A passage to India

Our church has a tradition of doing a "Parade of Nations" for its annual missions emphasis. They hadn't done it in a few years and decided to put it back on the schedule for this year. Faith was very excited about being in a parade. She signed up for India, because a sari seemed like a low sewing-intensive costume choice. (I don't sew. Much like math and science, sewing depends on being exact. I'm not an exact kind of person, more of a close-enough kind of person. Close-enough doesn't mesh well with sewing.)

I went to the fabric store, looking for a suitable drape-y fabric and was surprised to find a whole row of bolts of fabric specifically for saris. I got a little carried away with the beautiful prints. This blue floral is gorgeous, but a plain cotton batik would probably have draped better and been less slippy. My mom hemmed the rough edges and basted it at the right length, and I attached it with 3 safety pins and an elastic string. Faith had a great time being in the spotlight. Here she is with the flag of India she carried down the aisle.

On Realpolitik

We are inclined to defend comfort more fiercely than liberty, especially when the comfort is our own and the liberty is someone else's.

-- Anthony Daniels, "The Fear of Worse," National Review 21 February 2011

The newest item on my C.V.

Flawless out-loud reading of Fox in Socks at full-speed at bedtime. I'm just saying.

(The only copies I can find on Amazon are in Mandarin Chinese or paperback with an audio CD. What's up with that, Amazon?)

Walking like an Egyptian

Here's another 2010 flashback:

The week of Thanksgiving, I took Faith to the "Lost Egypt" exhibit at the Museum of Science & History. They had several interactive exhibits about identifying specimens at an archaological dig, the technology of building pyramids, and how to read heiroglyphics; plus, they had a real mummy!

Zoo school

Faith and Eric went to zoo school this Saturday: a morning class where they learn about a particular animal, make a craft, take a field trip into the zoo to see their animal, and sometimes have an animal come into their classroom. Faith has been going since last winter/spring; Eric's first class was last fall. (Before the age of 4, it's a parent-child class, and I figured if I was going to have to sit at the zoo with him, I'd rather wander around with him on my own schedule than try and keep him focussed on the classroom presentation. So that's what the 2 of us did while Faith was in zoo school: looked at animals and rode the carousel and the train, then picked up Faith afterwards and went to lunch.)

Faith's class this week was "They Came From Beneath the Sea," so she made a jellyfish and got to touch a live starfish. Eric's class was "Read Ya Later, Alligator," and he made an alligator hat (there's a tail on the back of his head) and went to see the saltwater crocodile.

Tangled 2

Faith sat down to continue the story from Tangled Sunday evening. This is her story, spelling and all.

Once upon a time...
There once was a princes named Rapunsel. She had just maired a man named Flynn Rider. He was very hansome. They had fun together. And they loved each other. They spend a lot of time together. And they had a pet cat named Gorge. He was a very cute cat. And they had a son name Eric. And they also had a daughter named Faith. And they lived happiley ever after.
The End.

Continuity errors and other annoyances

Continuity errors really bug me. Not the little things, like "Oh, in the last shot, his cup was halfway empty, and when they changed angles, it was full again." I understand that movies and TV shows are made much like sausage, and there is a maximum allowed level of insect legs/visual take-to-take errors that creep in. I am not a perfectionist ... about that, at least.

No, it's the writing errors that bug me. Sitcoms, as the lowest form of television writing, are the worst. They just don't care; all they're interested in is achieving the laugh. The classic example is Bewitched: the rules about magic changed from week to week, to suit the storyline. Some weeks, Samantha couldn't undo another witch's spell; some weeks she could. Once you accept that the writers are just monkeys chained to typewriters in the basement, desperate for a punch line, you shrug it off. If they don't care, why should I? It's more disturbing when it's a high-brow sitcom like The Dick Van Dyke Show, when Laura's married name and how she and Rob met keep changing from flashback episode to flashback episode. TDVDS is the caviar of sitcoms, and it's painful to see them flounder. But it was truly a different world back then; who would ever have thought in 1966 that all the episodes would be captured on DVDs for people to sit down and watch and critique in real time, rather than spread over five years.

It's when the errors occur in shows that focus on attention to detail that they really rankle. Monk is all about attention to excrutiating detail -- and yet Adrian's beloved late wife Trudy was a scholarship student at a private day school in San Francisco at the same time as she was growing up the daughter of a wealthy game show producer in Los Angeles. It's not just TV, either. In Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, at the top of page 166, Harry "heard the door close" and then, in the next paragraph, he "hurried across the room [and] closed the door." That was tremendously disappointing. I had such respect for J. K. Rowling that for the rest of the book -- and indeed, the series -- I kept waiting for this discrepancy to be a plot point, for it to be revealed that someone had been sneaking around his room to explain the twice-closing door.

Which brings us to this week's Chuck and what isn't technically a continuity error but rankle nonetheless. The whole impetus of the plot was that Sarah didn't have any friends to invite to her and Chuck's engagement party -- that it was going to be all his side coming, in other words. So Chuck hunts down her old teammates and adventure/hilarity ensues, of course. Then we get to the engagement party that was the source of so much angst, and it's peopled entirely by good-looking extras, a virtual reenactment of Ellie's party in the series premiere. Who the heck are all these people? Chuck's friends? I don't think so. None of the Buy More staff, no Big Mike, no Jeffster! (Granted, Ellie wouldn't have invited them, but they would most certainly have crashed the party to perform.)

Now, I'm fully aware that, in real life, the lack of Buy More recurring cast was almost certainly due to budgetary issues. They had to pay Lou Diamond Phillips and three hot chicks, so the Buy More staff (not to mention, Captain Awesome) got a week off. But in an episode whose entire plot is set in motion by Chuck feeling bad that Sarah wouldn't have any friends at the party, shouldn't Chuck have had some friends at the party?

Halloween flashback

Yes, I let the kids wear the same Halloween costumes as the previous year. They both still fit, and there wasn't anything else they desperately wanted to be. Might as well get my money's worth out of the costumes. Eric's actually fit better, as he was taller and less likely to trip over his.

What we're reading now

Faith has read All-of-a-Kind Family since my last bibliographical update and will soon be finished with Betsy-Tacy and Tib. Eric has been working his way through the suggested books in the back of his reading text: Have You Seen My Cat?, Look What I Can Do, I Love You, Dear Dragon, Blue Sea, Hop on Pop, Inside Outside Upside Down, Green Eggs and Ham, Go, Dog, Go!, The Carrot Seed, Whose Mouse Are You?, Home for a Bunny, Who Took the Farmer's Hat?, and A Kiss for Little Bear. (I have very warm memories of Faith first reading Home for a Bunny; she sounded so cute saying, "A ... home ... for ... a ... bunny ... A ... home ... of ... his ... own.") The next books in the list are Henry and Mudge, Nate the Great, and the first Magic Tree House book, but the complexity of those stories is a bit much for a four-year-old so we're digressing into some other beginner books before getting back to the more school-age books. Right now, we're starting the stories in this book, which I liked when I was little. It's sadly out of print, and the stories in it don't seem to be available elsewhere so when my ancient copy gives out, that'll be it for "Tony and His Friends," "Too Many Bozos," and "Come On, Play Ball."

As for me, I'm still working my way through a backlog of magazines. I recently read an interesting behind-the-scenes-of-the-Deepwater-Horizon in Fortune that reminded me of the old disaster stories I used to read in 1980's-era Reader's Digests, of the ilk that told you Joe Doomed was eating breakfast and Vivaca Victim was driving to work at the exact moment two storm fronts were meeting 50 miles to the northwest. I always enjoyed trying to divine who was going to live and who was going to die from the way they wrote the story. The giveaway was if they told you what someone was thinking, as there was no way to find out what someone had been thinking if they had in fact died in the disaster. It's cheating of the deepest kind to make up what someone might have been thinking; some of the later stories did this, as I recall, and met with my disgust. Don't claim to be nonfiction and then make stuff up.

Calendar concerns

Tonight, Tommy offered to go to McDonald's and get a Diet Coke for me. I told him he didn't have to; it wasn't Valentine's Day anymore.

"Every day is Valentine's Day," he reassured me.

Faith overheard and asked him, puzzled, as he was putting on his shoes, "What about Easter? Easter isn't Valentine's Day."

Slumber party

Well, kinda. We'll get to it in a minute.

This is a photo of Faith and Eric last October, when I had just bought them the Pillow Pets that Faith in particular had been asking for for months. It amused me recently to see Pillow Pets pictured in a parenting magazine article on current fads. When Faith said everyone had one, seems like she was right; all her friends have them, anyway.

She got her new Pillow Pet just in time to go on her first sleepover later that month. Her friend Alyssa turned 8, and her parents let her invite a friend over to spend the night in lieu of a party. Faith was thrilled, especially since she now had the de rigeur sleepover accessory. I remembered my first sleepovers and how they ended with a phone call to my dad in the middle of the night to come pick me up, but I needn't have worried about Faith. She cried because she didn't want to come home the next day!

Anyway, when Faith turned 8 a few weeks ago, we returned the invitation. The ice on the roads made us postpone it the first weekend after her birthday (although the weekend turned out to be lovely, contra the forecasters), so we went and picked up Alyssa on Saturday afternoon (along with her Pillow Pet, of course -- she has the pig). We all went out for pizza that evening, and the manager at the pizza buffet, who's known Faith since she was a toddler, gave us a free pizza and tray full of cinnamon rolls to take home for her sleepover. (She took Alyssa right up to him when we got there to introduce her to Quyen and tell him she was on a sleepover; he's like a friend of the family. The kids are very disappointed when we go there on his day off. "Where's my guy?" Eric demands with a pouting lip.)

We had a successful overnighter. The girls stayed up past 12:30 talking after we put them in bed at tennish. I got everyone up and dressed and to Sunday School on time the next morning. Alyssa lost a watch and an earring, and I found both. So yay me!

Re: Yesterday's blog title

Just to clarify:

They're overly sensitive and far too incovenient to rectify. I mean, really, what is the point of all the talking on the box about easy-to-access hush buttons on the front of the unit, when the unit is on a 10- or 12-foot ceiling? What is easy to access about that? Why has no one made a smoke alarm with a remote you can push from the floor to make the darn thing shut up? Do it; you'll make millions.

Why I hate smoke alarms

Number of times something in my house has actually been on fire: zero.

Number of times the smoke alarms have decided to go off and off and off anyway: TOO MANY.

I turned on my little countertop electric grill to cook some chicken breasts for dinner tonight, and just as it got hot enough to put on the meat, the infinitesimal, barely-noticeable amount of smoke the non-stick cooking spray gave off set off the smoke alarm. And, of course, we have the super-safe, wired-together, if-one-goes-off-they-all-go-off kind of smoke alarms, so within a matter of seconds, five smoke alarms were piercing my eardrums. As aforementioned, I was in the middle of cooking dinner and couldn't leave the rice I was making to go out into the garage, move everything out of the way, and carry in the ladder to reach the 10-foot ceilings and turn the stupid thing off, so we just sat there and listened to the smoke alarms bleep for 20 minutes straight until I could put the lid on the skillet and leave it to simmer.

Then, even when I did get the ladder and climb up to push the button, it kept blaring again for a few seconds and shutting itself off over and over again every few minutes for an hour. This, with the windows open on to the thirty-degree weather and every fan in the house on to disperse the "smoke." That's the kind of day this was.

So, yeah, I forgot about updating the blog until after midnight. Through the magic of backdating, this will still count as Thursday's post. So, ha.

(Faith actually managed to fall asleep on the couch directly under the offending smoke alarm while it was in its after-throes and never woke up. She sleeps hard.)

How I Spent My Summer Vacation, Part Six

Faith's last special "extracurricular activity" of the summer was a week of zoo camp. Here she is with a "ZOO" mask and a balloon-animal kangaroo with clothespin joey.

Snow day

All that snow that fell Thursday night finally made for some actual outside fun for the kids on Friday, instead of just a sheet of ice across the top of the grass. It was aided by the reappearance of the sun, temperatures higher than predicted, and the lovely drip-drip-drip sound of things starting to melt off after 3 days in the deep freeze. Of course, now they're predicting more freezing rain and snow tonight and tomorrow. They predicted snow for Sunday, and it turned out to be a lovely day; I hope their predictive skills are similarly reliable this time. We've had our annual winter weather event, thank you, and it stuck around much longer than usual. There is no clamor for a repeat performance.

News Anchors Is Smart!

Apparently, the guy who posted this on the internet got fired by NBC. News Anchors is thin-skinned!

Winter Wonderland

Shortly after midnight this morning, not long after I had posted yesterday's blog, Tommy and I were turning off the lights to get ready to go to bed when he noticed that it seemed awfully bright outside for an overcast night with no moon. We went to the window and saw this. It's amazing how much lighter the night gets, even with no moon, with snowflakes in the air and on the ground, reflecting the streetlamps and porchlights. It was brighter after midnight than it was before sunset on that overcast day!

Not walking in a winter not-wonderland

So. Still iced in. Getting old.

Technically, we're not entirely iced in, which is good for our sanity. We got out yesterday for some lunch in a cold restaurant (subject to rolling blackouts, which I'm guessing affected their heating system) and to pick up Faith's birthday cake, and today we bundled up and went to McDonald's to let the kids play somewhere other than our living room. But it's been below freezing since the wee hours Tuesday morning and isn't expected to break that barrier again until Saturday afternoon. Patches of the roads are clear, but then again, other patches are literal sheets of ice so getting out is a nerve-wracking adventure.

Once we've been out, getting in is a nerve-wracking adventure, as well. Our driveway is steep, shaded, and faces north, so it's always the last thing to melt off after a winter weather event. Tommy was able to get out and get the bottom half cleared Tuesday afternoon, but as you can see from the picture, this isn't a "moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow" winter weather event, but a "overcast sky on the multiple shards of ice" winter weather event. You don't even leave footprints walking on this stuff, so there's no way anything but the sun and several hours of above-freezing temperatures will clear the rest of the driveway. We barely got the car up the incline into the garage this afternoon.

The good thing is that Tommy took vacation this week to be off for Faith's birthday, so he's not having to be out driving in it. Of course, it also means that all the things we had planned to do on his week off aren't getting done. And Faith isn't happy that we didn't get to go to her favorite restaurant on her birthday, as we usually do.

Looking forward to the thaw....

A very "Tangled" birthday

Faith turned 8 years old today. We've been iced in since Tuesday morning, but we managed to get out far enough today on the icy roads to pick up her Rapunzel cake from the bakery. UPS has been slacking off this week as well; a package with one of her presents has been sitting in a nearby town for more than 24 hours waiting for the roads to clear. Fortunately, I had some presents bought the old-fashioned way: by driving to the store for them earlier. She got the "Tangled" storybook and Flynn Rider doll she wanted to go with the Rapunzel she got for Christmas, plus a "Tangled" shirt. My parents also walked the 3 blocks through the coldest weather in the area in 15 years to watch her blow out her candles and bring her a pink butterfly watch.

How I Spent My Summer Vacation, Part Five

After Faith's week of museum school came Eric's fourth birthday in mid-July. His favorite gift was the ray gun Faith gave him with real lights and (ear-splitting) sounds.