Xantippe gets yet more Taunton Press books

With the start of a new fiscal month, I found myself with $45 in fun money to dispose of. It went very quickly as it always does. I got a microplane grater and two Taunton books: Patterns of Home: The Ten Essentials of Enduring Design and The Farmhouse: New Inspiration for the Classic American Home. Taunton, of course, is the publishing house that brings us Sarah Susanka and her Not So Big House empire, as well as a series of very useful paperback idea books on different facets of residential home design. I own about a dozen Taunton books. Did I really need to buy these two?

Patterns of Home is by the same three architects (Jacobson, Silverstein and Winslow) who produced the classic work A Pattern Language and it's supposed to be a streamlined update of that work. The "ten essentials" are: inhabiting the site, creating rooms outside and inside, sheltering roof, capturing light, proportion, flow, private edges/common core, refuge and outlook, places in between (which in my opinion repeats both private edges/common core and refuge and outlook) and composing with materials. On my first reading, I felt disappointed by the book, but I'm warming up to it as I skim through it again. I think the principles are very good, but the houses chosen to illustrate them don't always manage to. The beginning of the roof section is particularly unfortunate. It's full of exterior shots of busy rooflines and interior shots of cavernous rooms with the sort of soaring beamed ceilings that always make me think of winter heating bills and cobwebs. I'm glad I have the book, but any Susanka book will give you more consistently appealing photos.

What about The Farmhouse? With a lot of other books, I think "This is pretty, but it isn't my house and I don't belong there," but this book and these houses speak to me. There's something wonderfully elemental about the farmhouse. Farmhouses have clean, simple lines and uncomplicated floorplans but are very traditional. They are warm and welcoming with surfaces and floorplan that are oriented toward function. Interestingly, the stuff that I like about these American farmhouses is very similar to what I like about the Scandinavian homes that I've seen on the blogroll at thekitchendesigner.org.

4th of July

We had a quiet 4th of July. We went to the neighborhood barbeque Saturday, the kids enjoyed their tire swing, and on Sunday we made it to the pool. C is starting a two week Red Cross swim course this week and the Red Cross is strict about no floaties, no goggles, no nothing. C hates having water splashed in her face and she has had group and private lessons starting when she was four to very little effect, so I've been hyperventilating a bit ever since I heard the rules at the parent orientation. The initial plan was to do the helicopter parent thing and insist on goggles (or maybe even get a pediatrician's note), but we had the sudden inspiration yesterday to tell C that she would spend the first 30 minutes in the pool with no floaties and no goggles. I am happy to report that the 30 minutes stretched until nearly an hour. This is very good.

The swim course was supposed to start today but we woke this morning to thunder and rain. The class today was canceled. That's the bad news. The good news is that it's 77 degrees outside now and we got free water for the lawn.

Tire swing III

The old tires came off the car, the new tires went on, and the tire swing went up yesterday on the live oak tree in the front yard, complete with at least a dozen holes drilled in the bottom for drainage as per dave. s's advice. I will try to remember to interview my husband later to get more technical details. The hardware cost $71 I believe, which is about $20 less than the kits you can get premade. Every bit of the hardware on our swing is good for at least 500 pounds of weight, which is apparently not true of playground-grade stuff. The chains attach to the tire at three points, and those chains are sheathed in vinyl tubing. I helped a bit with getting a chain into a vinyl tube and it was fiendishly difficult. Eventually, he set up a pulley system to make the work easier. The tire swing looks great and the kids love it.

Oh, and he made lemon muffins last night and we watched Gran Torino.

HEB bread flour

HEB is our big Texas grocery chain. As a thrifty (hee!) housewife, I try to buy almost everything through their store brand. As I was getting ready to empty a bag of HEB bread flour into an air-tight canister, I had a look at the recipes (all in English) on the packaging. Here's a list:

• sopapillas
• flour tortillas
• bread machine white bread
• traditional challah bread
• pizza dough

So those are the recipes that HEB thinks will appeal to English-speaking Texan buyers of inexpensive bread flour. It is true that my husband wants to learn to make both tortillas and Indian nan, but I'm not sure that he's the demographic they have in mind.

While I'm talking about HEB, I'd like to rave a bit about their vintage-looking Texas-themed facial tissue boxes. They sell various facial tissue boxes with cowboys and horses and bluebonnets and old-time seed packages. They're the most beautiful disposable thing I've ever bought and I hope they keep making them.

4 miles

I did 4 miles on the treadmill this afternoon, listening to an audio version of Bleak House. I'm nearly one third in. The thing is, if I can manage to carve out the time, it isn't really that much more physically difficult to do 4 miles rather than 2 miles.

July budget

Tonight was budget night. Thanks to tuition expenses and drops in business income and some other things (uniform costs for D and medical), our savings for this month are only $400, just like last month. This is a revolting (although not unexpected) development. I think we'll probably wait until the beginning of the summer before doing anything radical.

Summer camp

C has started another week of summer camp. This session focuses on hands-on activities with plants, butterflies, vegetables and fruit. There will also be some work with a GPS-device, I believe. The site is a suburban elementary school with an impressive garden. I think C is having a good time, but the veggie pizza they made today and the veggie smoothies they are going to make challenge her goodwill.