Well hi... 'cause, that's how this starts out

Well hi. Thought I'd make one last post for August, for whatever it's worth. Today felt like fall, and that's just not right. Not yet. There are TWO blankets on my bed tonight, and the air conditioner's still in the window. What kind of sense does that make?

On the homeschooling front, we sat down at the kitchen table today and DID things. Woo-hoo! The snarkapoo started a spelling notebook... she likes to spell, and is good at it. We found some things to work on, though. I gave her a list of herbs and spices, some of which she wasn't familiar with, and she did a great job of sounding them out phonetically. Echinacea became ecenashea. I thought that was a pretty good guess.

We also started reading Book 1 of A History of US: 11-Volume Set by Joy Hakim. It looks like all the good things I've heard about this series might be true. It's full of information, but written in a very chatty, down-to-earth style, and has plenty of open-ended questions to get kids really thinking and forming their own opinions. I like that. She read all the quotes in the first chapter about the meaning of history, and we talked about them... after clarifying who Cicero and Marcus Garvey were. Here's a favorite: "It is one thing to write like a poet, and another thing to write like a historian. The poet can tell or sing of things not as they were but as they ought to have been, whereas the historian must describe them, not as they ought to have been, but as they were, without exaggerating or hiding the truth in any way." - Miguel de Cervantes, from Don Quixote. There's a lot to think about there.

There was more, but it's late, and time for a last cup of tea before bed.

**listening to: Music for Harp, Flute and Cello by Angels of Venice. I'm very much in the mood for soft and pretty at the moment, but of course, being me, with mysterious, Renaissance-y overtones. This music is awfully close to perfect. It soothes me, and makes me yearn, opens up windows in my heart, and provides a rich backdrop for imagination.

Rain, rain, go away

We TRIED to go swimming today. Threw our stuff in the car and drove to the pond where we normally swim... and by the time we got there: wind. rain. thunder. (sigh) Bonnie was waiting for us there, and invited us back to her house. By the time we got THERE, the sun was shining. So the kids went outside to set up the Slip 'n Slide. They played for about 10 minutes, and then it started raining and thundering again.

I don't really like to complain about the weather. So I'll stop there. The afternoon wasn't a total loss... there were brownies, and children swooping around in superhero capes, and good conversation. Another day closer to the end of summer.

I'm not saying that's a bad thing. It's good, really. School starting isn't an issue for us. And the past few months have crawled like molasses.

Modern fantasy, the retro version

So, I've been perusing this book from the library for awhile - Modern Fantasy: the Hundred Best Novels, by David Pringle. The title page further specifies: An English-Language Selection, 1946-1987. It's a good book. Each entry has a mini-essay with info on the author, a plot synopsis, and some commentary. Fun to read for a fantasy freak.

I was a little surprised, though, to see that I've only read 9 books (or series) from the list:
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis
The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
The Once and Future King - T.H. White
A Fine and Private Place - Peter S. Beagle
The Last Unicorn - Peter S. Beagle
Watership Down - Richard Adams
The Forgotten Beasts of Eld - Patricia McKillip
The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever - Stephen R. Donaldson

Wait a minute, that's only 8 books. (looks over the list again) alright, only 8 books then. geez. Interestingly enough, all of those 8 are on my (ever-growing) list of favorites. In fact, just looking at the names is enough to make me want to reread them all.

But, there's so much on the list that I always MEANT to read, and seriously need to! The Gormenghast Trilogy by Mervyn Peake. The Dying Earth books by Jack Vance. Anything by Fritz Leiber. I've never read A Wizard of Earthsea, for crying out loud! or anything at all by Guy Gavriel Kay! This just doesn't seem right.

Not to mention the books that I've never heard of, but that sound intriguing enough to check out. Day of the Minotaur by Thomas Burnett Swann, for instance. The Owl Service by Alan Garner. And all of this was published over 20 years ago, since which the boom in fantasy has only gotten bigger!

(sigh) You know that feeling you get as a reader, that sinking in the gut when you realize that you're not going to live long enough to read everything that you want to? I'm trying to ignore that feeling and concentrate on the fact that as long as I live, I'll never run out of wonderful, fascinating stories to dive into. Because after all, what's life without reading?

The water's cold

To get started blogging again, I was trying to post a video that I took at a truck stop in Virginia last month. It consisted of two stuffed dinosaurs and a King Kong doll, all battery operated and battling for supremacy of a shelf in the gift shop. It was pretty entertaining at the time, given the fact that the van had broken down and we were killing time waiting for a hose to get replaced, or something. However, I left the silly thing trying to load for an hour, and nothing happened. It was only 20 seconds long. My skills as a web diagnostician are limited at best, so I just left it. Here's a much classier image from that trip.
I like historic sites in general, but Monticello is probably my favorite one to visit. I've been there three times, I think, over the years. One draw is the sheer beauty of the site. A green mountaintop, lush gardens, views over Charlottesville... as a landscape aficionado, it's irresistible. Thomas Jefferson's design for the house is fascinating, as well. I guess that's a large part of what I find so appealing about the whole place... everything there, from the furniture and paintings, to the vineyards, to the shape of the windows, is an expression of one man's mind and personality.

The snarkapoo had a good time, too, being a history nut. (She became obsessed with the Revolutionary War when she was about 6, and things progressed from there. I dunno. She's 9 now.) This was amusing: she became highly upset that the date of birth on Jefferson's tombstone was April 2, 1743. All of her books say that he was born on April 13. HOW to reconcile this? How could all of her books be wrong? It was an intellectual trauma, to be sure, until we asked our guide about it during the house tour. Turns out that the British Empire didn't adopt the Gregorian calendar until 1752, by which time there were 11 days missing. Whew. What a relief. I'd been really worried about the drive home, if we hadn't gotten an explanation for that.

Maybe my next post will be a current ramble, instead of a month-old one.