Talk of Summertime

Mockingjay Predictions

2010-08-23T12:39:00.000-07:00

Guess what's happening tomorrow??

Anyone?

Mockingjay comes out!! Hooray!

In case you're one of the few sad folks who doesn't know about the wonderful Hunger Games series (a group which does NOT include either of the last two 10th grade classes I've taught), Mockingjay is the finale to the most exciting, action-packed, romantic YA trilogy to grace the shelves of Barnes and Noble pretty much EVER. (And yes, if you're wondering, I'm rating it over both Twilight {which should have remained a trilogy} and the Mortal Instruments series.)

So, in the same tradition that brought you the Harry Potter predictions of '07, I offer my theories on what Mockingjay will contain.

#1 Peeta will die.
Yup, I'm not alone in this view, according to some of the fansites. It's a pretty fair bet that when someone is too good for this world, he or she won't last long in it. Peeta is just too saintly to survive the cut-throat Panem of the Hunger Games. And his death would maybe give Katniss the kick in the pants that she needs to fully commit to the revolution.

#2 Katniss will end up with no one.
Sorry Team Peeta and Team Gale. As wonderful as both those guys are, Katniss has stated repeatedly that she doesn't want a husband or children. And I can't imagine the aftermath of the revolution to be such a happy fuzzy place that she changes her mind about that. Whether Gale will also die, or whether Katniss will simply choose not to be with him, I don't know. I suspect she'll spend at least the first half of the book agonizing over her guilt about being with Gale while Peeta is missing; but in the end, I think she'll decide to be alone.

#3 Prim will have a crucial role in the resistance.
Primrose has been pushed to the sidelines one too many times, relegated to the role of scared little sister watching as Katniss kicks butt in the Games again and again. I think it's time she found her groove--whether that means she uses her healing skills in a more central role or discovers some other awesome skill. Katniss is going to have to recognize that her sis is no longer a helpless child.

#4 Katniss will reconcile with her mom.
Although they became more friendly during Catching Fire, Katniss and her mother still have some baggage to work through. I'm looking forward to a nice mother-daughter heart-to-heart in Book 3.

#5 It's time for the Capitol to wake up.
As we've seen through the conversations with Katniss's prep team, the Capitol people aren't exactly evil--not the way President Snow and the Gamemakers are. They're just overfed, indolent, and ignorant of how the rest of the world lives. (Hold on, who does that remind me of? Oh well, guess it's not important.) Also, addicted to voyeuristic violence. Okay, so they're a little bit evil. But I think if the resistance can somehow shock them into acknowledging the conditions outside the Capitol and the suffering of the rest of the people in Panem, they might find a few allies among the Capitol residents--like Cinna, for example (assuming he's still alive--which I think he is, by the way).

Okay, so those are my predictions--nothing shocking, I know, but I haven't been quite as active in this fandom as I was in Harry Potter's; plus, two books doesn't give you quite as much of a running start as six. :)

Anyone else want to chime in with some HG predictions? You have about nineteen hours left!

2010-08-13T08:53:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking a lot about my garden lately. Partly because I've been spending so much time in it, and partly because I've been reading a book about a poet who spent his life gardening. The book is full of photographs, poems, and musings about what is the essence of a garden and what it has to teach you.

I love how much there is to learn about gardening. There are a several plants that I've tried to grow now for two or three years and failed dismally each year. Somehow that excites me--how much more awesome will it be when I finally figure out what they need to grow well! Someday I'll learn how to harvest seeds from all my plants, so I don't have to buy as many annuals and vegetable starts. I'll learn how to recognize diseases and pests and the best ways to deal with them. I'll know the perfect day to plant beans and how to get the jasmine to bloom.

I love how even though I'm still sort of flailing around in my little garden--like a child beginning piano lessons who just pounds away on the keys--even though I'm planting the wrong plants next to each other and over-watering or under-watering and not controlling the weeds well and putting stuff in too early or too late, my garden still manages to be beautiful. Imperfectly, unevenly beautiful, but still. It still produces delicious food for me to eat and flowers to go in my vases.

Gardeners often talk about the endless work of a garden, but I sort of love that there's always something to do. A garden is never finished. It's endless work because it's endlessly producing, endlessly living. And whatever you start in a garden has the potential to go on indefinitely. Unlike a cake which gets eaten or a blouse that gets worn or goes out of style, a garden can make lifelong changes on a landscape--like in my neighbor June's yard, where she has lived and worked since she was a child.

"I think of gardening as an extension of one's own being, something as deeply personal and intimate as writing a poem. The difference is that the garden is alive and it is created to endure just the way a human being comes into the world and lives, suffers, enjoys, and is mortal."
--Stanley Kunitz

2010-06-23T16:02:00.000-07:00

Summer has arrived, my friends. I can tell because all the windows in my house are open, my garden is growing, and I've spent the last, oh, four hours on the internet without feeling at all guilty. Don't worry--I wasn't playing Facebook games or anything. (Not that I couldn't, if I wanted.) No, I was doing serious research.

Really.

Did you know that Portland has the second-highest rate of human trafficking of all cities in the US? And that half of the victims are children? We all know that the I-5 corridor is a huge pipeline for drugs, but it also enables the sale of women and children from Seattle to LA. And that makes me feel just a little less warm and fuzzy about this beautiful valley I live in.

Apparently people are trying to build a shelter for victims in Portland, and there was a campaign earlier this year to educate people at gas stations and rest stops on how to identify and report trafficking victims. It's weird, though. This is happening so close to where I live, and yet it seems so far out of my range of influence--we might as well be in different worlds.

And I can't help wondering how to respond Christianly to this new knowledge. It doesn't seem like enough to just stop using Craigslist or donate to one of the (admittedly great) abolitionist organizations. This isn't Thailand or Somalia, it's the Willamette Valley. I live here. I should be able to do something.

Thoughts?

2010-04-25T09:12:00.000-07:00

Want to hear the most embarrassing thing I did this week?

I was teaching my 7am college class, drinking coffee, expounding on some issue like immigration or racial profiling. (I'm sure my students were riveted.) As I took another sip of coffee, I suddenly felt a tickle at the back of my throat. I tried to cough, swallow, or clear my throat, but to no avail. Instead I spewed a mouthful of coffee across the whole table, the opposite chair (thankfully empty), and my students' stack of response essays (sorry, kids).

There was a moment of stunned silence, where we all looked at each other. "Good thing Seth skipped today," said one student, looking at the empty, dripping chair. And we all busted up. I'm guessing that was pretty much the end of meaningful instructional time that day.

Slamming the Poetry

2010-03-12T09:08:00.000-08:00

"Poetry is like a sport to you!"

This was the observation of one of my seventh-graders yesterday afternoon. He continued, "Everyone else says, 'Aw, man, I missed that basket at the game,' but you're like, 'Aw, man, I missed that line of poetry that I was reciting.'"

So the annual Poetry Slam at East Linn was this week. We (the English department) were more frazzled and put less planning and preparation into it this year than in previous years, but it somehow turned out just as well--maybe even better than in the past. For one thing, we had a number of guest presenters (Thank you guys!) who read or recited original poems. The kids seemed to be more prepared this year too, for some reason.

I particularly enjoyed listening to my drama students reciting story poems--like "The Cremation of Sam McGee" and "The Raven" and "Casey at Bat." I myself memorized "Curfew Must Not Ring Tonight"--a Victorian Gothic number, the sort of thing Anne of Green Gables would recite at the a concert, with lots of lines like "her cold, pale brow" and "the darkened, gloomy tower." But, alas, I didn't get to perform it because we ran out of time. I did squeeze in the famous Spiderman poem (like I do every year), but that was all.

Next year, we're going to try to do the Poetry Slam in the fall, when things will hopefully be less hectic. And, who knows, maybe some of my students can still be a part of one of the poetry slams held in the community, like the one I went to a couple weeks ago.

2010-03-06T13:24:00.001-08:00

Sitting here at Borders with a baby on my knees. He's sleeping pretty good, although he's not quite sure that he wants to be asleep.

See?

This is Pierce, my friend Tammy's baby. He and I have bonded in the last 24 hours. I'm also pretty fond of the other one--Anna--but I feel that Pierce and I have a real connection. We've built the trust. Maybe it had something to do with the time he spit up all over me, or the time I found him his binky when he really needed it. Whatever it is, we're homies now.

As you can see, Anna and I have a much more complex relationship. You might say we just don't communicate as well. For example, I'm not sure if this expression means, "They have cranberry scones here? I never knew that" or "Insert pacifier here, please." What do you think?

Anyway, I have not changed a diaper yet, but I have administered several bottles and elicited a number of very satisfying burps. However, I'm strictly off-duty between the hours of 10 pm and 7 am. so I guess I'm just dabbling in babies at this point.

Still, I clearly have some mad skills.

2010-02-26T23:28:00.000-08:00

Can I just say how much I love the movie While You Were Sleeping? It's such a classic. I rewatched it recently, and I was struck with how much better it is than any romcom I've seen in the last few years. Take, for example, Sandra Bullock's most recent romantic role in The Proposal. There was, like, no chemistry between her character and Ryan Reynolds' character. The only reason apparently given for why they end up liking each other is that they're forced into all these intimate situations, and she's repeatedly humiliated. (...which, apparently makes her likeable? *deep breath, stops self from going into feminist tirade*) Compare that to Sleeping, where Jack and Lucy have all these long conversations and are constantly bantering and laughing together.

One neat thing I noticed this time that I don't think I've ever noticed before is that part when Jack gives her the snow globe of Florence the night before she's supposed to marry Peter; as he stands in her apartment, you can see the globe lamp of her father's shining behind him in the background, which is a kind of cool visual symbol there.

I also love how it's not just about a lonely girl landing herself a ring, but about how she learns to speak for herself and articulate her feelings. There's all these great character-building moments at the beginning where she lets herself get pushed around and doesn't complain--the hotdog guy gets her order wrong, her boss pressures her into working Christmas, Joe Jr. takes her passive response to his come-on as a "yes." And of course the big one--when the nurse tells everyone she's Peter's fiancee, and she can't manage to tell them the truth. But by the end of the movie, she's clearly speaking her feelings--she interrupts the chaplain at her wedding to say, "I object"; she gives the speech explaining all the past mix-ups; and she's the first one to say "I love you" when Jack proposes.

Plus, I have to say, I love Sandra Bullock so much more in those big baggy sweaters she wore in this movie, where her face just shines out in the midst of all that gray wool, than in all the tight-fitting, fashionable, high-heeled outfits of The Proposal. You know?

I'm excited because I picked up my copy of While You Were Sleeping at the almost-defunct Hollywood Video for pretty cheap--so now I can watch it as many times as I want. I highly recommend a little trip down memory lane with this movie if you haven't seen lately--it's a keeper.

2010-02-25T21:49:00.000-08:00

I almost didn't go to the "Middle School Poetry Slam" that I saw advertised at the Lebanon Coffee Shop. I was tired, and there was grading to do, and my throat still hurts. But I did. I pulled on some shoes and went downtown, and I found a bunch of kids huddled around the entrance of the coffee shop, the way teenagers do when they go anywhere new, looking over their shoulders and giggling and waving to each other.

I went inside, and discovered there's this whole huge awesome back room at the coffee shop, with old fashioned booths and big wooden tables--kind of an English pub vibe for the whole place--and it was completely packed with middle schoolers and their parents. Everybody had coffee, and there was this young teacher in a suit who was running the thing. His students came up and recited their poems--all original, it sounded like--and they had other kids judging and a local adult poet reading his poems here and there.

How cool is that! And better yet, I talked to the teacher and the local poet about coming to our poetry slam in a few weeks and reading poems. And while we're on the subject, consider this an open invitation, O faithful blog readers, to come to the ELCA Poetry Slam on March 10 and read us a poem. (Yes, I'm looking at you, Jennifer Rouse.)

So, I'm glad I didn't stay on my couch all night, especially since this teacher (Mr. Brandt, or something) claims he's going to try to have another poetry slam in a month or two, so I can see about getting my students involved--or at least present, as spectators. Because poetry is cool.

2010-02-23T21:35:00.000-08:00

Lebanon has a new bakery. (Yay! Go Lebanon!) It's right by Dutch Bros., which is a great location, if you ask me. And best of all, it's open at 6 a.m. For those of us who are, you know, up and about at that hour.

I went there this morning and got an amazing caramel roll and some coffee, and then just sat and enjoyed it for awhile. (See, before this, anyone who wanted to go for coffee and pastry before school had to go to... wait for it... the so-called "coffee shop" at Safeway, which consists of a Starbuck's kiosk and a few tables in a nook behind the registers. Lame!) Now, there's an actual place with real, freshly-baked pastries (though no espresso, but like I said--Dutch Bros.--not far).

And lest this sound like some kind of paid advertisement, in the interest of full disclosure, I will admit that the owner gave me a whole bunch of scones and rolls and such to pass around at our staff meeting in exchange for a few well-placed recommendations around the school. And they were good. So this is me going a step further: you should go there*. It's yummy.

*Umm, not exactly sure what the name of said fabulous bakery is... Three Sisters' Bakery, maybe? Like I said, it's by Dutch Bros. You can find it.

2010-02-22T20:27:00.001-08:00

Bleh. I've been dealing with this nasty sore throat for about a week now. It teases my by giving me brief periods of feeling well, where I can work in the garden or play games with my friends, and then it turns around and sucker-punches me. I've been taking lots of naps and drinking lots of water, so hopefully it will start dwindling away here soon. *sigh*

*heads back to bed*

2010-02-20T20:45:00.000-08:00

Spent most of the day outside, pulling weeds, planting an early crop of onions and peas, cleaning up last year's dead stuff, and scattering flower seeds. Spring is coming!

Observing

2010-02-17T20:52:00.000-08:00

Welcome to the Lenten season. This is one of my favorite times of year, as I'm sure I've mentioned before. (In fact, if you'd like to read what I've written about Lent in past years, you can click on the tag "Lent" way down on the sidebar.) I find the experience of observing this tradition--with its rich history and deep beauty--so incredibly moving every year. Or perhaps moving isn't quite the right adjective--stilling is more like it. It is almost as though the world jolts to a stop on Ash Wednesday, and we are given time to reflect, repent, and renew our devotion. I for one need that built into the calendar because I rarely can create that kind of space in my own life. And of course the community aspect of a religious holiday ("holy-day," remember?) matters too. We're all creating this space together, as a body, as a family.

My home church doesn't hold an Ash Wednesday service, so I went in search of one (which in this case means, "drove past a number of churches until I found one with a reader board advertising a service"). This year it ended up being the Mennonite church in town. One of the things I love about being a Christian is the sense of family that I feel in pretty much any Christian community. I can walk into any church and, social awkwardness aside, feel that these are my people, that I belong with them*. We are unified in purpose and hold our faith in common. I don't have to prove my worthiness to be there or compete with anyone for membership. I walk in, sit down, and immediately join in communal worship, repentance, and dedication with eighty people I have never met before. How utterly beautiful is that?

*I recognize that not everyone feels this, and I am sad for those whose experience with certain Christian communities has caused them to lose this feeling; however, it is truth, whether or not the behavior of others reflects it or we perceive it at a given moment.

A Jonah Day

2010-02-16T19:46:00.000-08:00

I've had a more or less wretched day--or, as Anne would call it, a Jonah Day. However, rather than a string of unlucky experiences, there were just two: first, that I'm coming down with something that includes a painful sore throat, and second, that I accidentally booked the plane tickets for my spring break trip in February instead of March. (Yeah, remember that whole thing about February having exactly 28 days, which means that March's dates correspond to the exact same days of the week as February's? Makes little mix-ups like this common.) I only discovered it because Expedia sends you like fifty email confirmations of your flight, and I happened to notice on one subject line that it said "2/20." *sigh* And of course, it had to be non-refundable, which means it cost me a bunch of money to rebook PLUS flights are more expensive now so my new flight cost more and is less convenient. And all this on a day when I already wanted nothing more than to crawl into bed with a lozenge. Boo.

But, I did get it rebooked. And then I went home and crawled into my papasan chair with a blanket and watched episodes of Psych, which if you're unfamiliar is a detective show featuring a guy--Shawn Spencer--who pretends to be psychic, but is actually just really observant and deductive. Anyway, there was this scene where Shawn is following the path of the killer's gunshot trying to find the bullet, and he thinks it has gotten lodged in a nearby tree. And his partner, Gus, says, "You're looking in the wrong place, Shawn. The murder was ten years ago. Trees grow. You need to look UP." And sure enough, they climb about ten feet up the tree and there's the bullet, and then the bad guys come and start shooting at them, etc, etc.

But my little fact siren started going off about this time because... I read Encyclopedia Brown as a kid. A lot of Encyclopedia Brown, as a matter of fact. Once, I even dressed up as his sidekick, Sally Kimball, for Dress Like a Book Character Day at school. (If only I had read Nancy Drew back then, my outfit would have been a lot cooler.) And there's this one great EB story where Bugs Meany (Encyclopedia's nemesis) tries to perpetrate one of his many neighborhood frauds by carving something high, high up in a tree and claiming it happened fifty years ago. (Remember that one?) And Encyclopedia, being the brilliant youth that he is, solves the case by pointing out that trees grow from the top, not the bottom, so anything done to the trunk will pretty much stay at the same height throughout the tree's lifetime. Including, presumably, bullet holes.

How can this be, Psych writers? Are there no trees in Los Angeles or New York or wherever you are writing? The Internet (including OSU Forestry Dept) plus my own common sense as a nursery owner's daughter stand firmly behind Encyclopedia on this one. And what's more, how can you be a detective story screenwriter without being thoroughly well read in classics such as Encyclopedia Brown? It's just not right. Listen, if you ever need help figuring out which direction stuff in a car goes when you slam on the breaks, or whether you can lift a gold brick with one hand, or how people refered to World War I before there was a World War II, come talk to me. I'll direct you to my friend, Encyclopedia.

If at first I don't succeed...

2010-02-15T15:05:00.001-08:00

In the spirit of No-Fail February, there is another failing I must confess and put right. Months ago (let's not calculate exactly how many months, ok?), a certain poet contacted me about reviewing her book on my blog. This was the first (and I suspect, last) product review I have ever been offered, and I was super excited. (It's like I'm a real blog! Like, an important one!)

She sent me her book, and I started reading it, and kept reading it, and never... actually... got around to reviewing it. Not because it was bad--on the contrary, her poems are quite interesting and definitely evocative of teenage-girlhood. I think just about anyone who's ever gone through adolescence would find something to connect with.

Anyway, I was mostly just nervous about reviewing poetry, which--you have to grant--is the most intimidating kind of writing to evaluate, and I was (am) also super busy (as always), so without an actual deadline, I just kept saying to myself, "I'll do it next weekend." And here we are.

So with that preamble, I'll introduce you to the book, School Girl: Poetry of a Pre and Post Adolescent, by Anarda Nashai. (You can read my Amazon review at that link, btw.) Nashai wrote the poems in this book between the ages of 13 and 17, and then published them later, in her twenties. As a frequent reader of teenage poetry, I smiled a lot as I read, recognizing an unmistakable teenage voice that almost made me nostalgic for those years. I plan to share a lot of them with my students--hopefully they'll be inspired to write more consistently on their own.

Here's a few lines that I particularly liked, by way of example:

From "Another Innovation"

If I were cursed
With the potential to be perfect
I would reject, with one look
Today's existing pigments
That make me the architect
Of thick stone men

--Anarda Nashai

So, do me a favor. Head on over to Amazon and take a look at this collection. If you have teenaged poetry-lovers in your life, you might think about recommending it to them. In fact, I've collected a whole list of poetry collections for teens on Amazon's Listmania, now that you mention it. Go check it out.

The Official Valentine's Day Theme Song

2010-02-14T10:13:00.000-08:00

...is right here.

Also, second place.

2010-02-12T22:59:00.000-08:00

The school day before Valentine's Day is always an interesting one at my school. One of the choir's fundraisers is selling their services on V-Day to people who want to embarrass their friends or significant others with a serenaded love song. It's pretty cute, though, to watch the *lucky* person stand up in the middle of the class, while thirty-five other students sing "My Girl" or "Build Me Up, Buttercup" to him or her. (Less fun is having "Build Me Up, Buttercup" stuck in your head for the whole. freaking. rest of the day.

So, I figured you should have the chance to share this experience, and I recorded one of these scenes on my oh-so-fancy netbook webcam--very high class, here, yes indeed. Hopefully it will work. :)

2010-02-10T20:44:00.000-08:00

Ever wish you could just lie back and have knowledge piped directly into your brain? Well, as it happens, there's this great new knowledge-piping technology... called podcasts. I've discovered several great ones lately and have been enjoying the shiny new bits of knowledge each week. And it's something that I can do while washing dishes, or driving, or getting ready in the morning. So, since knowledge is meant to be shared, here are my top podcasts picks this month.

1. This American Life. (Thanks to Steph for introducing me to this one.) Organized around a different theme each week, this radio show features interviews, monologues, memoirs, and other human interest stories. It's smart, funny, and has a great personality. :)

2. RadioLab. (Hat-tip to Kara for this one.) I've only listened to one and a half episodes, but it's already made the list. The Animals episode had two of the most amazing stories of giant sea animals I've ever heard. Think science, math, and psychology made interesting with narratives and interviews. It makes me want to sit people down, plug headphones into their ears, and hold them captive until they love it as much as I do.

3. The Tolkien Professor. This one's for the bibliophiles. A professor of medieval literature gives talks about Tolkien in a clear, accessible, witty way. It's everything I love about academic literary discussions without the pompous narcissism of *some* literary criticism. Not mentioning any names or anything...

So, I'm too tired to figure out all the links for these. I guess you'll have to do the legwork yourself. Just, you know, plug these titles into the search window on iTunes. You'll find it. And if you have any other recommendations for me, leave 'em in the comments.

2010-02-09T21:31:00.000-08:00

Ok, one of these days here I'm going to think about my blog post before 9:30 at night in bed with my laptop. But not today.

So, uh... topics...

*looks hopefully around the room*

Lamp, bookshelf, houseplant, candle. Nope, no topics there.

Here, topic topic topic.

Oh well, maybe I'll catch one tomorrow. They can be tricky little buggers.

In Honor of Valentine's Day (just this once!)

2010-02-08T13:01:00.000-08:00

10 Ways to a Geeky Girl's Heart

So, so true. (Take notes, gentlemen.)

MKF Update

2010-02-07T22:06:00.000-08:00

Found a dried-out, dessicated mouse carcass on my bed today. Wonder how long that's been hiding in some corner before Miss Kitty Fantastico decided to bring it to my attention. These are questions that I just try not to answer, even in my mind.

Speaking of Miss Kitty Fantastico, in case you've been wondering, she's doing very well. She bit me this morning. Typical. All her fur has grown back, although there's a noticeable color change where her stitches were, which is kind of weird. She still doesn't like to be touched on her back at all--I suspect there's some nerve damage or something. She gets very cranky when you try to pet her back. (Translation: goes psycho cat and starts biting everything in sight.) So, fair warning, if you come visit. When I pet her, I usually pick her up, turn her over, and scratch her chest and tummy, which she likes for about twenty seconds. I wouldn't recommend that approach to a visitor, though. In fact, it's best if visitors to my house just keep a respectful distance altogether.

2010-02-06T23:42:00.000-08:00

Went to get my hair cut today. The woman who has cut my hair the last two times, who I really liked, has apparently moved to Eugene, so I got someone new this time. "What would you like?" she asked me. I told her I wanted just a trim--just a tidied-up version of the cut I already have.

"Are you sure?" she asked.

Uh, yeah...?

"Oh, okay," she said. "It's just that this A-line cut that you have is going out of style. So I was just wondering if you wanted to try something new."

I told her I guessed I'd survive being slightly out of style for awhile longer. "I've only had this cut for about 8 months," I said.

But then, of course, I spent the whole time that she was cutting wondering whether I ought to get a new style next time I get it cut. Like, really? I really have this whole hair crisis because one person says she thinks it's going out of style? Really?

Apparently so.

She went on to say that the styles that are in are either super super long or super short. Since neither of those are an option for me, I guess I'll just have to stick with the unfashionable middle ground. And in the meantime, I'll comfort myself by quoting Esme Squalor*. "Orphans are in. Water is out. Pinstripes are in. Elevators are out. Having lots of money is in. Asking questions is out."

*Huge props if you know who this is.

Flight of the Ducklings

2010-02-05T22:25:00.000-08:00

Oops, missed one. Oh, well. Moving on...

Want to see the amazing wall decorations I've come up with for my classroom? See, I had the eighth-graders watch that scene from Planet Earth where the ducklings jump out of the tree. (Watch it here.) And then I had them write poems about what they saw. I really like this assignment--I did it last year with a scene of baby turtles and got such great poems.

So, then, I decided I wanted to display the best of the duckling poems in a creative way, and I suddenly had this great idea. A wall o' flying ducklings. Voila.

I used wallpaper samples for the ducklings and leaves, and wrote the poems on clear plastic wrap. I love it. It makes me happy to have something on my walls that isn't in primary colors.

It's After-School Latte Day

2010-02-03T16:17:00.000-08:00

Wednesday is the hardest day. At my school we have chapel on Wednesdays, and all the classes that day are shortened. Somehow, although the school day is exactly the same number of minutes, it feels at least an hour longer. Maybe because I'm rushing every class to fit stuff in....or maybe because of the illusion of adding an extra period to the day. Compound that with an afternoon staff meeting, and I'm wiped out on Wednesday afternoons.

For this very reason, before this year I rarely went to Wednesday night church events--even though I often wanted to. I would go home, make dinner, eat it on the couch, and never. get. up. again. But this year, we have a new thing at our church, where we serve a meal at 6:30 every week before the 7:00 Bible studies and kids' events.

I can't even tell you what a difference this makes. I don't even go home on Wednesday afternoons any more. I stay late working at school, then go to church a little early and hang around or help with the dinner, and then attend the Bible study. Granted, sometimes I'm falling asleep at Bible study... but I'm happy to be able to participate in church more than once a week.

But all that to say, Wednesday has also become my after-school latte day. It's what gets me through what has mostly become a 13-hour day. Mmm, I can almost taste it now...

Happy Groundhog Day!

2010-02-02T16:43:00.000-08:00

The groundhog is definitely not seeing his shadow in Oregon (assuming we, uh, have groundhogs in Oregon. Does this holiday apply to nutria?) so we better get some sunshine and warm weather soon. I'm ready for it to be garden season already! By the way, I freakin' love that movie (Groundhog Day). I watched it last week and it just never gets old. Especially the scene where he steals the groundhog and drives off a cliff. *evilgrin*

Well, I'm taking a brief 45 minutes at the Lebanon Coffee House to relax, drink my latte, and browse the internet, and then it's back to the To-Do list. On mine today:

Comment on a batch of 7th grade essays that are like two weeks overdue. Poor 7th-graders, even teachers push them to the back of the line.
Finish (okay, start) my church newsletter, which is two days overdue. (Slightly better. Still not good.)
Collect as many tape measures as I can lay my little paws on for tomorrow's Geometry lesson.
Write a quiz on Helping Verbs.
Collect some pictures to send with letters to my sponsored kids. (Think not that I'm bragging about being oh-such-an-involved-sponsor. I haven't written one of them in years.)
Create a 7th grade seating chart.
Reread the chapter on "Seeing" in Annie Dillard's A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. (This is the best one on the list. If you haven't read this book, you need to. It's lovely. It's lovely squared.)
See how many songs from the 10th Anniversary Les Mis performance are on YouTube so I can show them in my World Lit class. My copy is missing. Also, it is almost completely worn out because of the time I watched it every day for like eight months straight in college.

Can she finish it all in one evening AND get to bed by 8:30? Time to find out...

No Fail February

2010-02-01T20:08:00.001-08:00

I'm woman enough to admit it. Blogging in January was a massive fail. Not one post, I'm sad to say. Nope. Notta one.

And it occurred to me this week that if I'm going to keep my blog from going the way of the disposable camera, I need a plan.

So I'm thinkin', February is a short month. 28 days, so I hear. This would be a great month to try to post every day. Put an end to the fail.

It also happens to be the first day of the new semester. Which contributes to the sense of starting afresh...not so much to the having-time-to-think-of-a-thoughtful-post. So instead, I leave you with a link to a site about people who fail way harder than me. Behold, the idiots of Facebook:

Failbooking

Warning: Being copies from real facebook pages, some of these can be a little (or a lot) foul. Be thou warned. (Here's a direct link to one or two that are non-offensive--well, to morals anyway.)

Edgerton Tales, Part 3

2009-12-24T05:00:00.000-08:00

A couple more random (and less tragic) stories for today. First, one about my own father, when he was a young lad. These are the kinds of stories I always begged for before bed as a child, but I've had to wait until now for them all to come trickling out.

The tale started as a discussion about curfews--who has them, who doesn't. At our house, for example, my parents rarely waited up for any of us to come home when we were teenagers. (My guess is, my mom tried to wait up once or twice and ended up asleep on the couch by 9:30 p.m., so she finally gave up altogether.) My cousin Amber swears its the same with her parents. "I stick my head in the door and say their names, but they never wake up. I say it three times: 'Mom and Dad? Mom and Dad? Mom and Dad?' and then I figure, 'Well, I'm home,' and I go to bed."

This opens the door for adult reminiscing. "Well, there was that time when Dave tried to sneak in through the cellar when he came home late." (This, as with all the tales of my parents misdoings, prompts catcalls and teasing from us offspring. "What, Dad?!" "What were you doing out so late, anyway?" "Surely not!")

"No, no," my dad protests. "That was Bob's fault. I wasn't even driving yet."

"Well, they were supposed to be home at 10 o'clock. So at 10 when they weren't home yet, Raymond--your grandpa--he locked the doors."

"We came home at about 10:05, found the doors locked, and your uncle Bob just said, well, we'll get in through the cellar. There was a trap-door in the bathroom leading down to the cellar, see."

"But when they tried to climb up, Raymond was ahead of them, standing on the trapdoor."

"What did you do?"

"We knew we'd been caught. We just had to wait until he let us in."

This is the same uncle Bob whose house we went to for lunch yesterday. He lives on a farm a ways outside of town and was telling us a story about a big farm auction in the area this year. "They were selling equipment from the farm estate of three bachelors. Whenever they bought anything, they bought in threes--three tractors, three combines, three balers. They managed to sell it all in just one day, but they had two auction rings going at once, two auctioneers. I'm sure there were some disappointed folks, though, because they willed all their money to the casino."

"What!!" Everyone reacts at once.

"Well, maybe the sister might get a little. But almost everything was willed to the casino. No one liked them, see. They bought up 150 quarters* out there and they were pushing everybody else out. They didn't have any friends. So when they got old and couldn't drive anymore, everyone pretty much forgot about them. Except the casino sent a limosine out to pick them up every day."

"That turned out to be an investment," my dad mutters.

"Did they all live together?"

"I don't know. They had that farm business together, and one of them had that big nice house out there, but I don't know whether they all three lived in it. They had it in their contract, though, that if one of 'em married, he was out."

"I bet there were a lot of ladies after them too--gold-diggers."

"Guess they just had a lot of girlfriends..."

*This means a square quarter-mile, I learned. 160 acres.

Edgerton Tales, Part 2 (edited)

2009-12-23T18:36:00.000-08:00

** I had to redo this post because I heard a few more storm stories that really begged to be included.

With the foreboding forecasts of big snow this week, I've been hearing some of the stories of storms long past. My aunt Karen was telling us about a big storm that came up "out of nowhere" years ago that took everybody off guard. Apparently, they announced at the schools around noon that anyone who wanted to go home had better leave immediately, and my uncle Bob took the kids in his pickup and started home right away. Karen was at Grandma V's and didn't even bother trying to go home.

Well, the storm came up so fast ("It was like it just dropped down on us out of the sky") that by the time he was within a half-mile of Grandma's, he couldn't see anything through the windshield. Aunt Karen was almost beside herself, but she happened to be on the phone with a neighbor, who saw a car drive by, so Karen went running out through the field in the wind and snow, yelling their names.

"They never would have heard me, but Bob had the windows down and the kids had their heads out helping him see the road." (All the listeners gasp at this.)

"You could have been lost out in the field yourself--who knows if you could find your way back to the house," says Grandma.

"Well, I could still see the lamp by the house, so I was able to get back, and anyway I saved my family," she says. "You know that hill by the old house was so steep--it still is, you know, people go in the ditch there all the time. And the there's that S curve--if they had missed the driveway, they could have ended up in the pond or who knows where. Because only a few minutes later, it was blowing so you couldn't see the silo from the house."

"There was a boy out by Pipestone that got stuck in his car and froze, didn't he? What was his name? He was a W_______, wasn't he?"

"There were a lot of people that had to stay over that night," Grandma adds. "Everyone has stories about that storm."

Then there was the "Storm of '75"--not sure if it's the same one as above or not, but my mom remembers it clearly as well. That was the last time there was a storm in this area "so terrible cold" that it killed cattle--always a primary concern for a farm community. My mom worked in Luverne at the time and when she drove to work the day after the storm was over, there were cattle standing in the fields, frozen solid. She even shuddered just talking about it. "It was so eerie."

But that's not even the most disturbing storm story. "Was that the year Harriet DeG____ passed away?" my aunt asked. "Harriet and Daryl were going home on snowmobiles with their two children when that storm hit. He was with one child and she was with the other and they got separated. Daryl and the first child made it home, but the other two never made it. And they found them dead the next day... at the end of their own driveway. They had gotten that close."

Edgerton Tales, Part 1

2009-12-22T14:12:00.000-08:00

I always hear lots of great stories when I'm in Edgerton, especially when several aunts and uncles and grandparents get together. Usually they're stories about no one I know, but that doesn't make them any less interesting. Sometimes I think Edgerton is a bit like Mitford, if you've ever read those books.

For example, we were talking this afternoon about people getting in each other's business, and my grandma says, "Shall I tell you a humorous story?" Awhile ago, my grandpa was having some health troubles and passed out one evening. Grandma called 911 and the ambulance came to pick him up. "By the time we got to the hospital [in Luverne]," as she put it, "people in Leota already knew we were there." Apparently, there are some people out in the community who have police scanners so they can keep up on local happenings. "Henrietta has hers on twenty-four hours a day, they say, and as soon as she hears anything, she's on the phone right away to her friends. They don't say folks' names anymore because people complained, but they still say the address, and she just looks it up."

That right, she looks it up in the phone book. This is a community so small that a reverse address look up is possible without the internet. My grandmas don't approve, though. "They picked up Mrs. Van S____ a few weeks ago," Grandma W went on, "and you know, she's a real private person. Well, Henrietta looked up her address and told Linda D____ and she worried about it all day, but she didn't dare call because she knew Mrs. Van S___ was so private. That ain't right."

"No," Grandma V replied. "That isn't called for."

"That's exactly the right way to put it. It isn't called for."

2009-12-22T09:22:00.000-08:00

Well, we made it to snowy Minnesota. The roads were totally clear until the last, like, 5 miles, and there's been snow ever since. It snowed several inches last night, and they're predicting a big storm starting tomorrow afternoon. So I might get to see a real Minnesota blizzard. Woohoo. Grandma keeps reassuring us that she has plenty of food and that if we're snowed in we'll just eat and play games. :) No doubt.

Luckily, I'm always perfectly content to be stuck inside for any amount of time, provided I have enough books. What's more, there's a new coffee shop in Edgerton (new--as in, the one and only, ever) that's within walking distance of both my grandmas'. So I really am set for a nice relaxing holiday.

And speaking of great holiday books, I have a couple of recommendations. I really like fantasy books, as you know, but it's sometimes hard to know where to find good ones that the literature critic in me can stomach. For example, I quit after reading the first book in the Eragon series because I couldn't handle the fact that it was such an obvious rip-off of Star Wars. And I'm always wary of fantasy novels set in a Lord of the Rings-type universe because they often seem to be just rehashing old material. That said, there are two books I've discovered recently that fit that genre and are still unique and very compelling. The first, I've recommended before, but I'm going to again because it's that good. I keep trying to explain it, but every description I come up with just sounds tired and blah and this story is definitely neither of those things. Go read the Amazon synopsis if you must, but I suggest just buying it. You won't regret it.

This next one I checked out from the library right before my trip. I had seen it around from time to time, but there wasn't anything all that compelling about the summary so I hadn't gotten around to reading it. However, I started it in the car on Saturday and finished it in bed at Grandma's house Sunday night, that's how good it was. It still incorporates a lot of the standard fantasy tropes--orphan with hidden powers, chosen one, mentor, Light vs Dark, quests--but the main character just really grabbed me, and it messed with enough of the cliches to make me happy. Plus, this is the first fantasy novel that dealt head-on with a particular pet peeve of mine--I'll let you read it and figure out what that might be. Apparently, it's the beginning of a quartet. I'm thinking about checking out the old Edgerton library to see if they have the rest.

2009-12-12T17:10:00.000-08:00

Time for a few updates. Looking over the last couple months of posts, I've left a few plot points hanging.

First, NaNoWriMo. I wrote about 11,000 words. Not quite 50,000, but I'm cool with it. It's way more than I would have written without the 50K goal. And now I do have my future novel in much clearer focus than it was before. Plus, I had a lot of fun writing and talking about it throughout November.

Second, the public library troubles. Remember those? I did end up going in and talking to the head librarian about their interpretation of "for classroom use only." She was very kind and explained her perspective fully, but what I was left with was a sense that they don't really want to be offering this Business Library Card all that much. She talked a lot about how much city residents are paying in their taxes toward the library and how important it is to her to protect their money and be fair to them. When I asked her to explain what "for classroom use only" means to her, she simply said that it was completely on the honor system and that if I said it was for classroom use, the library would believe me.

But, I said, one of your librarians called and left a message on my phone berating me for my choice of books.

Her answer: that's because your list of books didn't look appropriate for a classroom.

Okaaayyyy. What can you say to that logic? So I left.

And then I got busy and didn't go back for awhile, but this week I got itchy for some reading material and went back and checked out a nice big stack. So here we are. Pretty much the same place as before. Guess we'll see what happens next year when I try to renew my card. *sigh*

And now, my friends, I have a tale to tell. A tale of excitement, danger, and lots of flashing lights. It all starts with a truly magnificent stack of ungraded papers. A stack that Hercules himself would blink at. I didn't blink. I cranked up the Christmas music and graded my little heart out until about 7 p.m. last night. Then, the intimidating stack having been reduced greatly, I decided to go home and get me some dinner. I walked outside.

I slid. I skidded. I sprawled. I slipped. I shifted. I skated.

My friends, there was ice. This was troubling. Most of you are familiar with the East Linn hill. If you are not, simply imagine a rather steep, rather curvy, rather narrow, paved downhill driveway that comes to a T at the bottom of an even steeper hill. And also there are lots of trees everywhere. You see why I was nervous. I walked up to the parking lot and discovered that one could carefully work up speed and slide a good ten feet across the surface, even in heels.

I pulled out my cell phone. "Daddy!" I called. "Help!"

My dad offered to come pick me up like the good father he is, but he did agree that it might be best if I waited for him down at the bottom of the hill.

Right. I gathered up my bags and started to shuffle my way across the parking lot. Luckily, I have on my keychain a little LED light from Borders. It's quite dim, but it was a whole lot better than nothing. The parking lot was slippery, but the hill was even worse. I had to walk on the tiny little dirt edge of the road without stepping on the pavement, which would make me slip, or falling over the edge of the hill. In the dark. In heels.

Plus, every few minutes, a car would come slipping and skidding up or down the hill, wheels spinning, engine revving (did I mention there was a basketball game?). So I would wait for them to go by and hope desperately that they wouldn't spin towards me out of control. It was nuts.

Finally I got to the bottom and my dad picked me up. We saw emergency vehicles at least three times on our way home, and then, less than half a mile from my house, we had to stop and wait for about twenty minutes while they cleared away a wreck on my road. (And wow, that car was mushed.) So a fun night for everyone, apparently.

So I got home eventually, made dinner (I was starving), watched Castle (apparently crime shows are my new thing...yes, I'm ashamed), and went to bed. Aaaand, I pretty much just lay around all day today, despite the fact that the remnants of the stack are still waiting for me. I've pretty much decided that in this kind of weather, it's best to just stay horizontal.

The Best Contest Ever

2009-12-11T08:52:00.000-08:00

Owlhaven is holding an awesome-possum contest over at her blog. Guess what you can win?

A Sony E-book Reader!

How sweet is that?

The rules of the contest are also cool. You get to share your favorite book quote and tell why you love it. Something that I like to do anyway--whether or not people want to hear it, actually.

(Unfortunately, I've been very slow in choosing my quote and getting this blog posted--as usual--so there are only a couple of hours left in the contest. Quick dash over there if you read this in time and get yourself entered.)

So the quote I'm going to share here is from one of the books that I read each spring with my 10th-graders, called Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton. It is a beautiful book about a confusing, violent time in the history of South Africa, and the redemption of a Zulu pastor and his son.

This excerpt comes from almost the end of the book, when the pastor begins to see the possibility of restoration for the broken land and people. I love it because it describes--in a way that you can understand and believe--the voice of God speaking in revelation.

"After the Bishop had gone, Kumalo stood outside the church in the gathering dark. The rain had stopped, but the sky was black with promise. It was cool, and the breeze blew gently from the great river, and the soul of the man was uplifted. And while he stood there looking out over the great valley, there was a voice that cried out of heaven, Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people, these things will I do unto you, and not forsake you.
Only it did not happen as men deem such things to happen, it happened otherwise. It happened in that fashion that men call illusion, or the imaginings of people overwrought, or an intimation of the divine."

2009-11-26T17:44:00.000-08:00

Ok, television. I've had it.

I've had it with your selling out any modicum of realism in the development my favorite characters for the sake of a trumped-up plot twist. (Except you, The Office. You're still on my good side. For now.)

Now listen, TV. I'm not unreasonable. I understand your need to create and maintain romantic tension between your leads. You have to have the unrequited lover--like this guy...

And this guy...

And, heck, even this guy......And I understand when you need to stretttcccchhhhh the romantic tension out for a completely ridiculous length of time, like for example, these guys...

And sometimes you have to separate the leading couple in order to create a few nail-biting episodes--pretend to kill one of them off, say... so we can weep for days in our little one-bedroom apartment, wondering what is the point of anything if a slayer can't even have a happy life with her reformed vampire boyfriend superhero...

*ahem* Anyway.

Yes, all that I get... It's the requirement of the medium you're working with. Create drama, suspense, blah, blah.

But here's what is not ok. Once you've gone through all the work of getting us to identify with your characters, figure out that the characters are meant to be together, root for them to get together, cry and scream and agonize over all the obstacles to their relationship that are overcome one by one, rejoice when the blessed hook-up finally happens (in whatever form that might be), you cannot, I repeat CANNOT go and break them up again for a completely stupid reason that no rational person--let alone two of them--would accept as a deal-breaker.

Ok, I'll explain.

Here are some acceptable ways to break up a meant-for-each-other couple:

1. One of them apparently dies in a fire set by her roommate's evil doppleganger and then two years later reappears in Shanghai with no memory of where she's been for the last two years, during which time her OTL (one true love, obvs) has gotten married to an NSC liaison who is actually a double agent working for a terrorist organization.

That makes sense. It could happen to anyone.

2. On the day of their wedding, one of them is kidnapped by an evil nemesis, who replaces her with a clone who eats frogs so that her fiance marries the wrong person, and then she hits her head and gets amnesia and becomes a lounge singer, and when her memory is finally restored, the wedding is postponed again because the alien relatives of the fiance return to earth and take him away to Krypton.

I mean, seriously, that would do damage to any relationship.

3. In order to save the world from an invading alien horde, the hero must permanently seal up the cracks between dimensions, leaving the girl stranded on the other side.

You know, these things happen.

Here are some NOT acceptable ways to break up a couple that has taken *years*--really, years--to get together.

1. One of them delays the wedding one too many times (for perfectly legitimate reasons, btw, like, say, discovering a long-lost daughter) and the other one calls him out with a ridiculous ultimatum and then walks away for good.

That, right there, was the last episode where I really loved Lorelai. After that, I tolerated her for the sake of the other characters and the world. You know it's bad when they sacrifice a character's core appeal for the sake of drama.

2. One of the characters decides he's not good for the other one and they have no future together and he walks away. Babies and growing old my foot, Angel. We all knew you were just going to LA for your own show. And Buffy, you're no better. Hello, Season 7 finale, with the cookie dough analogy? Whaaat?

3. One of the characters is apparently afraid of commitment and so the morning after she declares her love to her OTL, she goes out and marries somebody else... for some reason... Yeah, never really figured that one out, Starbuck. Your motivations are still a mystery to me. Like your reincarnated existence.

4. And this one, the last straw that was the inspiration for this post. After a year of dealing with several potential relationship stresses completely without drama or jealousy, including a wash-out wedding, a secret husband, and about a hundred dead bodies, these two break up because one day it occurs to both of them that they "don't trust each other"? And that is apparently that. Relationship over, end of discussion.

I know at this point you may be wondering whether the stress of teaching has finally gotten to me and I've cracked. But as far as I can tell, I'm completely sane, just sick of watching TV shows whose writers are willing to be completely untrue to the characters they've created in order to boost ratings by a few points. It's not ok. I will suspend my disbelief about a flesh-eating kraken from another dimension devouring the hero before I will buy two characters who spend five years falling in love and then break up because one of them wears the wrong color t-shirt or some similarly lame excuse.

I'm telling you, TV. Shape up. I mean it.

Ok, yes

2009-11-11T11:46:00.000-08:00

I am doing NaNoWriMo this year. (See sidebar.)

I probably won't say much about it on here, but watch my Twitter feed for *live updates* (aka, live whining*)

Headband Happiness

2009-11-01T19:45:00.000-08:00

Last time I was in Nampa, I did a little shopping, and in almost every store I visited, I noticed one new item: headbands. Cute headbands. The kind of headband that you build an entire outfit around because it's that cute. But there were two problems.

#1: I have a big head. (Some of you know this about me already.) This means that plastic headbands tend to break after an hour or so of me wearing them, and metal headbands have to be skinny enough that they don't put too much pressure on my temples or I get headaches.

#2: The super-cute headbands were expensive. Like, $26. Or more. That is too much for one poor schoolteacher to pay for a headband, no?

My solution to these two problems? I shall make my own headbands!

However, this turned out trickier than I thought because, as it happens, a plain, unadorned metal headband is quite hard to come by, unless you are a wholesaler who wants 500 of them. But I finally found someone on Ebay willing to sell me 5, and I went to Michael's and Walmart and found some accoutrements, and then I scheduled a Sister-Mother craft night.

And we made headbands.

First we assembled our materials: embroidery thread, buttons, rhinestones, fabric rosettes, feathers, plain metal headbands, ribbon

Then hot-glue a nice thin ribbon to the metal headband (or, alternately, wrap it with embroidery thread for a more casual look).
Glue on your decoration--we used feathers, buttons, flowers. The rhinestones below ended up needing to be wired on, however. They were too heavy for the hot-glue alone.

And voila! A lovely finished product. Tres magnifique!

Plus, their was some good sister/mom time to be had as well. We wrapped up the evening by watching a very girly movie--Ballet Shoes.

2009-10-22T10:39:00.001-07:00

Walking through the campus courtyard this morning, I heard a frog croaking. And for a moment, I wished I was ten (instead of twenty-seven) and wearing playclothes (instead of an "outfit" and heels) and could crawl around on my knees in the mud and catch it (instead of grading essays and lecturing on Plato). *sigh*

2009-10-09T10:32:00.001-07:00

One of my eighth-grade students brought Cupcakes for Life for her class this morning, which was sweet. Guess what she brought me.

A Ho Ho with white frosting and sprinkles.

Which is, obviously, disgusting.

And also, um, kind of awesome.

(I ate two bites. That's all I could take of that much awesome.)

How Things Are Right Now

2009-10-08T18:32:00.000-07:00

After a full day of school, an hour-long math lab, and another hour of working at my desk, I looked down at my shoes and noticed a slight problem.

One black.

One brown.

Hmm.

2009-09-29T20:45:00.001-07:00

Ok, I've been sitting on some great stories for the past week, waiting until the whirlwind of schoolwork calmed down and I could tell them to you. So let's get to it...

First, I had an incident with my blender. This would be my new blender, the one I got from Amazon with my birthday gift card. The beautiful smoothie-making blender that leaves no ice chunks in my banana-blackberry-pear smoothies. Well. I was making tomato soup with some of my many garden tomatoes, and the last step calls for some blender action. So I poured about half the soup into my new blender, popped the top in, held it on, pushed the "Pulse" button, and then... there was a tomato soup explosion. Tomato soup everywhere, all over me, the floor, the cupboards... and worse, I scalded my whole left arm from wrist to elbow with boiling-hot soup. Not cool. And then I realized that the the little round plastic thingie that fits in the center of the rubber lid had fallen into the blender and gotten all chopped up. So half my soup was ruined, AND I have to find myself a replacement blender part. Bummer.

In other bad news, remember that grammar seminar that I was so excited about teaching at the ACSI conference? The conference that is this upcoming weekend? Well I got a call from the conference people on Friday, telling me that because of the extremely low attendance, they're trying to save money by reducing their space at the convention center, and therefore they're cutting classes, and one of the classes they're cutting is mine. *sigh* This majorly sucks. I was really really excited about that opportunity. They say that I can teach it next year, assuming the attendance is any better then... a big IF. Also, this means that there won't be as many good seminars for me to attend this weekend either. I'll probably have to sit through yet another class explaining what a "Christian worldview" is. Goody.

I've been hanging on to the last vestiges of summer for as long as possible. On Sunday, I took what might be my last nap in the sun this year. I've been eating tomatoes until they're practically growing out of my ears, and the produce was stacking up in my kitchen until I had basically a giant cloud of fruitflies that would begin circling whenever I walked in. I finally cleaned all that up this week and hit the flies with Raid until I got rid of most of them. Actually, a bunch of them flew out to be caught in the spider web of the giant bloated mama spider that lives in the corner of our back doorway. I was sort of hoping that she would die from the secondary Raid poisoning after eating all those fruitflies, but she's still scuttling around up there. And if you want to know why I don't just knock her down with a broom, the answer is that somehow it's less skeevy to walk under her web every day than to touch her at all, even through the secondary medium of a broom. As for smashing her, that does not even bear thinking of--I get nightmares from the very thought of the squ...I can't even say it. Ew ew ew.

2009-09-17T17:23:00.000-07:00

I have to say, I get a little thrill at the end of each day when I get to sharpen all my pencils to their most pointy sharpness. There's just something about it...

Library Blues

2009-09-14T23:28:00.000-07:00

Whew--made it through the first week of school AND Eagle Fest. Somehow I always come home from that day exhausted, even though it involves little more than sitting around in the sun watching 150 teenagers run around... Don't really get how that works...

But yeah, school's going well so far; nothing to report. What I have to talk about is somewhat different. Remember a year and a half ago when I talked about getting a "business" library card? A few of you expressed your sympathy back then for what I went through. (Many thanks.) Well, it wasn't over. Oh no.

On Saturday, I went in to get that card renewed, all prepared with my picture ID with address, cash to pay up all my fines, and original card. I filled out the paperwork, paid my money, and handed the librarian the stack of books (and one DVD: Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, if you're interested). She took a look at the books, looked me up and down, and said, "Are all these for your classroom?"

"Uhhh, yeah," I said. (Ok, this was not completely the truth, admittedly, but I assert that the question was flawed. Read on.)

So she checked everything out and I left. End of story... or so I thought. *cue scary music*

This morning, I found I had been left a voicemail. It was a librarian (a different one, I think). She tells me that there was something I forgot to sign and I need to come back and sign it, and then she continues, I see that you have a business card and I would like to remind you that the purpose of this card is for business use only. I understand you teach fourth grade, so books like The Jeeves Omnibus and other books from the adult section are not appropriate for your classroom. It is a misuse of your card to check out books for personal use.* And so on.

Ok, so not only does this show more sloppiness with the facts than one might expect from a librarian, it seems to me to demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding about the role of a library in the community. I mean, silly me, but I thought teachers and librarians were on the same side. With that whole building cultural literacy thing? Aren't I the one who's helping to educate the voters of the next ten, fifteen, twenty years? If I can't get kids to like reading, how many of them are going to vote for a nice big library budget someday?

And really? "For use in your classroom"? What does that mean, exactly? That I directly read it aloud during class time? How about if I extract a mentor text from it? Does it count if I read it in order to decide whether to buy a copy for my classroom? What if I just want to keep up with the current YA publishing trends so I know what to recommend to my students? What if it contributes to my professional development?

The way I see it, "use in my classroom" is not a yes-or-no question. How useful a piece of media is (yes, I'm including DVDs in this statement too) falls somewhere on a spectrum between "contributes to the general well of knowledge that I draw upon as a teacher" (and I don't say that glibly--my wide reading over the past 20 years impacts my teaching every day in specific, concrete ways) to "is excerpted and xeroxed and distributed to twenty-five students." The latter is fairly rare with library books, I'll grant, but that's because my school budget already covers my curriculum. That's its job. I don't look to the library to provide curriculum, I go to the library to fill in all those gaps which are critical to my success as a teacher but not economically feasible for my school to provide for.

Am I wrong in thinking that that's what a library exists to do?

And I don't think it's right for them to ask me to justify every single work that I check out, because often I don't know whether something will be relevant until after I've looked at it. Or until a year later when it suddenly fits with something I'm teaching.** Or until a student asks a question about it. Frankly, it's just not their job to police my checkout history--it's their job to provide the resources I need to be the best teacher I can. (Ironically, The Jeeves Omnibus is one of the books I was planning to read aloud to my class--or at least a story from it.)

So I'm going to go in sometime this week and say most of that. Hopefully, I won't get my card revoked, because it would be a bummer not to get to enjoy our brand new library that I like so much. So, I'll keep you updated.

*Not a direct quote, as I deleted the voicemail in anger after listening to it. Pretty close, though. The part about fourth grade was definitely in there.

**Example: I used a clip from that Marie Antoinette with Kirsten Dunst when I was giving background for Les Miserables.

2009-09-06T08:37:00.000-07:00

I canned 9 jars of tomato sauce yesterday and 17 jars of pears. Whew.

It's extremely satisfying to see that food lined up on the countertop. This is for you, oh friends who live in faraway places. I'm saving money to come visit you this year...

And they say school spirit is dead...

2009-09-04T17:00:00.000-07:00

Apparently the easiest way to rile up a roomful of high-school-going-on-college kids is to suggest that their current college experience is the educational equivalent of the clearance rack at K-Mart. Ok, I didn't actually say that (but only because I didn't think of it at the time). I think they got the gist, though.

I know, I know. Sometimes I just can't resist.

In particular, I can't resist offering my blunt opinion (asked-for or otherwise) when the subject of college courses in high school comes up. (In fact, since I started writing this post, I had yet another conversation--this time with a parent--on the topic.) And since I didn't get to finish my rant in the aforementioned situation with the high schoolers (a certain someone's mother tactfully changed the subject), you get to be on the receiving end of all my opinions.

See, our town's public high school apparently has a program where students can start attending the nearby community college essentially for free during high school--even going so far as to allow them to attend two full years at the CC and earn an Associate's degree at the same time they receive their high school diploma.

Great, huh? High school kids love it, parents love it... and why not? Free college, more access to higher education, a challenge for higher-achieving students and all that, right? The idea is sweeping through the community--it gets mentioned almost every time I talk to high school students or parents about college. And my own private high school is dabbling in the trend with a few similar classes on our campus.

Except, here's the thing: imagine for a moment that you teach fifth grade. Then imagine that your principal has a brilliant idea; he decides that a few of the second graders really need a challenge--they're beyond the rest of their class, so he sends them to you. If, after a few months, those second graders are doing pretty well in your class and really enjoying themselves and learning a lot, you probably shouldn't be patting yourself on the back. You should be rudely awakening to the fact that your class is far too easy for fifth graders.

This is the problem that nobody seems to be talking about (at least among the students and parents that I meet)--the more high school students that take college classes, the more college becomes a glorified high school. Now the truth is, as some of you know, I teach a couple of these college credit classes at my high school. And though I try as hard as I can to make the classes rigorous and challenging (and I do think it is valuable curriculum, certainly*), I have no illusions that I'm providing anything like the experience my students would get if they took the class as freshmen at a four-year college or university.

In reality, high school students, even the bright ones, aren't developmentally ready to think at the level of a college class (particularly the ones that I teach--which involve critical reading, thinking, and writing). They need that extra year or two to grow and develop before they enter a college environment. Moreover, the ideologically homogenous nature of a Christian school means that they will not encounter any sincere proponents of opposing viewpoints in class discussion**. Try as I might to play the devil's advocate, it's not the same. And, as a high school teacher, I still have to censor somewhat the material that I present to them because they are still in high school. That's just the reality of a high school classroom.***

But what a lot of kids are looking for is just something more challenging than their current high school classes--which I totally get. I'm all for advanced classes in high school so that bright kids can be challenged and be more prepared for college when they get there. They used to call these AP classes, honors, or college prep, and it helped universities distinguish the serious, committed students from the rest. College credit classes have an entirely different mindset. Whereas an honors class implies that the student wants to learn above and beyond the typical curriculum, a college credit class invites the student simply to get his or her education over and done with as soon as possible.

At this point you may be asking, why would colleges be willing to dumb down their curriculum to accommodate high schoolers? (This is an easy one.) It starts with "M" and ends with "oney." And that seems to be the primary motivation for everyone who champions these programs. Parents are sold on it because they're afraid of the giant monster that is college tuition. It's great for (some****) employers because you're bringing kids into the workforce at an earlier and earlier age. It's great for the government because those workers can start paying taxes earlier (and they used up less of the education budget on the way). And it's great for Disney and Pepsi and Verizon because those workers are less educated and therefore more susceptible to ads telling them how to spend all that money they're making.

Here's who it's not good for:

The kid: They're cheated out of a well-rounded, quality education in order to join the 9 to 5 assembly line as soon as possible. They lose the full experience of college as a transition to adulthood--breaking away from parents, meeting people outside of their usual community, encountering different viewpoints, discovering new interests, changing their minds a million times about what they want to be... so much of that happens in the first two years at a four-year college.*****

Democracy: Instead of educating citizens to be fully knowledgeable and engaged with the society around them so they can exercise their rights and freedoms--such as voting, serving jury duty, carrying firearms, raising children, and more--with wisdom and discernment, we focus on "career training," as if the only thing education is good for is producing workers who have no existence outside of their cubicle.

Art and Culture: There's an excellent article in Harpers this month about the denigration of the humanities in our school system (you can borrow it from me if you want). If it's not directly applicable to a job setting, no one seems to be interested any more. But humans are more than their jobs! Art, music, drama, culture--it can bring joy and meaning to your life, help create empathy and make you a more compassionate person, and broaden your experience of the world. It's worth investing some time in.

The Church: So many great men and women of the Church were rigorous thinkers and champions of education--not because they believed Christians needed to get a good job and make a good living--but because our God is revealed through creation, through a Book, and through reason. Our ability to understand God and creation is vastly enhanced through a study of the humanities--philosophy, history, literature, art, and music. It is no accident that these disciplines are the first to be chucked as our economy reduces education to career training.

Hmm, I feel like there might be some people who would say, Okay, okay, I get all that. Culture and art and everything is important, I know. But I just need to make sure I can get a good start at college, get some classes under my belt early on--I'll get to all that other stuff eventually, after I know that I have a good job to fall back on. But, really, will you? Most adults I know have trouble finding time to fit a single book into their schedules--and we're talking an Oprah's Book Club title, not The History of Art in the Western World. Once you're well into your nursing or engineering or computer science program, are you really going to make room for Greek and Roman Drama or Irish Literature? Being forced to take those kinds of classes as part of a liberal arts degree has sparked an unexpected interest in the minds of many a science- or math-minded student. Not that they changed their career path necessarily, but they enriched their minds and experiences for the rest of their lives as a result of exposure to something new.

Here's my main point, put succinctly: Rather than supporting the pursuit of knowledge and experience, which is the right goal of education, college classes in high school create the culturally destructive mindset that higher education is something to race through as quickly and cheaply as you can, so you can get that awesome job and start raking in the bucks. Hopefully I've done a better job of communicating that argument here than I'm sure I did to those high schoolers a few days ago. I feel passionate about this topic (can you tell?), and I hope that this trend I'm seeing peters out soon (though I'm not holding my breath). Please write in the comments if you have any questions or want to present any counter arguments to anything I've said. I really would love to hear them.

*I really love teaching the material of my college credit classes, and I do think they offer much to our student body and do a lot to prepare our students for college. (If I didn't think the classes were profitable, I wouldn't teach them.) I just wish they weren't billed as a replacement for the same classes in real college.

**Even public schools often draw students from a fairly homogenous community (especially in rural Oregon), which would be different from that of a college campus.

***True, only the first of these objections (that students are not developmentally ready) applies to high school students taking college classes on a community college campus, but I think that first objection is, in fact, the most important.

****That is, those employers who just want some mindless automatons to push buttons, shuffle papers, or make change out of a register. Employers who want thoughtful, creative, well-rounded people with knowledge and abilities instead of "skills" are getting cheated by this system. They belong in the second category.

*****This is not meant to be a bash on two-year colleges--they provide a useful service for the educational needs of some people. But many of the students who, during high school, rush into programs like the ones I've mentioned are not students whose ultimate goal is a two-year degree. They are usually high-achieving students who would otherwise attend--or plan to ultimately transfer to--a private college or a university.)

Getting Oriented

2009-09-03T08:55:00.000-07:00

Student Orientation today. Luckily they won't be orientating* in my room because it's still more or less in shambles. I did manage to get one of my bulletin boards decorated, and it's pretty cool if I do say so. And I moved and reorganized bookshelves (a beginning-of-the-school-year ritual), but there are still books, posters, notebooks, mini-whiteboards, pushpins, file folders, cleaning supplies, markers, colored blocks, toy swords, supply catalogs, broken miniblinds, paper plates, plastic bags, tissue paper, milk crates, and cardboard boxes covering pretty much every flat surface. Oh well. Tuesday morning will come, and when it does I will be ready.

But back to Orientation... As I remember it (and I know it hasn't changed much), Orientation is less about getting your schedule and locker and hearing announcements and much more about showing off your second favorite new fall outfit (your first favorite being saved for the first day of school, of course), your new haircut, and (if you're a boy) your straggly attempt at a beard that you've worked so hard on over the summer and which you'll be forced to shave off before the first actual school day. It's about scoping out the new kids, seeing whether the cool kids are still as cool as you remember them (they're cooler), furtively spying on your crush (maybe that beard's not so straggly), and making sure your group of friends hasn't undergone any major changes that would mean you're not really friends anymore.

Frankly, as a teacher, Orientation is so massively not scary by comparison. In fact, sometimes when I tell people I teach high school, or worse, middle school, (this happened just the other day), they get this horrified look on their faces like they're thinking they would not set foot in a high school campus if it were the only safe bunker in a nuclear holocaust. They start shaking their heads and backing away and muttering, "Wow... oh wow... I could never... how do you...?" I think they must somehow imagine that going back to teach school would somehow be the same as actually being in high school again--a frightening thought, to be sure. I think they imagine the boogeymen of their teenage experience--be they the mean girl clique or the gym class bully or the sadistic principal--is still waiting for them behind those doors.

But it's not like that. (Or, at least, it's almost always not like that). I'm usually just an observer of the high school tragicomedy, sometimes an unwitting contributor to it (having cruelly assigned homework on the night of the big date, or whatever), but rarely an active participant (or victim). Plus, I now get to see what I was blind to twelve years ago--that the "mean girls" are terrified of losing the security of their clique, that the heartthrob (as he would have been) works so hard at being cool, that the weird outcasts are usually dealing with adult-sized problems outside of school, and that they're all insecure, sensitive, naive, in need of kindness and understanding, and all possessing something that makes them special and worthy.

So, as I say, the disorder of my classroom is less important today. Because, for me, Orientation is about remembering what I do and why I'm here--organizing my mind and attitude for the year ahead and preparing my heart to be part of these kids' lives for another school year.

*Isn't that word horrible? I love making fun of pompous, redundant business jargon.

ohboyohboyohboyohboyohboy...

2009-09-01T21:14:00.000-07:00

Guess what happened today!

Catching Fire came out! The book I've been waiting for since May, when The Hunger Games rocked my world. I'm oh-so-very-excited.

Brenna came with me to the bookstore (possibly in order to secure her first place spot in the list of those who get to borrow it when I'm done), and I could hardly even wait until I got home before starting it. I'm currently on page 76 and am only taking this short break to share my joy with you.

Back to reading...

2009-08-25T21:08:00.000-07:00

I have a new obsession. I read--listened to, rather--a Wooster and Jeeves novel last year about this time, and I picked up another for my long drive to Nampa last week. But when I returned to the library after I got back, I found that I had already consumed the only two Wodehouse audiobooks in stock. Sad. Luckily, Librivox came to my rescue and provided me with further Wooster and Jeeves giggles. I've been listening to it pretty much straight for the past 48 hours. And, dash it, you can't listen to that much uppity British slang without picking up a few choice phrases, what?

I think my favorite aspect of Wodehouse's writing is his penchant for slipping in little jokes without any fanfare among the bigger gags. Like, there's this great part where Bertie Wooster's like, "The next morning, I was so low over the whole fiasco I didn't even want my breakfast--I told Jeeves to go ahead and drink it."* I nearly dropped the blackberries I was holding I laughed so hard.

Do you know what I think, chappies? I think I need a Jeeves. A nice, articulate, tea-brewing, I-try-to-give-satisfaction-sir Jeeves. I could do with someone to bring me breakfast in bed, iron my clothes, do my shopping, pay my bills, tell me that word I'm thinking of, fix me pick-me-ups whenever I'm down, and solve all the problems of my life. But, then again, Jeeves would probably not approve of certain items in my wardrobe. I definitely think he would look with disapprobation on my hightops from hippietown. And I feel that I would not hold up well in a battle of the wills with Jeeves.

So perhaps it's just as well. I'll have to make do with the ink-and-paper Jeeves instead, at least until I make my millions. In the meantime, you should check out the adventures of Wooster and Jeeves as well, if you haven't already. It's a topping good time. Start with "Right Ho, Jeeves" from Librivox (there's even an option to download it straight into your iTunes, for free of course). So get to it, my lads.

*My paraphrase from memory--not a direct quote.

2009-08-24T17:12:00.000-07:00

Sitting in the butterfly chair on my porch yesterday, I succumbed to the grand old tradition of Sunday Afternoon Nap, the pleasure of which was magnified by the sunshine creeping across the porch, the knowledge of summer's dwindling, and--as I started to wake up--the distant sound of June playing hymns on her piano as only old church ladies can play hymns. It was extremely lovely to lie there in the sun, eyes closed, and listen to the rolling arpeggios and heavy chords of "O Come, All Ye Faithful" or some such tune. I eventually got up and watered my flowers and washed my car, serenaded all the while from across the lawn.

I've finally been enjoying the fruits of my labors en masse. Zucchini, cucumbers, tomatoes, broccoli, and green onions are all coming ripe pretty much continuously, and I eat some combination of the above for just about every meal. So, if you're interested in enjoying a few of these foods along with me this month, here's a super easy and super yummy recipe that I've been fixing every couple of days for some weeks now.

Preheat the oven to 350. Start with some kind of flatbread. I've used everything from pita bread to roghni naan to pre-cooked pizza crust. Spread on a layer of hummus. I prefer plain, but flavored might be good too. Add grated cheese--mozzeralla's best, of course, but any kind will work. I've even made do with feta once, and it was yummy! Add sliced zucchini and tomatoes. Add a little more cheese. Bake about 10 minutes (or to taste). Zucchini should be mostly cooked, bread should be crunchy.

You can also add some kind of meat--I've recently tried turkey sausage, which was good. And if you want to go really healthy, you could omit the cheese. And need I mention that this is a one-serving recipe? It's a filling meal for one female adult. :) Moreover, I've prepared it for several friends on different occasions and it was a smash hit--even among the skeptics.

Also, if you find yourself with excess zucchini, you can take yourself on over to Jen's recipe for healthy zucchini bread. I can attest that the muffin variation is delicious, even if--like me--you completely forget to add the applesauce.

2009-08-20T22:37:00.000-07:00

We have new pastors. Our former pastor is pursuing a different ministry and the conference has assigned us three pastors in a complicated machination that's too boring to explain here and anyway the point is that one of them is a girl who is my age. Now, the existence of another female human being under the age of forty in my church is exciting enough. But the fact that this particular being is friendly, literate, and likes to spend time in coffee shops is just too much to be hoped for. But, we've been hanging out quite a bit in the almost-month since she and her husband moved into the parsonage, and I can attest that we get along, that she likes to have long discussions in which both parties may or may not hold divergent viewpoints, that she reads good books, that we have many similar interests, and that in general good times are to be had in her company. I've spent the last month trying not dance in happy circles, burst into tears, tell my entire life story in a loud obnoxious voice, bake a giant Welcome-to-Lebanon cake, camp out on her front lawn, or otherwise reveal my scarily giddy excitement at her arrival lest I frighten Miss Muffet away.

But I think... and it's been long enough now that I believe I can say this without jinxing it... that God has sent me a friend. :)

2009-07-15T13:29:00.000-07:00

Went to the midnight showing of Harry Potter last night (don't worry, I won't spoil it if you haven't seen it yet), which means I'm basically useless today. Wow, I hate staying up that late. I slept in until about 11:30, but of course my brain is still meg fuzzy and lethargic. I'm happy that the sun has come back though. Soon it will be river-floating time. Woo hoo.

It was so funny yesterday, my neighbor/landlord June had called me on the phone to come over and see a new bouquet of something ("show-and-tell", she called it; she loves showing off her flowers...or even pictures of flowers). I wasn't able to come, though, because I was over working at the Pregnancy Center, but I left a message saying I'd try to stop by in the afternoon. Well, about 2:15, not long after I'd arrived home, the phone rings, and when I pick up, June says, "Would you like to have tea at 2:30 or 3:00?" It cracks me up when she does this--she likes to give me "positive choices," like a toddler. "Would you like to have naptime before or after your snack?" But, I wasn't particularly busy--just trying to decide what kind of dessert to make for an Anne of Avonlea-watching party that night--so I said 2:30 would be fine and went over and had tea with June. Of course, the blessing ended up being mine in the end, because not only did I get to have a lovely chat with her, she gave me the bouquet of Easter lilies and very fragrant pink roses, along with a large basket of marionberries, which solved the dessert problem.

So, I never allow myself to feel annoyed for longer than, like, a second when June uses creative methods to get me over for tea and a chat because I remember certain other neighbors and am immediately reminded of how lucky I am to have June.

Things That Are Awesome

2009-07-13T21:50:00.000-07:00

1) Our new library! I visited our new public library today--the first weekday it's been open. It's bee-you-tiful. I never thought Lebanon would have such a great library. There are huge windows and easy chairs and ever so many shelves. Somehow all those books look more interesting on the brand-new shelves--I can't explain it. I only got to spend about an hour there today, but I envision many lovely hours of browsing and studying and reading.

2) The new Harry Potter movie! (Well, I haven't exactly seen it yet, but I'm taking it on faith that it will be awesome. And of course, the fact that it is coming out tomorrow night at midnight is totally awesome.) According to the interviews and such that I've listened to, this one will be more funny and less dark and action-y. Which makes sense, since both the seventh movies will be non-stop action.

3) The cream cheese mints that we made today for the wedding. Secretly, every wedding I go to I look around for these mints and am very disappointed if all they have are the standard pastel powdery ones. They aren't quite as good lukewarm, so I only ate one while we were rolling them and pressing them into molds. But on the day of the wedding, I'm going to be sneaking in before the ceremony and snitching them from the fridge, I can promise you.

4) Seeing like ten people I know at the paint store while in my sweaty paint clothes and bandana. Oh wait, no, that's actually NOT awesome.

5) The Hunger Games. I know I talked up this book already once on here, but I've been reading it aloud to one of my friends, and I'm repeatedly struck by how great the writing is. The first time around, I was really focused on the plot and the emotion and finding out what happens, but this time I'm paying a lot more attention to the language, and it's amazing. Seriously, read it.

6) Joss Whedon's comics. I've been reading Buffy Season 8 for awhile, and I love it of course, because I love all things Buffy (except possibly the new movie--what's that about?), but I discovered Whedon's Runaways series at the library today and read the collection of #25-30 because that's all they had, and I really liked it. It had a very Whedon feel, which is always a good thing. The more I read comics, the more I like them, but it has taken awhile to get used to the form. My tendency is to skim, focusing on the word bubbles, but you really have to slow down and study the drawings as well, panel by panel, because they often contain crucial elements of the plot that you would otherwise miss. I never thought I would get into comics, but the more they feature women NOT wearing pointy metal bras and without bodies in which most abdominal organs have apparently been relocated to the breasts and/or butt, the more I think they might be kinda ok.

2009-07-11T21:05:00.000-07:00

Wow, this has been a busy week. Let me tell you all about it. Here's what has happened:

1) I cut my hair. I know I promised to do it way back when and then changed my mind, but this time it's really real. I have this kind of strange picture where I look a little crazed, but it gives you the idea.

2) I got stung by a bee for the first time EVER in my life. We were shearing our boxwoods the other day and I apparently chopped through a nest. Yes, it hurt, but the greatest pain was emotional. The pain of betrayal. Bees have always taken care of me before--we were friends. They buzzed harmlessly around me and treated me nicely. Well, it's all over now. Bees and me are through.

3) I also went to the dentist. It's been, let's see... over three years since I went last. Remember? I had that root canal and crown in grad school. Anyway, the dentist who did my crown was so great that I wanted to go back to him, but by the time I was ready for another cleaning, I had moved back to Lebanon and completely forgot his name AND the location of his office. So I had to go back to the U of O and trace my referrals until I figured out who had treated me. How did this take two years? Wellll, it may have had something to do with my aversion for going to the dentist in the first place. Procrastination on overdrive. So, anyway, I went back and guess what? I had NO cavities. Woo hoo! That is cause for some celebration.

4) One of our new pastors, named Shanette, invited me up to Salem to participate in a meal with the homeless that her current church helps organize. It was a great experience and it's definitely gotten me thinking about similar things that could be done for our substantial homeless population out at River Park. Not only do they provide a meal once a week (five churches take turns), they build relationships with the people in that area, so that when there is a need--like a medical problem or cold weather or whatever--they can trust (to whatever extent it's possible) that that need is legitimate. Also, they have been able to help a number of people into apartments or jobs, which is a more long-term solution than a meal here and there. But according to Shanette, getting to know them, listening to their stories and problems, and helping create a community for them are the most important things that this ministry provides. Neat, huh?

5) I got a netbook. Woot! I've been saving up for some time for a laptop, since the one my brother gave me awhile ago worked and then stopped working. :( I finally decided on a netbook because of how convenient they are. I discovered last year that hauling even a normal-sized laptop to school every day, along with all my other books, is kind of prohibitive. But this one is less than 3 pounds and fits in a purse! (I love gadgets.) Most of this post was typed on it, and I haven't found the keyboard to be uncomfortably small. Plus, it's going to be very convenient to use with my classroom projector.

6) I threw a little party last night for my National Honor Society students. I had promised them in the spring to try to take them out to lunch one day and it never happened, so this was my alternative. I didn't have a great turnout (blame the summer, I say), but we did have a really good time with the kids that came. Logan and I took on Geron and Ryan in badmitten and squeaked out a win in the last point. Which obviously makes us the Super Awesome Badmitten Champions Forever.

Yes, and all that happened just this week. Whew. I think I'm going to go to bed early tonight. I'm completely wiped out.

2009-07-06T22:00:00.000-07:00

Like Twilight?

Like Buffy?

Ever wonder what Buffy would say if she met Edward?

Now's your chance to find out.

Trust me, it's everything you've ever dreamed.

2009-06-25T08:37:00.000-07:00

All right, I'm going to call the vote. As it stands, there is a tie between "Begin" and "Wonder," so I'm going to exercise my vote to break the tie and pick "Wonder." I couldn't decide when I first made that post, but the more I went back and looked at it, the more I favored the last one. I like it because it matches my room and the weirdness of it actually appeals to me. Besides, I'm always better at wondering than at actually beginning. :)

I spent yesterday working at the nursery, painting one of the office buildings. It's an old house and the siding is practially falling off (in places, at least), but we're giving it one more coat of paint to eke out a couple more years. Anyway, that rough cedar siding means painting with a brush, which = major hard work in the hot sun. But I had Speaking of Faith and Galactic Watercooler and Pottercast to keep me entertained. And I feel very strong and Amazon-like after painting by hand for ten hours. :)

2009-06-23T09:04:00.000-07:00

Tell me if any of you have this experience...do you ever notice that when you're not really spending time in the Bible and in prayer, spiritual concepts--maybe from books that you pick up or said in church or mentioned by a friend, or even from the Bible itself--start to sound empty and trite. You start to find fault with sermons, notice the flaws and inconstencies, entertain more doubts. And it becomes harder and harder to get motivated to do anything about it.

Whereas when you are making purposeful time in your life for God, intentionally being thankful, spending time in self-reflection, pursuing humility in prayer, those statements/concepts/quotes become real again; you can find the best in them. That's not to say that you lose your ability to be critical (in the best sense), but space is created for those ideas to be entertained honestly in your mind.

At least, that's what I thought about today when I read this verse:
"To be carnally minded is death, but to be spiritually minded is life and peace."
Rom. 8:6

2009-06-22T10:09:00.000-07:00

I have only 10 pages left in my journal (that would be the replacement of the one lost last summer at the Chicago airport). So, I'm looking to get a new one from the same company, Papayalicious. Here's what I love about the one I have:

1) The cover is bee-you-tiful (and unique).

2) It's thin--not too bulky to fit in a purse or slip in with other books.

3) The paper inside is actually attractive. (I hate it when journals have a really pretty cover and then the inside is this hideous paper. Or if it's too froofy--like bright pink or something.)

4) Half the pages are lined and half are unlined. The perfect compromise.

5) The lines are college-rule. Which is important.

6) The pages are big enough to write a decent amount--about 6x9".

7) It has an attached ribbon bookmark.

Here's what I don't love:

1) It's not spiral-bound.

2) It starts to fall apart after about 8 months (clearly, I need to write faster).

Obviously, the pros win out. (At least until I find a journal with no cons at all...) So, I've gone to Papayalicious's website and picked three choices for my new journal that you get to vote on. Here they are:

BEGIN

FLAMINGO

WONDER
Vote in the comments!

News, Thoughts, Links

2009-06-20T13:09:00.000-07:00

The first thing that's been on my mind this morning is the fate of the protesters in Iran. In case you've been out of touch with the news lately (no judgment here--that happens to me often), here's a recap: Iran held a presidential election last week and the purported results showed a victory of around 65% to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the incumbent, who is supported by Ayotallah Khameini, the supreme leader of Iraq. However, those results are mighty sketchy, for reasons that a John Green video outlines much better than I could. Supporters of the reformist-ish candidate, Mir Hossein Mousavi, began protesting election fraud and those protests have continued now for several days. Yesterday, Khameini told the protesters to disperse and warned that they would be responsible for any violence that occurred. Today (which is to say, from yesterday evening until midday today in US time), police and basij (the volunteer militia, sort of) have been shooting, tear-gassing, beating, and otherwise harming protesters all over Iran. When the wounded are taken to hospitals, police are waiting to carry them away. Instead, many protesters have been bringing wounded to European embassies to be cared for. You can keep up with what's going on at these Twitter sites: IranRiggedElection, IranElection09, Smileofcrash, Persiankiwi. Or if you prefer to read an actual article, here's one. I don't know that Mousavi would be necessarily all that much better of a president (from a US perspective), but the people of Iran still have the right to have their choice of a leader respected.

Other things I've been meaning to share with you:

I've been hearing some weird language usage lately--particularly, people who are verbing words in business contexts. At H&M in Seattle a few weeks ago, I overheard these beauties from some staff members: 1) "When you're merchandizing..." 2) "Do you think you would wardrobe this with that?" And then the other day at the Pregnancy Alternative Center, the volunteer supervisor asked me 3) "to reception." As in, be the receptionist. Do these not just grate on your ears? I don't even know what #1 means. Presumably #2 means, "Would you pair these two items of clothing in a display outfit?" but surely it can be said in a more graceful way. And #3 is just ugly and results from the obsolescence of "receive" as the root of "reception" and "receptionist." Bleh.

And on the In My Life Channel, the latest news: I have been injured. Yes, while fruitlessly chasing the world's naughtiest dog, who had absconded with a glove (hours after chewing apart Father's work boots), I tripped over my own feet and landed on my shoulder, which is now massively bruised. I also spent 8 hours scraping paint off a nursery building yesterday, so my upper body is basically one giant sore muscle. I was going to go back and work today too, but that's feeling less likely. I think I'll probably instead spend the afternoon cleaning my very dirty house and moping about how my arm hurts.

Did you know that the movie Ivanhoe is now out on DVD? Those of you who shared Professor Hill's class know which one I mean--it stars Olivia Hussey and Anthony Andrews. I watched an old VHS version in Brit Lit at NNU and slept through the middle third of it. (Yes, I did occasionally sleep through classes in college.) I was ticked when I woke up because I did actually want to watch it, and I thought I'd never have the chance. But now it's back and all remastered and pretty. You should watch it. It's awesome.

Lastly, I recommend that you head on over to youtube and watch Harry Potter, the Musical. Just in case you ever wondered how on earth Professor Quirrel could sleep.

You can call me Flower if you want to.

2009-06-16T08:22:00.000-07:00

There was a baby skunk in my yard yesterday. Yup, around 5 o'clock I looked up from my computer and saw a black-and-white figure toddling around my back yard, nose to the ground. Hold on, aren't skunks nocturnal? I asked myself. Well, there was counter evidence, right before my eyes. I watched him wander around the perimeter of the grass before climbing up and over the mound and disappearing into tall weeds. Huh, weird. I thought. I told my dad about it later at our church meeting. "During the daytime?" he asked. "Huh."

When I got home, June was out working. "Have you seen our new visitors?" she said, and pointed to the skunk, who was over in her driveway now.

"Oh, yeah, that guy was over in my yard earlier. He walked all around..."

"Actually, there's five of them," she said. "They live under my house."

Oh.

So, of course something must be done. The property already smells faintly of skunk. (Not that I really mind that smell too much--when it's faint, that is.) But they are really cute--I mean really. And not particularly scared of people. The little one that was out in the evening wandered up and down while June and I looked at our flowers. I have this mad urge to put out food for them.

Not that I will. I just think it's so adorable the way they sort of rock back and forth when they walk. And their little faces. I mean, look at it. I had a stuffed skunk that I slept with for awhile when I was little--maybe that has something to do with it.

But, alas, June has already called an exterminator, so their days are numbered. Maybe they'll wander off and find a happy little home in the woods before he gets here. I'm gonna just hope.

2009-06-15T08:43:00.001-07:00

How do y'all feel about Twitter? I kind of feel towards it the way I used to feel about MySpace and after that, about texting--that it's an annoying toy for people who have too much free time in their lives and feel the need to spend it making superficial and self-involved announcements about themselves.

Of course, now I am actually on MySpace and Facebook, and I do occasionally text people, so I think I can see where this is going. And if you've been online at all recently, you've probably seen too that Twitter is completely everywhere--it's replacing people's blogs, it's replacing some message boards. There are people whose internet presence has shifted in large part onto Twitter. (And can I just say that the whole vocabulary is sort of irritating to me: "tweets" and "twitted" and "twittering." Thank goodness I don't have to use these words in aural conversation or Miss Kitty Fantastico would probably launch herself at me from across the room, teeth and claws bared.)

In fact, I've been reading (and watching) today about how much of the news from the troubled Iranian election yesterday has been coming through on Twitter, since the government of Iran has shut down most of the news outlets. So, apparently not all tweets are comprised of the lunch menus of celebrities. Plus, all the cool kids are doing it. I'm trying to hold out in my little 140-characters-is-not-meaningful-writing bunker, but I don't know how long it's going to last. And, well, frankly, although a good 65% of my brain thinks Twitter is pretty much useless and a big time-waster, and maybe 25% is intrigued by the few worthwhile uses for Twitter, I have to admit that the remaining 10% thinks it would be... um... kinda fun to tell the world random things about my life throughout the day. What can I say? I'm a child of the blogging age.

2009-06-12T23:10:00.000-07:00

Ahhhh... *she sighs a giant sigh of relief, having at last graded all papers, entered all grades, filed all lesson plans, reshelved all books, attended all meetings, vacuumed all carpet, inventoried all materials, stacked all chairs, and signed all forms, and being now at leisure to begin her summer vacation*

The vacation is not starting off entirely roses, however, as I have come down with a curious and disagreeable condition whereby my left eye is bloodshot, puffy, and teeth-grindingly itchy. Conjunctivitis it is not. I have some theories, but I'll keep them to myself. Needless to say, the vast majority of my energy is devoted to maintaining the thread of self-control that keeps me from scrubbing my eye out with a grill brush. With the rest, I've been organizing some school files, putting together lists of poetry for next year, and reading a really excellent fantasy novel recommended by the good people at Powells. :) The Name of the Wind. It was awesome. I probably spent like twelve hours reading it this week. The only thing is I didn't realize it was the beginning of a series, so I was all expecting to get the narrator's whole life story and ended up only getting like up to his sixteenth year or something. It was one of those things where your fingers realize the books is winding down and your subconscious goes, Hold on, we can't be there yet... and you get all confused and have to flip back to the title page and see "Part 1" or whatever. *sight* And the worst part is that there's no release date yet for book 2. Sad.

Everyone keeps asking me what my plans are for the summer, and for the first time in a long, long time, I really don't have any. I can't afford to go anywhere. Mostly I'll be working--either for money or on school stuff. Helping out with my sister's wedding. Garden. Volunteering some at the Pregnancy Alternatives Center, I expect. Reading a lot. Probably not too much else. I'm ok with it. I need the break.

Guess What Day It Is?

2009-06-05T11:47:00.001-07:00

And guess what time it is?

How to make a Burger King hamburger palatable

2009-06-02T17:42:00.000-07:00

1) Take it home
2) Unwrap
3) Open and place hamburger patty on separate plate
4) Microwave 30 seconds
5) Place top and bottom bun in toaster
6) Toast
7) Go out to garden and pick two leaves of lettuce
8) Wash and dry lettuce
9) Remove original lettuce from wrapping and discard
10) Reassemble burger ingredients
11) Enjoy

Is there anything potentially hazardous in this book?

2009-05-28T16:59:00.000-07:00

Ok, so back when the post office changed their policy about leaving packages in mailboxes, I know I blogged about it, but I can't find the post to link to, so I'll just give your a recap: It's massively stupid and inconvenient. That's my opinion. It hasn't changed now that the policy has been in effect for a year or two. I still don't appreciate having to physically travel to the post office with my innocent package, stand in line, hand the package to the postal clerk, say, "no, I don't want insurance, delivery confirmation, or rushed delivery," etcetera, etcetera. I still have no idea how personally walking in and handing my package to the clerk prevents it from being a bomb. I still think that the inconvenience and cost to millions of citizens greatly outweighs whatever security benefit could be gleaned from one or two dangerous packages that are maybe stopped by this law. But whatever.

The point is, most of the packages I bring in are books that I'm sending to someone via Paperback Swap.com, so sometimes the clerk will say, "Is there anything dangerous, flammable, or potentially hazardous in this book?" And I always want to respond with a clever comeback like, "I certainly hope so," or "Just on page 45" or whatever, but I'm a little bit afraid that a team of riot-gear-wearing soldiers from Homeland Security will jump out from behind the counter, tackle me to the ground, and throw me in an unmarked van if I do, and I'll never be heard from again. So I just look blandly at him and say, "no," and take my receipt, and leave. But next time, I'm going to say it. I really am. And if I suddenly go missing, you'll know why.

2009-05-24T08:38:00.000-07:00

This post is coming to you from sunny Seattle, Washington! My sisters and I came up for the Northwest Folklife Festival this weekend. I love the folk festival so much--as Geron put it, "It's like the fair for weird people." But we'll probably take some time out for a trip to Pike's Place and shopping...or whatever else takes our fancy. Our hotel is only a couple blocks from Seattle Center, so there's lots to do right around here--last night we walked down to The Melting Pot and had chocolate fondue. :)

Geron and Brenna are still sleeping--I told them they could sleep in as long as they wanted because the festival doesn't start until 11--but I'm up, so I think I'll go down to the nearest coffee shop and read in the sun with a cup of coffee. Mmm... I love the city.

Covers for the books below

2009-05-21T15:14:00.001-07:00

Books (A Title)

2009-05-21T12:15:00.000-07:00

Want to hear about all the YA books I've been reading lately? Amazon and the library have been very good to me. Here they are:

The Magic of Reason by Justine Larbalestier

I've been enjoying reading Justine's blog in the last couple of months, but it was actually by coincidence that I picked up one of her books at the library the other day. It actually took me a couple of days to make the connection. Anyway,I started reading this one thinking it was just a novel, and then I got about a third of the way through and came to the end of a book... at which point I realized that it was actually part of a three-book set. No wonder it had taken me so long to read 1/3 of it.

Apparently this belongs to the Urban Fantasy genre, whose precise definition I was pretty unclear on up to a week or two ago when I realized I was overthinking it. Urban fantasy means exactly what it says: a story set in a big city (usually New York) with elements of traditional fantasy--magic in this case, but sometimes also vampires, fairies, wizards, etc. I liked the trilogy in general, but I found some of the internal logic inconsistent or confusing. And I have to say, I never really totally fell in love with the main character. But it was unique in its portrayal of magic as a disease that saps its victim's life force, either killing them or driving them crazy. Again, though, even this was a difficult thing to reconcile with as a reader because magic is also portrayed as being an intrinsic part of a person's identity, without which they would be incomplete. I can't really think of anything in the real world that this corresponds to, even obliquely, so it didn't really ring true for me. But the series was worth reading--I probably just won't buy it.

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

Ok, background: if you've ever been to the airport with me (or heard any of my airport stories), you know I have issues with airport security. The kind of issues where I think they're a deeply irritating, generally incompetent, and slightly ominous waste of my time. (I could go on...) So I was quite happy to read a book that validated my feelings and was massively satisfying to boot. Set in the near future, it's about a group of kids who enjoy playing interactive online games and hacking in and out of their high school's invasive surveillance system. But when terrorists blow up a nearby bridge, the kids are picked up and interrogated by homeland security. Shocked by his own government's lack of respect for his rights, and by severity of the new security crackdown on his city, one of the kids vows to take revenge on the whole system. Think V for Vendetta, think Shadow of the Hegemon, think 1984.

Suite Scarlett by Maureen Johnson

This is the only non-fantasy/scifi/speculative fiction story on this list. In fact, the number of realistic books I read has seriously dwindled lately. There's just so many awesome fantastic tales out there I can't resist. But Suite Scarlett holds its own with fun, unique characters and a fast-moving plot. Scarlett lives in an old historic hotel in New York City and on her sixteenth birthday is given charge of one of the suites. While her friends are off on exotic vacations, she has to spend her summer chasing after the eccentric, flighty former starlet living in her suite, who drags Scarlett into her many crazy and dangerous plans: 1) write a best-selling memoir, 2) get revenge on the evil actress who sabotaged her career, 3) turn Scarlett's brother's amateur play into a critical success, 4) save the hotel from complete financial collapse. Can they do it? (Yes, they can!)

The Mortal Instruments series by Cassandra Clare

I think this trilogy has been compared to Harry Potter and Twilight a lot, and there are some fair comparisons to be made there. Like HP, it has a very intriguing world full of creative possibilities. Like Twilight, it has a cast of beautiful teenagers with superpowers and enough teenage heartbreak and angst to power a supernova. It's totally engaging and fun to read, but I will say that I foresaw every. single. plot twist. Like five miles ahead of time. So I spent a lot of pages going okay, okay, get a move on already, tell me something I don't know... And for that reason, even though this is sort of spoilery, I'm going to go ahead and tell you that I got extremely sick of waiting for the main character to figure out that her crush isn't really her long-lost brother like everybody thinks. Like, is there no other possible way to have forbidden love except by making it apparently incestuous? I mean, as soon as it became clear she didn't have any other real options for a love interest I knew there would be some kind of switched-at-birth thing, but still. Ew.

The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan

I don't know if I've mentioned this, but I'm kind of obsessed with zombie books lately. There was Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and now this one. I even had a dream about zombies the other night. (Our entire family was fleeing the city, but I had to go back for my books.) Anyway, I've been eyeing this book on the Borders tables for awhile, and I finally broke down and got it. It's set in a post-zombie-apocalypse world, where the remaining human population lives in tiny fenced villages surrounded by forests crawling with the undead. Mary dreams of the faraway ocean, which most of her friends and family dismiss as a myth, but her life is already planned out for her: an arranged marriage like everyone else to help repopulate the human race and a life inside the fences.

I was expecting this book to be action-packed, but it's actually a bit slow. Or, as Scott Westerfield puts it, "driven by... grim relentlessness." I suppose that's appropriate for a zombie book. Overall, it seemed really allegorical--except I had the nagging feeling the whole time that I wasn't quite figuring out what was supposed to be represented. The story could have benefited from a bit more action and a bit less rumination, in my opinion.

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

Wow. Just wow. An infinity of wow. I've been hearing lots of hype from the YA lit bloggers I read (John Green, Maureen Johnson, Justine Larbalestier, Cheryl Klein, Melissa Anelli), but I purposely withheld high expectations in case the hype was overrated. People, it is not overrated. In fact there should have been more hype. Allow me to add to the hype. (hype, hype, hype, hype, hype, hype, hype, hype...) This book is so completely made of awesome I can't even describe it. I bawled. I can count on one hand the number of books that have ever made me cry, ever, and this one is at the top.

A brief, non-spoilery premise: *deep announcer voice* "In a world... where the government can't be trusted... reality television takes on new and sinister meaning...." (Have I mentioned I love futuristic books?) Twenty-four teenage champions, chosen from twelve districts across the country, fight to the death in a bloody competition broadcast nationwide to lower the morale of the rebellion-prone districts. Katniss Everdeen has some hunting skills and cleverness, but they are no match for the trained, conditioned warriors turned out by wealthier districts. As the games begin, she must find a way to survive the brutality of the competition, while still holding on to some measure of her humanity. This book is an obvious throw-back to the ancient gladiator games, with all the heriosm, romance, and tragedy of Sparticus or Ben-Hur (but fewer chariot races). The main character completely won me over about twenty pages in with her care for her little sister, (in fact, I think I identified with a lot of her personality as a firstborn), and she remains realistic, flawed, and heartbreakingly tenacious throughout the story.

Seriously, if you pick one book from this list to read, let it be this one!

2009-05-13T10:27:00.000-07:00

I don't usually go all emo and venty on here because I don't want my blog to sound like my junior high journals, but... I don't know, the last few weeks--maybe even months--I've found myself really down, which has translated into a sort of simmering irritability that I've not been able to shake. So I haven't blogged very much because the temptation was too strong to be all snarky and sarcastic towards people who didn't deserve it.

The biggest problem is that I don't know what the problem is. That is, I don't know that there is just one thing dragging me down. If there was, maybe I could deal with it and move on. But looking back over the last few months, I'm thinking there's just a huge combination of stressful things--the perfect storm. (Although, even saying that makes me feel guilty because people I know are dealing with much bigger problems than me--deaths, serious illnesses, things that make me so thankful for all my blessings. I know I have it really good, and I'm usually able to remember that, but somehow I still feel how I feel, which is what I'm trying to acknowledge here.)

Anyway, a few of the issues include...

announcements by several important people in my life that they are moving thousands of miles away in the coming year
several big stressful parent and student conflicts at school
money stress (thank you, IRS)
the particularly wet and cold spring
the coming loss of our pastor of 11 years
the fact that I've been back in Lebanon for 3 years and still haven't made any friends my own age
all the normal stress of the end of a school year compounded by the seemingly million activities that interrupt instruction and make me feel like my students will never finish the year's work

The one thing that has been an escape from everything lately has been my yard and garden. There's something about the physical, creative work of gardening that soothes me, no matter what else is going on. I've spent probably 3-5 hours of every partially sunny day working outdoors lately and I would be glad for even more. I never get tired of the magic of seeing dead-looking, strangely-shaped seeds transform into tiny shoots and leaves--it thrills me every time. But even pulling weeds or rocks is satisfying--watching the garden plot clear and seeing the piles of weeds grow.

Do you know what I would love to do someday? Have a big estate with beautiful, tailored gardens (fountains, gazebos, statues) and rent it out for events--weddings, tea parties, anniversary parties, picnics. (I'm sort of picturing Poet's Garden for any of you who live in this area.) Fantasizing about an unrealistic career is one of the main ways I deal with being in a funk.

Anyway, the sun is coming back this weekend, so things are looking up. And school will soon be over and gone, along with all my stress. Until then, if you want to give me a call and hang out, I probably won't say no. And I promise I won't put you to work pulling weeds. :)

For your amusement: What if Pinocchio were a vampire slayer?

Random Facts

2009-05-11T08:58:00.000-07:00

Goethe wrote "Letters are among the most significant memorial a person can leave behind them." Do you think this quote applies to blogs?
It is 104 degrees in Hermisillo, Mexico, right now.
That is approximately twice the temperature of Lebanon, Oregon.
Today is the Walkathon.
Jamba Juice has a booth at our school, selling smoothies.
Repetitive, rhythm-heavy, melody-light, brain-melting music will be palpitating through giant speakers for the next five hours.
The awesomeness of point five is almost enough to cancel out the awfulness of point six, but not quite.

2009-05-10T14:32:00.000-07:00

Remember last Christmas when I told you about painting my room? Well, I finally got around to taking some pictures so you can see what it looks like. It's been four and half months and I'm not sick of it yet, so that's good. :) Notice the Walt Whitman quotes.

2009-05-10T14:25:00.000-07:00

This has been the work of this weekend. I have lettuce ready to harvest already and there will be basil and spinach soon.

And my back patio is looking lovely too...

2009-05-08T13:47:00.000-07:00

Walkathon is here again and the school spirit is high. Kids come to school in the craziest, most unbelievable outfits. "What are you supposed to be," I ask. "A feather." "A stick figure." "A basketball," they say. Oh. OK.

But one of my favorites this week was a team that decided to impersonate the teachers--luckily, they got our permission and let us have some choice in how we wanted to be caricatured. A very nice student named Lara played me, and as you can see, the resemblance was uncanny.

2009-05-06T20:46:00.000-07:00

After months (years?) of delay, I finally took my aunt's recommendation and read A Thousand Splended Suns by Khaled Hosseini. Anyone else read that book? Technically, I listened to it, which is always fun--I love getting to hear the actual pronunciations of things, although the downside is that you don't know how anything is spelled. I picked Suns over The Kite Runner because I had heard it was slightly more happy and I wasn't in the mood for something tragic and devastating. But I'm particularly glad I read it because I noticed some really interesting parallels with another book I read this month: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, by Anne Bronte. Aside from the obvious differences--that these two books are set in completely different cultures, completely different parts of the world, and completely different time periods--there are actually a lot of interesting comparisons. If you have an interest in reading either of these books in the future, you might want to skip this post because there will be spoilers.

In both books, the protagonist is a woman living in a culture that puts her under her husband's absolute control--for Suns, that's an extremist Muslim regime, for Tenant, it's Victorian England. The two characters, Laila and Helen, endure in their destructive, abusive marriages for a long time, attempt and fail to escape, have children, and ultimately survive their husbands and go on to build new lives. In both cases, it is clear that the restrictive laws against women play a role in corrupting the character of men by removing the natural consequences of their bad behavior. Because their wives have no legal recourse, the men in these novels feel no need to restrain their violence, emotional abuse, tyranny, and profligacy. Because the law does not recognize the women as people, their husbands feel no need to.

What I found particularly intriguing was each portrayal of the husband's influence on his son. In both stories, the husband/father takes a particular interest in his son--more interest, in fact, than he takes in his wife. But in both cases, his preferential treatment causes the child to become rebellious and disobedient (particularly to his mother). He mimics his father's disdain for her and the seeds of violence and depravity take root--even in a young boy. In Tenant, in fact, this is the thing that turns the tide in Helen's conscience and motivates her to flee with her son. She can't bear to see him being corrupted day by day by her husband's wicked example. In Suns, Laila's son finally starts to recover his sweet nature once they are out from under his father's control and Laila has married a man of integrity and kindness.

I love making unlikely comparisons like this--and truly, both books are highly worth reading, I really enjoyed them both--but it's just amazing to me that two completely different books--one written by a woman, one by a man--can portray the exact same struggle in different continents, different eras. In both cases, the culture puts the burden of restraining one's husband on the shoulders of the wife without giving her the power or influence to do it, and the result is the disintegration of the marriage, not to mention all the suffering, fear, and conflict that filled the intervening years.

So, if you've read Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, but never picked up anything by that other Bronte, let me urge you to find a copy. Or if you read Reading Lolita in Tehran and want something similar (sort of), give this a try. (As my aunt rolls her eyes and heaves a sigh...) Or you could go for the gold and read them both! And then email me and tell me if you agree with my comparison. :)

Things that make me happy

2009-04-30T10:34:00.000-07:00

My greenhouse tomatoes are four inches tall!
I figured out 2 of the 3 newest clues on Thisisnottom.com ALL BY MYSELF!
Overusing exclamation points!!!!!
AND CAPITALIZATION!!
The Prufrock allusion in the latest installment of the NotTom novel
Maureen Johnson's blog
The IT Crowd--a completely hilarious British sitcom that I could watch for hours
Particularly the character Moss on said TV show, like whom I want to go around talking
Writing incomprehensible-but-grammatically-correct sentences
Getting accepted to teach a seminar at the ACSI conference
Isometric dot paper
The Mortal Instruments series
Leggings
My new book of sci-fi short stories
The AMAZING fairytales written by my Elective English class. (I'll see if I can get their permission to post some.)
The Tenant at Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte, currently my favorite of the Brontes.
My new poster of Doctor Who in my classroom
When a student struggles with something for a few minutes and then suddenly "gets" it
When one of the staff has a birthday and people bring cupcakes
Anticipation of strawberry season in about a month
Egg salad sandwiches

2009-04-04T18:44:00.000-07:00

Have you heard of ThisIsNotTom? If not, you should definitely not let another day go by without getting in on the action. Basically, the site is a series of riddles--images, videos, poems--all interactive, and as you solve pieces of the puzzle, you are rewarded with chapters of a fascinating, sort-of futuristic novel about a woman trapped in some kind of virtual reality (or so it seems--there's only about 5 or 6 chapters out so far). The riddles are not easy--I'm gonna go ahead and tell you that I used a cheat site* for some of them. But the last series I solved entirely by myself (that is, myself and Google--you'd have to be a trivia genius to solve more than one or two sans Google). It's quite gratifying to stare and stare and stare until your eyes glaze over and then--suddenly--sit straight up and realize you know the answer. It makes you feel extremely clever.

Today I spent most of the day outdoors, as, I'm sure, did 99% of Oregon's inhabitants. I hoed up my garden and pulled some weeds, and then when I was tired, I found a patch of sun, dragged a chair over, and just sat there. I did take a few minutes to make a grocery store run, and I don't know if it was the weather or the scarcity of jobs or what, but those people at Safeway were cheerful! I don't know when I've seen an entire squadron of cashiers so helpful and friendly. I spilled my coffee all over the floor at the checkstand, and the guy cleaned it all up for me, talking and joking with me the whole time. It was almost surreal. I'm so used to bored, surly cashiers. Is the presence of sun in the Willamette Valley so affecting that it even raises the spirits the Safeway employees in their windowless domain? Or are they just so desperate to keep their jobs that their supervisors can actually enforce a positive attitude for once? I don't know, but I gotta say, I liked it.

*This forum provides clues to help you along in one thread, and straight-up answers in another thread if you're completely stuck.

2009-04-03T19:58:00.000-07:00

And a couple more TV-related items:

Anyone out there watching Dollhouse? It's getting better, I think, in the past few episodes. I completely freaked out when I watched the "Man on the Street" episode and found out Mellie was a doll. Holy Cow. And...sad. Tonight's episode is being advertised as an "event," whatever that means, and it sounds like the whole Dollhouse organization is going to come apart--which seems a little early to me. I mean, they didn't bring down SD-6 in Alias until the middle of the second season. But whatever, Joss Whedon. I leave it in your capable hands. Don't let me down. Hey, maybe it will turn into an Alias-style show, where Eliza Dushku hunts down the evil organization that manipulated her and stole her life. And you could have, like, Alpha hacking into her mind and making her do stuff that she doesn't remember. That could be cool.

And, I've been Netflixing episodes of My So-Called Life, which I never watched back in the 90's when it was actually playing and would have been relevant to my life. Now I just watch it and get completely un-nostalgic for grungy flannel shirts and life without the internet. And high school. About which it is scarily accurate.

But, in particular, I want to talk about an episode that deals with a trope that I find particularly annoying as a high school English teacher. And I feel like I'm breaking some kind of secret English teacher pact here, but I'm talking about movies like The Dead Poet's Society and Freedom Writers. TV Tropes calls it the Save Our Students trope. Here's how it goes: apathetic, trouble-making kids sleep-walk their way through school until the arrival of Non-Conformist Teacher, who really "gets" the kids and inspires them by being tough or sensitive or edgy or hyper. And then the kids, who were really just good kids all along, waiting for the chance to open up and discover their inner genius, start liking school and wanting to learn and reading actual books without anyone telling them to. Wonderful! All this unusual motivation makes the Evil Administrator perk up his ears and wander over to see what the commotion is. He finds something naughty about Non-Conformist Teacher's methods and fires said NCT. Newly-earnest teenagers rebel, stage some public demonstration of angst, but to no avail. NCT trudges off into the sunset; students learn an important lesson. The end.

I'm sure you can think of some other examples of this. Danny Darko, for one. Dangerous Minds. The art teacher in Speak.

Anyway, My So-Called Life plays with this scenario a bit. The NCT is a substitute who gets the kids to rewrite their poetry submissions for the school's literary magazine. Unlike the previous Boring English Teacher who cared only about grammar and punctuation, "Vic" (of course, you always call the NCT by his/her first name--surnames are evidence of antiquated authority structures) gets them to write the truth about their feelings (I'm sorry, but the NCT always speaks in italics) and thus produces a much higher quality of writing than can ever be achieved by attention to stylistics. But then the principal reads one student's racy sex poem and the jig is up.

However. This particular show was unique in that Vic didn't end up being quite such a hero after all: turned out he had ditched his family and was currently ducking child-care payments. So our heroine gets simultaneously inspired and disillusioned. Slightly closer to real life.

Anyway, the reason this trope annoys me so much that I'm willing to write an entire blog post ranting about it, is that it hits close to home. Of course I want to be that amazing inspiring rule-flouting teacher of awesome. I feel like I'm constantly trying to live up to that ideal of What A Teacher Should Be. But the reality is, that teacher is like Mary Poppins--she can only exist temporarily, and her effectiveness relies upon the repressiveness of the former regime. If the Non-Conformist Teacher ever got to stick around for long enough, the excitement of their new approach would wear off and they would become the new boring.

(The Onion does an awesome job of nailing that idea in this article, "Naive Teacher Believes in Her Students.")

It's sort of like my eighth-grade class. See, I have the extreme good fortune of inheriting the eighth-graders every year from a very strict, rule-enforcing, traditional teacher. They come to me expecting that they will have to sit quietly in their seats, do their worksheets, and raise their hands to ask a question. Which allows me to have discussions, active games, and participatory lectures because all that stuff seems like fun to them in contrast to what they've been taught to expect. But if their seventh-grade teacher was another version of me, they'd have a been-there, done-that attitude about it all, and it would be much harder to maintain order or get them interested in learning. As it is, the classroom discipline starts to slip around this time of year and I have to tighten things up and crack the whip a bit. (That was a metaphor, in case you wondered.)

Anyway, all that to say, the myth of the NCT really undermines the work that real-life teachers do, because it rests on the completely unrealistic--and, frankly, childish--belief that kids' greatest problem is being misunderstood, instead of the more complex reality that students are sometimes lazy, sometimes selfish, sometimes smart, sometimes not, sometimes eager, sometimes sullen, sometimes hurting people, who are ultimately responsible for their own choices, just like the rest of us. And real teachers just do the best we can with what we know how to do, for better or worse: conform when we have to, sacrifice what we must, be tough, inspire as much as possible, and try not to get fired. Because the truth is, being there is the only way to make a real difference.

Now, having said all that, I still can't help but get a little--dare I say?--inspired by this video, What Teachers Make.

2009-04-03T08:00:00.000-07:00

So, Battlestar Galactica...

(You were wondering when I was going to get around to this, weren't you.)

What did you think of the finale? I have to say, it ended a whole frakkin' lot happier than I thought it would. Seriously. I was preparing myself to have everyone be dead at the end. Or to have them all just be traveling out in the universe forever. Or for it to just end in the middle of a battle scene with no resolution whatsoever. I basically thought, anything is possible with this show.

But I was glad that they went with a more conventional (relatively speaking) ending. It made me happy to see them finally reach Earth and have there be sunshine and a well-lit set for once.

Getting specific:

1) Loved--loved!--that Roslin made it all the way to Earth and was happy before she died. Aw. And Adama putting the ring on her finger? *sniff, sniff*

2) Not really sure how to feel about Starbuck being--what--like, an angel? So, does that mean she wasn't the real Starbuck after she flew into the black hole? I don't really like to think that. Maybe she was like, ghosty Starbuck, visiting from heaven or whatever--completing her mission, like Patrick Swayze. :)

3) I get why they did all the flashbacks at the end, but I didn't really like them. Except for Boomer's. I like that she finally fulfilled her promise to the Admiral after all that time. Except, of course, it would have been better if she hadn't kidnapped Hera in the first place.

4) And while I hate Tory with a fiery passion, I'm not cool with the Chief up and killing her there in front of everyone while they just look on in approval. That is actually called murder, and no, it's not ok just because you're getting revenge for a previous murder. I mean, I guess he does sort of self-exile after that, but still.

5) Baltar, Baltar, Baltar. Despite being an annoying, whiny, self-absorbed, pretentious, cowardly, hypocritical poopie-head for four seasons, you still get to walk off into the sunset with the hottest woman in the human race. I don't see how, if God exists (though he doesn't like to be called that), he can allow things like this to happen.

6) I read that some people are interpreting the finale as an endorsement of mysticism and spiritualism over rationalism and science, and I can see that, certainly. They jettison all their technology into the sun and go back to being cavemen in an attempt to "let their souls catch up with their minds" or whatever. But, I think the last scene (with Head Six and Head Baltar) indicates that that never really happens. Whatever it is about humanity that causes "all this" that happened before to happen again, it would seem that the technology isn't the cause, it's the symptom. Going native just postponed it a couple hundred thousand years. In any case, this seems to be the central question that the finale poses. What do you think?

2009-04-02T08:00:00.000-07:00

Ok, bravo everyone on the movie quiz. You got them all but six. Here are the answers to the last few:

1. When you're alone, you can make any choice you want. But when someone loves you, you lose that right. I won't give anything away 'til we have it all. I can't. Iron-Jawed Angels! Seriously, people, you need to see this movie! It's so wonderfully beautiful. It's beautifully wonderful. Go Netflix it right now.

6. There is nothing more mean and ugly in this world than to have a loving gift, a beautiful spirit, and a desire to give and share these things when there is no one to share them with. Rigoletto. Remember this movie? The fairytale about the prince who's cursed with an ugly face and he comes to a small town during the Depression and teaches a girl to sing? Don't tell me you didn't love this movie when you were 12. I know you did.

7. Too many guys think I'm a concept, or I complete them, or I'm gonna make them alive. But I'm just a f***ed-up girl who's lookin' for my own peace of mind; don't assign me yours. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. That may have not been the best quote to represent this movie. But I do love that line--it upsets the whole Manic-Pixie Dream Girl thing, which is part of what that movie is all about.

12. Don't say a word. Let me talk. You missed me? Because I missed you. You're a real tyrant. It's so hard to be mad at you. But don't kid yourself, I still am. I want to talk and forget the game, just for once. Like my dress? I hesitated. Nabbed it off my sister. She has another red one, like a thermonuclear bombshell... That's the one I should've worn. I must've spent... three hours in front of the mirror. But I got there, see? I'm pretty. You better like it, or I'll kill you! Love Me If You Dare. I love this movie, and I have blogged about it, but it's pretty obscure. It would have been awesome if someone had gotten it, though. They would be my soul mate, for sure.

18. 1) Honor is a private matter within; it's an idea, and every man has his own version of it.2) How gracefully you tell your king to mind his own business. Becket. About the Archbishop of Canterbury who's murdered because he opposes the king over the political power of the Catholic church. Ok, granted, also obscure. But definitely worth watching.

25. I'd like to get in, get on with it, get it over with, and get out. Get it? The Court Jester. Siblings, I'm disappointed that you did not guess this one. After the hours upon countless hours that we watched and rewatched this movie together...sad.

That was fun. Thanks for playing, everyone.

2009-04-01T08:00:00.000-07:00

I recently got a new book off Paperback Swap: The Boyfriend List by E. Lockhart. Remember back when I mentioned The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks? Or, if you know me in real life, I might have raved about it to you? Well, this one is by the same person. It's pretty good, although I liked The Disreputable History better. Basically, The Boyfriend List is about a sophomore girl who's having panic attacks, so she goes to see a therapist and talk about her problems, which mostly revolve around boys. I'm still trying to decide whether I can put it on my shelves at school, despite the not-quite-East-Linn-standard of boy-girl activity. Hmm.

Anyway, I share this with you because there were two bits in particular that struck me as being particularly insightful--this first one mostly because I had a conversation over spring break about this very thing. Read on:

"At first, I wasn't going to tell my parents. I tend to keep them happy, get
good grades, come home by curfew and not angst publicly about my
problems--because as soon as I tell them one tiny thing about what's going on,
they act like it's an earthquake. They can't bear when I'm unhappy. They try and
fix it; they'd fix the whole world if they could, just to make me feel
better--even when it's none of their business. It's one of the many hazards of
being an only child."

Isn't this just the perfect description of this decade's parents? I was talking to one of my Nampa friends, who is a professor, about this very thing. He claims that because so many of this current generation of teens and college students are the only child of their household, their parents have a greater investment in their success, which accounts for the helicopter parent syndrome in schools. I think there's probably more to it than that--a greater sense of entitlement, for example, and cell phones, and less faith in institutions, and so on--but it's funny that this YA book that I just happened to read reinforced his argument only a few days later.

And here's the second quote:

"Katarina and Ariel and Heidi were always talking about their phone
conversations with boys. Already, in sixth grade, I'd think, How do they get
started with these things? Do boys just call them up for no reason? Or do they
make an excuse, like Oh I forgot the math homework? Or did the girls call the
boys? I just can't picture any of the eleven-year-old boys we knew making phone
calls on a regular basis."

Oh my gosh, I totally remember thinking this in junior high--and even well into high school. Girls in my class would be like, "Oh, so-and-so said this on the phone last night," and I'd be all, How does that happen? What do you even say to a boy on the phone? What do you talk about? It was all very confusing and fuzzy to me. And then if a boy did call, it was this big deal, like, does that mean he likes me? Do I have to get permission from my parents to be talking to him? What do I say to him when I see him tomorrow? Yeah... I was a little obsessive... Possibly that's why I didn't get any calls from boys...

2009-03-31T18:22:00.000-07:00

I just went to the insurance office and set up insurance on my new car. I talked about deductibles and liability and collision and everything! I'm, like, an actual adult.

2009-03-24T13:01:00.000-07:00

I hereby declare that, weather notwithstanding, spring is officially here. Why? Well, here are the reasons.

#1 I am on Spring Break and in Nampa. I've been helping my friend Tammy paint her living room--not exactly the most obvious thing to do on spring break, but as you may know, painting is my calling. And it is a fun thing to do with a friend. Usually when I'm in Nampa I spend time with my friends at restaurants and coffee shops. So it's kind of nice to be burning calories instead of consuming them and saving someone money and time instead of spending it. It's a recession-friendly vacation, is what.

#2 My seeds arrived last week, on the very day that I had planned to go plant the seeds I already had. Super timing. So I bundled up, went out to my dad's greenhouse, and planted about 12 flats of veggies and flowers, in preparation for my future garden. Although it felt like I was spending a fortune on seeds, doing it this way means I won't be paying for the four-inch pots of tomatoes, peppers, basil, cucumbers, and zucchini that I usually buy at Walmart or wherever--which are MUCH more expensive than even heirloom seeds. And what is even more economical, there will be some seeds left over for next year and hopefully I'll be able to harvest and save some of my seeds this year after I've harvested the plants.

I love planting things. Even though my fingers were frozen and I got some bark slivers, I cranked up my iPod and had a blast poking my little seeds under the soil and imagining their little green shoots coming up.

#3 I have a fun green cardigan that my sis got me from H&M--very springy. A lady at a boutique I visited today said it was a very "in" color. Unfortunately I couldn't take credit since I didn't pick it out, but it made me feel good anyway.

#4 I have a new car! How does this relate to spring? Umm, not really sure, but I had to mention it. Dad found me a great car for much less than I had expected to spend, so hooray! I haven't made its acquaintance yet, but as soon as I get back from Nampa, I'll give a full description.

Yippee for spring!

2009-03-15T12:36:00.000-07:00

This is Lazy Blogger Day. I'm stealing a meme off facebook (Lynette's page, actually). I think it could be fun, though--all interactive and stuff. Here's the gist:

A. Pick 25 of your favorite movies.
B. Go to IMDB and find a quote from each movie.
C. Post them for everyone to guess.
D. Strike it out when someone guesses correctly, and put who guessed it and the movie.
E. NO Googling/using IMDb search functions. That's cheating, and it ruins the fun.
F. Don't answer all of them, give some people a chance

So, here we go. Some of these are pretty easy, some are a bit difficult, and a few are expert level only. Good luck!

1. When you're alone, you can make any choice you want. But when someone loves you, you lose that right. I won't give anything away 'til we have it all. I can't.

2. ~~The fool looks at a finger that points at the sky.~~ Amelie Guessed by Kandice.

3. ~~Sometimes the world tries to knock it out of you. But I believe in music the way some people believe in fairy tales.~~ August Rush Guessed by Logan.

4. ~~If love was a choice, who would ever choose such exquisite pain?~~ Anna and the King Guessed by Friend of Rumbles.

5. ~~With this hand I will lift your sorrows. Your cup will never be empty, for I will be your wine. With this candle, I will light your way into darkness. With this ring, I ask you to be mine.~~ The Corpse Bride Guessed by Rumbles.

6. There is nothing more mean and ugly in this world than to have a loving gift, a beautiful spirit, and a desire to give and share these things when there is no one to share them with.

7. Too many guys think I'm a concept, or I complete them, or I'm gonna make them alive. But I'm just a f***ed-up girl who's lookin' for my own peace of mind; don't assign me yours.

8. ~~This is one time where television really fails to capture the true excitement of a large squirrel predicting the weather.~~ Groundhog Day Guessed by Jen.

9. ~~Sometimes we don't do things we want to do so that others won't know we want to do them.~~ The Village Guessed by Logan.

10. ~~Manure just happens to be my specialty.~~ Wild Hearts Can't Be Broken Guessed by Friend of Rumbles.

11. ~~And God said, "Where the Hell is Tim?" And there the Hell was Tim. And God said, "Let there be doors that open when they open, and close when they close."~~ Noises Off Guessed by Lynette.

12. Don't say a word. Let me talk. You missed me? Because I missed you. You're a real tyrant. It's so hard to be mad at you. But don't kid yourself, I still am. I want to talk and forget the game, just for once. Like my dress? I hesitated. Nabbed it off my sister. She has another red one, like a thermonuclear bombshell... That's the one I should've worn. I must've spent... three hours in front of the mirror. But I got there, see? I'm pretty. You better like it, or I'll kill you!

13. ~~What? I'm being her mother! That's what mothers do with daughters; they talk about how to look prettier.~~ Penelope Guessed by Friend of Rumbles.

14. ~~I believe I've seen hell and it's white, it's snow white.~~ North and South Guessed by Rumbles.

15. ~~There is only one page left to write on. I will fill it with words of only one syllable. I love. I have loved. I will love.~~ I Capture the Castle Guessed by Kandice.

16. ~~I would die to free our people from the chains of bigotry and superstition.~~ Lady Jane Guessed by Tammy.

17. ~~I carried a watermelon.~~ Dirty Dancing Guessed by Friend of Rumbles.

18. 1) Honor is a private matter within; it's an idea, and every man has his own version of it.
2) How gracefully you tell your king to mind his own business.

19. ~~One thing's for sure, if we don't sell papes, then nobody sells papes.~~ Newsies Guessed by Lynette.

20. ~~You mean you were diagnosed with something called a brain cloud and didn't ask for a second opinion?~~ Joe Versus the Volcano Guessed by Amanda.

21. ~~Ah... well, you know, you go out there and you give a 110%, and you wanna play good, and, you know, you hope you play good... I think we played pretty good tonight!~~ Bedazzled Guessed by Lynette.

22. ~~People don't like to be meddled with. We tell them what to do, what to think, don't run, don't walk. We're in their homes and in their heads and we haven't the right. We're meddlesome.~~ Serenity Guessed by Rumbles (I knew that's what you meant.)

23. ~~I owe you nothing. And you are nothing to me. Thank you for curing me of my ridiculous obsession with love.~~ Moulin Rouge Guessed by Kelly.

24. ~~Sink me, your highness, it was this damned cravat. Simply refused to tie. I ask you. Sticking out like a pincushion.~~ The Scarlet Pimpernel Guessed by Lynette.

25. I'd like to get in, get on with it, get it over with, and get out. Get it?

So, that's it. My favorite movies, in a nutshell. (Although, granted, there were a few I skipped because I didn't want to have the exact same list as Lynette. Anne of Green Gables, for example, anything by Jane Austen. :) Good luck!

2009-03-01T13:20:00.001-08:00

Happy February Is Over Day, everyone! In celebration, perhaps you want to redecorate your computer desktop with a nice spring-like literary background. May I recommend something Jane Austen-related?

A March Jane Austen wallpaper from AustenBlog.

Also in celebration of the coming spring, I ordered seeds for my garden yesterday. I won't tell you how many items I had in my shopping cart when I finally hit the "check out" button, but I will say that if anyone needs ANY vegetables this summer, you know who to ask. (Excuse me, whom to ask.) Has anyone ever grown celery before? I never have, but I'm looking forward to it. And when I actually buy a house someday, I'm going to start an asparagus patch, but I figure there's not much of a point right now--they take several years to really get established.

I'm going to be really organized this year, I've decided. I'm going to have a little planting calendar and actually mark the rows this time so I know what's growing where. (Even though it is kinda fun to be surprised when stuff comes up.) I'm going to start seeds inside one of my dad's greenhouses so I don't have to buy those expensive four-inch pots of tomatoes or cucumbers or whatever. My garden this year is going to be awesome. Made of awesome.

Let's see... I haven't given you any MKF news in awhile. She's doing really well, although her fur still hasn't grown back noticeably. She brought in something dead and bloody the other day, so she's reasonably recovered her agility and strength. She bites more, but I think that's more due to a combination of cabin fever and spring fever than to her recovery. Once it warms up and she can spend more time outside she'll be less cranky. And in the meantime, I'm getting my cuddling needs met by Brenna's new kittens, who love nothing better than to curl up in your lap and fall asleep purring.

And finally, I must express my deep frustration with the SciFi Channel website and their devious machinations regarding the posting of Battlestar Galactica episodes online. So far in the season, they had been posting each BSG episode the morning after the Friday airdate. So if I couldn't watch it on an actual TV, I could wake up on Saturday morning, make myself a cup of coffee, and watch the episode on Hulu or Scifi.com (as several of you suggested after my Dollhouse/BSG freakout.) However. Last week, after watching Dollhouse on Friday night, I logged on the next morning to find out what happens when the new Ellen shows up on the Galactica only to find... the episode wasn't posted! Nor was it posted at 11am...or 3pm...or 8pm... or Sunday morning. So I started trolling some fan forums to find out what was going on, and I learned that--as in previous seasons--the SciFi Channel has switched midway through the season to posting the episodes a week later online, apparently in some kind of evil effort to boost sales of their iTunes episodes, which are posted the next day. How completely depraved is that? So if you miss one episode, you end up forever a week behind, because you can't watch the NEXT week if you haven't yet seen this week. Unless you cave and buy the episode on iTunes, which just reinforces their evil behavior. Seriously, someday our kids are going to be like, Mom, what was it like when entertainment media was transitioning from television broadcast to internet distribution? I'm doing an essay for school. And we'll be like, Well, honey, it was a dark time... a time of chaos and unrest. Be glad you didn't have to live through it. *sigh* So I watched the episode yesterday that I missed last week, and now I'm waffling over whether to bow to The Man and buy the next one or be strong and wait a week, even though I really really really want to know what happens.

*sniff*

Lastly...thoughts, comments about Dollhouse? It doesn't feel like Joss Whedon to me. It feels a little bit bland so far. But I'm still withholding judgment because I don't want another of Joss's shows to get canceled before it even gets a chance to get good. I wasn't sold on Buffy until Season 2, after all. You have to give that man time to get all the pieces on the board.

2009-02-25T20:20:00.000-08:00

The Poetry Slam was today. It went very well, but now I am extremely tired. Extremely tired. Like stare-at-your-kitchen-cupboard-for-45-seconds-trying-to-remember-what-dish-you-wanted tired. Wow, throwing events is hard. So I'm going to talk about that later, and instead leave you with some fun links to explore.

First, some making-fun-of-Twilight links. Cause that never gets old.

Two recaps of Twilight by way of Microsoft Paint.

A comic that proves, once and for all, HP is better than Twilight. (In case you have any doubt).

Second, two more Brotherhood 2.0 vids. Wow, I love those guys. (And if I weren't so tired, I would find another way to say "wow," since I already used it once in this post, but...yeah...)

The one where they answer the question "How do I get boys to like me?" posed by a 15-year-old. An age-old question.

The one where they prove that Shakespearean insults kick some modern insult booty (and also show that someone else besides me in the world gets excited about cataloging their library).

2009-02-23T20:33:00.000-08:00

So that last post was my 600th blog post--how about that? Also, two weeks ago was my five-year anniversary. (I'm all about the anti-climax.) It's pretty cool to think about how many words I've written on this blog in the past five years. And how much of my life it has chronicled. And, God willing that the Internet doesn't spontaneously combust or start being controlled by corporations or censored by the government or costing actual money, it's pretty cool to think about how much of my future will someday be described in full detail on that Archives sidebar. Neato.

I'm recovered from my illness, thank goodness. Now I just have all that catching up to do. I was pretty much better by Friday, but I still didn't do much over the weekend, just in case. I did go with my siblings to the pet shelter to pick out a new cat on Saturday. There was a really cute tan one called "Buffy" that I just loved--I wanted to take it home myself and give Miss Kitty Fantastico a new friend, but alas. Actually, we didn't find any cats there that were a good fit, and plus, the adoption rate is pretty steep when all you're looking for is a pair of claws to keep the barn free from mice. Instead, we looked in the Tell-n-Sell and found someone who was giving away kittens--fixed, inoculated, and all--and it was such a good deal we got two.

So those are Brenna's new pets, and my parents are fighting the doomed battle of prohibiting them from being indoor cats. They're sort of half-grown kittens, as you can see, and very sweet.

2009-02-19T11:43:00.000-08:00

I'm feeling a bit fuzzy to be writing a blog post, but here goes anyway. This is the first full sick-day I've taken in like two years (I think, unless I'm repressing some memories...) and I'm hoping it will be enough rest and recuperation that I won't need to take another one for awhile. In the meantime, I'm watching Heroes on Netflix, catching up on some grading, reading library books, and taking frequent and lengthy naps. In fact, last weekend, I basically slept 12 out of every 24 hours for all three days. But, as I was discussing with a friend, the kind of sick where you feel exhausted and weak for no reason is better than the kind of sick where you're exhausted, weak, and puking. Am I right?

2009-02-13T18:11:00.000-08:00

Oh no, oh no! I don't know what to do!

Watch the long-awaited premiere of Joss Whedon's Dollhouse on Fox or the next installment of the final run of Battlestar Galactica on the SciFi Channel???

What kind of evil corporate executive allowed these shows to broadcast on the same night at the same time? I think my head might explode!

2009-02-09T21:34:00.000-08:00

Ok, I have another Brotherhood 2.0 video for you all to watch. It's called Super Bowl Analysis from an Idiot and it makes me laugh much. Particularly the Edward Cullen discussion. And, yes, apparently it is possible to discuss the Superbowl and Edward Cullen in the same video.

2009-02-08T18:29:00.000-08:00

So, I was at the Corvallis Book Bin yesterday, trying to sell some books. (I ended up buying far more than I sold--a common, if ironic, occurrence.) I had noticed when I came in with my armfuls of resale fodder that there was a table set up for an author to sign books. I glanced at the book, but it was something political so I wasn't really interested.

Later, at the checkout counter, the guy who had been sitting behind the table at the entrance came up to me and started talking to me about his book. Interestingly, his conversation was not at all about the merits--or even the content--of his book, but entirely about the fabulous bargain of buying it for half off and getting him to sign it. An author-signed book for $12! he kept saying. What a deal! I was trying to decide how to point out that it wasn't really a deal if one didn't want to buy the book in the first place, when I was distracted by the fact that his words weren't coming out real clearly and he was unusually desperate-sounding for a published author. Hmm...
I quickly ran through the possibilities: drunk? high? inherently inarticulate? extremely sleep-deprived? so dazzled by my beauty (ahem, unshowered that particular morning) as to be rendered incoherent? In the meantime, he was explaining how his book was a study of "focus groups" and their perspectives on America... or something like that. I decided not to ask what the heck were focus groups.

When he finally wandered off, I raised my eyebrows at the girl behind the cash register and she rolled her eyes. "We're getting ready to kick him out," she told me in a low voice. "He's getting drunk and is making himself a nuisance. We're going to call the manager."

I considered asking where in the 'verse this guy was getting alcohol in the middle of a used bookstore but just settled for "Good plan."

"Yeah. It's getting worse..."

And I left by the other door, musing at the tragic loss of my illusions that published authors were brilliant, articulate people. This afternoon, I looked his book up on Amazon. The blurb gives me no helpful information about what the heck focus groups are or why I should care about their unique view of America. Anyone interested in helping me out on this one?

In other news, I've been randomly looking at YouTube vlogs, such as the vlog brothers, and it makes me tempted to start a vlog myself. But then I realize that I'm much, much more eloquent in text than in person, and I had better just stick to my regular blog and leave the live-action humiliation to the experts.

However, I was inspired by the Google web meme from Hank Green's video, so I decided to try it out for myself. Basically, all you do is take your name with a verb and Google it and see what you come up with. Here are the verbs: needs, looks like, says, wants, does, hates, asks, likes, eats, wears, was arrested for, loves. Enjoy.

"And mustard is all Devon needs." Yes. That really was the first one that came up. Promise.

"devon looks like his old man" Yet another tragic consequence of having a gender-neutral name.

"Devon Says No to Regional Government Petition" Darn right. And She Means It!

"Devon wants to protect our water?" Or does she? Maybe? She is not sure?

"Devon Does Baja" Sadly, this is from a p*rn site. I've learned from previous Google excursions that I share a name with a rather popular (ahem) film star.

"Devon Hates Haircuts" when they are accidental.

"Devon asks Lily what is wrong" and Lily says that an evil, power-hungry maniac is coming to kill her baby boy because James was so stupid as to make the most untrustworthy of his friends the Secret Keeper and now she's going to have to sacrifice herself in the desperate hope that it will create a mysterious yet powerful charm which will protect her child for years to come.

"Stuff Devon Likes" This is a video created by a very opinionated young lady. Watching the whole five minutes isn't necessary. You'll get the gist in about 45 seconds.

"devon eats a hot pepper. and regrets it." Glad somebody learned that lesson for me.

"Devon wears Prada" ...she wishes.

"Devon was arrested for the murder of Carmen" but she didn't do it.

"Devon loves Sensa" even though she doesn't really know what it is.

Kindred Spirits

2009-02-03T10:27:00.000-08:00

This quote by William Blake popped up on my Google homepage. I love it because it perfectly represents the schedule that allows me to use time most productively.

"Think in the morning.
Act in the noon.
Eat in the evening.
Sleep in the night."

If I could find a job that let me do brain-intensive work all morning and physical (or at least active) work all afternoon, it would be ideal. Instead I have a job that is a mix of physical and active work all morning and afternoon, which is the next best thing.

As for sleeping at night, I've been having very weird dreams lately. This week, I dreamt that one of my coworkers gave me his novel manuscript to read and the entire thing was written in verse and that Michelle Obama had superpowers. Um, I don't think the two dreams were related...

And lastly, two entertainment features:

1) I very nearly hyperventilated while watching Battlestar Galactica last weekend (my little sister can vouch for this). I kept squealing and trying to throw things at the TV. It was completely awesome, though--like one of the best episodes in... actually, not that long. There have been a lot of good episodes lately. Can I say I absolutely love Starbuck? She ties with Laura Roslin for my all-time favorite character of that show. *sigh* Sad... how many episodes left now? Like, 6?

2) Did any of you ever see that movie, Iron-Jawed Angels? I don't remember it coming out at all, but it must have been fairly recently* because it has Hilary Swank in it, and Patrick Dempsey, and Francis O'Conner and some other people. Anyway, it's all about the suffragettes and their struggle to get the nineteenth amendment passed. I absolutely loved it. It brought me to tears. It made me want to stand up and cheer. Wow, it was so good. I totally recommend it. In fact, I'll probably buy it, and then you can borrow it from me. :)

*Amazon tells me it was released on HBO. So there ya go.

2009-01-30T11:58:00.000-08:00

It's lunchtime, and someone out in the hallway is singing at the top of his lungs: "L is for the way you look at me..."

Middle-schoolers are weird.

2009-01-28T10:22:00.000-08:00

It occurred to me this morning that I haven't picked up a book in like six days. That alone should give you an indication of how busy I've been. If that doesn't do it, consider this: I've been at school past 8 p.m. twice already this week! Poor Miss Kitty Fantastico has been home alone a lot lately. Grades for the semester were due yesterday--that was part of it. And a new semester has started, which means a whole 18-weeks'-worth of planning--that was the other part. Plus a whole lot of incidentals, like a missions presentation at church, the church newsletter, activities for the National Honor Society, and so on. And let's be honest, isn't January like the hardest month to get anything done in? (Ok, well, maybe in a few days I'll say "February is the hardest month to get anything done in.")

I've been starting to think about my garden and what I want to plant this year. I definitely want to try planting heirloom varieties of vegetables (after reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle), so I requested catalogs from a couple of nurseries. There's also a nursery here in Oregon that I might order from, since they're more or less local, but they aren't printing a catalog. And I must have catalogs so I can drool over beautiful pictures of the yummy veggies I will someday have. And I plan to be all organized this year and plant things on a schedule so I don't have things coming ripe all at once. I wish I had a big pantry and extra freezer so I could preserve more homegrown food. All the horrible starvation scenes from all the futuristic novels I've ever read are coming back to haunt me every time I open a newspaper. (Breathe, breathe...) But of course, that's not all that gardening is about. It's also about the sun, and the dirt up to your elbows, and green things coming up out of the ground, and working hard. And all of that sounds just wonderful when I've not spent more than five minutes outside at a time for the last month.

In other news:

... my sister has a new blog. She's student teaching for a few weeks down in Southern California and is chronicling her adventures here.

Have you heard of this book? It's such a ridiculously awesome idea, I wish I had thought of it. I'm definitely counting down until April 15.

And, Battlestar Galactica fans, are you going crazy yet, or what? Only that show can finally, finally give you the long-awaited hook-up of two favorite characters and then make it completely devastating. Seriously.

I've been asked to speak in chapel at East Linn next week. Keep me in your prayers until then, please.

Miss Kitty Fantastico, sadly, is still wearing her big plastic collar. I've taken it off a couple of times, but she keeps breaking open her scabs, so I guess it's going to stay on awhile longer. If only you could explain to cats what was good for them.

2009-01-19T17:33:00.000-08:00

Don't you hate it when people tell you how much you can do in "just 15 minutes a day"? Like, "Learn French in just 15 minutes a day!" or "30 minutes of exercise 5 days a week is all you need to stay fit" or "plan 10/15/20 minutes of Bible study/prayer/devotions into your day" or "just practice your instrument 20 minutes a day" or "take 15 minutes a day for yourself to meditate and relax" or "read the newspaper 15 minutes each day to stay up on domestic and world affairs" or "fix yourself a nutritious meal in just 15 minutes" and so on...

Granted, all of these are great things, and 15, or even 30, minutes a day is not that much, but--and you brilliant math minds have figured this out already--add them all together and you have substantially more than 15 minutes a day. How did this slip past the editors of Cosmo??? Surely someone out there in the self-help world has realized this. Right? ...someone...?

2009-01-18T15:10:00.000-08:00

Recently finished one of my ~~torture sessions~~ cleanings of Miss Kitty Fantastico's wounds. She's slowly, slowly starting to heal. You should see her, though. Pretty much her whole back is shaved and she has this giant scar like an S, criss-crossed with stitches. At least the doctor was able to cover the whole wound over with skin, so she should grow her fur back eventually. Right now, though, she looks--as one of my students put it when I showed them a camera-phone picture--like a plucked turkey.

The first five days after I got her back from the doctor, she had these tubes under her skin to let the wound drain, and I had to clean them with hydrogen peroxide several times a day. Guess how much Miss Kitty liked that. Twice, I had to call on my sisters and mom to come over and help hold her down while I dabbed at her with a soaked cotton swab. The rest of the time, I just wrestled her around the bedroom for about a half-hour until they were all cleaned up. I swear I heard every possible angry-cat sound in existence--angry whine, growling, hissing, spitting... all of it.

I can't even tell you how pathetic it was when she first got back. She has one of those plastic Elizabethan collars that she has to wear, so she was high-stepping around and bumping into things. She couldn't jump or curl up, so she would just spend hours sitting hunched over and staring dully at the wall. I had to cover the spare bedroom with a combination of towels and newspapers, and bring her food and litterbox in so she could be self-sufficient in there while I was away at school.

She's getting better now--more active. She still can' t really jump because of the collar, but she climbs around on stuff and tries to sneak out the door when I come and go. She's really hating being pent up inside. She'll get her stitches out later this week, but I'm thinking I'll still keep her in for awhile until she can defend herself against the neighborhood dogs and whatever else creeps around here at night.

So that's the MKF update. I would post a picture of her, but I think it would just be cruel. :) I'm almost finished painting my bedroom, though, so I'll put up pictures of that when it's all done. (It's awesome.)

And the best news saved for last... my sister Geron is engaged. Ryan came down for a week after we got back from Mexico and popped the question on the beach. Aww. So the wedding will be this summer. Very exciting. I'll keep you updated...

2009-01-09T16:55:00.000-08:00

Well, my week back home has been less than idyllic. Miss Kitty Fantastico was off walkabout when I got home, as she usually is when I leave town. I had no glimpse of her until yesterday when I got home from school and saw her up in her barn perch, crying at me. I called her for awhile and tried to lure her down with food, and when she still didn't come down, I climbed up there and pulled her down myself, only to discover the hugest, most grisly wound on her back. Seriously, it was probably 8 square inches.

It had already scabbed over, which indicates that it probably happened while I was gone. (Which means she's been hungry and alone up in that barn for a couple of days at least!) I freaked out a little, then took her in to the vet. He said that it looked like she had probably climbed up under a car and gotten caught by the fanbelt. (poor little girl!) I left her there so she could get rehydrated and anesthetized that night.

She's been in surgery today and is supposed to come home tomorrow. I called this afternoon to check on her and the vet explained how he'd cleaned up the wound. "I know I quoted you $300 dollars," he said, "and I worked through lunch, so you're getting a great deal." Oooo-kay. But seriously, though, I am really happy with the vet I've been taking her to. Going to the vet's is soooo much more pleasant of an experience than going to the doctor. I mean, obviously, it's not me that's getting worked on, so that's part of it, but the doctors there are amazingly soothing and friendly. Maybe if I had claws and sharp teeth, my doctors and dentists would be a little less brusque.

And clearly, Miss Kitty Fantastico has been demanding gentle treatment. The doctor spent a fair amount of time on the phone telling me how difficult she'd been to work with. "I don't know if she's a barn kitty or whatever, but she's been giving us a some trouble. She can be pretty nasty." Ummm, sorry? I sort of figured all cats were troublesome at the vet. Granted, this isn't the first time they've mentioned it. Last time she was in, they wrote on her form, "Miss Kitty Fantastico does not find our accommodations so fantastic." So there's clearly some passive-aggressive anger there. But, seriously, cats are known for being temperamental! I explained to him that, no, she's not a barn cat, but she is very much a one-woman cat. She's sweet to me, but... she doesn't like most people. You have to be worthy.

Anyway, poor thing, she's going to have some pretty nasty scars. I'm worried that she's going to have a big scaly patch where the fur won't grow--how sad would that be? People who come over will see her and think, what an ugly cat! But I guess I'll find out tomorrow when I pick her up, assuming I don't get an desperate call from a frazzled and bescratched caretaker at three in the morning. (That sounds like a scene from a bad Disney movie.) I hope this doesn't bode ill for the behavior of my future children...

Catching up

2009-01-07T20:54:00.000-08:00

Got back from Mexico last night at midnight. I spent the day in a daze, trying to remember what exactly I do between 7:30 and 3:30 at that big building up on the hill. And I have the Mt. Fuji of grading waiting for me.

But, I did do some writing while I was stretched out in the sun, so for your reading pleasure, I offer you The Baja Journals 08-09, or The Baja-ha.

I'm going to retro-post these, so they'll appear to have been posted on the day they were written. How sneaky of me!

The Baja Journals, Part 7

2009-01-06T23:06:00.000-08:00

After a week in rural Mexico, it was a bit of a shock to come back to Loreto and see a full-on tourist town with neat rows of casitas and upscale shops and restaurants. We only caught a glimpse of the town--the "unfashionable side" as Lady Bracknell would have it--when we flew in, but we came a bit early for our plane today and drove through the town. Now, I don't particularly like tourist traps to stay at, but after a week out in the boonies, the glitter and glitz did dazzle a bit--especially after our disappointment with San Rosalio. All us girls at least were wishing we had come early in the morning and could spend a few hours shopping and poking around. But alas, our flight home beckoned us and we have spent the last few hours shuffling boarding passes, passports, and luggage, and paying absurd amounts of money for a few crumbs to eat. I used up my six-month quota of fast food by wolfing down a Whopper Jr. and fries as soon as we made it to L.A. The airplane's cheese-flavored pretzel sticks were just not sufficient.

It was the first time I've been through customs in about six years. We kept drawing raised eyebrows from the officials at the size of our family. Really? You haven't seen a family of 8 before? I wanted to ask. We're that unusual? Apparently.

So the sunlight slowly makes way for dusk and rainclouds. Our capri pants and flip-flops start to look impractical and out-of-place. We find ourselves talking of the work waiting at home for us and the week ahead. The attendant asks us to put our seats in the upright position and the landing gear begins to unfold...

The Baja Journals, Part 5

2009-01-05T22:07:00.000-08:00

I cannot believe how good the food is here. I've already mentioned the tortillas and salsa, but literally everything we've eaten has been delicious. We bought a little packet of pancake mix from the market and were delighted to discover it made amazing pancakes. Seriously, I may never be able to go back to regular pancakes. We've also been eating our fish that we caught the other day--mmmm. And fresh fruit from nearby growers. Potatoes, peas, little oatmeal cookies, limes, grapefruit (sooo sweet and juicy), even the ham-and-cheese sandwiches made for us by our tour guide were yummy. It's good that our meals are so appetizing because we've been working up huge appetites.

Yesterday, we all piled into a big 12-passenger van and drove off with Salvador, our tour guide to the nearby cave paintings. We drove on ridiculously rocky and uneven dirt roads out into the desert, through two big metal gates, to a ranch owned by a doctor who lives most of the time in San Rosalio. Salvador stopped several times during the drive to point out different desert plants and explain their medicinal (and magical) properties. We were shown a flower that will make someone love you forever, a tree whose leaves will cure cancer, cacti with antibiotic sap, plants that will help diabetes, arthritis, burns, general pain, heatstroke, and a multitude of other ills. Plus, as a bonus, a tree whose leaves and pollen are amazingly toxic and will blind, paralyze, and/or kill you if you get too close.

We hiked into the ranch a ways until we came to a narrow canyon, cut through by a quiet creek. The whole area reminded me a lot of the ranch in Wyoming that I visited two summers ago--only with a lot more cacti. But the hills were just as steep and rugged--and magnificent. We went from trudging through sand one minute to clambering over huge boulders the next. At one point, we all had to take off our tennis shoes and wade through the water to continue on our trail. On either side the towering cliffs held crevices and recesses used by Indians long ago to store food and escape from flash floods. Salvadore was really knowledgeable about all the history and told us about everything we saw, from ancient history to legends to botany and geology. Geron and I loved looking at the boulders and parts of the cliff face that had all kinds of colorful pebbles buried in the soft volcanic rock. Purple, red, turquoise, orange, green, white, and gray--they looked like a Klimt painting. From time to time, we would come across smaller crevasses feeding into the main canyon that were packed tightly with cascading vegetation, which were taking advantage of every drop of trickling water.

We never reached the actual spring, but we were very close to the water table because the stream would suddenly disappear in some places and then reappear a few hundred feet downhill. The canyon floor was covered with all kinds of plants you never saw out in the desert--wild geraniums, daisies, long grasses--and whenever there was wet sand, you would find tiny black spotted frogs about the size of your thumbnail.

After awhile we reached the first set of cliff paintings, which, Salvador told us, ranged from 1500 to 3000 B.C. They were drawn in shades of vermilion, white, and black, some bright and clear, others faded. Salvador told us that the medicine man of the tribe would be the one to draw the paintings, representing the hunt, the hunters driving the deer over cliffs, bringing back their catch, offering it up to the medicine man himself, who would distribute it to the rest of the tribe. Some of the drawings, Salvador said, were of prehistoric animals now extinct, and that was probably the eeriest thing--that, and the rows of tiny white children's handprints, each finger and thumb so distinct, so familiar.

We weren't allowed to get too close to the paintings, much less touch them, but we sat there as Salvador unpacked our lunches, and ate oranges, boiled eggs, sandwiches, and Sprite in that place, as sacred in its way as all the great temple ruins of Europe and Asia, and far older.

After lunch, we continued our hike up the canyon, as it got narrower and narrower and more bouldery, until finally the creek filled the passageway entirely, and Salvador told us if we wanted to go any farther, we would have to swim. We were hot and sweaty enough at that point (though it was only 80 degrees in the sun--at most) that we were sorely tempted, but the prospect of hiking back, then driving back, in wet clothes didn't appeal. So we just looked longingly up, where the stream angled away from us, and turned back.

I mentioned to Salvadore that I had a sore ankle when he asked why I didn't climb up on the higher rocks like the rest of the kids, and after that he was very solicitous of me--helping me carefully over any big rock, warning me when the stones might shift, making sure I used my hands to climb between boulders. He also insisted that he knew how I could make it better that night. "Remember me," he kept saying, "when we get back," and he would give me pills, creams, bandages that would make it all better. I tried to explain that it really wasn't that bad, but finally I just had to let it go and hope that it really would slip his mind when we made it back to town. (It did.)

The drive back was less pleasant than the way over, our eagerness and excitement had worn off along with the cool of the morning. But even the ferocious jarring of the van over rocks and washed-out gullies became monotonous and undulating and we all basically zoned out, although we did catch sight of some road-runners on the way. And, I'm sorry, my friends, but Warner Bros. has lied to you--they are not the same size as a coyote.

I would have written about all these last night, but after dinner--right about prime journaling time--the power suddenly went out and we were all left scurrying about lighting tea candles that are scattered throughout the house. I used up about half of one finishing my book, but there definitely wasn't enough to write by. It stayed off long enough for us all to wonder what the next two days would be like without hot showers, and then long about bedtime, the lights flickered back on again.

We've been going to bed pretty early since there's not much to do around here after dark. No night-life to speak of, that's for sure. So even though we've been working ourselves to exhaustion every day, we've been sleeping 9-11 hours every night, so we at least start out each morning fresh.

...continued....

The Baja Journals, Part 6

2009-01-05T15:38:00.000-08:00

(Evening)

Today we had our last chance to snorkle. As we were getting ready to leave, one of the cars of the food vendors came. They've figured out that a very large family lives here and that we will buy basically anything they bring. So far, we've bought empanadas, banana bread, and tamales, and today a little girl climbed out of the car bearing a a large box of warm, homemade doughnuts. She was around 10, with a long braid down her back, and the first thing she did when she reached me (me at the pajamas-and-journal-and-coffee stage of the morning) was to set her box on my table and lean over to give me a hug. Surprised, I breathed in the scent of her clean hair as she whispered in my ear, "Feliz Ano." Then she proudly unveiled her sugary mound of doughnuts.

I conferred with the hive and, after stumbling around in my Spanish a bit, bought 8 doughnuts and placed an order for more fruit empanadas for tomorrow morning. (The first batch from the other day were sooo good--like scones with pineapple filling.) The little girl skipped off, clearly very pleased. We forgot to ask her name--maybe tomorrow.

So after we had all eaten our very heavy, very sugary doughnuts, we loaded up our snorkel gear--depite the threatening clouds and occasional drops of rain from the sky--and drove out to El Burro beach for one last snorkel.

The two other beaches we snorkeled at were very rocky. El Burro had a long shallow sandy incline, which made it much easier to get in and out of the water, except for one thing... stingrays. Everybody we talk to about snorkeling around here mentions the stingrays. "Be careful of the sandy places," they all say, "there's a lot of them." Apparently, you're supposed to do the "Stingray Shuffle" in the water because what stingrays really don't like is being stepped on. Combine that with Logan's retelling of the tragic and sudden demise of the Crocodile Hunter (look it up some time) and that long stretch of pale blue water didn't look quite as inviting. But, we pulled on our wetsuits and stingray shuffled our way out into deep water with fear and trembling. Our only companions on the beach were the flocks of pelicans, which would swoop together low over the water and, like a team of synchronized swimmers, dive into a school of fish and pop up moments later, their long beaks pointing and bobbing upwards as they worried the fish down their throats.

Once we had kicked our way out into deeper water, we discovered another difference of this location--there were giant clouds of seaweed in clumps around the rocky point. The cliffs, too, were more cavernous and cratered than the others. Who knew what might be hiding in those weeds or underwater caves? But we gathered our courage and explored. I may have caught sight of an octupus buried in one of the chinks of rock. (Or, possibly, just some maroon coral, who knows?) And when we were tired, we made it back over the treacherous sand without incident.

Our afternoon activity was a drive up to San Rosalio, which we had heard was a "quaint little town" that other people from this area had enjoyed exploring. I should explain first that Mulege is a tiny little village--I don't know, maybe 3000 people, probably a third of which are retired white people. The downtown area is about ten blocks long and three blocks wide, and everybody waves and says, "Buenos dias," when they pass by. There's no big tourist traps, just a few little shops downtown with pottery and blankets and such. The restaurants are delicious, the water is clean, there's no garbage in the streets, and we all feel pretty safe everywhere we've gone. The owner of the house we're staying at lives a few doors down and he leaves his house and all unlocked and tells all his guests to let themselves in any time to borrow scuba gear, fishing equipment, the internet, or whatever.

According to one of the retirees we talked to the other day (he was out walking his dog and we were in our usual morning configuration--on the front patio with a coffee), the Mexican and American community are on really good terms--they help each other out. The people here don't put up with crime or partying--to be honest, it seems very idyllic. Imagine our surprise, then, when the "quaint little town" turned out to be bustling, dirty, industrial, and comparatively dangerous-looking. Maybe if we had encountered it at the beginning of our trip, we might have girded up our loins and dived in for an adventure, but as it was, we high-tailed it back to our beloved Mulege and went out for (virgin) margaritas at the same restaurant we ate at on the night of our arrival.

It's hard to imagine living here year-round, like so many poeple we've met do. There's too much I would miss--Italian food, Starbucks, and bookstores come to mind for a start. And I would be a little freaked out to live somewhere without close, reliable medical care and where the police and military were not necessarily trustworthy. But I could get used to this kind of life--quiet, slow-paced, by the sea. Maybe if I become a writer some day I can come live down here for a few months, see the whales and dolphins that we haven't seen yet, become a snorkeling pro, learn to speak Spanish fluently. I could definitely get used to that.

The Baja Journals, Part 4

2009-01-03T21:56:00.000-08:00

(morning)

I am wishing I had spent a little time reviewing my Spanish before coming here. It's so fun to be able to talk to people in Spanish, and I've studied the language more than anyone else in my family except maybe Geron, but my vocabulario es no bueno anymore. The best is when vendors come by the house to sell banana bread or tamales or fish and we get to figure out how many and how much and what kind and when it will be delivered.

We sit for hours at a time out on our little front patio so I guess we're an easy target.

(later)

Today I feel like we're all a British family having a day at the sea. All we need are huge striped umbrellas and we'd be all set. After driving through a maze of dirt roads in the desert (through which I'm doubtful we will ever find our way back again), we arrived at Playa Punta Prieta, a round, rocky little cove that has been recommended to us for more snorkling. It was completely empty--just a few pelicans and the blue, blue water. And the bare hills rising up all around.

We spread out our blankets and towels and sunblock and flippers and wetsuits and flip flops and totebags and goggles. There isn't much sandy area to spread out in--just barnacle-covered rocks, some kind of lava rock probably.

"Well, that was fun, fun, fun," says Brenna, climbing out of the water as the sun sinks lower and the constant rhythm of the waves splashes behind her. She's zipped up in a short-sleeved blue wetsuit, which makes her, like, the cutest thing currently in the country of Mexico. Logan claims to have seen an octupus underwater. The rest of us just (just!) saw lots of urchins, schools of fish, different kinds of seaweed, anemones, etcetera. Dad saw a sting ray, which falls under the category of thrillingly scary.

I caught the trick of swimming with flippers, which seems to be a kind of pedal kick (at least that's what worked best for me.) My ankles aren't really strong enough to get much momentum from the strict up-and-down kick. Whatever you do, though, it wears you out fast. I got a killer side-ache today and had to just stretch out motionless in the water and breathe, breathe, through the snorkel.

And speaking of ankles, I wrenched mine today while clambering down the trail to the playa. Ever since the days of high school basketball, my ankles twist and sprain ridiculously easily. Luckily, it's still walkable (and swimmable)--especially lucky because we're going hiking tomorrow. It's pretty painful, though, if I don't go slow or if the ground is uneven. Hopefully it'll be better after a night's rest.

The Baja Journals, Part 3

2009-01-02T21:25:00.000-08:00

The day started at 5:45 when my iPod alarm went off. We spent last night scrounging the entires house for something with an alarm on it. Cell phones didn't have service and the laptop didn't have a loud enough beep. All of us were wakeful all night, afraid we would sleep through our time. I got up, made coffee, and dressed in a creative combination of summer clothes, meant to keep me warm. We drove out to the dock where Mateo was waiting for us with his boat all hooked up. I stood out on the dock waiting for him to start it up and -- had a sudden unwelcome visitor. What the heck?! I seriously hate being a girl sometimes. Too panicked to be embarrassed, I told Dad, sped all the way back home, rummaged loudly through the other girls' luggage, found what I needed, roared back, and we were on our way.

The whole fishing trip was fun, but I think my favorite part was skimming and bouncing along in the boat, as the sun started to rise and a cool-but-not-cold breeze whisked our faces. The cliffs rose up with a blue glow and birds circled overhead.

We stopped by the nearest point to catch bait fish with a row of hooks and colorful ties. With enough luck, you could reel up three or four flashing, silver, surprised-looking fish all on one line. Our guide was a fifty-year-old Mexican guy who chain-smoked as he baited our hooks and joked jovially in a mixture of English and Spanish. After about 45 minutes we caught a glimpse of a seal and that was the end of the bites.

Mateo guided the boat wayyyy out along the coastline of the Sea of Cortez, where it juts out in a series of little rocky peninsulas and cliff faces. We trolled back and forth for barracuda, which turned out to be long, slender, dark gray fish with jagged teeth. Mateo told us about each kind of fish as we caught them, pointed out an osprey nest, identified the dark shape glimpsed underwater as a hammerhead shark, gave us tips on reeling in our catches, and told us all about the other fishing boats out in the water, all without seeming--to me, at least--overly talkative. We saw one big shrimp ship, its trawler arms jutting out menacingly on all sides, surrounded by a thick swirling cloud of birds.

"I think it's raining over there," said Mateo with a smirk. Turns out the guys who work on that boat wear specially-made coats that soon turn, according to Mateo, "completely white."

Later, when we motored out to the open water to fish the bottom, we drew our own crowd of aggressive little seagulls and stern, watchful pelicans, which--mercifully--stayed in the water rather than in the air. When we felt our lines tug and started reeling in, the pelicans would perk up and start inching closer. "Vamanos!" Mateo would yell and wave them away.

In the end, we caught over 20 red snapper, whitefish, bass, and a few others that I can't identify. Mateo cleaned them all for us and we had fish and potatoes--along with the obligatory guacamole, chips, and salsa--for dinner tonight.

Now, I definitely could have gone down for a nap when we got back, but the other girls were itching to go snorkling, and since today might be the warmest we're likely to get--AND since I've never gone before--I pulled on my swimsuit and joined everyone out by the lighthouse. I was afraid the scuba gear would make me all panicky--after all, I can hardly wait two strokes to breathe when I do the front crawl at the pool--but once I stopped gasping over the cold water plunge and got most of the bitter salt taste out of my mouth, it was ok. I toddled around in the shallows awhile looking at sand and barnacles and then got brave and swam out to where the big waves were crashing on the rocks. And that's where the carnival was. The best I can think to describe it is that the thick clusters of rocks on the sea floor opened up to great underwater cauldrons--what would be big room-sized tidal pools if the tide ever sank that low. The water was green and murky; the waves rocked you back and forth, though not as much as you would expect from a surface view. There was a constant clicking, staticky noise--a bit unsettling, as if a hundred sets of dentures were clattering invisibly around you, but probably it was nothing more than the sandy detritus being tossed around by the waves.

Seeing underwater footage or swimming in a pool or lake doesn't prepare you for snorkling in the ocean. The aloneness, the unrealness, the roar of your own breathing above any other sound. And then, with gasping suddenness, the startling intrusion into your vision of something delicate and bright, recognizable yet gorgeously unlike any picture or video you've ever seen, out-of-place in the drab jagged rocks. Then another, a bigger and more colorful. Then a school, flashing at you like a sequined fabric, surrounding you for a shocking moment--swimming with you--then gone. Boulder after boulder looming up to be bypassed and reveal a new roomful of discoveries. The feeling that you are the first person to see these wonders--the only person who will ever see them--and yet the urge to point, to say, "Look! Look at that! See it? See that beautiful thing? How lovely!"

I swam until I was exhausted, and I wished I had the energy--and the courage--to go farther, explore more. I confess that although the big waves don't scare me and I'm a strong swimmer, I can't help being cowed at the prospect of deep murky water stretching out of sight in the sea. What might appear suddenly, horribly in those depths? A shark? A manta ray? A jellyfish? Some dread sea creature of legend and myth? My bones melt within me at the thought. This is the price I pay for my imagination...and for watching that "Deep Sea" Planet Earth episode. (Not Jaws, though. I will never see that movie.)

And after staggering, wobbly-legged, back up the shore, I collapsed on the rocks under a towel, feeling for the first time (Oregonian that I am) the sticky sensation of briny water drying on my legs, arms, and hair.

My third return to the house found me utterly exhausted, good for nothing but a hot--HOT--shower, a fluffy re-read paperback, and soft couch. And yet, here I sit, on that same couch, after everyone else has gone to bed, gladly reliving this day--at least long enough to fix it in my memory forever.

The Baja Journals, Part 2

2009-01-01T09:00:00.000-08:00

Palm trees lining the river, in some places trimmed back like an overgroomed dog, in others delightfully wild and jungly. Pelicans swooping low over the river, where they suddenly up-end and dive under the surface, then bob back up and float around for awhile, polite as you please.

Rugged, rocky hills rising out of the palms, with steep edges and cliffsides, covered in patches of ground cover and green spikes which, when you look closer, turn out to be cardon cacti.

A large cage attached to one of the nearby houses, filled with birds of all sizes--doves, little gray ones, blue and black hoppy ones.

Houses made of painted brick, lining the street with corrugated clay roofs perched lightly on four walls, triangles open to the outdoors. Walls of rock or cast iron fences enclosing the yards.

Small black birds that swim like torpedoes under the water, resurfacing seventy feet from where they dove twenty seconds earlier.

No grass. Instead, dirt mixed with broken shells in shades of white, peach, and pink.

Beat-up pick-up trucks bouncing along the dirt roads to and from town.

Vehicles driving up the beach laden with souvenirs. A man and his wife jump out and approach you with armfuls of their merchandise.

Seagulls swoop over the river in great uneven parabolas.

A hummingbird nest the size of my cupped hand, inhabited by a tiny green mother with a long beak and black eyes, still and watchful.

Sounds: distant rumble of a four-wheeler, chain of a dog's leash clinking, wind in the palms, dock clumping against its moorings, water rippling against the bank, birds, occasional cars passing along the dirt road, a distant hum--unidentifiable, a dog barking down the road, some kind of insect squeak, my own paper fluttering.

..........................................................................

There are clouds overhead today. Somehow this makes me happy--like we are going to see real Mexico, not just the postcard version. I can't help thinking of Walker Percy at times like this and wishing he would get the heck out of my head with his "authentic experiences" and "symbolic complexes" and let me enjoy the morning. But palm trees in cloudy weather do seem much more part of the real world and I love their shaggy manes even more first thing in the morning, alone on the river's edge with my coffee and my overpriced Mexican blanket.

Our house has stone floors and a big central living and kitchen area that is open to the outdoors up in the eaves. The bedrooms are enclosed with heaters--thank goodness!--and my morning ritual now includes pulling on jeans and a sweatshirt to leave the safety of my room. In the evening, we retreat to one of the bedrooms to play cards--all eight of us scrunched around a small table in the warm light--but I can imagine that the big room is cool and breezy in the hot days here. (It's times like these that I wish I were a bird watcher and could identify all the shapes and sounds I see and hear around me.)

The kitchen is sparsely furnished--or rather, strangely furnished--with about 3 coffee pitchers and juicer but no mixer and only two dish towels. Maybe everyone who stays here subsists on coffee and tortillas. Once you've tasted the tortillas, you might come to believe it. They're deliciously chewy and buttery-tasting. We've been eating them by the packet (about 60 cents)--both plain and wrapped around everything and anything we find at the market.

I've often thought I could live solely on Mexican food if need be, and here I'm getting the chance to prove my hypothesis true. We get salsa by the cupful from the tortilla factory in town, add extra tomatoes and onions to tame it down, and then fall upon it like ravenous puppies at every meal (and between meals).

The Baja Journals, Part 1

2008-12-31T08:00:00.000-08:00

? a.m.

1st full day in Mexico. It's much (much!) colder than we expected. Somehow, though, curled up here on the couch in a comfortor, listening to the birds in the palms and seeing the sun reflect off the water in the distance, I don't mind that it's only like 55 degrees. I made a pot of hot, sweet tea (no milk) and I'm hoping for Mom and Dad to bring back some yummy muffin-like thing.