Month: February 2012

Looks Like There’s Still Room in Tunisia for One Last Dictator

Sarah Bringhurst Familia

Can I tell you again how awesome Tunisia is? At the Friends of Syria meeting on Monday, Moncef Marzouki, Tunisia’s interim president (chosen just recently in December by the Constituent Assembly, the interim parliament) played an active role. He suggested only half ironically that Russia back up its support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad by offering him asylum should he choose to abdicate. And today Marzouki put his money where his mouth is, and offered President Assad and his family political asylum in Tunisia itself.

Proffering what even Marzouki admitted were undeservedly soft terms for a dictator might seem odd, especially coming from a country so intimately acquainted with the pain of despotism.… Read more

Welcome Home, Part 3: The Homeschool Room

Sarah Bringhurst Familia

This is the room we’ve all been waiting for. Well I have, at least. For years. One of my many favorite things about our house in Florida is that we have a completely dedicated homeschool room. That of course doesn’t mean that nothing happens in the room outside of our couple of formal homeschool hours each day (after all, homeschool=life, right?). But it does mean that I don’t have to go running around the house looking for supplies and books before we start, or have to contend with dozens of distracting toys sitting right next to us as we try to concentrate.… Read more

Pieces of Syria

Sarah Bringhurst Familia

This time last year I was in Tunisia, breathing the heady air of revolution, and observing curfew every night to stay out of gunfights between the army and the rogue police still loyal to ousted president Ben Ali. Egypt had followed close on Tunisia’s heels, and Qaddafi’s Libya was teetering. But as of yet, despite widespread unrest across the Middle East, Syria was still as silent as the grave.

Today in Tunisia, representatives of over seventy nations, (including the United States, but conspicuously missing China, Russia and Iran) are meeting to consider once again what can be done for the people of Syria.… Read more

Welcome Home, Part 2: The Dining Room

Sarah Bringhurst Familia

Well, I finally got around to taking pictures of another room in our house. And I do have another decorating problem to share with you. But first, a few photos.

Here’s our dining room:

Isn’t our bar-height table fun? I feel like a little kid sitting at it with my feet dangling. We got it when Axa was a toddler, partly because we loved the fact that she couldn’t reach onto the table and pull the dishes off. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get a good photo of the picture behind it, which is one of my favorite pictures ever. In fact, I tried to convince Tony that we should recreate it for our engagement picture.… Read more

Benvenuto

Sarah Bringhurst Familia

I absolutely cannot stop listening to this song, so I thought I’d share it with you. It is the official version, so you have to actually go to YouTube to watch it. But it’s worth it.

httpv://youtu.be/zNtDe7hfETQ

Fashionable Italian hippies recreating Woodstock in Amsterdam, and Laura Pausini by firelight. What’s not to love?… Read more

A Clean Kitchen is a Happy Kitchen

Sarah Bringhurst Familia

The title of this post was the sign my college roommate posted in the kitchen of our six-person apartment my freshman year. It was made even funnier by the fact that her last name was Kitchen. I adored my roommate, but I’m afraid I was one of the offenders. Between my untidy housekeeping and the fact that I was always coming home at odd hours having forgotten my key, and knocking on our bedroom window to be let in, I was lucky we were such good friends. I guess maybe she figured I would grow up someday.

And maybe I have.… Read more

Car-schooling

Sarah Bringhurst Familia

Since we are at present a one-car family (as opposed to being a zer0-car family during a good portion of the last couple of years abroad), sometimes we have to get creative about getting all our transportation worked out. Today the children and I took Tony in to work so we could grocery shop.  He works from home in the afternoons, so we picked him up after spending some time lunching in the park.

It worked perfectly. Our only problem was how to fit in the homeschooling we normally do between 10:00 and 11:30. Fortunately, most of our schoolbooks are available as audiobooks on librivox, so we can take them along in the car.… Read more

Welcome Home, Part 1: The Living Room

Sarah Bringhurst Familia

Now that the spiders are gone (hurrah for my non-squeamish husband), I’d like to invite you all to visit. You’ve been dying to come to Disneyworld for ages anyway, right?

Since we’ve had no immediate takers in the visitor department, here’s the first installment in my little virtual home tour.

First of all, I can’t even begin to say how in love I am with our new house. This may be partially a result of the fact that we haven’t lived in our own house with our own stuff for two whole years. Oh, and there’s the little matter that this is move number twenty of our eight-year marriage (you do the math). … Read more

More Florida Wildlife (Not for the Squeamish)

Sarah Bringhurst Familia

Like Axa, I’m O.K. with snakes. Lizards don’t bother me, even if they’re crawling on me. I can pick up snails, and I have even petted a slug at (Axa’s request, of course). But arthropods. Oh, arthropods. I do not do arthropods.

Due to nature study, and my commitment to helping my children say “ohhhh!” not “ewwww!” when they see an insect, I can now get on tolerably well with ants, ladybugs, crabs, praying mantises, and even beetles (and by “getting on” I mean literally letting them get on me and not freaking out). This has been a long and painful process, and I’m still working on the occasional flare up of internal anti-insect sentiment.… Read more

Our First Brush With Florida Reptiles

Sarah Bringhurst Familia

Nope, it wasn’t alligators; just snakes. And they weren’t in our backyard. We actually had to go looking for them. The Lyonia Environmental Center next to the library sponsored a 1  1/2 hour talk on local reptiles. Axa and Raj sat raptly through the whole presentation, which was very well done, I thought, by the seventeen-year-old daughter of the president of the Lake Region Audobon Society.

At the end of the presentation, they let everyone (everyone who wanted to, that is) come up and hold the snakes. Raj consented to touch a snake with one finger only, but Axa was in poikilothermic heaven.… Read more