Negative Capability

. . several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously--I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason--

(written by William Butler Yeats John Keats, an excerpt from a letter)

(LOL!! Yeats, Keats, very little difference. I have to tell you that I didn't even realize my mistake until I was driving down the highway taking the kids to ice skating lessons, with no prospect of being able to correct my error for at least 4-5 hours. Why in the world I waited to edit my blog post until I was driving down the road, I do not know. This is a very interesting brain I am dealing with.)

A Summation

An excerpt from Mariel's most recent history narration:

"England and France are quarreling. Again."

Creativity

In order to rearrange life, in order to create, one must get comfortable with disarrangement for awhile. One must be able to live with the unfamiliar without, to use Keats' phrase, any "irritable searching for fact and reason." In bearing with the tension of the unknown or the unfamiliar, one can enable something new to come into existence. If one forecloses a thought too quickly, because it seems too weird or strange or disorganized, then the pattern or beauty that may be contained within the fantasy may be lost.

--from the book, Driven to Distraction

Emily Dickinson

The Dust behind I strove to join
Unto the Disk before —
But Sequence ravelled out of Sound
Like Balls upon a Floor —

My New Favorite Quote

Creative thoughts happen unscheduled.

(From the book, Driven To Distraction)

Home Again

We got back from our trip to California tonight. I wanted to write something profound and beautiful and surprising-- even worked for awhile on some ideas connected with We Three Kings and New Mexico and a dusting of snow in the desert and for He is like a refiner's fire and the Year of Jubilee... But nothing came of it except the desire to work on it more or delete it altogether.

I am not feeling beautiful or profound, or even surprising. I just feel very tired. We all put up with each other well, and even had some fun on the way home, playing in the spots of snow as we stopped for gas or food, laughing at Popeye and Andy Griffith, and analyzing each other's personalities. (Surprisingly, I am a Relating Director and Mr. Honey is a Socializing Thinker. I thought I was a Thinker, but evidently I only play one on this blog.) The kids took their dolls on a cruise in the backseat this afternoon, and I got some crocheting done.

But California to Texas is Really. A. Drive. And not a task for the feeble.

I am so glad we are home.

Note to self: When leaving for an extended Thanksgiving trip, please remember to throw out the decorative pumpkins before you leave. And please triple check that everyone has their thick jackets. (I thank the Lord for Triss, who brought a matching sweater and/or jacket for every outfit she packed this trip. She is the only reason Mariel and Cornflower stayed warm through the wind and the snow.)

(By the way, if anyone is looking for a way to resign themselves to the high price of gas in Texas, I recommend a trip to California. A few days of paying upwards of $3.40 per gallon, and you will think nothing-- nay, rejoice-- at paying $2.88.)

Thanksgiving Happenings

Hi, all!

We travelled over twenty-five hours this past weekend in order to be with Mr. Honey's new nephew and my 83-year-old grandparents this Thanksgiving. Thanks to the wonder of laptops and WiFi, I am able to make a blog post from beautiful Petaluma, California. We drove through San Francisco and had lunch in Sausalito yesterday. The weather was perfect, sunny and clear and in the 60s.

This past Sunday we attended church in Niles Canyon, at the meetinghouse I was raised and married in, and got to visit with all the wonderful church folks there. It is a precious thing to know beyond a doubt that there is a place where you are loved and made much of simply because you are there. The warm hospitality of these lovely people is demonstrated through love that is maintained regardless of your action, inaction or wayward thought-- unconditional and abundant. Ahhh. This is what I mean when I tell my children I will always love them no matter what. I am not nearly so good at it as my folks in California, though. A very nourishing and reassuring love. I am taking notes.

Our drive out was uneventful, unique in the fact that each contingent had its own entertainment. We had a dvd player in the car for the first time in our little family's history. I have always been adamantly against tv in the car (I really don't even like it so much in the home), but this time I reluctantly agreed, knowing that one of the kids began dreading the drive out from the moment we began talking about it early last summer. So the kids had their movies, Mr. Honey had his radio with headphones and I had The Silver Branch and How The Irish Saved Civilization, along with a blanket I am crocheting. It was a rather lonely trip, to tell the truth. And we barely sang at all.

Cornflower and I developed colds on the way out, and are still nursing our snuffledy noses and scrubbing down every few minutes to keep others from getting sick. (I wondered if we ought to call the trip off, but we were already so many hours down the road, I just couldn't see it.)

Our new nevvie is the sweetest and most remarkable boy ever (of course), and we have the whole rest of the day to play with him and visit with his parents. We are taking him to the park so he can gaze up at the light glinting through the leaves on the trees. Good times!

Tomorrow we will be having Thanksgiving with four generations of my family in my aunt and uncle's home, which they have completely redone on a large scale and barely finished in time for Thanksgiving. And then we will go home. Twenty-five more hours. I wonder if I can hide the headphones and dvd player before we start out again? I don't know if I can bear silence across four states more than once.

Bloggy Thankfulness

Mama Squirrel is encouraging everyone to nominate some lesser-known homeschool blogs, and I want to get involved. Unfortunately, I cannot figure out where to place my nominations. (How someone as computer illiterate as I ever came to blog is one of the wonders of this desktop publishing world. I quite impress my friends, you know. I cannot function in Excel, I cannot open attachments, but, yes, this girl can blog. After a fashion.)

Oh, okay. I decided to try one more time, and realized this post is the form. Light dawns on Marble Head. You scroll down to the bottom of the post and leave your nominations in the message, right? That's what I have now done, so hopefully that is correct.

Here are the blogs I have nominated:

Best Curriculum or Business Blog: A Brave Writer’s Life in Brief

Best Family or Group Blog: The Common Room

Best Cyber-Buddy: Dewey’s Treehouse

Best Encourager: The Beehive

Best Teen Gal: The Heart of Flame Therein

Best Crafts and Projects Blog: The Heart of Harmony

Best Homeschool Mom Blog: Higher Up And Further In

Best Variety: Take Time To Smell The Coffee

Best Artistic Content Blog: Wittingshire

Best Unschooling: In a Spacious Place

Best Homemaking: Mrs. Happy Housewife

I have a Bloglines account and currently have 63 feeds on it, so these are just the tip of the iceberg. It's safe to say that these and a few others are the blogs I read every time I see that they have been updated. And sometimes I look at the unhighlighted blog name on my Bloglines list and wonder, "Is everything going well with them? I haven't seen a post in awhile." I don't comment on posts very often and, yes, I read from my feeds and not the blogs themselves a lot of the time. It's quicker. I do like to comment, but then I get stymied about writing just exactly what I want to say, and a lot of times I cannot figure out just exactly what I want to say in less than ten minutes. So I limit my comments to when I really cannot resist or when I know I have quite a bit of time (that happens rarely).

I really appreciate the ladies who take the time to share thoughts and ideas with the rest of us. Thanks so much for blogging!

Robinson Crusoe

Mariel used the picture on the cover of Sister Wendy's Story of Painting to help her envision this close-up portrait of Robinson Crusoe soon after he is shipwrecked.

Her exam narration on the story thus far:

Robinson Crusoe ended up on this island because he didn’t listen to his parents. His parents said, stay in England, but he didn’t listen to them and he ended up as a slave to the Medes[Oops, it’s actually the Moors], I think it was, and he escaped with a little boy named Xury. They got away on a boat and they went up until they came to Africa, and they killed some animals there, and the people on the shore gave them the meat of the animals, but one of them was fit for nothing and so they threw it overboard. Then they saw a Portuguese ship and they fired a distress signal and the captain let them in and he wanted to keep Xury and the boat and everything that Robinson Crusoe had on it, and Robinson Crusoe consented and they went to the Brazils and there at the Brazils Robinson Crusoe bought a plantation, but it didn’t go that well, but he thought to himself, “At least I’m not on a desert island!” And that exactly came to him! Because he was going to make his fortune and he got shipwrecked on a desert island, but he managed to get lots and lots of things off of the ship before it sank, and he’s been on there (where we are) for over a year, almost. And he hasn’t met Friday yet.

Homemade Christmas

Mr. Honey and I decided to skip the stress and cost and rush of purchasing gifts this year and go homemade with our Christmas, the only rules being that if we give it, it must be made by one of us using a limited amount of money for supplies; and we cannot force this change on any of our extended family.

(They wouldn't let us if we tried, lol!)

And since I cannot have you thinking my little family is blessed with superior virtue, I must reveal that a family trip has cleaned out the ol' Christmas fund-- we are making gifts simply to keep from perpetuating debt. We were a little depressed at first, but now that we are getting into the spirit of the thing, it is quite fun! I have all kinds of plans in my head, and projects going on in secret, which I really want to show you all, but I have to wait until after Christmas because my family reads my blog. What is really going to suffer this Christmas is the housekeeping, because we are going to use all our spare time in making gifts, lol! So if you come over, please ignore the dust. We'll try to keep the lights low so as to make it less noticeable. ;o)

Well, last week we were at the library picking up some things, and as I looked through the Christmas stacks I found some World Books that detail Christmas in other lands-- the traditions, the history, the music, the crafts, the food. What a gold mine!

(Do you remember the World Book Encyclopedias and Annuals? I relished our family's set as a kid, in those dark ages before Internet research.)

I just finished Christmas in Britain, which was even more interesting to me in light of what Triss is studying for history (ancient/medieval Britain). And Mariel and I read about the reign of Cromwell last year, but I hadn't thought about what a dampening effect the Protectorate must have had on celebrating anything, especially Christmas. And did you know Dickens had a lot of positive influence on Christmas once the Cromwellian years had blown by?

I started Christmas in Scotland last night, which is mainly about Hogmanay, their New Year's celebration. They moved their festivities from Christmas to New Year's during the time of the Covenanters-- those folks forbade (forbad?) Christmas as Cromwell did, for a lot of the same reasons. The Scots gradually turned their winter festivities from religious celebrations to secular, and now they have Hogmanay.

I'm really glad we don't live in a place where Christmas is forbidden. I know some Christmas festivities have their roots in pagan festivals, and I am not one to follow customs blindly; but I hope the traditions we indulge in are brief illuminations of the joy and goodwill that ought to be a part of the Christian life daily, and that our Christmas is just a special way to remind ourselves to "reflect redemption" in our everyday lives. (The Year of Jubilee Is Come, after all, and we do well to remember it.) The glow of it tends to linger and have an influence at our house for at least a couple of months after.

I only grabbed three of these books, the last being Christmas in France. These are the three countries, aside from the United States, that we currently read the most about in history at our house. After we are done with these three books, I'm going to get some of the others. There was a shelf full.

I find that reading about the traditions of the countries we have been studying is really bringing home the daily influence of historic events on the lives of these people. It is so easy to view history as a list of dates and battles. Reading about different historic events and their effects on the celebration of Christmas really illustrates for me the pervading influence of history on the lives and customs of regular people and its lingering effect on folks today.

Thoughts on the New Term

(A partial list of what to keep and what to change, beginning after Thanksgiving.)

a. Continue Triss in Apologia General Science, following the prescribed schedule. That is working well.

b. Switch Mariel and Cornflower to Considering God’s Creation for Science/Nature—work with them together once per week, then have them complete the notebook pages during their independent time. Do one lesson per week. Need two new workbooks @ 13.95 each. This will eliminate It Couldn’t Just Happen for Mariel and help compensate for eliminating Madam How and Lady Why. She can read It Couldn’t Just Happen in 6th or 7th grade. If Triss is caught up on her school work, consider having her teach the lesson while I do chores and listen in.

c. Continue using Exploring His Earth for Mariel and consider having Cornflower listen in. It is more of a geography book and I am counting it as such rather than science and eliminating the other geography book.

d. Eliminate ice skating lessons and have nothing on Thursdays but staying home. The kids can ride their bikes around the neighborhood several times per week for exercise.

e. Mariel is doing fine on her history—moving a little slowly, but I think we will be able to compensate for that in the summer. Continue her history as before.

f. Have Triss do Grammar of Poetry during her independent time and discuss it with me during her hour.

g. I need to have a checklist of things to discuss each day with the girls regarding their independent work. The only thing is, the checklist will change each day, so I have to make it up the night before. I need a checklist template, which I can alter each night. I need planning time each night also. I need to be more dedicated to doing what I ought rather than what I want. Erg. How can I be dedicated to doing the regular, mundane things without being rigid and controlling? This is quite a challenge for me. Either I am a drill sergeant, or we float through life, airily neglecting essentials. Some of my friends think I am too rigid when I am trying to keep to what we should be doing. Perhaps I am, but I have to hold on to schedules and plans with both hands or else they easily slip from my grasp. Oh, why am I thus tossed?

h. Redo the schedule thus:

i. 8:00-9:00 Breakfast Meeting: breakfast, Bible, memory work, singing, Copywork, review Spanish, and read any articles I have found that I want to share with the kids.

ii. 9:00-10:00 Housekeeping Hour: For December, this will be when we work on our Christmas projects and I will do chores as I can between helping the kids with schoolwork later on. Beginning in January we will do dedicated Flylady-style and/or Large Family Logistics-style cleaning during this time. I would really like to fit in some Charm lessons once a week, but I need to think more about it and plan out all of the lessons in advance. That really fell apart this term. Also, wouldn’t this be a good time to write letters and thank you notes? I have been trying for years to get us going with regular correspondence and it has never worked out

iii. *10:00-11:00 Cornflower’s Hour: This is when I work with Cornflower on anything she needs help with—math, readings, phonics all happen during this time.

iv. *11:00-12:00 Mariel's Hour: This is when I work with Mariel on what she needs me to help with. This time is just not long enough. I can only fit math and part of one reading into an hour of help-time with Mariel. Where can I get additional time? If we eliminate ice skating, there will be a whole afternoon of additional time. I can add another hour each afternoon but Tuesday if necessary.

v. *Note on the two above hours: Do Considering God’s Creation and Exploring His Earth once per week from 10:30-11:30 with both children. Is this going to be doable, or will it be a challenge because it alters the weekly schedule? Flexibility is a quality to be desired.

vi. –During all of this time, Triss will be doing her work independently. She is very good at that, which is excellent. I can have her teach Considering God’s Creation once per week as long as she isn’t feeling frazzled and behind. I think she will enjoy it, and it will be good review for her.—

vii. –Also during this time, musical instrument practice will be rotating in and out, thusly—

1. 10:00 Mariel/violin
2. 10:30 Triss/piano
3. 11:30 Cornflower/piano (this is a change from 11:00 to accommodate the CGC and EHE lessons)
4. 1:00 Mariel/piano
5. Hey, I would like to have a regularly scheduled piano practice time, too! How to work that in, I wonder. Perhaps have it scheduled regularly, but give it over if one of the kids needs additional schoolwork help.

viii. 12:00-1:00 Lunch. We really enjoyed doing artist/composer study during lunch, and having poetry tea once in the week, but I wasn’t as consistent with that as I should have been, and so for the last few weeks we missed composer and artist study, and we have only done poetry tea three or four times (hey, that’s almost half the term, better than nothing.) What caused me to set it aside? Well, I ran out of my preparation, partly. I need to have everything ready in advance so I can simply pull it out at lunchtime. The other things that factored in were wondering what we would have for lunch, having places we needed to go at lunch, and the living/dining room tables being messy and in need of clearing. We stack books on them. So I need to have poetry, artist and composer completely prepped for the term ahead of time, and also need to be organized where decluttering tables, planning the lunch menu and prep is concerned.

ix. 1:00-2:00 Triss' Hour.

x. 2:00-3:00 Mariel's other hour.

xi. 3:00-4:00 Take a break unless we have evening plans and someone hasn’t finished schoolwork.

xii. 4:00-5:00 Chores.

xiii. 5:00-6:00 Dinner prep/relaxing

xiv. 6:00-7:00 Dinner

xv. 7:00-10:00 Evening activities, or relaxing at home until each person’s bedtime, or finishing what absolutely must get done for the next day (chores or schoolwork).

xvi. The Spanish lesson is on Tuesday during the time I teach piano, and Latin has been relegated to Triss alone, so she can do it during her independent time.

xvii. All music lessons take place on Tuesday, as well as nature study. We tried to have family geography lessons on Tuesdays as well, but we needed a little more wiggle room for piano lessons, so that fell by the wayside. Triss is reading the Brendan Voyage and doing mapwork for that and history on her own, and I will combine Cornflower and Mariel in EHE once per week. Cornflower is also reading some of the Holling books this year.

What's On My Desk?

Well, you have read what was in my cart this week, so I thought you might be interested in what is on my side of the big desk in the schoolroom. Triss and I share a very long desk, and recently Javamom and I were laughing at how high the piles have gotten on my side, covered in stacks of Useful Books.

We are tremendous book-stackers at our house. We pull books off the shelves at the drop of a hat, and hardly ever reshelf until we cannot get to our tables. (Update: Okay, I just realized this is not strictly true. We reshelf once a week, on Tuesdays, when we have people coming to our house for piano lessons. I don't always include my desk in the decluttering process, though.) Someone once told me this is an organizational style, but it doesn’t feel organized to me. You should see my half of the big desk right now.

(If anyone is wondering why in the world I am hyperfocusing like this, it is because I am trying to get organized for our Term 2, which starts after Thanksgiving. I have to reorganize before each new term-- The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men, gang aft agley, Robert Burns, you know. This post started out as a tangent I took while laying out schedule variations for the new term. There is so much noisome thought in this head o' mine, it has to come out some way!)

Just for fun, here is a list of the books on my desk, dining table and coffee table right now (Update: Oops, I decided the list would be too long if I included the books on my dining table and coffee table, so this list is just for my desk):

1. Answer keys: Latin for Children, 6th grade SF Exploring Mathematics (what’s this doing on my desk? We aren’t even using this text this year!), 3rd grade SF Exploring Mathematics, Apologia General Science solutions and tests, UCSMP’s Transition Mathematics

2. Two copies of the essay, “I, Pencil,” graciously given to us by a good friend

3. The Mystery of History Vol. 1 (Creation to the Resurrection), lent to us by the same friend

4. Dover Coloring Book on Victorian Fashions, also given to us by the same generous friend (this one is sitting here because I was impressed by my friend’s habit of making copies of the Dover coloring pages rather than letting kids color directly in the books. I would really like to do that, but we do not have a copier at our house. So the book sits on my desk, pristine and unused. I should just hand it to Mariel. She loves coloring this kind of thing.)

5. Books for Triss' Girl Scouts Thinking Day projects on Greece: Black Ships Before Troy, The Odyssey, Susan Wise Bauer’s Story of the World: Ancient Times, Age of Fable, H.A. Guerber’s The Story of the Greeks, the d’Aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths (Why these are on my side of the desk and not her side, I cannot figure out. Also, Thinking Day isn’t until after Christmas. Surely we can reshelf these for the time being and dig them out again later.)

6. My old planning notebook (I transferred my last two months of the year from this book to my new planning notebook. I think I can file this old one away now.)

7. Truthquest History’s Dark Ages guide, borrowed from our kind Spanish teacher

8. The Grammar of Poetry (Both Triss' copy, which should be with her things, and my answer key)

9. KJV Bible

10. Our Island Story (this should be on Cornflower’s shelf)

11. A lovely advance copy of a book on masterly inactivity, which I am not sure I am supposed to be talking about yet

12. The d’Aulaire’s book on Columbus (I don’t know why this is on my desk. No one is studying Columbus. I think it is something Cornflower is reading in her spare time.)

13. A friend’s copy of The Writer’s Jungle, lent to me for two weeks. I am trying to read it from cover to cover in that time, and it is thick. I definitely want to get this for teaching composition.

Well, now that I know what I have on my desk, I think I can straighten it up. Several of these books belong elsewhere. Yippee!

What's on your desk?

Okay, I'll Play

Javamom has listed the contents of her grocery cart and asked what we got at the store this week. Frugal blogs and great deals have been absorbing quite a bit of my interest lately, so I decided to post my cart contents too.

The last couple of months I have doing a big shopping at the beginning of each twice-monthly pay period, and then just buying produce and maybe some dairy mid-pay period.

I have also been playing around with different ways to save money on my groceries the past few weeks. To make my list for this trip I referenced the Kroger flyer for deals, and also used the Everyday Bargain list from Hillbilly Housewife, as well as my own Master Grocery List that I keep on my computer in Word. I shopped at Kroger for deals only, and Walmart for the rest.

Here is what I bought:

1 package romaine hearts (lettuce)
1 thing of celery
2 heads of broccoli
1-4-pack of tuna
3 jars of peanut butter (I love the stuff)
Many cans of evaporated milk (we use this in our coffee)
Several cans of tomato sauce
4 cans of frozen concentrated orange juice
1 pound of turkey lunchmeat
1 pound of beef bologna
3 loaves of 100% whole wheat bread
1 package of turkey hot dogs
2 packages of turkey ham (I don't usually purchase ham for supper, but decided to this time)
3 pounds turkey bacon
2 cans of pumpkin
1 bag of fish sticks
1 container of dried minced onion
1 container of bay leaves
1 package of instant potatoes
1 package frozen mixed vegetables
1 package frozen strawberries
1 pound of butter
4 pounds of margarine quarters
1 package chicken thighs
2 lbs carrots
1 head of iceberg lettuce
1 package of peppermint sticks
6 dozen eggs
24 packages of ramen
1 dark chocolate candy bar
1 Sunday paper
several packages of sugar free pudding mix
many cans of green beans
4 cans of chili (no beans)
2 packages of graham crackers
1 container of canola oil
1 can of pears (in pear juice)
3 packages of storebrand mac and cheese
4 avocados
1 artichoke
2 cans of peaches (in juice)
1 can of coffee
1 bag of raisins
1 box of saltine crackers
2 pounds of cheese

And, for the grand finale, I purchased two 17+lb turkeys for .37 per pound.

So there you have it.

TCOO Ch. 36

Mariel has worked especially hard on written (typed) narrations this term. She has been retelling This Country of Ours chapters on the individual colonies of the United States. Today she finished this one on New Amsterdam (New York), and I think it is her very best so far, so I promised to post it on the blog. I hope you enjoy it!

TCOO cha.36

The change of Governors was not a happy change. Stuyvesant acted as though he was a king!! He shouted commands out to the people, and they were scared of what might happen to them if they didn’t obey. Stuyvesant was a tyrant*. There was a man who even dared to write to Holland! But when Stuyvesant heard about it, he foamed at the mouth! Can you imagine? He should have been put on the next boat to Holland, or London! But with all of his faults, he was a much better governor than the last one. He was Dutch, so he soon got mixed up in the Henry Hudson river thing. The Dutch said that both sides of the river belonged to them. The Swedes just laughed and hoisted their flag and sailed down the river-and then said that they would do it again too! Then the Dutch built a fort and the Swedes tore it down! Stuyvesant then &there decided that they went too far, and he gathered 600men, the largest number of men together and he beat the Swedes! Hooray!

Trissquote

"My thoughts are all folded up and put away for the night."

freewrite

I got the kids to do some freewrites for me last week. Triss posted hers to Mossflower, full of exuberance and oddly proud to be misspelling and ignoring punctuation. (I thought about explaining that the point of freewriting was to really say what was in your head and not gloat about breaking The Sacred Rules of Language Arts-- that breaking the rules is sometimes an unfortunate but tolerated byproduct-- but she was having such fun I didn't have the heart to do it.)

They had a blast. And then they decided to read their writing aloud, and we laughed until the tears came. Who knew Mariel wanted to be a biscuit when she grew up?

Personalizing Bede

Triss: Last night I dreamed that Little Turtle [Triss' good girlfriend] and I went to Bede’s house. He was very nice, he was a lot more interesting than his books, and he had a very nice wife and two boys that were mine and Little Turtle's age, and we all played together.

Me: You know he was a monk.

Triss: Yes! But he wasn’t in the dream. He didn’t even live in that time period in the dream!

His house was in the same sort of area that the Adams' [friends from church] house is, kind of a wood sort of place, kind of like a forest, and it had an enormous backyard. The house itself was sort of like those Dutch paintings that are all reddish gold sort of light. It was a cozy sort of house. I think it was one story because that was the only story we were on. It was laid out a little like our old house. The boys and Little Turtle and I all played in the backyard and I vaguely remember that we had a play battle of some sort. Then we all went to the park and then Little Turtle and I went to the store where we found Bikkle [a young friend from church] in with the picture frames.

Me: Dreams are so weird.

Triss: Yes, they are.

Bede was sort of like Daddy and Goggy and Brother Chris all rolled into one. And he looked a lot better than the picture we saw of him on Wikipedia.

Me: This is so funny to me, because when I was planning your school, I was sure you wouldn’t like Bede, and I thought Birth of Britain would be much more to your taste. But you’re dreaming about Bede and dreading Birth of Britain. I guess I don’t know your mind very well.

Triss: I don’t know my mind very well! And I don’t really like to read Bede, but I liked him in my dream.