See Rock City, Then Tiny Montenegro

The other day I saw a SEE ROCK CITY bumper sticker on a parked car. Hadn't seen one of those in years. Or the side of a barn with those words. But I remember them well, as long ago as 1969. Repetition has that effect.

The Schleswig-Holstein High "Calendar/Handbook" arrived in the mail yesterday, ahead of Lilly's first day of high school, August 23, which is right there on the calendar. The handbook section is lengthy: 25 pages, twice as many as the calendar itself, and chock-a-block with policy and regs. The index includes, among many other subjects, Behavioral Intervention Policy, Bullying, Disabling Products, Excessive Show of Affection, False Fire Alarms, Gangs, Hazing, Loitering, Pranks, Search & Seizure and Sexual Harassment. Sounds like the subjects covered in Room 222.

The list of disabling products, in case you're wondering, includes stink bombs, mace, pepper spray and other noxious substances. Do kids even make stink bombs any more? If so, leave them at home, kids.

I've been too busy to pay much attention to the Olympics, but I did check the medal standings this evening. Not so much the big-damn-deal headline contest between the U.S. and China, or the home-team surge by the British, but for more obscure medal winners. I didn't see Togo on the list this time. Too bad. But I have a soft spot for the places that are taking home exactly one bronze, which so far is quite a few: Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Puerto Rico, Trinidad, Tajikistan, Turkey, Uzbekistan, Morocco, Hong Kong, Latvia and Argentina.

Maybe no Togo, but Botswana has won a single silver, its first-ever medal: a fellow named Nijel Amos in the 800m footrace. Other countries taking home medals for the first time (according to CBS; NBC can't be bothered with anything but Team America): tiny Montenegro -- Google the term, you get some hits -- and even tinier Grenada.

Eventful Early June

For me, work consumed a lot of the last day of May 2012, a Thursday. It was just as well that the day felt like the last day of March. It was cold and rainy. The week before was warm and, mostly, so was the week after. But May 31 was Winter's own reminder that he'll be back soon enough. It takes more than climate change to flummox the old man. Lilly and Ann came home from one of their last days of the year and, so quietly I hardly noticed, sacked out in the living room, Lilly on the couch, Ann on a sleeping bag next to the couch. It isn't something I see too often.

On June 2, I drove with Lilly to Woodstock, Ill., where we saw Al Stewart in concert at the Woodstock Opera House. We also had time to wander around Woodstock town square, and found the plaque commemorating a moment in Groundhod Day when Bill Murray stepped in a cold puddle.

On June 4, Lilly "graduated" from 8th grade. Had a ceremony not too different from a high school or college graduation, which we attended. It brought back fond memories of my "graduation" from 8th grade. The bell rang, and that was that.

The very next day, though I had a mountain of work to deal with, I joined my family and three of Lilly's friends in an excursion to the grounds of the Adler Planetarium on the shores of Lake Michigan. From there we saw the Transit of Venus.

Early Summer Interlude

Time for a break. Back posting again June 10, more or less. This year, everything from around Memorial Day to around my birthday gets to be my own string of holidays. That doesn't mean I won't be working much of the time, though occasional days of indolence might be possible. Or I might see a few things worth describing later. I can only hope.

Or I might try something new. I already did that yesterday when I sent a text message. I've written millions of words of text in my life (a few years ago, I estimated 250,000 a year, both for-pay and not), but none to feed into a phone. Some e-mail messages are so short they might as well be text message, but strictly speaking, they don't count.

Lilly has taken to sending me text messages occasionally, which I see about half of the time. Usually along the lines of "I'm here, doing this." If I want to answer, I call her. But yesterday, on a whim, I followed the directions to answer via text. My answer: OK.

My attitude is still indifference when it comes to this kind of communication. It's a generational attitude, of course, but I don't mind being on the non-youthful side of this one.

Cole Porter's birthday is coming up in early June, which is a good reason for posting this version of "You're the Top," with Porter singing the song himself. Sure, there are more polished versions, but I like this one.



Also, annotated lyrics, including some not in the version above. I have to say I didn't know what a Bendel bonnet was either. It might have been the top once, but sic transit gloria mundi. I also have to say I've never had a strong urge to read Ulysses in time for Bloomsday, which is also coming up.

Item from the Past: Zion NP

Zion Canyon at Zion National Park, May 2000.

To get a sense of scale, note the people standing on the trail near the bottom of the picture. A fine walk along a river that, I assume, created the canyon in the fullness of geological time.

At one point, the river was shallow enough so that we could stand in it and only get our feet wet. Lilly, who wasn't yet three at the time, was eager to do so, and spent more than a few minutes picking up stones from the water and throwing them back in. The majesty of the canyon didn't impress her, but those rocks sure did.

Springtime Misc.

Recently I interviewed a fellow at Pure Industrial Real Estate Trust, a company whose portfolio is made up of industrial buildings in Canada (I'm using the commercial real estate definition of "industrial," mainly warehouses and distribution centers). The company's acronym is PIRET. I didn't think anything of it until he told me that its symbol on the Toronto Stock Exchange is AAR.UN.  You know, ARR like a PIRET says, he told me. I got a kick out of that.

I pull up Google News every day and see more stories about the election, mostly horse-race coverage. Do I want to read this? No. The election is six months from now. I know who's running. I might take a passing interest when the Republicans fill their VP position, but other than that, this mess can wait till October.

Lilly and I saw some cool cloud-to-cloud lightning this evening, off to the east, where it must have been raining. She hadn't been aware that lightning could do such a thing. I told her that it could; a meteorological teaching moment. Ball lightning didn't come up, though.

Ann did her state report recently: writing, making a cube with pictures and drawings on it, and doing an oral report with props. She picked Texas as her subject. I was able to supply her with a number of props: postcards of various Texas spots, a plastic bluebonnet, a bag of Fritos, a 21 X 34-inch Texas flag that I hang in my office. She said a classmate held it up while she did her report.

But there was more. She wanted some Texas songs. She'd read that "Texas Our Texas" was the state song, so she wanted that on tape to play the class. I didn't tell her how seldom I'd heard it growing up, or the fact that a lot of people — a lot of Texans — think "The Eyes of Texas" is the state song. She wanted two others, and asked me for suggestions, which is a recipe for me suggesting something unusual.

Which I did. I suggested "Galveston," which I hadn't heard in some years. Not really about Texas, though part of the theme, and she took to it, maybe because she'd read about the city in one of her books. It's an example of song that's melodically peppy yet lyrically poignant. Not nearly as many people know the follow-up song, "Dear John, From Galveston," in which the narrator is so upset after receiving the title letter that he takes out an entire nest of Germans or Red Chinese or Viet Cong single-handedly in a berserk fit. Not to worry, he only lost a couple of fingers and some hearing in one ear, and lived out his days quietly as a family man in Houston — he married another girl — working as an appliance, and later car, salesman.

The other song I suggested was "Across the Alley From the Alamo," which doesn't have all that much Texas in it either, except for the essential ingredient of the Alamo, added for euphonious purposes. We played all three songs on YouTube, taping them on one of the tape-using microcassette-recorders I quit using a few years ago in favor of a digital recorder, and she played them for her class. Lo-fi, but passable. If that doesn't count as fair use for educational purposes, I don't know what would. It isn't likely that any of the other kids had ever heard those songs, and maybe the teacher was unfamiliar with them too.

But I Think They'll Remember HAL

"Is this Planet of the Apes?"

"This is weird, Daddy."

"I don't get this movie."

"This music is creepy."

"Wait, what planet is he on?"

Recently I decided it was time for my nth viewing of 2001: A Space Odyssey. It's been a number of years since the last time. So I rented a disk and watched it yesterday evening. I didn't ask any of the rest of my family to watch it with me.

But they hung around in the living room anyway, mostly doing other things with their electronic gizmos, but apparently with one eye on the seemingly incomprehensible doings on the screen. Lilly and Ann provided the comments above as the movie progressed.

Ant Stories

In August 2001, I drove to St. Louis with Lilly, who wasn't quite four years old, to visit my brother Jay and nephew Sam, as Sam moved into his dorm for his freshman year at Washington University. Lilly and I spent the first night at a motel en route, and it so happened that Them! was on TV that night. We watched most of it. Lilly was frightened and much more recently -- last year, in fact -- claimed that she actually remembered how scared the giant ants made her, which was the only thing she remembered about that trip.

It had been years since I'd seen the movie. What I remember from the 2001 viewing, besides Lilly's reaction, was that I hadn't realized that a pre-Matt Dillon James Arness was in it. Thinking about Them! now, I'm surprised some producer somewhere hasn't managed to remake it into a CGI travesty in which the ants are created by genetic engineering, rather than atomic testing. Give it time.

In the summer of 2006, we came home from Canada to discover that ants were busy trying to take over our house. Or least set up shop and live in it. I called in professional help and the bugs were dispatched. They were large black ants, and they've never returned.

I bring this up because I discovered a trail of very small ants this morning across the floor of the room in between my office and the kitchen. We'd seen these little black ants here and there during recent weeks, and even some in the upstairs bathroom, which I discouraged with a few squirts of bug spray. But I guess their numbers increase if they're aren't dealt with more systematically.

Most of the ants were following one of the grooves in the floor created by the grid-like pattern of tiles. The groove is a straight shot across the floor -- an ant highway -- all the way from the trash bin in the kitchen to a small hole in the baseboard. Their lair must be in there. Well, nest. But that always sounded too pleasant for ants, which have some nightmarish features if you think about it. (Or see movies in which giant ant mandibles kill people.)

So I picked up some ant traps today, the kind that promise that the ants will enter, pick up a load of poisoned food and take it home to the nest. The first time I ever used such a thing was in Japan, during the first year I lived there. Ants invaded; somehow I found the ant traps in a store, though I had no idea what to ask for; and they worked very well. During the 2006 ant invasion, ant traps didn't work. So we'll see if these little ants take the bait of doom.

The Name Salad

Got an e-mail from Americans for Gary J today -- how did I get on that list? -- and the subject said: Gary Johnson is Angry! Find Out Why. I have a pretty good idea. He's asking himself, why isn't it my turn? Even the pizza guy got a turn.

We attended the Rosa Luxemburg Junior High Winter Band Concert this evening, in which Lilly participated as a trombonist. For anyone worried about the "winter" in that name at the expense of Christmas, I can report that the program included no fewer than four songs with "Christmas" explicitly in the title, plus others with obvious Christmas associations. Some tunes I wasn't familiar were "Santa at the Symphony," "Funky Ol' Saint Nick," and "Rhapsody in Red & Green."

I looked at the lists of kids in the bands (7th grade, 8th grade, the district junior highs' jazz band) and I'm pleased to report a multi-ethnic salad bowl of names, out here in the homogeneous suburbs. A selection: Avila, Begbaaji, Freiburger, Gonzalez, Hirjoi, Jones, Khokari, Kim, Li, McCoy, Nagorzanski, O'Connell, Patel, Popovic, Rizvic, Scalafini, Schmaus, Stribling, Takizawa, Walker, Woo. As for first names, the likes of Ann, Alex, Caroline, Jessica, Jonathan, Kevin, Lilly, Mike, Patrick, Rebecca, Sarah, Thomas and William are represented, but so are Aya, Ena, Jemi, Koryana, Malik, Mumbua, Reena, Sergio, and my own favorite, a kid named Vlad.

A Teen Birthday

Strong cold winds this morning, and strong winds on Tuesday mean garbage cans in motion. Plus a variety of loose trash in the yard. So the first thing I did this morning was deal with that situation. More wind tomorrow morning, I hear, but at least the trash cans will be in the garage.

Lilly's birthday was before Thanksgiving, but her party -- a group of the usual suspects in the living room, these days including a sprinkling of boys along with the girls -- was on the day after Thanksgiving. All in all, she had a good time.

As usual, I took a picture of the cake.

She chose the wording this year. Anything you want, I said, as long as the bakery doesn't have to call me up to make sure I really wanted that on a cake. They didn't question her choice.

Call of Duty: MW3, Grand Theft Auto & Best of All, Death Race

This evening I pulled up Google News and one of the Top Stories headlines was, "Mitt Romney's Dark Side: Presidential Hopeful Tried Cigarettes, Beer." For a moment I thought an Onion article had wormed its way into the standard Google feed. But no, it was from Reuters.

Early this afternoon, as I pulled up to a red light at a major intersection, I noticed a fellow on a unicycle cross the street on the other side of the intersection. Riding casually across, one-wheeling his way to his destination. That's the first time I've ever seen anyone on a unicycle here in the suburbs, unless you count the performers at the circus a few years ago, which was technically in the suburbs.

Come to think of it, I can't remember seeing too many non-circus unicyclists on the streets of Chicago or Nashville or San Antonio, either. But I did see kids on unicycles sometimes in Osaka, and heard that some schools teach it in PE class.

At the grocery store today, I bought a popular soft drink whose commercial tie-in at the moment is Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. The clerk, a young man in his 20s, asked me if I'd played it. I said no, not interested. He told me that the soft drink packaging includes (I think) some kind of code that gives players extra ammo (or maybe a kit containing one forty-five caliber automatic; two boxes of ammunition; four days' concentrated emergency rations; one drug issue containing antibiotics, morphine, vitamin pills, pep pills, sleeping pills, tranquilizer pills; one miniature combination Russian phrase book and Bible; one hundred dollars in rubles; one hundred dollars in gold; nine packs of chewing gum; one issue of prophylactics; three lipsticks; and three pair of nylon stockings).

Apparently the game was released last weekend, and for some this event was a big hairy deal. I know this because Lilly told me about it. The release caused a lot of chatter at her school, especially among the boys she knows. I asked her if she had any interest in playing herself and she said maybe, but among that kind of game she likes to play -- at other people's homes -- Grand Theft Auto. You learn all kinds of things about your kids if you pay attention.

By golly, I think I'm supposed to fret that such a violent game will affect my daughter in evil ways. You know, just like the urges people my age felt to run down pedestrians because of the primitive arcade game Death Race. Ah, the screeching wheels, the screams of your victims. Doesn't that take you back? No? Wiki asserts that "because of its limited production run and the number of units that were destroyed, Death Race is very rare today. Collectors will sometimes pay $2,000 for a working unit in good condition." If it doesn't have one, the Smithsonian needs to get one.

In the late '70s, Mike, a guy I knew in high school, and I would sometimes visit the airport in San Antonio and play games at its arcade room, which was usually empty in the evenings. Death Race was one of the games there, and we played it. It was probably all we could do not to commit vehicular homicide on the way home.

The Cernan Earth and Space Center

Classic Northern November today. Gray, rainy, mostly leafless, though some yellows and reds are hanging on. Not too chilly, at least, and there was other good news from out there, beyond the clouds: the asteroid 2005 YU55 didn't actually hit the Earth.

On Sunday I took Lilly to the Cernan Earth and Space Center, a planetarium in west suburban River Grove, Illinois, named for the last (most recent) man on the Moon, and part of Triton College. It's a little far to go regularly, and it had been a while since we last went -- four or five years, though Lilly said she'd also gone there on an elementary school field trip.

The show, "Journey to the Stars," promised to be "a multimedia program that combines stars, video, panoramic scenes, planetarium special effects and numerous space images to describe what research astronomers now know about the birth and death of stars, how backyard stargazers can better understand the immense scale of the universe, and how humans have developed space probes and manned spacecraft to extend our reach into space."

The show promised, in other words, to cover a lot of ground. Or rather, cover a lot of space. So it did, with some narrative cohesion. That's my complaint about most of the planetarium shows I've seen as a adult. Lights go down, stars come out, and there's tons of neat stuff in space! This, that, and the other thing! I'm not sure what kind of thinking goes into writing like that, but it might be that since the show's for youth, any damn thing in any order will do, as long as there's enough light, noise and motion. A lot of cartoons seem to be created on the same principle.

"Journey to the Stars" was mostly familiar territory for me, but not as much for Lilly, which of course was the point of bringing her. Later I asked her what she hadn't heard before, and she said the prediction that the Sun was going to expand to a red giant in some billions of years and fry (or completely engulf) the Earth. The show offered that information in the context of the life cycle of stars, including stellar endgames, from supernovas or plain novas or mere expansions to collapses into dwarf stars or neutron stars or that famed bizarro celestial object, the black hole.

Naturally there was also some discussion of the Hubble Space Telescope, but no mention, not even in passing, of the other orbiting Great Observatories, the lost Compton (gamma rays), Chandra (x-rays) and Spitzer (infrared). Too bad. Individually and as an ensemble, they're marvels of the age.

Before the main event, the planetarium also showed the equivalent of a newsreel -- namely, what's in the sky in early November -- and a cartoon -- namely, a mini laser show, "Mini Pepper." The laser images danced around to three songs from Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, mostly colorful Spirographic-like images, but sometimes laser-drawn representations of the lads in their day-glo band uniforms, except not day-glo but neon in outline. Interesting effects, but 10 minutes was about enough. I'm not sure I could have sat through a longer laser show, but then again I wasn't in a chemically enhanced frame of mind.

The Cernan web site -- which doesn't address the issue of chemical enhancement -- says that its equipment is "a Voyager V-17OWC laser projection system [that is] is one of the most advanced domed theater visual projection display systems in the world. Manufactured and installed by Aura Technologies Inc. of Chicago, Ill., this system represents the latest in state-of-the-art entertainment and educational laser display technology. The laser itself is a Color Pro krypton-argon water-cooled laser, which is capable of producing more than 18 quintillion color combinations, stunning special optical effects and dazzling aerial beam effects."

Item From the Past: Lilly's First Jack o' Lantern

We got around to creating a jack o' lantern this evening. Ann drew a design on the pumpkin, then I carved the top off. I insisted that she remove most of the pumpkin seeds and slimy orange entrails. I'm tired of that task, and I also wanted a visceral Halloween memory for her. Then I cut some more holes.

I would put it outside tonight with a candle, but it's an intensely windy and wet night out there, so it can go out on Halloween itself.

Lilly said that she wanted to help with this year's carving, but when the time came, she didn't bother. When Lilly was just a few weeks short of her first birthday in 1998, I took a picture of her examining a curious orange orb.

Later, I put the jack o' lantern on our front porch.

Later still, squirrels -- or very small minions of Beelzebub -- feasted on it, making it more frightful.

The Day of the Flapper

The chain inside the upstairs toilet broke this morning, so after everyone else had left for school or work, I made my way to the hardware store formerly known as Ace (now it just says the generic "Hardware"). Toilet chains are sold only in combination with toilet flappers, and I got one.

It made my day just to learn that name. I've seen the part in operation over the years, of course, but never thought about its name. I also today learned even toilet flappers have a web page, as everything seems to: "All the flap on THE FLAPPER." Read and learn.

It didn't take long to replace to flapper-chain combo. The old flapper, with its bulbous front end and two prongs sticking backward, could be a small model for a Romulan or Klingon ship or the like. That is, a sinister-looking Enterprise sort of model.

For all my grousing about Halloween, I am looking forward to some parts of it, such as accompanying Ann and her friend on their rounds. It won't be many more years before I won't do that any more, as Ann wanders in a pack with her friends, just as Lilly does (even though I chide her that she's too old for trick or treating -- but we both know that attitudes have changed since I was in junior high).

Lilly never wore the costume to the right for Halloween activities, but she did pose for a picture. I think I took it 10 years ago. The costume came as a special section to some Japanese magazine. We unfolded the section and did some re-folding and presto, some child-sized space armor and a helmet emerged, ready to wear.

How Places Get to Be Iconic

I flatter myself that I don't make a lot of impulse buys, but there's only so much accuracy in that notion. Recently I came home with Landmarks, a set of A+ brand flash cards. Only $1 at a certain big box retailer, which is a steep discount off the list price of $2.95 -- a sum I wouldn't have paid. The sense that you're getting a deal is an important factor in impulse purchases.

Still, I'm out a dollar, so what did I get for it? Thirty-six flash cards picturing famed places around the world. Distributed by Dalmatian Press of Franklin, Tenn. (a suburb of Nashville) but -- I love the precision of the label, right on the box -- "Printed in Ningbo, Zhejiang, China."

Each card features a picture on one side with no description. The other side has the name of the place and a canned description. Wherever it was printed, I assume that Dalmatian Press created the deck, so American landmarks are heavily represented: 11 of the 36 are fully within the United States, with one more, Niagara Falls, being shared with Canada. Nine are in Europe, six are in Asia, and three are in Africa, and I'm counting the Suez Canal as Africa. Three are also in South America, if you count the Moai of Easter Island, and I do. Two are in Australia and one is in Mexico -- count that as North America.

How many did I recognize without looking? The places are so iconic that it wasn't that hard. I suppose that repeated exposure is the real secret of achieving iconic status (or clichéd status, take your pick). Anyway, there were only two that I couldn't name: Kuwait City Towers, because -- what's it doing on this list? Also, Diamond Head on Oahu, because I'd never seen it from that particular angle. It looks like it could be any number of islands in a warm climate. I didn't recognize the Suez Canal immediately, but was able to guess correctly. Likewise with a card with shot of Kilimanjaro.

I've seen 20 of the 36 sites in person, probably because it's weighed so heavily in favor of U.S. sites -- I've been to all of them. I could have taken the pictures myself except for that oddball shot of Diamond Head.

But the cards aren't really for my edification. I showed them one at a time to Ann, then Lilly. They showed age-appropriate familiarity. Ann didn't know many names, except for the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower. She said she recognized more by sight than that, however, such as the Alamo, Mount Rushmore, the Gateway Arch, the White House, Big Ben and the Pyramids of Giza. Except for the Alamo and the Gateway Arch, which she has seen within the last few years, I figure she's seen the others on cartoons or other TV shows.

Lilly knew more places, both recognition and by name, though I didn't keep count. Yet for a fair number of them, the cards were clearly an introduction to the place for her -- the likes of Angkor Wat, Ayers Rock, Christ the Redeemer in Rio, the Dome of the Rock, Hoover Dam, Kilimanjaro, Machu Picchu, the Moai, Petra, St. Basil's, St. Peter's and the Sydney Opera House.

I could go on about this, such as wondering where some of the omitted iconic places are (Great Wall of China, the Forbidden City, the French Quarter of New Orleans, the Grand Coulee Dam, the Panama Canal, Angel Falls, the Brandenburg Gate, the Arc de Triomphe, Pompeii, the strange manmade islands of Dubai, Graceland, etc., etc.) but I have work to do. Still, for all the food for thought we got, I'd say my dollar was well spent.

Unstructured Summer Days

No organized activities for my children this summer, except for the sporadic times I dropped Ann off at a park district games-and-swimming program that ran from early June until last week. It involved low fees and no commitment, so barely counted as organized. But the girls are entertaining themselves. Too much Wii, maybe, but that's just the opinion of someone whose most recent video game interests were Space Wars, Space Invaders, Galaxian, Pac-Man and Donkey Kong.

Other activities have surfaced for them as the summer goes on. Yesterday Ann took a sudden interest in buoyancy, filling up a large metal bowl with water and testing objects to see if they would float. When her search for new objects brought her into my office, I suggested she take notes of what floated and what didn't. So she did, on a single post-it note. I have it in front of me now.

Floats: an aluminum-foil boat, a rubber ball, six peanuts in their shells wrapped in plastic wrap, Lego pieces, pencils and some other small plastic items. Does Not Float: all coins tested, even aluminum ones, a Spongebob plastic figure, a plastic ring, a rubber ring, two metal rings, a paper clip and something that I can't decipher that looks like "small moron," though I don't think that's the correct reading.

Lately Lilly has been using cake mixes to make various cakes, topped with icing she makes from recipes she finds on the Internet, along with improvisation. She's been making some good stuff, too. One of her icings included sugar, confectioners sugar, butter, cocoa powder and Mexican chocolate -- that last one was added to the recipe, I think -- and boy was it good. She's promising other forays into cooking in the coming days, such as fried chicken for dinner using a select assortment of seasonings in the batter. I expect that'll be tasty as well.

No Datapoint Left Behind

Cold again. Bah. Not freezing, but still bah. Puts me in a curmudgeonly mood, just in time for a sheaf of papers Lilly brought home from school today.

Rosa Luxemburg Junior High insists that I micromanage my eldest daughter's studies. Or at least that's one interpretation of the Student Summary Reports they send home six times a year, complete not only with an "in-progress grade" that breaks her grades down into as many components as the University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index or some such. For instance, her "Trimester Achievement Grade" in Spanish breaks into Homework (20%), Formative Assessments (30%), Summative Assessments (¿qué?) (30%) and Daily Work/Participation (20%).

That's not all. There's a list of assignments she's done in each class. My own favorite is in Language Arts -- good to see that pedagoguese for English still kicking around -- under the subcategory "Achievement JRH Grade -- LAR Writing Communication." Therein I find New Friends Extended Response; Tone Paragraph; Lesson 18 Sentences; Lesson 30 Vocabulary Sentences; Noble Experiment Response Questions; Figurative Language Poster; Lesson 25 Vocab [sic] Sentences; and "Thank You, M'am" [sic] Response Sentences.

What's going on here? Do I need to know all that detail? Is it to persuade me that the teachers are doing their jobs? (I'm sure they are.) Does the administration insist the teachers do it to make it look like the administration is on top of things? Since the papers are clearly computer printouts, can I trace it to some educational software developer who sells schools on the idea of More Better Data? A state mandate of some kind? Parents who demand this kind of information?

Then again, I think I will ask Lilly just what Noble Experiment Response Questions and Tone Paragraphs might be. I could stand to learn something new myself.

The Cookie Gaggle

Saturday night was noisy around here. Enough of Lilly's friends were visiting to form a gaggle, which means noise. But it was mirthful noise.

At some point one of her friends suggested making cookies, and it happened that we still had a "sugar cookie baking kit," a green box acquired sometime after Christmas at some discount. One of the gaggle had the further idea of documenting the process with our digital camera, so they took turns with camera in hand.

Mostly the shots were girls mugging for the camera. But there were a few process shots.

The kit included cookie-cutters in conventional festive holiday shapes. Christmas is long over, but I guess these could be Mardi Gras cookies. Close enough.

No pics of the final product, however. They didn't last that long.

Then and Now

January 30, 2003

January 30, 2011

True Grit Holidays

New Year's Eve 2010: the Great Melt here in northern Illinois. Three or so week's worth of snow started melting in earnest with overnight above-freezing temps early on the 30th. By the 31st, all except the hardiest of snow islands were gone and the air pleasant, like a lost day of spring. A parting gift from the year 2010, which will not be remembered fondly for a while, and then forgotten in its particulars, except by historians and other eccentrics.

I finished True Grit, the Charles Portis novel, on Christmas Day; and saw True Grit, the movie now playing, on New Year's Day. Like a lot of people, I hadn't ever read the book, but had seen and enjoyed the famed earlier movie version, though it's been a good many years now.

The prospect of seeing the new movie led me to the book first, and I was rewarded with the best novel I've read in years. Guess I'm a sucker for books about tough yet sympathetic characters on harrowing journeys as opposed to, say, books about unhappy academics who commit adultery and struggle to write books about unhappy academics who commit adultery.

The Coen brothers' movie hews pretty close to the book, which helped make it satisfying, though they usually make satisfying movies in a lot of other ways, such as by hiring a talented cast and paying close attention to the details of time and place, as they did with True Grit. The arresting visuals, with Texas passing for Oklahoma, greatly added to the effect.

I dragged Lilly, protesting, to see the movie. She's old enough now to see an occasional movie that hasn't been dumbed down for an adolescent audience, male or female. She was one of the youngest members of the New Year's Day audience at the suburban multiplex we visited, a fact she pointed out. But after it was over, she said it was "not bad." High praise indeed for something her dad likes.

Snowballs as Big as Your Head

The first snow does have its charms. One of them is bushes covered in snow, especially if you've strung lights on them. It looked this way on Saturday. Later, sunlight thinned out the snow cover on the bush, but not so much the ground.

Saturday was all right for snowball fighting. Lilly and Ann had a running snowball fight during much of the afternoon. This is Ann, showing off one of her projectiles.

Off camera, Lilly had a large ball of her own. It was a case of mutually assured splatter.