This and that

Thanks for all the nice comments on the dresses. I do find sewing for myself very satisfying. Maybe I need to do more...while I don't have the wonderful dressmaker shop down here, there is a Jo-Ann fabrics that carries some nice stuff, maybe later this fall I will make time to make another dress from one of those patterns. The 2174 has a view with slightly longer sleeves and I think made out of a darker, heavier fabric it would make a nice fall dress.

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TChem, the Moundbuilders book is by George R. Milner and its full title is The Moundbuilders: Ancient Peoples of Eastern North America. Publisher is Thames and Hudson. (Amazon has it, so I expect other booksellers would have it/could order it. It's possible it could even be gotten via ILL; I'm sure some university libraries would have a copy)

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"Buried Indians" - my second Moundbuilders book - is interesting but very different from Milner's book. The author of Buried Indians spends more time reflecting on modern-day things, on how the residents of Trempeleau think about the mounds and the Native history, and in the section I'm on right now, she's discussing how the Euro-descended population (mostly of Scandinavian heritage) think about the Native people who live there...there's a mix of condescension (the "noble savage" idea brought into modern times - mainly in the sense of "they have some mystical knowledge of the natural world we don't") or pity/contempt (the idea that the Native people are all poor and many are alcoholics). The fact that there's now a large Native-run casino (the Ho-Chunk casino; I think I actually have seen the one she refers to) muddies the issue somewhat.

(I think of a comment one of my Anglo students once made about the Indian Casinos here: "We took their land, and now they're steadily winning it back from us." Though from what students have told me, some of the people who are heavy users of the casinos are people who might not really be able to afford whatever losses they incur...I admit I'm somewhat laissez-faire about gambling (or "gaming," which is apparently the new, politically-correct term for it*), figuring it's a choice...not a choice *I* would make, because I tend to be tight with my money, but whatever...but it does make me uncomfortable to hear that the casinos are packed on the days when the government checks come out.)

(*And I wonder how the people who call themselves "gamers" - the World of Warcraft fans, the people who do things like set up Settlers of Catan festivals - feel about the re-use of the term they apply to themselves.)

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My brother does metal detecting. Last week, he was out searching somewhere and he found an odd copper thing. (Apparently, the fancy metal detectors have readouts where the range the readings fall into allow you to make a pretty solid guess as to the type of metal). When he dug it up, it looked like a projectile point of some kind. He e-mailed photos of it to someone knowledgeable and apparently what he found was a Copper Culture point (or, the person he e-mailed said it looked like a "Celt" except it was a bit small). (He found it in a semi-public area, certainly somewhere he had permission to be detecting).

That's pretty exciting. I'm not sure if he's going to donate it to a museum or something (or even if it were something in sufficient condition that a museum would want it). He dug it up because he thought it was an old copper coin, so I doubt anyone could come after him for "disturbing a site" or some such.

Maybe I should send him my copy of "The Moundbuilders" now that I'm done reading it. Except, I think the Copper Culture were a different group, more northerly.

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It's raining today. We got some rain on Thursday but it was a brief, downpour-ish rain that didn't do much good for anything. The rain today is a slower, steadier rain that may actually give some help toward breaking the drought.

I can't quite describe or explain the sense of grateful relief a person feels when it starts raining again after months with no rain. It's like you felt the climate was broken, somehow, and now it's getting back to normal again.

And at any rate, I just LIKE rainy days. I always have. Even when I was a kid I did. I don't know why, whether it's that I have sensitive eyes and too much bright sunlight hurts them (too much bright light DOES bother my eyes; sometimes I will turn off the overhead lights in my office and work just by the light of the computer screen) or if it's that I'm fundamentally an "indoor" sort of person (my chosen profession notwithstanding) and I like rain because it gives me an excuse to stay indoors.

But I would like to see more rain now. I hope we have a cool, rainy fall, so we can recover from this summer. (Also I hope we have a cool fall so I can wear some of my knitwear earlier!)