I tweeted a request for computer programming tutorial recommendations (for Jane), and a number of useful suggestions came pouring in via Twitter and Facebook. We’ve not had time to investigate them yet—we are busy enjoying a grandparent visit for a couple of days—but I thought I’d post the list here [...]
Things I did this week:
• Spring cleaning. I know, I know, I’m six months late. Or six months early: maybe that’s a better way to look at it. Besides, I once heard a chaparral expert mention that Southern California’s true spring is in November (going by plant [...]
The everyday magic of surface tension: “the quality of a liquid that causes the surface layer of that liquid to behave like an elastic sheet.”
HT to my hubby, as usual. He always finds the best stuff.
[...]We’re lying side by side, reading. A book for him, a screen for me.
Me: I want a cupcake.
Him: What? Where’d that come from?
Me: This post I’m reading. See?
I point at the word. CUPCAKE. It looks somehow magical, evocative, as if it were spelled out in actual cupcakes instead of plain [...]
Wonderboy: My hearing aids aren’t working.
Me: Oh, are your batteries dead?
Wonderboy: Huh?
Me: Do you need new batteries?
Wonderboy: What?
Me: Come here, let me check your hearing aids.
Wonderboy: I think my batteries got dead.
(And yes, we can communicate in sign language as well, but during this conversation I was holding a plate [...]
Just one week ago, Jack was in his prime. Ruddy, round-cheeked, he had a cheerful grin for all the world.
Then he went out one night and got lit up.
Now, sad to say, that once sprightly youth has aged before his time. He spends his [...]
“It’s rather an unusual case,” said Madam Chairwoman blandly. “The prisoner is a poet. You will all, I know, cast your minds back to the many poets who have written favorably of our race—’Her feet beneath her petticoat, like little mice stole in and out’—Suckling, the Englishman—what [...]
Once upon a time, there was a very tidy cupboard.
Then along came young Sir Destructalot.
Having wreaked maximum havoc, he paused, well pleased with his efforts…
…and looked around for new frontiers.
Enticing prospects beckoned at the far corners of his world, but first [...]
What I should probably try to chronicle tonight is how Jane, Beanie, and I came to the conclusion this morning that Plutarch is garlic. (That’s a compliment.)
But it’s late, and I only have a few minutes here, and the pieces of today that might disappear if I [...]
Well, my day went something like this:
Drove to children’s hospital for Wonderboy’s appointment with our favorite specialist, the esteemed yet down-to-earth doctor of genetics. Only one of my boy’s many many physical anomalies seems to be genetic—the albinism—but Dr. J is also a dysmorphologist, which means she takes an interest [...]
Because I sliced my thumb and forefinger while washing a knife this afternoon (nothing serious) and don’t feel like doing much typing.
And because you can’t ever go wrong, can you, posting pictures of scrumptiousness like this?
Yesterday he managed to snag a bottle of barbecue sauce out of [...]
I hate to break it to him, but I think he’s a little too big to play Tom Thumb.
[...]
Here’s something fun: the Cloud Appreciation Society. Float on over to check out some amazing photos, learn about the different types of clouds, and marvel at the Cloud of the Month. I particularly enjoyed the Society’s manifesto:
WE BELIEVE that clouds are unjustly maligned
and that [...]
A conversation reported to me by the 14-year-old:
Wonderboy (looking at book): “Biscuit is spelled B-I-S-C-U-I-T.”
Jane (hiding book): “That’s right! What does B-I-S-C-U-I-T spell?”
Wonderboy: “Biscuit!”
Jane (still hiding book): “That’s right! How do you spell Biscuit?”
Wonderboy: “With letters!”
[...]Overheard: the three-year-old exclaiming over the nine-month-old, “Oh, they just grow up so quickly!”
[...]During yesterday’s evening tidy, Jane asked Wonderboy to put a pair of shoes away in the cubby.
Wonderboy, as many of you know, is hard of hearing. Even with his hearing aids in, he cannot pick up soft unvoiced consonant sounds such as those made by the letters C and T.
Which [...]
“You, child. What do you know of Greece?”
Betsy had not understood much of what had passed, but she remembered her nursery night-light burning in a little pan of grease and she said, “It is a bright light.”
Uncle Ambrose leaned back in his chair and stared at her and his jaw [...]
Perusing my archives, I see the wonders of Balboa Park have inspired a good many posts. (And other creative pursuits.)
I draw (a little); she paints (a lot).
• Helixes (viewing mummies at the Museum of Man; visiting the Botanical Building)
We counted koi in the long lily pond [...]
Banded Garden Spider. Legspan: three inches.
That hole at the tob of the web?
Is where I stuck my hand.
[...]
Another week full of drafts and snippets, words squeezing into the teasing interstices of busy days. Most of what I jotted down had to do with the subjects that got their hooks into us: a chronicle of paths wandered, links explored.
(detail)
During our Balboa Park day last [...]
(A photoessay.)
[...]
This is one of those weeks during which I filled up my drafts folder with fragments of posts but never had time to finish anything. We’re having such perfect weather here, perfect even by San Diego standards: brisk, not chilly, not hot. Glorious. I’ve been working on [...]
Why, I wonder, am I so compelled to write about my reading life? I suppose it has something to do with memory, with holding on to things (we recall best those things which we have narrated, as Charlotte Mason was astute enough to recognize), and also with the way putting [...]
The September Carnival of Children’s Literature is up at Susan Writes: another excellent assortment of posts from the prolific kidlitosphere.
[...]
The Beany Malone books by Lenora Mattingly Weber have been recommended to me many a time over the years, usually by fellow Betsy-Tacy and Anne Shirley fans. I finally got around to reading the first in the series, Meet the Malones, and I found it enjoyable and—peculiar.
The [...]
A perk of living on the west coast is that by the time I get up on Monday morning, the East Coasters have written their morning-after-Mad-Men posts. I don’t know about you, but I love the dimension that internet recaps and essays have added to my television viewing. First I [...]
Betsy-Tacy Convert Week is underway!
I received my giveaway copy (destined for Laurie of Seaglass Hearts) and am rooting for Team Philomathian. The reissues are perfectly lovely, I must say. Wonderful feel to the covers (and that swoony vintage art), the classic Vera Neville illustrations, and loads of photos [...]
Jane shares my relish for a good little-kid story and often emails me choice snippets of conversations she has overheard. This one made me laugh out loud for real (LOLFR?).
Rilla, AKA ‘mommy’: “I want a lollipop!”
Beanie: “No, you’re too sick to have a lollipop.”
Rilla: “But I WANT one!”
Beanie: “Oh, fine, [...]
What we read today (an excerpt; “the astronomer” is a boy named Dick, who is stargazing with his sister, Dorothea):
“Got it,” he said. “Just over the top of the hill. Come and see it.”
Dorothea joined him. He pointed out the bright Aldebaran and the other stars of Taurus, and offered [...]
I like to make these lists now and then, snapshots of what everyone in the family was reading at a given point in time. Lately I’ve been trying to take note of what the kids are reading and jot the titles down in my notebook. I don’t catch everything, [...]
In case you missed this at the bottom of a long post earlier this week: A hilarious performance of Rossini’s Cat Duet by sopranos Felicity Lott and Ann Murray. This is the same duet that Betsy and Tacy performed in the school concert every year to the delight of [...]
Tomorrow is the last day to sign up for Betsy-Tacy Convert Week.
If you’d like to participate but don’t have a potential convert in mind, Bonny Glen commenters Lenetta and Anna would love to be adopted.
Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins, the sequel to The Hunger Games.
I don’t care if this book got a zillion volts of buzz. I loved it anyway.
(Heh.)
What I thought before reading The Hunger Games, upon hearing the premise (dystopic society sends lottery-selected teenagers to horrific danger dome [...]
I shared this story in the comments on Sarah’s lovely blog…it’s so funny I can’t resist telling it here too. Several years ago, when we lived in Virginia and my oldest child was about 8 or 9, I took the kids to a living history museum (the ten-awesome [...]
“There are quiet places also in the mind,” he said meditatively. “But we build bandstands and factories on them. Deliberately—to put a stop to the quietness….All the thoughts, all the preoccupations in my head—round and round, continually, What’s it for? What’s it all for? To put an end to the [...]
After I posted my Robert Pinsky story, I sent the link to Facebook and got this comment from Sally T., a Facebook friend I know through homeschooling—not writing—circles:
Heh — that would have been about the same time that I was poetry editor at Quarterly West, at the U of [...]
Due to the enthusiastic response, the sign-up period for Betsy-Tacy Convert Week has been extended to Sept. 4th. Remember, HarperCollins will send you a copy of Heaven to Betsy/Betsy in Spite of Herself to give away to the unBetsyed friend of your choice.
I got to chauffeur him once. He gave a reading at UNC-Greensboro while I was an MFA student there—this would have been around 1992—and as poetry editor of The Greensboro Review it was one of my jobs to help get our visiting authors from place to place. In this case [...]
It’s still (Poetry) Friday here on the West Coast.
The other day I mentioned a book I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about:
I wanted a few days to savor the novel I finished earlier this week: Lost by Jacqueline Davies, a spellbinding account of—well, the 1911 Triangle [...]
Y’all know I’d do just about anything to introduce new readers to the most wonderful wonderful, out of all hooping Betsy-Tacy books by Maud Hart Lovelace.
And I think I’ve mentioned how excited I am that the six high-school-and-beyond Betsy books are coming back into print in September.
All my best Rilla material—the stories and quotes I want to save forever—winds up on Twitter and Facebook these days. (That’s the fastest way to jot something down.) But just in case Twitter goes kaboom someday, I think I’ll start a Rilla-page here for easy future memory-laning. Like most three-year-olds, [...]
I was looking at my reading log for the past three months and laughing at how aptly it characterizes our summer.
June: Regular activities wind down; we’re home for long, lazy days, hanging out in the backyard, enjoying the sunny evenings. I read nine books.
July: Whoosh! How’d we get so busy? [...]
“Jane, it’s the wreck of a fine man that you see before you,” he said hollowly.
“Dad . . . what is the matter?”
“Matter, says she, with not a quiver in her voice. You don’t know…I hope you never will know… what it is like to look casually out of a [...]
My Shakespeare Club is having a week of “camp”—four mornings of theater games and Taming of the Shrew scene rehearsals, gearing up for a performance next week. We are having a blast. Gosh I love this bunch of kids.
Afterward, when everyone goes out back to play for a while, I [...]
Once again, I’m using my Delicious autopost thingie to flag some things for Jane’s perusal. Will probably do this more and more often; it’s such a handy way to bookmark interesting pieces for my teen to read at her convenience.
Jane—a couple of related articles—this piece by Michael Pollan (I loved [...]
Technically, this isn’t a quilting project at all because I didn’t do any quilting and didn’t use batting. It’s just a pieced quilt top backed with fleece.
We adore it.
I had some Moda Objects of Desire charm packs and used everything except the prints with shoes on them. [...]
Flagging a few things for Jane (and anyone else who’s interested):
When it comes to our lawns, brown is golden — latimes.com Soap Souffle - How to Blow-up Soap in the Microwave at Steve Spangler Science—Add Ivory Soap to the shopping list, please. YouTube - Simple Gifts— Lovely. HT Mental [...]Rilla: “I have an idea! Let’s play X-Men.”
Me: “Okay, Starfire!”
Her face falls. “Oh, Mommy,” she quivers, utterly crestfallen, “that’s my Teen Titans name.”
[...]
