Melissa Wiley's Blog, page 147

January in San Diego

January in San Diego is still, after four years, messing with my head.

Hang on, five years! Our fifth January here, that is. We moved here in October of 2006. So that's five winters, right? 2007, 8, 9, 10, 11?

Five winters here. I'm reading all your posts and Facebook updates and tweets about the snow, snow, snow, and it's almost surreal. I have this cherry tomato plant leftover from last summer, baked brown and crispy by the October heat, that sprang back to life after our freakish December rains. It is loaded with fruit now, green arms bent low to the ground, hung all over with orange-red globes. A southern California Christmas tree of sorts. Huck and Rilla don't even like tomatoes—juice? seeds? are you trying to poison them??—but they can't wait to run outside at lunchtime and fill a bowl for me.

Scott and I go out walking in the mornings now. It's jacket weather until the sun is high, or maybe only sweater weather. Chilly on the shady side of the street, warm on the sunny side. When the kids go out bike-riding in the afternoons, they complain of the heat.

The hibiscus bushes are blooming in all the neighbors' yards, giant hedges of them. Ice plant with its many-skinny-petaled flowers, a brash magenta. Cape honeysuckle—there's a big one in our backyard, a tree really—thick with orange trumpet flowers the hummingbirds love.

I haven't heard the parrots this week. Last week they were racketing from tree to tree all over the neighborhood.

My poppy seedlings are going to perish if I don't get around to watering soon. Watering the garden in January! Five winters is not enough to normalize that for me.

In the schoolyard behind us, the sunflowers are tall. I forgot to plant any in our yard until last week—Rilla helped me. We just grabbed a handful from the birdseed bin. We've got nasturtiums coming up all over the place. I love their leaves almost as much as their flowers—like lily pads for our ladybugs.

My dear friend Eileen has been posting the most gorgeous photos (and words too, achingly beautiful) on her blog—pictures of her snowy rural Virginia landscape with soft, contoured mountains in the background. They make me miss Virginia like crazy, miss Eileen's homey kitchen with the big mixing bowl always ready for cookie dough. I read her blog and I'm filled with longing, almost envy…I, who love snow to look at but am generally miserable in cold, having, as I do, the circulation of an octogenarian.

Then I have to laugh at myself—I told Eileen this in her comments today—for coveting her snowy landscape. I know many of you are suffering from all these repeated dumpings of snow. This photo someone linked to on Facebook today, taken in Huntington, Long Island, made me laugh and wince all at once. I know we're in the climate people dream of fleeing to in the winter. I'd be dreaming of it myself if I lived in the East.

But much as my blood appreciates the sun, the warm, my brain can't quite get a handle on it.

January in Southern California. It's just so totally trippy, dude.

Journey North Mystery Class

...starts next week! Are you ready?

Here's a post I wrote three years ago about the project. We've done it every year since, gosh, 2006 I think? Every year it has been a blast. Always so exciting when you start figuring out where the ten mystery cities are…

We've done the project by ourselves as a family, with a group of online friends, with a group of local friends—all sorts of arrangements. The last couple of years have been immensely fun, each year culminating in a big feast where each group brings a dish representative of its assigned Mystery Location.

Can't wait!

Downton Abbey Open Thread

I forgot to post this after we watched Episode 2. New ep tomorrow night!

Bound to be spoilers in the comments below. Episode 2 certainly gave us lots to talk about…

Saturday Snapshot

Deep Thoughts, by Rilla

A poem by Rilla, age 4 1/2.

Cup

Cup

can

drink

out

of

there

self

That is to say, "Cup can drink out of itself." Got a bit of a zen-riddle quality, doesn't it? Even more so, in the multicolor crayoned original.

Today is Poetry Friday. Rilla was inspired to write a poem (this was one day last week) after Rose and Beanie and I had made one of our frequent visits to The Poem Farm. Amy's funny, fresh, thoughtful verses make you want to start playing with words yourself.

Today is also the Feast of St. Agnes—which, falling on a Friday, kind of begs a reading of Keats's "The Eve of St. Agnes," doesn't it?

This week's Poetry Friday roundup an be found at A Teaching Life.

I Almost Forgot!

Good thing I read The Wine-Dark Sea. Melanie is celebrating her blog's sixth birthday, and that means Bonny Glen is six years old too. Melanie and I didn't know or discover one another until later, but we began our blogs on the very same day in 2005.

Six years of blogging. Over two thousand posts. Jiminy crickets, I yammer a lot.

Here's a big long post I wrote this time last year.

Here's a link to my yammery archives.

Thanks, all of you, for reading, visiting, commenting, and otherwise encouraging the yammering. You've made this lots of fun for me, and I'm mighty grateful.

Recently Read to Rilla

I keep posting about what I'm reading to Rilla, but of course I'm reading to my little boys too. Huck's in board book land; you probably have all the same ones. (He's also big on the Dr. Seuss ABC and Richard Scarry's Cars and Trucks and Things That Go.) Wonderboy's a whole different kid in terms of reading and being read to. That's a post for another day. He listens in to most everything I read his little sister, but he's much more interested in mechanics than story. When he chooses a book, it's usually Seuss or Elephant-and-Piggie or the Pigeon or a Boynton. Which is lucky for us, because all those things are fun to read over and over and over and over and…

Anyway, Rilla's last week-or-so's worth of read-alouds, often enjoyed with one brother perched on my lap and the other digging a sharp elbow into my thigh. This list goes backward from the past week or so, because I sent the links over from Diigo. This means some of my notes won't make much sense.

• Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling

Rilla's first time. Today we read "How the Whale Got His Throat" and "How the Camel Got His Hump." Utterly delicious to get to watch a child hear these for the first time, all over again. (And another Kindle-read.) Wonderboy loves them too, the bumpy jumpy cadences.

• The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins by Dr. Seuss

She begged for this but got stressed out by the King's threats and fury, and all through the second half she just wanted me to quickly tell her (not read in detail) what happened. It's always funny to read Seuss's prose—as much of it as I was allowed to read, at least.

• The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle by Beatrix Potter

Oddly, we read this on the Kindle—so no art. Beatrix Potter without the art! It's almost heretical! But, see, I was reading a book of my own on the Kindle, and Rilla burrowed in and started picking out words she recognized, Scout Finch fashion. I asked if she wanted me to find a story for her, and she was rather gleeful at the prospect of reading one of HER stories on MOMMY'S Kindle. I poked around to find some things in the public domain. Potter turned up right away, and fairy tales, and Mother Goose. I downloaded one of each. What she's enjoying is having me enlarge the font to its maximum size, and she reads the words she knows, and I read the rest, and she's doing that echo thing where she says a word before I have a chance to finish it. I absolutely love this stage. She's right on the brink.

• My Very First Mother Goose by Iona Opie, illustrated by Rosemary Wells

A frequent request from both Rilla & Wonderboy. Family favorite since Jane was tiny. Rilla's at the emergent-reader stage where nursery rhymes are hugely satisfying for her, because she can fill in from memory the words she can't yet read. (And each repetition nudges her closer to reading.)

• Chicken Big by Keith Graves

Arrived in a goodie package from my agent. What a fun picture book! The other chickens in the coop don't quite know what to make of this enormous new chick. Is he an elephant? An umbrella? Goofy and giggle-inducing, and wonderful cartoony art. The cover just kills me.

• Good Work, Amelia Bedelia by Peggy Parish

Rilla's first time! The word games completely bewilder my more literal Wonderboy, but he enjoys seeing Amelia at work.

• Days with Frog and Toad by Arnold Lobel

Our favorite part is the Shivers story…

• Pelle's New Suit by Elsa Beskow

Such a sweet, simple, satisfying story, comfortably formulaic. And ink-lined watercolors tend to be my favorite illustration style—Elsa Beskow is very Carl Larsson.

• Butterflies in the Garden by Carol Lerner

Rilla and Wonderboy like this one more to look at than to hear. The illustrations are beautiful—butterflies and caterpillars on their host plants in the garden. A pore-over-and-hunt book.

Posted from Diigo . The rest of my favorite links are here .

More Victorian Stuff and a Note from Howard Whitehouse!

Another quickie post to record some fun learning moments from this morning…I seem to keep doing this lately, these kind of "here's today's rabbit trail" posts. Bit lazy of me; I have a separate blog where I (sometimes, sporadically) record these things. Somehow it's easier to do it here. Never know whether it's of interest to anyone but our own family, but I kind of like having the archive all in one place.

Anyhoo. We read about Luddites in Story of the World (we're bouncing, lately, between that and Abe Lincoln's World and Landmark History of the American People—I may have said this already; and also by "we" I mean mainly Rose and Beanie and me), and then, taking the excellent suggestion of kind Anne in the comments, we visited the BBC Schools website's section on the Victorians. I had forgotten about this site, which has a smorgasbord of fun stuff. We spent a lot of time there back in Ancient Greece days. Today we mostly looked at the photos and illustrations pertaining to the rise of factories, especially the parts involving child labor. My lasses are fascinated by the contrast between their lives and the lives of, say, an eight-year-old coal-mine door-opener in the north of England, in the days before laws were passed that said you had to be at least ten years old for that sort of work, and could spend no more than ten hours a day at it. Beanie will be ten in just over a week; the notion of spending all daylight hours huddled in a dark coal tunnel caused her eyes to grow as large as if she had, in fact, done just that. Well, almost.

We looked at Victorian architecture a bit, too. And then squeezed in a chapter of Strictest School in the World before lunch.

Speaking of which! Fun news from the author, Howard Whitehouse, who kindly wrote me an email yesterday! He's offering a very nice deal on the three Emmaline and Rubberbones books: His publisher, Kids Can Press, has made it possible for him to offer a limited number of inscribed, hardcover copies at a much reduced rate:

$5 USD each, plus actual shipping at media (book) rate by the post office.  A set of all three, inscribed to whoever you like, would be $21 including a very nice mailer envelope (!) delivered within the US. More outside, obviously.

The books are The Strictest School in the World: Being the Tale of a Clever Girl, a Rubber Boy and a Collection of Flying Machines, Mostly Broken (2006)—a Victorian prison break tale set at a boarding school involving flying machines and pterodactyls.

The Faceless Fiend, Being the Tale of a Criminal Mastermind, His Masked Minions and a Princess with a Butter Knife, Involving Explosives and a Certain Amount of Pushing and Shoving (2007)—in which a master criminal plans to kidnap lovable-yet-deranged Princess Purnah, with Sherlock Holmes, a Belgian Birdman, and an elderly dog.

The Island of Mad Scientists, Being an Excursion to the Wilds of Scotland, Involving Many Marvels of Experimental Invention, Pirates, a Heroic Cat, a Mechanical Man and a Monkey (2008)— where our adventurers are pursued madly, and a whole collection of Victorian scientists (some real, some not) are held captive.

Personally, I think those subtitles alone are worth five dollars apiece. We already own the first but I might take advantage of the sale to round out our set, and stash the extra copy away for a future birthday gift.

To order, contact Mr. Whitehouse at professorbellbuckle (at) yahoo (dot) com.

Official blogger disclosure notice: Nothing to disclose! Just passing along the author's kind offer.

Downton Abbey Open Thread

Are any of you watching this? We're only a few minutes into Episode 2, so no spoilers please—but I would love to hear your thoughts on Episode 1 in the comments!

Downton Abbey on Masterpiece Theater

Potato Chip Science

Have any of you tried out the Potato Chip Science kit? It was one of the coolest things I saw at ALA last weekend and I've got one on the way…looks like something my gang will enjoy the heck out of. Would love to hear about your experiences with it. I'll report back after we've had a go ourselves.