First and foremost, I am a wife, homemaker, mother, and teacher of my own children. That is my vocation. Everything else is an avocation to one degree or another. Most of my time is spent on those ordinary homemaking tasks that women have done (for the most part, pace the feminists, happily) for most of human history--cleaning, cooking, and caring for children. Living as I do (lucky me) in 21st century America, I get to obtain food by the simple expedient of driving to nearby stores and shopping, and this takes a fair bit of my time as well.
Homeschooling three children is a big time-taker, but it’s a responsibility I would not be without. You probably won’t find a lot of information on this site about homeschooling, because I’m too busy doing it to talk about it. But I recommend it highly and urge all intelligent parents who love their young children at least to teach them to read, using phonics, even if the hapless children are then turned over to a school for the rest of their education. On this topic I highly recommend Why Johnny Can’t Read by Rudolf Flesch. I can attest that the method Flesch describes works like a charm, even if you didn’t think you could do it. I have developed a very unprofessional set of materials on teaching your child to read, including four chapters (the fourth fairly abruptly cut off), plus many word lists, sentences, and even short phonetic stories. The phonics material is available in PDF form here (as announced on the main page). Please do give me credit if you should reproduce the materials or recommend them to others. If you are interested in using this material and would like it in a word processed form (I have it in Word Perfect), so that you can modify the lessons for your own child’s use, please make contact with me. I now know how to send zip files and should be able to zip up the Word Perfect version and send it to you. Warning: If you open a Word Perfect file in MS Word, some of the tabbing will be lost, and the lists will therefore look a bit odd. However, if you want the materials for purposes of modifying them anyway, this may not matter. All of the columns should be straight in the PDF version linked above.
Analytic epistemology is one of my most fun avocations, even if it is one I don’t get to spend much time on. It was my work in philosophy that motivated the development of this site, because I wanted a place to post my curriculum vitae and some papers and current work. Since I am a contributor to What’s Wrong with the World as well as to a personal blog, I thought it would be just as well if readers could find me on the web and get some sense of what I have done philosophically. Occasionally someone in philosophy asks me, “Who are you, exactly?” That means that they want to see my vitae. See the main page for a link to it.
I am (as readers of my various blog posts know) politically very conservative and opinionated. The murder of the innocent, born and unborn, seems to me a crux of our time. If we don’t get it right when it comes to protecting innocent human beings from horrific slaughter—and we are getting it disastrously wrong, and worse all the time—our society will go to hell in a handbasket quite soon. Grousing about the evils in the world (many, but unfortunately not all, caused by liberals and their ilk) is one of the things I do most of in what spare time I have. Probably I should do less of it.
I’m an entirely traditional Christian—deity of Christ, resurrection, the whole works. (And don’t get me started on the evils of the Emergent Church movement.) Raised a fundamentalist Baptist, I’m now a member of a continuing Anglican church. Continuing Anglicans use the 1928 Prayer Book and do not ordain women. Hymnody is one of my interests. I’ve had the enormous privilege of learning most of the hymns found in any old-fashioned Baptist hymnal and, since I’ve been in the continuing Anglican church, adding to that many wonderful Anglican hymns that I’d never known before. My kids are, of course, learning them all too. I hold a hymn sing at my house for homeschooling families and other Christian friends every six weeks to two months.