I haven't been around here much lately, but I've recently set up a new website and blog at www.ameliasmith.net

See you there!

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Creating a Home for Body, Soul, and Spirit by Bernadette Raichle rating: 4 of 5 stars I borrowed this book from the local Steiner playgroup. I've enjoyed the parent-toddler group, and have picked up a lot of ideas about education and childrearing from its Steiner/Waldorf based activities, but I've always been a bit uneasy about its philosophical underpinnings. Here, at last, was a book which was explicit about how Anthroposophy informs the operation of a daycare centre, and man, is there some whacky stuff in there! The anthroposophical jargon about creating a "penetrated" environment and the four sheafs (Physical, Etheric, Soul/Astral, and Ego) would turn off most people I know, but it does explain why Waldorf kindergartens are organized the way they are. I gave this book four stars because it was exactly what I was looking for, and because I think it is useful, but it is not particularly well-written. Some sections are less well-developed than others, and as I
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Spanische Windtorte

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When I was young, my mother had a nearly-complete set of the Time-Life Foods of the World cookbooks. Although the recipes in these were not, as a rule, very good, I was much taken with the photo on the cover of The Cooking of Vienna's Empire -- a Spanish Windtorte. I told my mother that I wanted one for my birthday cake. I had not grasped quite how difficult they were to build. I think we wound up with more of a Pavlova instead. The thing is, a Spanische Windtorte is almost exactly the same thing as a pavlova, only with a fancier-shaped meringue. So, when I set out to make one again yesterday, I used a combination of this Pavlova recipe and these Spanische Windtorte instructions . I increased the quantities in the pavlova recipe by about 1/3, and, in the final step, did not macerate the fruit but rather mixed it with sugar immediately before adding it to the whipped cream mixture... but I'm getting ahead of myself. Making the meringue was fairly straightforward, except that
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Sick days etc.

As with NaNoWriMo, my attempt at NaNoBloPoMo has been a bit uneven. I'm on day 11 and I think this is my 9th post. It's not that I don't have ideas, it's just that the day has been slipping away from me. I have all sorts of miscellaneous household stuff to do all the time, I have bits and pieces of paid work, and I like to keep up with the news, which is always incredibly distracting. Today I'm also achey and tired, probably fighting off the Thing That's Going Around. My son had it about a week ago, my nephew and niece have it, and my husband has also been feeling a bit under the weather. I'm not absolutely bedridden -- I did take the dog out for a walk, do laundry, and do grocery shopping -- but I spent a good part of the day lying around feeling like doing nothing at all. So it seems like a good day to talk about what to do when you're feeling like crap, because being on the road to better health doesn't mean you'll never get sick, especially
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