VICTORIAN FARM

I am happy that my favourite pyromaniac, historian Ruth Goodman, is in the follow up series to Victorian Farm. I am giddy because the series follows the triumphs and travails of three historians on a rural estate who survive only on what they can grow in the garden, or forage, or raise in livestock with the technology of the late Victorian age. The sequels will be A Victorian Farm Christmas and Edwardian Farm.

Ruth Goodman is a domestic historian who also was a presenter in A Tudor Feast at Christmas , a recreation of a sixteenth century Christmas banquet.

I cannot wait until the next series. The Victorian Farm was delightful and worth every minute of viewing.


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UPDATE

I am currently employed as a technical writer and editor. The work is more steady but it is also tedious. The challenges that I venture lack emotional interest. Technical writing and editing, however much I may gain in compensation, bores me.

I want to be off with the fairies, or at least with fliskmahoy mice up to never any good. I continue to write on the second book of a novel series despite the grim outlook for the publishing industry in these less than holy days of the winter retail season. Work does not salve over deficits in the generous waste yard of this blighted economy. I feel as if I should have a tin cup to beg my work when I accept those alms from hires. There is not any space to write what one wants but only room to write what one must. I struggle with loneliness and, depressed with the near morbid thought, ken I am not isolated in the abyss.

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WHERE ARE WE NOW

….stranded in the middle of Canadian school system purgatory. I am still homeschooling on part-time because the powers, in this temporal existence, that be retain my child on a yo-yo schedule for an hour and a half, then return aforementioned child home to a mother who is stressed for time in trying to pick up gigs and to write a second novel. I am picking up copy writing bits and editing shards but this is razing me to the white, skull-hued splinters of Joycean coloured bone.

What am I writing? For shame. I truly doubt the administrators who keep our family on the schedule’s leash would think in this manner, of James Joyce or anything connected to literature with regard to the dilemma. I cannot have an intelligent conversation with those rule-conscious minds that produce very little in real education. The schoolwork from this institution is not impressive. I have seen only the maths curriculum in the school district and it is not up to the standards that would prepare a child to go to the next grade level. There is not much one can do to maths to boggle the subject unless an incompetent teaches, and the school district has won the lottery with its failure to provide adequate subject matter. To quote my eldest, “This is baby crap!” The literature is similarly dreadful. I taught my child at home for a year and the“literature” the school provided was sunny and wholesome makelit about icicles and whatnot. Ew. I read to my child the works of Oscar Wilde, Stevie Smith, Emily Dickinson, and Heian era poetry ---among other choice morsels to feed the soul. The school prison does not give, with its rigid conformity, but scraps for the heart. Mine, certainly, now starves.

However, despite the hassles, I've kicked out another chapter last month in the novel and vetted another for inclusion last week. I have spotless turnaround time on gigs with perfect grammar and spelling. I will survive but these are the loneliest moments of my life.