Pretty busy for a holiday

Accomplishments For Today:

!. Shaved legs for the first time since August. This may be TMI, but I have a doctor's appointment and even though they're only looking at my shoulder, I have to be prepared.

2. Doctor's Appointment. I got my shoulder biopsied. I'm missing a chunk of me. As well as some leg hair.

3. I made a pie! Its called a Creamy Strawberry Pie. It's made of strawberries, jello, and ice cream. It's not as good as the homemade blueberry syrup I made the other day, but still pretty tasty.

4. I cleaned up for company. I even scrubbed the shower, which company isn't likely to see unless things go really bad.

5. I introduced company to the joys of Adagio fandom teas, Monsters and Mysteries in America (the puckwudgie episode), AND Expedition Unknown.

Critters

I just finished reading American Monsters and my favorite line out of the whole thing is: "As one of Edgin's companion eyewitnesses said, "There ain't nothing right about that thing." I love it. It sounds so formal up until the quote, as if some proper English lords were out on the moor when they spotted something unusual. They stop and stare and fidget and harrumph because there is no seemly way to scamper and it really is rude of this mysterious creature to put them in this situation at all. And then the peculiar beast begins to bound about on its hind legs and one of the valets turns to young Lord Edgin and says it.

Of course, it actually happened in the Ozarks, which isn't nearly as funny. Imagine the British actors of your choice in the role anyway. It's still good for a grin.

The book has also given me something new to look up and think about: the ringdocus! Is it a legendary creature, a wolf, a hyena, or just a botched taxidermy job? Whatever it is, it reminds me a lot of the Beast of Gevaudan.

Oh, I'm never gonna be the same again...

Is it weird that the main thing I carried all through 2015 was Strange Magic? I mean, it came out in January and I saw a preview maybe twice that had all the weird eyebrow expressions and “Yeah Right!”s in it and honestly, looked pretty terrible. But then I heard it had Alan Cumming in it and reconsidered, but still didn’t go see it until I saw a photoset on tumblr that someone had done of the big fight scene with Maybe You’re Not the Worst Thing Ever written on it. (song lyric from Galavant.)

So I went out to watch it by myself one afternoon. I admit I cringed a little when we opened with a song, but it was a good song, so I went with it and it wasn’t long before I was fucking delighted. I loved it. I clapped and chortled like a happy seal. I stopped at a Walmart on the way home to get the soundtrack and they didn’t have it, so I went home and bought it off itunes.

The next order of business was to get somebody else to go with me. I dangled the thought of Alan Cumming singing in front of Debbie until she gave in and went with me. I still loved it, but she ended up in a fetal position whispering “I can’t! I can’t!” by the end. However it only took her two days to decide that yes, in fact she could, because she wanted to see it again.

By then, it had mysteriously vanished from theaters. We got Fandango on it and found that three hours away, in Martinsville, there was a dinky little theater still playing it. We debated whether we were crazy enough to drive six hours to see a movie we had both already seen, but then decided that yes, in fact we were.

After that, we couldn’t find it playing anywhere at all, so there was nothing to do but wait for it to be released. Meanwhile, I wrote fanfiction and regaled my class with stories of fairies and goblins in love until they were as excited for it to be released as I was. When I finally got it, they all sat and watched it all day, which was a miracle.

And then I began to lend it to people. My mom teaches 8th grade and they loved it. My sister teaches 5th, and it was a hit with them. My nieces and nephew loved it so much, I bought them a copy. I lent it to the kindergarden class and they loved it. Everybody I lent it to thought it was great. One of the subs who only got to watch part of it looked me up later to find out what happened. Everybody loved it! So I can not for the life of me understand why it did so badly.

We also did a tri-state merch search to find any merchandise we could. There was NONE. I don’t get it. This is Disney AND Lucas here. They haven’t had trouble merchandising in the past. And it came out right before Valentine’s Day so there shoulda been all kinds of stuff! Like those cheap boxes of kids’ Valentine’s? That would’ve been PERFECT.

And even now, the fandom is amazing. There is so much good fanart and fanfiction out there that it almost makes up for no merch. This whole year has gone by with me just as goofy over it as I was at the beginning. Now the only licensed product I really would interested in is “The Art of-“ because I would sell organs for that. Maybe not my own, but still.

Be Gentle, February

Phew. January was the month of meetings. I’ve been a frantic little hummingbird going to all the meetings in relation to the pipeline they want to put right through our town. The big concern is the ground water because it tends to suffer in operations like this. Then there’s the 300 foot swath they want to cut through the state and I’ll be here all day if I list all the things we’re concerned about. Money has been a problem this month. It just keeps disappearing! It had me seriously considering salary vs lifestyle, if I have to give up my house or get a new job or just an extra job. I also don’t know if I’ll have my current job for much longer. If they don’t have the numbers by the end of March, I probably won’t be kept on. Stressful! I also have sheep now. Technically, they aren’t mine, but I’m keeping them until their new field is ready. Two of them are probably preggers. I just hope they don’t have any lambs until they’re safe in their new digs. I hope February brings me good news.

Here there be moon madness.

I could not figure out why the kids at work were so off the map into Crazyland today. Just nonstop bonkers from the time they fell through the door at 730 to when I had to pry my thumbs out of one's grip so I could fall out the door at 330. There's usually a reason everyone is squirrely, either a change in the routine or drop in barometer, or something to have everyone just a little off-kilter. There wasn't a clear indicator this time, until I walked out of the rotary meeting just a little while ago.

Wow.

One of these days, I have to figure out how to take pictures of the moon, because nothing I own can do it justice, but outside is the biggest, shiniest, turning the surrounding clouds into silver shapes like rabbits and pirate ship-iest full moon I've seen in a long time.

It explains everything.

It has happened again: A horse is being named after me! This time a real live horse.

I just finished Chuck Amuck by Chuck Jones. It tells of his life before and during and a little after his career as the genius behind Looney Tunes and so many other animated pieces of our childhood. I especially loved the stories of his family and his pets. The story of his cats alone is so funny I laughed out loud over and over again. It has good sense in it as well, and practical advice, such as this:

Father taught us to swim early- even before he taught us to read. So I learned to swim before I learned to read. The reason for mastering swimming, Father said, was because of his distaste for drowned children. "I never knew a drowned child that was worth much," he said. "Horrid, bloated things, fish-belly white, which, I suppose, is natural enough, since fish, like drowned children, spend a lot of time underwater."

Father's distaste for dead moppets was not shared by Huckleberry's friend Jim: "I alwuz liked dead people, en done all I could for 'em"- one of the sweetest and most mysterious statements in English literature.

Father had another simple straightforward statement about the ocean, the only valid one I have ever heard. "The ocean," he said, "doesn't care."

This is all you know about the ocean, and all you need to know. Over the seventy-odd years of my life I have seen the wisdom of this statement many times. I have seen powerful swimmers washed ashore dead in an apparently pacific ocean; I have seen infants carried out to sea by a frothing riptide only to be cast back by a succeeding breaker. I have seen a whale crushed by its own weight on a receding tide, and I have seen a strange and wonderful white mare ride a breaker from straight out to sea- we watched her from among other whitecaps on a wind-tossed autumn day, a mile or so offshore, until she breasted the last wave and galloped off down the beach. I knew then and I know now that she came from Tahiti; I've seen her in Gauguin's paintings.

"The sea," Father repeated, "doesn't care, but you do. Heed well." Father often talked like one of the wolves in The Jungle Book: "Heed well, Louis Pasteur: 'Chance favors the prepared mind.' A cat," he went on, "can adjudge the speed of everything of possible danger to him except an automobile; that's why cats get shot down so often by cars- their mind are not prepared. If you want to be smarter than a cat- which is unlikely- prepare your mind and your body for any contingency you can anticipate. It's the lazy person's way- and I do hope you are wise enough to be lazy- so learning to swim is not a sport. Being faster than someone else in the water is silly and ridiculous: a six-year-old child can trot faster than the best swimmer in the world can swim. The only thing you need to know about swimming is how to breathe when you're in the water; if you can breathe, you can swim, and the important thing about swimming is to get where you want or need to go. It may be six feet if you fall into a swimming pool (most children who drown in swimming pools do so within six feet of the deck edge). It may be a mile or so if your boat founders. But one thing is certain: water is an alien element- you can't breathe underwater. It's that simple. So, if you want to spare my feelings, learn to swim.

"Swimming," my father went on to say, "is a form of transportation. Like walking, it can be done for pleasure. But when you stop walking, you don't ordinarily sink, so never confuse the two."

See? Hilarious and a very good point.

Princessing is not for the weak

We were talking princesses in class the other day, as happens with four year olds sometimes. We were at the art center. I was doing the daily observations and the kids were drawing or cutting out or pasting or whatever they felt like. I said that if I was going to be a princess, I wanted a big cute animal to be my friend, like a gigantic boar to ride on or something. Then, I had to explain what a boar was, how they had big teeth and tough skins and nobody could stop me with my big pig. One of the girls made this for me: When I asked what animal she wanted, she smiled and showed me this. "Spiders," she whispered. "Lots of spiders." Forget princess. I think this one's going to be queen. (also posted on LJ)

Colors!

The new curriculum has this book. Beautiful watercolors for each color. The preschoolers had fun finding the antelope on every page.

Trailer 1

I had an idea for some connected short stories that I was thinking I could try to hammer out for Nanowrimo. As usual though, as soon as I had some background characters for the main one to bounce off of, I fixated on them instead. It happened with the Besnicks. Marco and Yvette are the son of the trailer park landlady and the local tattoo artist, respectively. I got a friend who does research help me see what sort of imagery would be appropriate for them. Marco's grandparents came from Rimavska Sobota and Yvette' s great-great grandparents are from Haiti, but she's closer to her heritage than he is.

I tried to base their faces on Jennifer Hudson and John Leguizamo, but I don't think they look much like them. Marco was smitten at first sight with Yvette. He courted her with Victorian flower language, going to the tattoo parlor with symbolic flowers. He would tell her what they meant while she tattooed them on him. It didn't seem like he was getting anywhere until he realized she had tattooed on a rose leaf that he hadn't asked for . He had to look it up, but a rose leaf turned out to mean 'you may hope' and that was it. Marco had always been a mama's boy and pursuing a girl she didn't approve was the first time he had ever gone against her. Yvette got the blame for that, of course, but she let Marco name the twins after mom-in-law's parents and that soothed a lot of it. First draft of tattoo ideas for Marco before I got the idea to group the flowers into the skull image.

Starting Again

New year and soon a new job and I would be lying if I said I wasn't nervous about both. The first book of the year is So Dear to My Heart by Sterling North. Disney made a really sappy movie about it once upon a time, but I had already read the book before I saw it and was very disappointed. The movie doesn't have all the intrigue and otherworldliness of the Cat Hollow folklore that you get in the book. Most of the background plot was ignored to focus on the cartoon farm animals and the kid playing Jeremiah was working really hard to make sappily cute faces. Disney sugarcoated over a lot of Granny's hellfire and brimstone and her fear of anything outside her own little patch of a farm. It skims over how miserable Jeremiah was too, with nothing of his own, not even the truth about his parents, and always the threat of Granny taking what he does have away. (first the calf, then the lamb, the trip to the fair, the story of who his parents were and what happened to them.) The book is better. It brings the tiny little town and all the ghosts and legends it holds to life. There is more history and mystery and darkness and light in the book. The movie's cute enough, in a forced way, and I know that it's Disney and intended for kids, but I read the book when I was in grade school and really enjoyed the more complex story. Cartoon lambs are cute and Burl Ives can sing a little ditty with the best of them, but they are nowhere near as interesting as lovers running into fires to save each other, and ghostly violin music played by a mute hermit, a tree growing from the grave of the woman Granny thought was a witch, and all kinds of old mountain lore. It's just better.

Portraits in Crayola.

The kids I work with took to drawing me the other day. The first one is actually what I was wearing that day. I don't know where the Queen of Hearts down there came from, but I love the expression on the last one. There's some dispute over my coloration, but that may be the available markers more than anything.

The Eric Carle Project

We read Eric Carle books all week, talked about the illustrations, and painted sheets of paper in different colors. Once the paint was dry, we cut out our shapes to make our zoo critters.

A bird.

A unicorn.

An owl.

A horse.

Ostriches.

A peacock.

This was my first real project in the new job and I think they did pretty well with it, being four years old and all.

Building Tomorrow's Bookworms Today

Here's one of the projects I worked on with the first graders. The whole point was to encourage them to read on their own, so my spiel was about how no matter what they were interested in, there was a book about it. While we waited to go to the library to find one, they got a piece of paper to fold to decorate a book about something they liked.

They came out pretty cute! I like The Werewolf That Lived in the Dark.

A Picture May Be Worth 1000 Words...

But being there is worth an easy billion.

Pictures never do justice to a hike through the woods. They show the colors, the light and the shadow, the little pieces, but not the whole picture. We hiked to the Cascades and there's so much to see and feel. We were asked why we would jaunt over hill and stone and up the stairs for four miles in the heat of July.

Pictures don't always explain and most people who ask that question don't care to hear about the smell of the river, wet rocks and moss, and black earth under dead leaves, or how laser intense the sun is through the trees and how it lights up the whole canopy like stained glass, or how the temperature drops to a chill you can feel in your belly when the path takes you between two huge stones, how the roots and the moss cushion and trip your feet, how the wind sounds like a tidal wave when it roars over the falls and down in to the valley around you, or any of the reasons that take me back out to the falls every summer.

John Bauer Artwork

The first time I saw a book illustrated by John Bauer I was so struck that all I could figure was that I had seen the artwork long ago or had dreamed it or something even more magical. See for yourself. Beautiful, beautiful stuff.

Remembering the Beauty of Things Set Aside

I read this again:


I keep forgetting how much I love it.





See?

I will never be able to watch this enough.

Seriously, it's awesome.

Explains a lot actually.

One of my coworkers has told me that our workplace is built over what used to be a very old graveyard. Maybe those lights in the workroom aren't set on a timer after all. Anyway, it reminded me of this:

Family Pictures

Three and four year olds love to brag on their own families, and they were happy to draw them. Some included every relative they ever had or heard of. Some included Batman. Some went the Abstract Expressionist route.



At least one of the Dads looks like Cthulu.