The Fool's Progress

On Sunday, my wife and I celebrated our fifth wedding anniversary. The missus whisked me away from work several hours early and delivered me to a Bed and Breakfast near our house, the Circle S. It was fabulous and heartily recommended. The 29th is a special day, as it is Kansas day, my late grandmother’s birthday, and her anniversary with my grandfather, as well as the wedding anniversary of a dear Aunt and Uncle. We exchanged vows in front of the John Brown mural in the Capitol in Topeka. Two boys and two moves later things seem to be good. Thanks love!

I read this to approach Peirce and as an overview of pragmatism in general. The book seems to meet these goals. I do not yet know enough to form an opinion on the author’s stance, but he seemed to be more favorable to Peirce and Haack and against Rorty. Being dependent on the opinion of your peers or culture to determine how to act is bleak indeed. If truth is ethnocentric, then how does societal change happen?

The author writes well and conversationally. The claims attributed to Peirce seem incontestable; it is only as other writers work them over in later chapters that they become objectionable. Immediately James seems to stretch the ‘pragmatic maxim’ further than it can bear by introducing nominalism. Peirce’s pragmatic maxim is:

Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.

James and Peirce differ in what they had in mind with these ‘effects’. “James… is more explicit than Peirce… The effects are the sensations we are to expect and the reactions we must prepare. Here, too, there is a crucial difference between Peirce and James. Whereas Peirce aims to relate the meaning of an idea with the habits to which the idea gives rise (which are generals, not particulars), James relates the meaning of an idea strictly to particulars; i. e., sensations and reactions… Peirce rejects nominalism, which is the view that only particulars are real, in favor of realism, which is the view that some generals are real also.”

The idea that nothing can result from our ‘particulars’ doesn’t seem to work, but I guess I still need to read more. The rest of the chapters fall into line with distinction built upon distinction and philosophers surveyed put their own ideas on display. Dewey still seems daffy, and the source of much ill in education today. Eugenics rears its ugly head in Schiller, and some Italian intellectual bomb-throwers are detailed. Haack seems interesting, while Rorty terribly misguided. If he is right than there is no reason to study philosophy or anything else. Cornelis De Waal also has a book in the same series On Peirce that I should probably seek out.

I have a few other short books and one long tome I am midway through before I plan to start some serious Peirce. Daniel Dennett’s latest leaps to the front of the line once it appears in February.

The boys are down, hopefully for the night. We spent the afternoon with Grandpa Buffalo (my dad), and they should be tuckered out.

On Monday, the missus transitioned from part-time to full-time at her new job, leaving the boys and dad with much more time together. I am attempting to feel my way to a new schedule that will work for all of us.

How does anyone balance the endless household chores, while supporting my two new people as the explore this great big world, a marriage, two jobs between us, reading, writing, trying to sell the house as well, am I missing anything? The decision to read or write in my free time looms. When I do write, do I fill up space on the blog or work on something more serious? Somewhere here is a happy medium. I work weekends so on Mondays I like to catch up the kitchen chores and start laundry. Perhaps I can read and write on alternating days. All of us this will become easier (right, right?) as the boys age and become more independent.

Tomorrow we get to put new tires on the Family Truckster, there goes an afternoon and $500 down the drain. The workweek begins anew Friday.

I read No Victory, No Peace quickly once I got my hands on it last September. I had been following Angelo Codevilla’s essays closely and was looking forward to this collection. It does not disappoint. There is tension between the author and some of his critics in the essays that are not explained in the text, but readily apparent to the reader. The author explains his purpose and timing:

“I began these essays in the fall of 2001 because it seemed to me that the George W. Bush team’s failure to formulate a plan for victory was contrary to the principles of warfare. Its collective mind was muddled. After the murder of some 3,000 Americans, it would surely do something. But what? Against whom? To what end? All too soon it was clear that the team had no idea, or too many ideas, and that the result would be incompetence.”

The author goes on to note that he waited to publish the book after the 2004 elections to prevent it from coming across as partisan. Competence and incompetence are nonpartisan. The author makes the case that the Bush team never established what they were after, or how they would get it. Terrorism is bad and democracy is good, but how do we get the peace we desire?

Really, I would like to simply copy and paste the book. It is a classical take on the prosecution of war, our war, and our current failings on these scores. The author repeats, again and again, that war has two outcomes: victory or defeat.

“Common sense does not mistake the difference between victory and defeat: the losers weep and cower, while the winners strut and rejoice. The losers have to change their ways, the winners feel more secure than ever in theirs. On September 12th, 2001, retiring Texas Senator Phil Gramm encapsulated this common sense: “I don’t want to change the way I live. I want to change the way they live.”

Codevilla pulls no punches, and his criticisms all strike true: “The U. S. governments’ ‘War on Terror’ has three parts: ‘Homeland Security’, more intelligence, and bringing al-Qaeda ‘to justice’. The first is impotent, counter-productive, and silly. The second is impossible, the third is misconceived and a diversion from reality.”

Throughout, Codevilla emphasizes the importance of regimes, and destroying those that would wish us harm, the enemy. We won’t even identify the enemy regimes, such as the Wahhabis or the Baathists. The Saudi royalty are not devout and live non-Muslim lives. Codevilla recommends letting other Muslims destroy them, and most provocatively revoking the property rights over the Saudi oil fields.

Codevilla decisively highlights a path to lasting peace, if we can only stomach the price of the war. Victory does not come on the cheap, despite whatever the President attempts to sell us.

This book was a disappointment. I knew Santayana wrote widely and developed a theory of aesthetics, but the man who wrote and knew the nature of things so forcefully intrigued me. The very questions of aesthetics seem dubious to me, and unable to advance beyond the various eyes of the beholder. An interest in aesthetics presupposes an interest in the opinions of other people, while the artist is only expressing a self as they can. There is an underlying current of humor to this book. Is it really a good idea to consult a life-long bachelor hermit who finished his days closeted in a monastery in post-war Italy, as an expert on love and the good life?

The story of lonely man at home everywhere and nowhere, certain of his atheism and creed, and uncomfortable with earnestness or duty, certainly resonates with this reader. I was prepared to be sympathetic but discussions of various theories of love were uninteresting to me.

I am still wondering at the rift between Harvard and Santayana. The Claremont piece by Algis Valiunas includes this quote:

“In ‘A Brief History of my Opinions” Santayana recalls the distress that James’s Pragmatism caused him: “I could not stomach that way of speaking about the truth…” What makes Santayana’s gorge rise is the way in which the idiom and the ethos of the marketplace, of American go-getterism, have insinuated themselves into James’s discourse. Here is James ‘s characteristic mode, in which he disowns the notion that truth is one and incontrovertible, and endorses a multiplicity of truths that remain true only so long as they prove useful: “Our account of truth is an account of truths in the plural, or processes of leading, realized in rebus, and having only this quality in common, that they pay.” The proof of James’s truths is their ability to deliver the goods. The American small change of unconsidered common opinion, the medium of everyday traffic, come to pass as hard philosophical currency. The pragmatic “account of truths” underwrites the promise of a future that pays big time. Hence the hopeful ring of so much of James’s prose, which anticipates the clattering avalanche of the jackpot sure to follow the next yank on the lever, or the one after that.”

The essay is worth quoting in its entirety. One more nugget:

“Santayana writes for those strong enough to accept without yelping the harsh terms that nature imposes on those it has brought into being. “There is no cure for birth or death save to enjoy the interval.” The weightiest matters can be handled lightly, with a decorously murmuring quip.

I can’t help it, the closing paragraph:

“Rarer even than the richness and subtlety of Santayana’s mind is the humility which acknowledges that his most cherished thoughts might have missed the mark on the question that matters most. Having pressed reason as far as it can go, he reasonably recognizes that reason alone might be insufficient to understand the human place in the universe. Philosophical brilliance may not be the one thing needful, as ordinary men tend to realize more readily than those possessed of extraordinary intellect; not often does one find a philosopher saying, even if just in passing, that there could be human powers more crucial to understanding than those of pure mind. It is a measure of Santayana’s reverence for the truth that he allows that his own thought might never have grasped it. To borrow a phrase from his favorite James brother, Henry, Santayana was one of those on whom nothing is lost; and the shows more fully than any other 20th-century philosopher what man might be, although by his own admission he may not have the last word on what man is.”

That’s the man I was after, not an aesthetician. It may be eventually possible to merge neo-Platonism and moral philosophy with evolutionary biology to reach a materialist plateau of understanding our numerous plights, but his book doesn’t help get us there.

I usually seek out the faith column on Saturdays, though it often doesn't pertain to me. A recent Saturday edition prompted the following exchange with the columnist, who has his own blog.

Dear Mr. Tammeus,

I have read your columns with interest for several years, since moving back to the Kansas City area in 1999. I am a non-theist, but am greatly interested in reading about the faith I lack. The writing you did following September 11, 2001 and the loss of your nephew was very powerful.

Your latest column, though, is a real stinker. I know next to nothing about theology, but I do know Darwin never says, "everything that dies somehow is inferior to what survives." Natural selection describes a mechanism or event like the tide or erosion. For example, the shrew-like mammals that were running around the feet of dinosaurs 65 million years ago were not superior to the thunder lizards. They were, however, able to survive the effects of a cosmic impact near the present-day Yucatan Peninsula. It does not matter why. Darwin provides a mechanism for what happened next. That's all. That now, millions of years later, you can provide a value judgment to the occasion can have no bearing on what happened then. It is as if you are arguing against the rising tide instead of merely taking a few steps back.

Similarly, Professor Hanby's fitness paradox exists only in human minds, not in the world we are struggling to understand. We inject 'fitness' into explanations after the fact. That this may threaten what we like to believe about ourselves does not make it less so. I think the basic difference between those who possess faith and those who do not is the expectation of an explanation from the universe. In some ways, the hubris of those of faith is astounding. Gravity is less well understood to scientists than evolution by natural selection (gravity breaks down when examined at the molecular level), but I have yet to encounter anyone threatened by a non-biblical explanation of what happens when you drop your car keys. The world owes you no explanation of your existence and if that leaves you feeling bleak it is your problem. Denying reality as we perceive it to preserve a self-image serves no purpose but ignorance.

KC:

Thanks for your interesting note.

I think that when Hanby was talking about what dies and what survives, he was referring to what becomes extinct and what doesn't (because obviously everything living eventually dies). And I think his concern there (and mine) has to do not so much with what Darwin himself said or didn't say but with where people after Darwin have taken his thinking. One of the dangerous places people have gone is toward what's called social Darwinism, with its descent into eugenics. That, of course, cannot be laid directly at Darwin's feet, but it's helpful to understand where some of the assumptions behind natural selection can lead and how those assumptions may conflict at least with the spirit of the doctrine of creation.

Anyway, if you have read me for quite some time and I'm only now upsetting you, I'd say you were overdue.

I’ve deleted the second exchange, but I pointed out that hopefully the horrors of Nazi Germany discredited social Darwinism for all time. Meanwhile, if modern-day materialists are on the hook for implications of their ideas repudiated sixty years ago, then modern day Christians must answer for Pat Robertson and his outbursts regarding Ariel Sharon, Hugo Chavez, and the Dover PA school board elections.

I also pointed out that with a government of democratic pluralism; the problem isn’t which ideology rules but any ideology that has complete power. Pluralism requires we leave ultimate questions unanswered in the public sphere, thus the current culture war.

Mr. Tammeus responded by asking whom to surrender to re: the culture war, which I thought was funny.

I have on my ‘to-read’ shelf bothThe Life of Reason and Scepticism and Animal Faith. I have fondled The Last Puritan in numerous bookstores but have never committed to an overnight. Occasionally I stumble across a reference, a passing note, and think to myself ‘someday.’ Today is the day. I also at some point acquired George Santayana, Literary Philosopher and I am diving in.

The same issue of the Claremont Review has homage to the man and philosopher over several pages, despite his atheism and lack of overarching narrative answer. I am about to reread the original piece, and then dive into the book. Wish me luck with the keys to the good life. May I live as long, write something worthwhile, and die as certain.

The Claremont Review of books is indispensable. As I stated earlier, I disagree with many of their socially conservative views. On balance, however, it explores books and topics that otherwise I would miss. The editors do not limit themselves to the usual right-wing echo chamber ideas either. In the current issue, once you get past the opening editorial, explores the battle over whether social conservatives or libertarian republicans can lay claim to Barry Goldwater. A review urges social conservatives to consider the possible alternatives before committing to unthinking opposition of a Giuliani presidential bid.

I first read Angelo Codevilla in the Claremont Review in 2003, and he has consistently been the clearest and sanest voice in opposition to the administration’s ongoing Monty Python skit that passes for foreign policy. I am writing a quick review of Mr. Codevilla’s 2005 book No Victory, No Peace that I will post soon. The current essay calls the administration to task being clueless as usual, and for consistently picking the wrong side in Iraq’s ongoing civil war.

There is an interesting back and forth between Harry Jaffa and Ralph Rossum over degrees of originalism in constitutional interpretation. The also disagree over the place for a natural law reading of the constitution, such as whether the Declaration of Independence has any bearing on the matter. Somewhere eventually I’ll summarize my own understanding of the topic, based on spending the past six months rereading bits of Hobbes, Locke, and Machiavelli, followed by The Spirit of the Laws by Montesquieu, followed by Madison’s notes of the Constitutional Convention, the two Library of America volumes on the subject, and the Federalist. Suffice it to say whatever the accomplishments of the proponent, the idea that the Declaration has anything but an ancillary role, if any, in understanding what the founders were doing is silly. They were politicians, haggling over their interests, not deities walking the earth. The only political argument the founders dealt with that is settled is slavery, and that took a Civil War and hundreds of thousands of lives. The rest is pure politics, up to and including the Supreme Court. Any other view is utopian and dangerous.

There is a review of a book by a noted theologian, Interpreting the Bible and the Constitution, which sounds fascinating. Note that the editors examine the book despite the reviewer ultimately disagreeing with the author:

One may perhaps attribute Pelikan’s suspicion of originalism, and his amenability to the idea of developmental interpretation, to his long and fruitful study of Christian history. The Bible, after all, is vastly more complex than the Constitution. Its internal narratives, its lyrical poetry and thundering prophecy, its layers upon layers of meaning, all serve to distance it from the Constitution. If the latter expresses the structure of government resulting from the reflection and choice of ‘we the people’, the former attempts to bear faithful witness to man’s encounter with an ineffably mysterious reality. Moreover, as Pelikan acknowledges, the Christian scripture are widely thought to consist of both letter and spirit, law and gospel, whereas the letter of the Constitution is incomplete without being animated by the spirit of the Declaration.

… Alternatively, the spirit of those of us now alive could animate the Constitution. That is the central argument: which has precedence, dead guys with wigs or modern a modern understanding of American rights?

A reviewer from the Naval War College explores a modern interpretation of responsibility:

The four cardinal virtues of modernity turn out to be ‘niceness’, tolerance, industry, and responsibility. Blitz’s respectful yet ultimately merciless probing of the contemporary manifestations of these various qualities rings many bells; but it is also apt to leave readers with the depressing feeling that modern virtue is a long way from the real thing, and to make them wonder whether such thin gruel can really sustain liberal democratic societies in the face of the many challenges confronting them today.

As the Love and Logic people might say, whose problem is it if the reviewer thinks the gruel is too thin? That’s right; THE REVIEWER has the problem - someone else upset the world doesn’t explain itself clearly.

A review of Renaissance art explains how Roman artists felt free to use Greek myths to prove their own points freely, often using the Greek Gods in ways that would horrify Greeks. Included is this stunning sentence:

The ancient Greeks looked to their myths for an explanation of why the world was as it was; why justice came slowly if ever; why humans died; why people so often got things wrong.

Can you imagine the lack of self-knowledge it takes to chastise those silly Greeks for their crazy, improbable beliefs: are we were any different, except alive?

The closing shot takes issue with the President promoting democracy for its own sake.

The President believes and often states, as if it were a self-evident truth, that, “Democracies are peaceful countries.”

It is heartening to read anything sane regarding our foreign policy, especially in a conservative publication. Mark Helprin goes on to note various democracies that have instigated or participated in wars.

An Instinct for War may have just butted its way to front of my ‘to do’ list. This interview is a must read for every voter, if they can’t be bothered to track down the book.

War continues to rage in Iraq. President Bush recently declared that America is winning. Knowing what you do as a military historian, do you think anyone, at this point, can make this statement with certainty?

Not in my opinion. It is just too soon to tell. I can’t say that I’m particularly optimistic. There is a kind of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle operating when you go to war. You go to war for one set of reasons, and you may be deluding yourself or not. But then the war changes out from under you. And if you start off with a kind of reality deficit, you fall farther and farther behind. I’m not sure we’re keeping up with reality.

Reality has never been a part of this administration's plans. Attack, attack, attack, spin, spin, spin, we're winning, if you're not for us you're against us, repeat.

Do you think we started out realistically?

No. I think the war began with a whole lot of preconceived notions about what the future held in the Middle East. Way back in the early ’90s, Paul Wolfowitz (former deputy secretary of defense) wrote an article essentially criticizing the administration for not having gone far enough in Desert Storm. In some ways, that was a kind of a starting point, a preconception that Iraq could be a democratic bellwether in the Middle East. I think it had more to do with a set of beliefs than any sort of knowledge about Iraq. Paul Fussell, the terrific literary historian and critic, said that the precondition for understanding war is a keen sense of irony: the difference between what you expect and what you get.

Never mind that even if we get what we want, a democratic islamic republic, it has never been argued that it will be good for the United States. Going to war so people who hate us can vote freely for people that hate us would have made a better Monty Python skit than foreign policy.

I'm working on links to amazon.com, until then read the interview.

So, you know the story. A fellow, despite all the ominous warnings and foreshadowing, joins up with whaler, sails the seas, discourses on whales, men, and fate, and then everyone else dies. While you are reading, keep an eye out for the trinity. It is everywhere, three masts on the Pequod, three mates, three harpooners, and three days to hunt the whale, three legs for Ahab.

“The reason the mass of men fear God, and at bottom dislike Him, is because they rather distrust his heart, and fancy Him all brain like a watch.”

-- Letter from Herman Melville to Nathanial Hawthorne, June 1851.

“A sense of unspeakable security is in me this moment, on account of your having understood the book. I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb.”

-- Letter from Herman Melville to Nathanial Hawthorne, November 1851.

The peg-legged Ahab is ultimately impotent in the face of natural fury, despite his maniacal approach. For instance, on the first day of the hunt, after Ahab repositions the boat and the harpooner in anticipation of the rising whale: “But as if perceiving this stratagem, Moby Dick, with that malicious intelligence ascribed to him, as it were, in an instant, shooting his pleated head lengthwise beneath the boat (italics added).”

We are all marked by a head-to-toe birthmark – our mortality, and the curse of self-awareness in an indifferent world. In fact, Ahab usually celebrates the lack of a will, his state of being fated and determined to hunt his nemesis.

“Like a truly myth-making poet’s, Melville’s imagination was obsessed by the spectacle of a natural and human scene in which the instinctive need for order and meaning seems mainly to be confronted by meaninglessness and disorder; in which the human will seems sometimes to be sustained but oftener to be thwarted by the forces of physical nature, and even by agencies that lie behind it; in which goodness and evil, beneficence and destructiveness, light and darkness, seem bafflingly intermixed. In none of the great formulations that were available to him, neither Calvinist Christianity nor in romantic optimism, could Melville discover a myth that for him was adequate to the lighting up of these obscurities. Moby Dick is his endeavor to construct his own myth.”

-- From _Herman Melville_, Newton Arvin, New York: William Sloane Associates, 1950, and my Bantam Classic paperback edition.

The challenge for me and many modern readers is to be moved by Melville while willing to accept his central premise from the start. I am on Ahab’s side, doomed and thwarted, at least to the point where you make an ass of yourself attacking the universe. This reading renders Starbuck the believing hero, carrying on as if he can return home safe. Starbuck is Patel from _Life of Pi_. When you are in a lifeboat with a tiger, you can either make a deal with it (Pi), or attack (Ahab). Again and again we learn Pi has the nicer story, but it bears repeating. What kind of person, given the choice, would choose the void, even if true?

Perth the carpenter and blacksmith became my favorite character. He destroyed his life, his family, and his future with the bottle. Yet he toils on hammering, creating and fitting legs for crazy whaling captains, writing, reading, living like us all, as we can and must.

If you haven’t yet finished, toil on through the cetology, blubber gore, and ‘savages’ to reach the last third of this book. Ishmael did.

I am surprised we haven’t had the President Bush as Ahab adoption, chasing after evildoers while ignoring all other sage advice. How would the rest of the crew stack up: Colin Powell as Starbuck, with Cheney and Rumsfeld as Flask and Stubb? Who is the sole survivor Ishmael, Condaleeza Rice?

The Claremont Review of Books is a publication of the Claremont Institute, and is supposed to be an answer to liberal book reviews such as the New York Review of Books and the New York Times Book Review. I subscribed to read the different viewpoint, and have not been disappointed, though I disagree with much of the material. Most galling are the fund raising appeals against gay marriage or activist judges from the Institute. THIS EDITORIAL from the current issue is typical.

I have trouble mustering outrage for the poor, persecuted Christians in the United States. They control every branch of national and local office, after all. It is astounding to me that they have the gall to attempt to dictate how other people greet them in December. Can pagans receive a happy solstice greeting at Hobby Lobby, or Jews a Happy Hanukkah at Chick-Fil-A? To think they typically accuse liberals of being overly concerned about their feelings!

The third paragraph fails utterly:

As a question of etiquette, the issue invites thought. To wish someone the joy of the holiday is not automatically to presume that he shares it. For example, it's not impolite to say "Happy St. Patrick's Day" to someone who isn't Irish. By the same token, one can wish a Frenchman "Happy Bastille Day" without being a Frenchman, or even approving of the French Revolution. The important thing is that, in saying it, you wish him well; imagining yourself in his shoes is a gracious part of such friendliness.

It is not that upset Jews or Pagans are demanding Christians cease expressing their religion, though some no doubt are and that is where the sensitivity arises, but that Christians are not receiving the greeting of their choice! Oh, the outrage!

The fifth paragraph conflates a public or government act of religion, and a private, market-based one:

This season's dustup over "Happy Holidays" is thus a mild case of a more serious disorder. The cutting edge of aggressive secularism reveals itself in efforts to banish Biblical religion altogether from public life: to remove "under God" from the Pledge of Allegiance, to abrade the Ten Commandments from public buildings, to discourage schoolchildren from filling their moments of silence with a joyful noise unto the Lord. In effect, the secularists demand that the tone of public life must be made to conform to atheistic standards. Everyone must be taught to behave as "practical atheists," in John Paul II's wonderful phrase. Even believers—especially believers—must learn to speak and act, outside the sanctuary of their churches and synagogues, as though God doesn't exist. Anything else would amount to persecution of non-believers.

If Target thought handing out baby fetus Christmas ornaments would increase business, they would.

The final paragraph strikes the right note, and notes that Christians gave the holiday away all by themselves:

Finally, religion dignified civil society by making it the home of man's highest purpose, to know and worship God. Yet civil society was also the site of man's lower but urgent purpose, economic exchange and moneymaking. The two were connected, so G. K. Chesterton observed, by such merry occasions as holy days. "Rationally," he wrote, "there appears no reason why we should not sing and give each other presents in honour of anything—the birth of Michael Angelo or the opening of Euston Station. But it does not work. As a fact, men only become greedily and gloriously material about something spiritualistic." In other words, if you want to keep complaining about the commercialization of Christmas, don't turn it into a mere happy holiday.

Non-Christians did not act to subvert the holiday over the years by replacing Jesus with Santa Claus, but many Christians did. Christians who are upset about this are reaping the crop of making a public display of faith in the first place. Once the horse is out of the barn it is not very likely to graze where the farmer would want it.

I just finished Moby Dick, reading it for the first time. I’m writing up that review now. This weekend I am plowing through some periodicals. The New Republic, Wilson Quarterly, The Claremont Review, and Granta all arrived this past week. Thus far I have finished NR and WQ. I am also plowing ahead on a Richard Dawkins book that I am not enjoying much. I received several books in December for my birthday and Christmas, and they are looming on the horizon (Thanks Mom!)

The world needs one more blog, or three. One will be a general-purpose discussion, fueled for and by my Midwest Voices column in the Kansas City Star. I have a few ideas, and will be flexing and working on them here. I’m also a dad and husband and will be blogging those experiences. I also will maintain a separate blog for book reviews, and a third one on my Kansas City Royals. Read away, and note that comments are welcome.

Thomas the Tank Engine to the rescue! Once the second boy arrived seventeen months after his brother, all those pre-parenthood ideas - no fast food, no eating in the car, no television babysitter - went out the window. My fourth child will probably be eating cold hotdogs off of the floor...

It is 1837 on a Wed. night, both boys are fed, and are demanding stories be read so this is going to be short. My first ever blog post. More to follow.