to. If we had given in a few years ago and purchased bunk beds I wouldn't have any way to separate them. They need more to do I guess but wow....... I don't want to do more! I don't like to be run ragged all day long. This is going to be a busy week. Physical therapy 3x for me (YUCK!) a library skills class, band and we must must must do some fall (spring) cleaning because the junk is taking over again and the boys closets need cleaned out big time in preparation for winter.
I'm a little scared to see what kind of clothes the kids have for winter. I'm afraid it may be NONE. It was easy when they were little. Now T1 is wearing a small man's size and he was so hard on his clothes that most of the hand me downs are not suitable for T2.

Time to hit the Goodwill (but don't tell the kids!).

Reasons why it's good to have your husband home

1. Spiders.

Need I say more? I mean,, gah! Look at that awful thing! He's in the bathroom and I screech. I screeched like a little girl. He agreed that it was a nasty looking one indeed and proceeded to try and kill it while it was on the curtain. of course he just knocked it off and it ran. I told him I needed to see a carcass or I was calling a real estate agent. As if I could sleep in a house where I knew that critter was crawling around! He had to move the entire bed before he found it.

He did show me the dead remains so I could relax.

My hero.

Co-op 10-2-07

Today was Co-op day. My station was on the Mound Builder Indians.

It was kinda tough to come up with enough interesting information on them to fill the amount of time I have with each group of kids.

I decided to try and make some mounds for our jr. Archaeologists to excavate. The kids liked that.

I used 2 parts plaster of paris, 2 parts dryish dirt (I found out later that the damp dirt WON'T set up!) and 1 part water or enough to make it "mud pie" consistency.

I used Styrofoam bowls as my moulds.

I put in a little mud, then I placed a "people cracker" dog biscuit in the middle. Put in a little more mud and then placed a few Halloween skull rings in the mix. Then I finished it off with a nice covering of the mix. Work quickly, it sets up fast! Or,, rather... it's supposed to. Some of ours didn't but I think my ratio went way off after sundown.

The dog biscuit was meant to symbolize the Indian chief in the mound and it was almost impossible to excavate him in one piece. I wanted to be able to explain to the kids how careful archaeologists had to be with their work. The skull rings had a 2 fold purpose. 1) skeletons,, duh. and 2) jewelry. One of the girls found a rock in her mound and it had a fossil in it!! We totally didn't do that on purpose! Cool huh?

We also brought a sampling of real ancient pottery shards, arrowheads, drill points, and a hammer or axe head.

In this age of technology, gotta have it right now, and as seen on tv, it's nice to play in the dirt every once in a while! I think they learned something too!

Shhhhh,, don't tell them!

Alpaca Shopping

I love Alpacas.

I mean, I REALLY love them! Someday soon I hope to get a herd. A smallish herd will be fine. (I don't ask for much! LOL)

They require little shelter- just a three sided building.

You can easily keep up to 6 animals on one acre of land

The don't eat much.

They are cute, CUTE, CUTE!

Their fleece and offspring yield high returns.

They are gentle.

They are "clean" and hypo allergenic

I knit. Come on,, do you need more reason than that?

The boys got to make a felted bar of soap while we visited Harmony Ridge Farms today. The owners were so knowledgeable and kind. We had them to ourselves for our whole visit! When it comes time to buy, I'll be visiting them again. I'll probably make an appointment to go up and learn more about them and take some training before that.
The whole family is completely enamoured with these gentle beasts of burden. We've justified the cost as being less than a registered dog and what great pets these are!
I mentioned to Jeff half joking (see the picture above) that I had free labor for quite a few more years because we homeschool and he told us that his grand kids homeschool too! Beware.... we home schoolers are everywhere!
On our way out the door we picked up a packet of information, some business cards and one of the personalized pens they offered.
What a cool way to spend a Sunday! We learned a lot, but don't tell the kids!

The Homeschool Bulletin Board

In our home school area, we have our "bulletin board". See it? It's nice, no? What? You don't see it? Silk trees make great bulletin boards! We hang all matter of stuff on it. Of course Mitt (our HS mascot) in always on the tree when he's not on the road with us. Which has not been often lately! Poor Mitt,, remind me to take him on our next outing!

I stripped the tree last night to dust it off (man, stuff in my house gets dusty, I mean D-U-S-T-Y) and change it's decor so there isn't any class projects tucked in the branches at present. I hit the dollar store for the decor. Spent a whopping $3. I'll probably find more junk in the attic if I can motivate to climb up there!

It will be our Christmas tree too. We don't have a lot of room for a big tree. I do bring out a few smaller trees at Christmas time and kind of make a "grove" by grouping them all together. Each tree has a theme. Not because I think it looks good ('cuz there is no hope for us there!) but because we have so many stinkin' Christmas ornaments! We have all the Hallmark Car ornaments and too many penguin (a past obsession) ornaments to count and a few years ago I got all obsessed with Scandinavian stuff. I will have to pull the lights off of it and string some new ones. I'm the laziest person alive it seems because all the strands of lights finally burnt out sometime in the spring and I just never took them off! But a Christmas tree must have lights, so I suppose sometime soon I'll make myself buy some new lights (all of ours are like,,,, first Christmas together old) and restring it soon.

I love doing weird and stupid stuff (like the tree). I think that's why we're so well suited to home school! I wonder if my kids will embrace this or just long to be normal!

Native American Fiction

Our local library has both of these books. Has anyone read either one of them? I read the first few pages with that cool thing Amazon.com has were you can look inside the book. They both seem to be very exciting and easy enough for my 8 year old to read. They are both strong contenders for our next "pass around" book. I think they'll also be good stories to reinforce our recent field trip.

Trumpet of the Swan- COMPLETE

We finally finished it up today. We all enjoyed it immensely as I've mentioned a hundred and one times. The ending was sweet and happy as I expected.

There was one funny thing that I did not expect though, more ironic than funny really! Keep in mind that this book was published in 1970. In the second to last chapter, a decision about a large sum of money needed to be made. One child in the crowd who was identified as ALFRED GORE suggested that the money be donated to The American Civil Liberties Union!

Funny huh? or is it prophetic? LOL

By the way, they money was given to the Audubon Society, not the ACLU!

Speaking of money. A friend of mine was telling me that she works part time from home. I was thinking "oh yeah, sure you do". Every time I hear that I think that it's too good to be true. She REALLY does tho! She does online customer service for companies like Sprint, Comcast, and AT&T. She gave me a link to apply but I seriously can't keep up with what we have let alone doing anything else. I guess it really is possible to work at home!

School went fine today. We were done by lunch time. T1 wasn't feeling good today but not so bad that he couldn't do his work. Isn't that the best thing about home school? What would have been an absence in PS was just a day with extra TLC for us!

Have a great weekend!