Welcome to Carrots! I'm so glad you're here. This is where I share thoughts on liturgical living, faith, parenting, culture, and an extra dose of Jane Austen. You can sign up for my email newsletter here to stay in touch, or look me up on Instagram!
Happy weekend, sweet friends! I know I’ve been MIA for the past couple of weeks but when I tell you why you’ll forgive me.
So we’d planned to be moved out of our apartment at the farm this coming Monday, but after Daniel interviewed for a few positions that would require him to start work this Monday we realized that we’d have to rearrange our plans for visiting family in Florida. So basically, in case he got hired we needed to move out a week and a half early AND pack up the van for a cross country trip with three small children in tow. And we had 48 hours to do it!
Have you ever packed up your whole life while small children unpacked the boxes you’ve already packed while your husband is at work? Well, let me tell ya! It’s a real TREAT!
But we survived! And once we moved all the boxes, we found out that we’d have time once we got back from Florida to do the deep clean so the apartment would be ready for new farm interns. That was a huge relief. Because I was not looking forward to staying up all night scrubbing out our tub and cleaning baseboards!
The kids were awesome road warriors on the long drive. Audiobooks kept us sane! And we’ve had a great week in Tallahassee with family and friends.
We also had time for a date at the French pastry shop where I used to work. If you’re ever in Tallahassee, you gotta go to Au Peche Mignon. All the heart eye emojis.
Guava Cheese Brioche, y’all. Just trust me.
On My Bookshelf:
One of my favorite/least favorite things about packing is putting all the books in boxes. I love looking at all our books and thinking about what I want to read and re-read. But then it drives me NUTS to have books in boxes that I can’t get to JUST IN CASE I MIGHT WANT TO READ THEM ALL AT ONCE.
Lately, I’ve been reading these three. I’ve got enough thoughts on Harry Potter and the Cursed Child for a blog post so keep an eye out and then Christy and I are going to chat The Awakening of Miss Prim for the Fountains of Carrots Podcast in the near future. Believe you me, you want to read this book. You will be delighted by it. It’s just lovely. I’m almost 400 pages into The Brothers Karamazov. I will finish you this year, you beast of a book.
Links:
Inside the World’s Only Surviving Tattoo Shop for Medieval Pilgrims: Atlas Obscura
What to Do When a Friend Loses a Baby: Mothering Spirit
This amazing ‘mermaid’ synchronized swimming duet at the Olympics
Evelyn Waugh’s Rex Mottram Prefigures Donald Trump: George Weigel
Beautiful Editions of Anne of Green Gables: Modern Mrs. Darcy
Learning to Read with Dorothy Sayers: First Things
I always love Jonathan Kelso’s photographs of southern life like these of Sacred Harp singing.
And have you heard about this Master of Catechesis program from the Catholic University of America?
And I’m planning a Carrots newsletter update with some of the things I’ll miss about living on the farm and some of the things I’m VERY excited about now that we’re moving to our new house. So if you’re not signed up yet, you can do so right here.
Lots of love,
Haley
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For once I’ll be in sync and ready for the book podcast! Picked up Miss Prim from the library 3 days ago! And I have many thoughts/disagreements with Cursed Child. Looking forward to getting to “talk” to someone about it!
Oh yay! Miss Prim is a short read and I’m just sure you’ll love it because I can’t imagine anyone NOT loving it!
Oh my goodness, I have a collection of those Coralie Bickford-Smith Penguin Clothbound Classics books, and I just love your photo of your beautiful books! We have several in common. Beautiful books are one of life’s necessities!
Aren’t those cloth bounds just STUNNING? They’re basically all I want for Christmas for the rest of my life.
WOW, congrats on getting all that moving done! I’m super impressed. I too have the same struggle with packing books.
I looked up that french pastry shop for fun, but I had to stop after the first few pages on the site because it all looked amazing and was making me want to pack up and take a trip to Tallahassee. That is so cool that you used to work there!
It’s all SO amazing! Such a fun place to work and everything is delicious. <3
Okay, so I read Miss Prim this week and have mixed feelings. On the one hand, I agree with its message – the author/protagonist and I have the same values; on the other, I felt the reader was basically beaten over the head with the message in a way that was both preaching to the choir and insulting/unlikely to convert others, and the writing wasn’t great (grammatically fine but characters were unrealistic and unbelievable). I guess I wish she had written a more believable Miss Prim especially; all these years of attending all-girls schools and I’ve never met anyone who is such a caricature (nose in the air when offended? Does anyone actually do that?), and also, for someone supposedly super intelligent and educated, she seemed awfully thick. Huh. Anyway, will listen to your podcast to see what you and Christy have to say.
Oh and also, the whole thing with referring to the main guy as the “Man in the Wing Chair” the whole way through felt terribly contrived. Daphne duMaurier got away with not naming a main character in Rebecca, but she… was a better writer. And the MitWC was also extremely unbelievable. He’s good-looking, lives in some esthetically pleasing but romantically crumbling mansion, is rich (enough), speaks twenty dead languages or whatever, is fond of children, is courteous, and of course is secretly in love with someone who also secretly pines for him… He’s a character from a novel Jane Austen would have skewered in Northanger Abbey. The author gives both him and Miss Prim a fault or two in an attempt to make them real, but they’re “faults” in the way heroines of those tacky Christian romance novels have faults, i.e. the cutesily attractive slight temper or stubborn streak.
Sigh… I guess I really didn’t like this book. Probably because it portrayed and advocated for things I truly are about, but did a terrible job of it.
*care about, not are about. That’s what I get for typing on a phone while bouncing the baby to sleep.
I really enjoyed Miss Prim. I’ll probably read it again because I just found it so delightful. That being said, I wouldn’t say it’s a masterpiece. It was a little too tidy rather than believable and it did hit you over the head with her ideas. I think it’s important to remember that what we read is a translation since it wasn’t published in English. But probably one of the most fun reads I’ve picked up in awhile.
Love the audiobook link! Thanks for re-sharing.
My pleasure, Alicia
I’m so jealous that you got to listen to audiobooks. I was all pumped with Harry Potter 7 for our drive from Utah to North Carolina…but Mr. Baby thought the voices were scary. And then my car charger broke. We were left with nothing but random radio stations! ???
Oh no! That sounds terrible!
Holly, I checked out the George Weigel link you have above regarding Donald Trump, and Weigel’s article is about as shallow as he claims Trump to be while referring to a character in a book! I wish some of the anti-Trump people would give some concrete and solid basis for hating/disliking the man. People seem to elevate themselves far above him and titter and laugh and belittle him, as if they were of a stronger fabric then he is… Or that the alternative, Hillary Clinton is somehow acceptable just to “vote our conscience”. The fact remains that at the end of the voting day, you have two to choose from. Two favors. You must choose between only two flavored, not three. You cannot go to the ice cream shop and choose a flavor they cannot give you! I just don’t understand how conservative minded people can at this point think any different, and stop stomping their feet in a tantrum about Trump. Again I ask, what are the concrete reasons they so dislike this man? He’s raised a good set of kids and has created jobs and careers for people, and what, just exactly are his moral foibles that everyone claims to know? Ah yes, he owns the Miss Universe or Miss America Pageant and he’s called a few women ugly. That must make him a mysoginist….
Hi Maria,
My name is actually Haley, not Holly. I think if you still refuse to see the serious flaws in Trump’s character at this late date, nothing I say will change your mind. There have been thousands of pieces written explaining concrete and solid reasons why Trump’s candidacy is an embarrassment to our nation. However, his vices go far beyond calling “a few women ugly.” The way he treats women as sexual objects (and famously said the way to treat a woman is “like shit”), owns strip clubs, prominently displays the Playboy mag he was featured in also support the argument that he has a big problem with misogyny among many other character issues. I don’t have the time to enumerate his many vices this morning, but if you want to actually read concrete facts about this man there are plenty of sources out there. I also disagree with the idea that we are supposed to just throw up our hands, cover our eyes, and accept one of two flavors when what we’re being offered is poison. The” ice cream shop” of your comment obviously needs some new flavors and if we don’t demand to have other options we’ll be stuck with two equally intolerable candidates in four years.
Maria,
Trump thinks that being a conservative is about conserving… money.
This is what he said in one of the debates.
I think we should believe him. That means, for me, not voting for him, and continuing to be appalled that he is a nominee.
In addition to this, and the fact that he has no values I agree with at all, he is extremely temperamental and will insult people at will, like the female debate moderator. If our national security is predicated on China not being easily offended, well, that is a problem.
I have been a “hold my nose and vote Republican” voter because abortion is so despicable that I can’t vote for a candidate that supports it (I still can’t, coupled with the fact that the dems now think every woman has a right to free contraceptives, even at the expense of The Little Sisters of the Poor, and that boys who think they are girls belong in girls bathrooms). But Republicans have long abandoned themselves to Mammon; if Donald Trump doesn’t wake up Christian voters that we have no voice in the national conversation, I don’t know what will.
If you think there are only two choices, read MacIntyre (“The Only Vote Worth Casting in November,” in addition to After Virtue ) and Chesterton. Voting down ticket is a choice.
Hi again, and sorry for getting your name wrong! You know what, after I wrote that, I rather regretted my comments because when it comes to politics- well…
My whole point is just that in this election, there are really only two choices for presidential candidates, and no amount of hand wringing is going to make a third choice possible, so it is either Hillary Clinton, or Donald Trump. If someone votes for a third, they are not going to get enough votes to get into office, and that is just giving a vote to Hillary. Perhaps Trump is just what the Republican Party needs after years of doing nothing and several becoming RINOs in the process. The whole party needs a shake up. I already know what is in the pike if Hillary gets in, I don’t necessarily know what holds with Trump. I wish I would hear more about why we don’t want Clinton in there on these Catholic blogs rather than why we don’t want Trump. Who is the viable third candidate? That is my only point. It’s either Hillary, or it’s Trump.
I thought the Awakening of Miss Prim was a really sweet read! Not many ladies novels out there with the word distributist in!
We moved across country a few years ago. I had a two year old and a one year old and was miserably sick with the pregnancy of my third. My husband was away for work for the entire week leading up to the move – he arrived home the night before we were to set off on a month long trip across South Africa to get to our new home. I think it was the cat that finished me off. I have this awful memory of lying in the garden getting the boys to pour buckets of sand on the mess as I threw up and in between trying to coax the cat to come and get in the moving box.
Yes! Loved that there was so much Chesterton in Miss Prim!
Oh my goodness! Your moving story sounds worse than mine
Miss Prim! Yes! My husband and I read it aloud to one another over the course of a few weeks- so delightful! The scene at the feminist league had us in stitches. I was, as I would guess you were, a bit disappointed with the ending- it was a little too weak. Alas, such things are difficult to write about.
I loved the Feminist League! I’m still thinking about the ending. Maybe Christy has some good thoughts on the end.