Find the cat in this picture

The difference between the black of the robe and the black of the cat is actually less noticeably in real life.  (In the photo, the robe looks almost navy blue.)  Squint your eyes when you look at it, and you'll see how well George uses camouflage to blend in when I drop my robe on the floor.

A review of the new "Winnie the Pooh"

I finally took the kids to see "Winnie the Pooh" today, as I had $3 Movie Cash I won on a package of M&Ms that expires at the end of the month.  My verdict?  It should have gone straight to video.

Movies simply don't mean the same thing today that they did when I was Faith's age.  Back then, a movie was an event; if you didn't see it in theaters, you simply wouldn't see it unless and until it was re-released or it was shown on TV, most likely abridged to fit in the commercials.  You went to the movies or you didn't watch it.  VCRs, not to mention DVDs, streaming, and various cable movie channels, were the beginning of the end for that model.  Thirty years later, if you're going to go to the trouble and expense of driving to the movie theater, it's for an experience you can't get at home: special effects and explosions on a huge screen with state-of-the-art audio (hence, Transformers and comic-book movies and their ilk), or the ability to see what's going to be an immediate water-cooler topic and join in the conversation (hence, the typically huge drop-off from opening weekend box office to the following week).

For a while, 3D has been the draw to attract audiences, but people are already tiring of it, mostly because the number of movies that can be plausibly improved by being shown in 3D is limited.  The sky-lantern sequence in the 3D version of "Tangled" is breathtaking, but do we really need to see "The Smurfs" in 3D?  When the 21st-century version of the technology was new, it was a draw in and of itself, but the "wow" factor has already worn off.  Remember how amazing the dinosaurs in "Jurassic Park" were when the movie was new?  Have you ever tried to sit through it now that you can see superior effects in TV commercials?

So, back to Pooh.  It's just not a "movie" in today's sense of the word.  I spent $13.50 on 3 tickets after my Movie Cash.  So not worth it.  But I would happily have spent $13.50 on the DVD for the kids to watch around the house.  I would have chuckled at parts, as I watched from across the room while doing other things.  Just sitting there with nothing to do but stare at the screen, I kept wanting to check the time.  And it was only an hour long!

As for the content of the movie, the beginning where we're focusing on Pooh and his rumbly tumbly really drags, but once the whole cast is given something to do in tracking and catching the wild Backson, the pace picks up.  Eeyore and Tigger come off best and have a funny action-song where Tigger tries to turn Eeyore into Tigger Two.  Owl's song about the Backson where he promises the others he isn't just making up all the things he's obviously making up is funny.  And the narrator is John Cleese, which ought to make the film just a little bit better than it is.  But overall: yeah, wait for the DVD release.  There is absolutely nothing about this movie which demands it be seen on the big screen, and I'd probably be a bigger fan if it hadn't harbored delusions of grandeur about not being a direct-to-video release in the first place.

"I am your father!"

Faith watched the Star Wars trilogy with Tommy this past weekend for -- well, I won't say for the first time, because I know she's sat on the couch while he was watching it before, but for the first time that she's paid any attention to the story line.  Her gasp at the big reveal about Luke's parentage at the end of "The Empire Strikes Back" was amusing.  I don't remember ever not knowing who Luke's father was -- it was common knowledge by the time I ever cared enough to watch the movies -- but I suppose "Empire" was the "The Sixth Sense" of its day.  (I had that one spoiled for me too, by a reviewer who wrote that he didn't want to spoil the ending but Shyamalan had obviously read "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge."  So obviously he didn't want to spoil the ending for anyone except those familiar with "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.")

Reader, I married him.

Today was our 14th wedding anniversary.  My mom came up the street to stay with the kids and the roofers, while Tommy and I went out to the restaurant where we had our rehearsal dinner fourteen years ago last night.  Faith called the outing our "kissy adventure."

Roofer Madness

You'll recall my earlier mention of getting a new roof -- and yes, that was early May and early June.  From the first week of June on, the roofer kept telling us the roof would probably go on "next week," and "next week" kept sliding on into the future as time went by.  The thing is, we decided to go ahead and pay the difference to get the new "green" roof with the Energy Star rating and the radiant barrier, as long as the insurance company was paying for the plain-Jane roof.  Apparently, they don't keep the fancy Energy Star shingles on hand; they manufacture them when the order is placed (or so our roofer tells us).  So we waited and waited and waited until they got our roofing material custom-made. 

Finally, two weeks ago, the roofer calls us triumphantly and tells us the roof will be installed July 26th -- which is our wedding anniversary.  By this time, I just want to get the thing put on and am afraid if I ask for a new date, it will be fall before it gets done.  So they delivered the material today, which is now sitting out in the driveway, and are to put the roof on tomorrow.  They say we don't have to be here, which is good, because Tommy and I are planning to go out; my mom will stay here with the kids and deal with the banging and the workmen.  I'm just hoping they can get it done in one day, which was the original promise they've already started to hedge on (because, you know, it's a special-order roof so it might be more complicated to install than an ordinary roof).  Wednesday is the day for the cleaners to come, and I don't know if they'd want to navigate a yard full of workmen.

An outing and an inning

Faith was invited to go swimming today with Alyssa's family.  They have a membership to the town rec center in the suburb they live in, and it apparently has an indoor pool with waterslides and a lazy river and all sorts of stuff.  Afterwards, she went with them to Cici's for pizza.  Easily one of her best days of the summer.

I sent Eric up the street to my parents' house before Alyssa's family came to pick Faith up.  (Whenever she has a friend over, he always thinks they're there to play with him, too, so he would have wanted to have been included.)  I had more than 3 hours to myself, which almost never happens.  It was very quiet in the house. 

Four VBS Sessions and a Sleepover

Tonight was the last night of our four-day VBS.  Back in June, when I suggested that Alyssa come spend the night with Faith during VBS, it seemed pleasantly far away, but this week I had to pay the piper.  (Hence yesterday's musing about whether to take them to a movie.)  Honestly, if I have to have any extra child in the house for 22 hours, it would be Alyssa.  She's quiet and polite and undemanding; she doesn't taunt the cat or insist on playing without Eric.  They colored and played hide-and-seek and flew paper airplanes and watched "Tangled," and we went to a McDonald's with an indoor playplace for lunch for an hour or so.  Honestly, it was less work than being home with just Faith and Eric all day, as I didn't have to referee as many fights.

The end for the Pooh?

This blogger laments the fact that the new Winnie-the-Pooh movie seems to have landed with a huge thud at the box office.  I have to admit to being part of the problem rather than part of the solution: I certainly didn't have the release date pencilled in on my calendar the way I did with "Cars 2."  Why?  Well, a plethora of reasons.

First is a fear of exactly what might pass for a Winnie-the-Pooh movie in this day and age.  I don't need to hear Eeyore making bodily-function noises or titter at Piglet talking about shiitake mushrooms.  And don't pretend that's not exactly what had the highest probability of happening.  From the reviews I've read, it didn't, but it was certainly a good possibility.

Second was my mature reaction to "The Many Adventures of Winnie-the-Pooh," the Pooh movie of my own childhood.  I had warm memories of it, but when I bought it for Faith and watched it with her, I was underwhelmed by the reality.  She never really took to it, either, mainly watching the disk for the episode of "My Friends Tigger and Pooh" in the bonus features.  (On an unrelated note, I can sell that back to Amazon for $37.25???  Dude!)

Third is the just-mentioned "My Friends Tigger and Pooh" itself.  Textbook preschool TV.  Faith loved it; I was bored stiff.  To some extent, Disney set this movie up for failure by defining Pooh as preschooler fare.  It's absolutely not true of the books.  I mentioned before about having Faith read Winnie-the-Pooh at age five to six; there's some quite advanced wordplay in there that went straight over her head.  But when Disney markets Pooh to babies and preschoolers, they can't be surprised when a new Pooh movie tanks.

Why?  Well, that would be point the fourth: Movies are too expensive to take very small children to (at least when the expectation is that they will be enjoyable only to very small children).  When I read the blog I opened the post with, my first inclination was to take the kids just to give Pooh moral support.  Then I figured out that for me, the kids, and Faith's friend Alyssa, I'd be paying $22 for a matinee and would still have to buy lunch for everyone.  And that's at the cheapest theater in this part of a town whose movie prices don't approach what they do on the coasts.  What if I had actual preschoolers, the age group to which Disney has marketed the Pooh IP?  Would I pay $22 to take them to a movie they're likely to sleep through or at least get bored and want to walk up and down the aisles?  Parents will pay more to take the family to a Pixar movie or the like because they believe there will be parts the kids enjoy as well as parts geared to the parents' enjoyment.  There's no promise of that in a Winnie-the-Pooh movie.

So, will I go see Pooh?  Probably, but not with an extra kid in the house to buy a ticket for, and only if it's still showing by the time I get around to it.  What does this mean for the Pooh brand?  Well, I'm sure Disney will still make money off it; there's lots of new moms out there buying Pooh layettes and such.  But I imagine this release has marked the end of Pooh as we have traditionally known him, at least.  The next Pooh movie will be 3D CGI, and they'll all be tweens in Hundred Acre Wood Junior High.

When life gives you lemons...

Sunday after lunch, our doorbell rang, and it was Faith's friend Olivia from across the street. She had talked her mom into letting her have a lemonade stand in their driveway and wanted Faith to come help her run it.  (Eric went along too, but he didn't want his picture taken so he's hiding under the table in between.)  They stayed out there for about two hours and made $12 (only half of which was attributable to my mom and me).  There were some very nice people in our neighborhood who came and bought lemonade at a dollar a cup, including one man who threw on his brakes in the middle of the street, rolled down his window, and said, "Is that lemonade?  That's just what I've been wanting!"  They each took home four dollars (and some sunburned cheeks, in Faith's case).

Lock up your daughters

Eric was looking at some of his birthday cards the other night.  One of Faith's friends from the neighborhood had made him a homemade card, and he pointed out to me that she'd drawn a heart on it.  "She loves me," he confided with a grin. 

Then he got the note his Sunday School teacher had sent, which was signed, "Love, Mrs. Pam."  "She loves me, too.  She loves me very much," he told me with a confident lady-killer's smile.  "I hope we don't kiss."

Isn't it ironic? Dont'cha think?

So, I'm reading a WSJ article about Simon Cowell launching his new show this fall and read this:

Mr. Cowell, 51 years old, sipped on his specially formulated antiaging smoothie, which he drinks daily, made with imported lingonberry, acerola berry, chokeberry and aronia juice flowing in specially from exotic locations.

Two "specially"s in the same sentence: that's a proofreading error, but whatever.  The next paragraph quotes Simon pontificating on the stakes of his new venture

...as he rode down Collins Avenue, blowing smoke from his Kool cigarettes out the open window.

So he spends untold amounts of money having weird berries flown in from exotic locations daily in the hopes of countering the effects of aging ... and he smokes?  That's like spending hours a day working out with personal trainers to stay slim and then eating pizza and doughnuts at every meal. 

 

Two thumbs up for today's guest blogger!

I've never had too much to say about Roger Ebert's opinion -- way back when, I seem to recall being more in tune with Gene Siskel's movie reviews -- but I'm a big fan of his take on a dumbed-down Great Gatsby.  A later clarification suggested the book in question was written for ESL students, but even then, why on earth would you desecrate the text of Gatsby so foreign-language students could read it?  Write your own simplified stories for lesson purposes -- I remember a lot of lame anecdotes about Pierre LeGrand and Yvette LeBeau when I was taking French -- and read the novel in translation until you're fluent enough to read the original.

Birthday boy

Today was Eric's 5th birthday.  When I got up this morning, he told me he was too big for me to pick up now; then he said, "Okay, I'm going to go watch TV, Sarah" to show me how grown-up he is now.  ;)

He had a Toy Story birthday cake, and he got a Lightning McQueen football,  a Mack truck that carries a little Lightning McQueen in back, and a Toy Story 3 Buzz Lightyear.  (Fortunately, I bought mine on sale right after Christmas and didn't have to pay the exorbitant prices now that they're no longer being produced.  I even got free shipping!)

Literary grabbag

The only book I had found that inspired Faith to sit down and read the whole thing in one day had been The Boxcar Children.  The other books, no matter how excited she is about reading them or how much she likes them, she won't read more than the one chapter a day I make her read.  She has a whole stack of books she wants to read, and I tell her she's never going to get around to all of them if she doesn't read more than one chapter a day; but somehow that one necessary chapter becomes in her mind 'one chapter and no more.'

A few days ago, though, she picked up an old paperback of mine at my mom's house: The Marvelous Inventions of Alvin Fernald.  She read four chapters there, then came home and finished up the rest of it within 24 hours.  So where's the magic?  Nothing against Clifford B. Hicks, but it's probably just that she picked up the one to read for fun, whereas the other ones, even though she chooses, she has to read.  I'm not sure how to fix that, though; before I started making her read a chapter a day, she'd go all week without reading a new book.  If she'd picked Alvin Fernald from her reading shelf here, she'd still be on the chapter-a-day cattle boat to China.

In other classic children's literature news, The Rescuers has been reissued!  All the Miss Bianca books have been out of print for years; I read them from the library as a child.  The others are still unavailable, but the first one is now available in a beautiful hardback edition.  I ordered it from Amazon the moment I read about it.  (If you're wondering, the Disney movie, while it took its name from the first book is actually based on the second book in the series, Miss Bianca.  In the first book, they rescue an imprisoned poet rather than a cute orphan girl.)

The newest book Eric has been reading is Little Bear's Friend.  He's very excited about it because, unlike A Kiss for Little Bear, it's a chapter book, like the ones Faith reads. 

Faith having a tea party with her stuffed dogs

Zoo day

I took the kids to the zoo this morning.  The animatronic dinosaurs are ending their run there this weekend, and they'd been wanting to go back and see them again.  Of course, it was also the hottest day of the year so far.  We parked at 9:50, ten minutes before the zoo opened, saw all the dinosaurs, rode the carousel, took the train back to the front gate, and were back in the car at 11:10, all for $5.  That's the beauty of a zoo membership: when you haven't spent forty dollars on admission and parking, you don't feel like you have to stay and get your money's worth.  We go, see what we want, and figure we'll catch whatever we missed next visit.

Edutainment

I took the kids to a traveling Cyberchase exhibit at a local museum today.  They had been seeing ads for it on "non-commercial" PBS since before it opened.  It was neat, I guess; they had a good time and want to go back again before the end of its run (Labor Day). 

I have the same issue with it as with all "interactive" children's museum exhibits (witness last year's Egypt exhibit): they're all full of buttons to push and fancy screens and video games to play, but the vast majority of children who attend, particularly all the school field trips, don't learn a thing.  They run through, pushing buttons at random and going away again before listening to or watching whatever pushing the button triggered: "I'm going to push this button, and then I'm going to push that button, and then I'm going to push that button, and then I'm going to the gift shop!  Done!"  And all the videos and puzzles and games the curators have put so much money and effort into to "engage" the younger generation are utterly wasted.  For all the enjoyment and education that result, they could just install button-shaped LED push lights on the walls under and around their usual collection and save their money and time.

Faith actually went through and read the directions and completed most of the puzzles and games involved, but honestly, if your child wants to do and understand all the activities included in one of these exhibits, you will be there for hours.  (We were there for 2 hours, and there were still at least 5 or 6 activities Faith didn't do, not to mention the video games, which she's shy of.)  And there's nowhere for parents to sit and stare into space when the whole thing gets a bit old .. which is pretty quick, if you're me. 

Dereliction of parental duty (squirrel division)

Saw Slappy's mother lying on our porch again today.  I think she's like Mayzie in Horton Hatches the Egg: happy to have someone else taking care of her baby so she can laze around in the shade.

Animal rescue

Yesterday evening, Tommy was mowing the lawn when he found a baby squirrel in the grass under our front yard tree.  (It's hard to tell from the above fuzzy picture, but it's about the size of a white mouse from a pet store.)  He scooped it up with his gloved hand, and we put it in a cardboard box under the tree, hoping the mother squirrel would come back for it.  I called several phone numbers for wildlife rehab I found online, but it being a holiday, I didn't get an answer anywhere.  By the time it was well dark, we hadn't seen any sign of the mother, so I tucked an old T-shirt in the box with it and left it until the morning to see what would happen.

I got up this morning, expecting to find it either dead or gone, but it was still in the box and wiggling around.  Fortunately, by 7:30 this morning, someone was manning the local wildlife care hotline that hadn't been answered on the evening of the Fourth.  They told me to put a heating pad in the box to make sure it got warmed up after being out all night (although I doubt it got much below 80 degrees overnight; last night I was more concerned about making sure it was in the shade so it didn't get too hot) and either bring it inside or make sure no wandering animals could get to it.  I put the heating pad in the T-shirt and the cardboard box inside George's pet carrier, as it was warmer outside than in, and left a message for the nearest volunteer on the hotline's orphaned-mammal list.

She called me back at about 9:45 and gave me directions to a woman the next town over who was an experienced wildlife rehabber, so I loaded up the kids and the squirrel and drove it to her.  Tommy and I had been leery of touching it, afraid we'd hurt it, but she was like the nurses at the hospital with newborns, just scooping it up with her bare hand and checking it out.  It wasn't hurt at all except for being hungry after having been abandoned for more than 12 hours.  She put it in a lined shoebox with airholes in it next to another similar box with another orphaned squirrel, even smaller than ours, and was going to start feeding it with Pedialyte.  She also had four baby skunks in a cage that looked very fluffy and pettable.

Faith cried to leave the squirrel behind with the rehabber.  She named her Pinky, but I prefer to think of her as Slappy.  She wants us to learn how to take care of baby squirrels now so if we find another we can keep it, although her enthusiasm was tempered when I explained that wildlife rehabbers don't keep the animals as pets but raise them until they can live on their own and then have to release them anyway.  Personally, I was just relieved to have handed the squirrel over to someone who knows what they're doing still alive and reasonably healthy.  I was afraid I wouldn't be able to find anyone to take it and would have to watch it die of neglect.  I was aware of the irony, however, in the number of dead squirrels on the road we passed driving twenty minutes to save the life of one baby.

After dropping off the squirrel, I took the kids to McDonald's to cheer Faith up; then we went grocery shopping.  When we pulled in, who did we see sprawled out on the porch right next to the front door but Slappy/Pinky's mother?  She could come down from the tree to cool off in the shade (I suppose that's what she was doing; she dashed up the tree when we got out of the car) but not to retrieve her baby.  Bad squirrel mother.  If she has other babies up in her nest, I hope she takes better care of them.  Although if we find another, at least I know who to call now....

Happy Fourth of July!

"Crow, I don't get you."

This consistently makes me laugh. I have the Gypsy "I don't get you" T-shirt, and Tommy has the Tom Servo "Nobody does; I'm the wind, baby!" shirt. He won't let us both wear them at the same time out in public, though.