Melissa Wiley's Blog, page 150

Booklogging

My Tumblr account worked well for me this past year as a way to log online reading (articles, notable blog posts—though inevitably many of the latter wound up in my Google Reader starred items, so I guess it depends on where I read something; I'm still more fractured in my chronicling than I would like to be). I need to be better about tagging, because once an article has Tumbld off the main page, I'm lazy about paging back for it. I could find something if I needed to, though, and that was the reason I set up the account.

I've tried half a dozen ways of recording the picture books I read to my younger set—which means I wound up with half a dozen incomplete lists. Messy. Paper just doesn't cut it because Huck is a terror with my favorite Flair pens. Twitter would be fastest—I even set up a separate Twitter account just for book titles at one point, but I seldom used it because it's a pain to log out of my main account and into the minor, and vice versa. Of course I could be perpetually logged into both at Brizzly, but I find I still don't bother. I'm going to try using the Tumblr for this, too, a picture-book log, for a while. It's such a fast and easy interface & I can jot notes longer than 140 characters if I so desire. So for now, until I forget about it, you can see what books my small fry are enjoying at the "Read to Rilla" tag on my Tumblr. If I stick with it longer than a week or two, I'll add a button in the sidebar here.

I'll keep chronicling the rest of my reading here at Bonny Glen, and on Goodreads when I remember. My 2010 book log is on this page. 2009. 2008.

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Clean Slate

As I mentioned to Penny in the comments, I've decided to give myself To Be Read-pile amnesty. All prior lists and reading projects are hereby officially scrapped, and I'll read what comes to hand.

Which is not to say I'm actually getting rid of the various long strings of enticing titles I have accumulated here and on Delicious, Listography, Google Reader, and in notebooks all over the house. Heaven forbid. I'm just erasing my mental "I need to read such-and-such" recordings and starting from scratch.

(And mixing cliches, apparently. What do you want, it's a vacation day for my brain.)

Clean slate applies to the blog, too, come to think of it. My backlog of posts, all those half-finished drafts: I'll finish 'em when I finish 'em, if ever. New Year, fresh start.

Scott gave me two new Fred Chappell books for Christmas.

xxxxxxxxxx

It was a very good Christmas.

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9:43pm Pacific Time

CYBILs work: finished.

Now what on earth do I read next?

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The Quieter the Blog, the Noisier the House, Probably

My dad teases me that whenever he and my mom come to visit, this blog gets quiet. This is, of course, a cause and effect. Who has time to blog when 1) there is my mother's soup to devour; 2) there are small children to rein in just before they completely flatten their grandfather with affection and bouncing; and 3) there is my mother's rocky road sheet cake to devour?

The fact that I spent most of the weekend in a cold-medicine haze didn't help, either. My parents entertained the (coughing, sniffling) troops while I took a lot of naps. It has been raining here for days so the energy level in my living room was rather riotous, at times. This did not in any way deter me from taking the aforementioned naps.

I also read three CYBILs books, which is a very good thing since we are in the home stretch here, just a week or so to go before our panel's powwow to finalize the shortlist. If you need me this week, look behind a book.

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Poetry Archive

An archive of my sporadic contributions to Poetry Friday. For the schedule of hosts, check here.

This week's host is the amazing Amy Ludwig VanDerwater at The Poem Farm, whose daily original poems are a source of great delight to me!

(This archive is a work in progress. I'm still working backward through 2006.)

June 2006

"Personal Helicon" by Seamus Heaney

"Portrait by a Neighbor" by Edna St. Vincent Millay—"Before she has her floor swept/ Or her dishes done,/ Any day you'll find her/ A-sunning in the sun!"

"Patterns" by Amy Lowell (a poem I first encountered as a teen in Madeleine L'Engle's Meet the Austins)

One for newborn Rilla: Coleridge's "Frost at Midnight"

"Childhood" by Rilke

And while they're not technically Poetry Friday contributions, I want to include these poems in my archive so I can find them easily: our family "Where I'm From" poems. Mine, Jane's (age 11), and, in a special gift to me, my father's.

August 2006

Jane's pick: "I Stood Tiptoe upon a Little Hill" by Keats

September 2006

"The Author to Her Book"—Anne Bradstreet

"Ho Ro, My Nut-brown Maiden" (scroll way down)

"Moving" by Randall Jarrell—"Never again will Orion / Fall on my speller through the star /Taped on the broken window by my cot…"

January 2007

Rigs o' Rye—a Scots ballad I quoted in Little House in the Highlands, a story-poem I dearly love. "This lad he was a gallant bold, / a brave young lad nineteen years old;/He's made the hills and valleys roar,/ and the bonnie lassie, she's gone with him…"

"On First Looking into Chapman's Homer"—a Keats poem we encountered in Swallows and Amazons

February 2007

On the Sonnet—Yes, it's Keats again

"Oh happy living things!"—Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Coleridge

March 2007

"So the world woos"—one of my favorite poems: "Letters from a Father" by Mona van Duyn

April 2007

"A Green Cornfield"—Christina Rossetti

March 2007

Sisters—an original poem courtesy of wee Rilla

April 2007

Good Friday, 1613—"Riding Westward" by John Donne

"Thou little tricksy Puck"—my girls' favorite poem, because it's about their brother: Thomas Hood's "A Parental Ode to My Son, Aged Three Years and Five Months"

June 2007

"Forests at the bottom of the sea"—Whitman's "The World Below the Brine"

"That has made thee mine forever"—Bonnie Mary o' Argyle

July 2007

"What is the grass?"—Whitman's Leaves of Grass

"For my heart's a boat in tow"—Loch Tay Boat Song, my favorite Scottish ballad

August 2007

"I wonder if the gardener knows"—Rachel Field's "The Little Rose Tree"

September 2007

"The music in my heart I bore"—Wordsworth's "Solitary Reaper" and selections from his sister Dorothy Wordsworth's journal of their tour in Scotland, which served as research for my Martha books

October 2007

"Let fall one by one"—Heaney's "Clearances," chosen on the heels of a "Tolland Man" quote from the previous day's Helixes post

August 2008

"The water is wide"—another Scots ballad

October 2008

"Understanding"—the poem by Sara Teasdale; the prayer by St. Francis of Assisi

"We must love one another or die"—Auden's "September 1, 1939″

April 2009

"Fortify your inner life"—some Seamus Heaney

May 2009

"Oh for a bee's experience"—during the height of my honeybee obsession, a bee trail and some Emily Dickinson

August 2009

"The Triangle Factory Fire"—a Robert Pinsky poem

And not part of Poetry Friday, but related to the post above:

Speaking of Robert Pinsky

It's a Small Internet After All

September 2009

"The Fairy Tales of Science"—a rambly post inspired by Ransome's Winter Holiday, with only a snippet of "Locksley Hall"

November 2009:

"Like little mice"—"Ballad Upon a Wedding" by Sir John Suckling, plus bonus picture of Johnny Depp

January 2010

"We are not really at home"—from Rilke's Duino Elegies, "The First Elegy"

October 2010:

Poetry Friday, we meet again—a reposting of my poem, "Lena, Waiting for the Mail"

November 2010:

"Spend all you have for loveliness"—one by Sara Teasdale; one by me

Sestina—an original poem written in 1993

The Huck Edition—an original poem, "Olympian Heights," courtesy of my 22-month-old son

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Another Post Office Line

OK, who punked me? I didn't see the hidden cameras but I wouldn't be surprised to learn they were there. Stopped by the post office today to mail one (one!) package. The line was out the door, easily half an hour long, but this didn't faze me because all I had was one flat-rate mailer and I knew I could use the automated postage machine. Only three people in front of me in line there.

The first of them had a longish transaction. No worries; we all know I've been that person before. The next woman punched buttons for a few minutes, frowned, and said "It won't take my package." She beckoned for the next customer, the man in front of me, to take a crack at it. All he needed were stamps, and the machine spit them out with no problem.

By this time a postal worker had joined us, an official-looking personage smartly dressed in a red and black suit. She re-entered the package lady's particulars, then shook her head and said, "Nope. Won't take it. I'm sorry, you'll have to wait in that line."—pointing toward the twenty-odd people waiting miserably for a turn at the counter.

The poor woman trudged off with her single small jiffy-bag. I lingered a moment, hopeful, as the postal worker swiped a badge and rapid-fired a code into the machine. Another woman stepped forward, carrying a keyboard and some kind of electrical gizmo.

"This is going to take a while," she told me apologetically. "I have to recalibrate the whole thing."

That's about when I started to wonder if I'd been set up. But the forlorn jiffy-bag lady stood slumped in the conga line, so I determined that Ashton Kutcher was unlikely to leap out from behind the Evergreens Collection signboard. (Evidently, though I find this hard to believe, post-office punkings of suburban mothers just don't fetch the ratings.)

Well, my sad and untelevised tale does have a happy(ish) ending. I got back in the van full of kids—we were heading home from the girls' piano recital—and drove home the long way, stopping off at a tiny partial-service USPS station I recently found tucked between a liquor store and a gas station. (Because you know how much time I spend skulking around liquor stores and gas stations.) Lines are short there, usually, because you can only do certain kinds of transactions. There was one customer at the counter, and a man in line ahead of me—but he saw through the open door that I had kids in the car and insisted I go in front of him. Which was so sweet and unexpected that I wound up being kind of glad the machine in the main branch had gone bust.

It is amusing just how much of my holiday cheer is happening in the post office this year!

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Nothing Falling Through the Cracks Here, Nope

Because THERE ARE NO CRACKS. My assortment of Urgent Things to Do is so vast that the Urgent Things are crammed tightly together, forming an impermeable surface for Slightly Less Urgent Things to bounce off and roll around underfoot, tripping me up at every step.

In other words, it's mid-December.

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Christmas List

Christmas lights up: check.

Tree trimmed: check.

Tree pulled over by inquisitive 23-month-old, spewing shards of ornament across the room: check.

Stockings hung by the chimney with care: watch your backs.

I was framed, I tell you!

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This and That, and a Poem by Rose

• Last call for signed Martha and Charlotte books before Christmas!

• Here's a sticky-note for my gift ideas roundup, now that my post office story has pushed it a mile down the page.

• I was interviewed in the Laura Ingalls Wilder edition of Ink and Fairydust, available here. Fun!

• Got a nice shout-out from the awesome Mia Wenjen at Pragmatic Mom, whom I had the pleasure of meeting at KidlitCon. We connected over our mutual love for Betsy-Tacy and All-of-a-Kind Family. Mia's right; All-of-a-Kind is another golden series that deserves some time in the spotlight. I love those girls!

• Another sweet mention came from Amy at The Poem Farm, whose poems delight me daily. Daily! It's amazing! Inspiring!

Rose is inspired, too. She showed me a poem yesterday, adding shyly, "You can post it for Poetry Friday if you like."

I do like, my sweet.

The bank in summer is always green,

While in winter it's a glistening white.

Spring, it attains a dew kissed mint,

And fall, it glories with amber sight.

So throughout the year, it is oft diff'rent

Color, each morn and night.

Such color, such beauty,

It is always filled with stunning light.

Poetry Friday is at Jama Rattigan's Alphabet Soup this week.

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This Post May Actually Be Longer than the Line at the Post Office

Monday morning. Long line at the post office. I had a stack of packages to mail—same as everyone else there. I also needed to pick up more of the flat-rate priority mail boxes, but the racks were empty. A man ahead of me in line needed some too, and one of the clerks had to go hunt up a new batch of them in the back room. Listening to the impatient sighs all around, I was glad he'd beat me to that request.

Except it turned out—after the guy left, which is a bummer—that the new stack of boxes was the wrong kind, just plain priority mail, not the flat-rate boxes. So that poor customer went home with a pile of the wrong thing. I was the one who discovered the error, while the clerk was taking care of my packages.

"Are these the same as the flat-rate boxes?" I asked, not seeing the words "flat rate" anywhere on the white slabs of ready-to-fold cardboard.

"Oh, shoot," said the clerk. "No. Shoot. We gave him the wrong kind."

I had already told him I was going to need a dozen of the medium flat-rate boxes, so he said he'd have to go look for them after he finished ringing up my packages. More restless sighs from the long line of people behind me. Now I was going to get to be that person, the delayer.

The clerk handed me my receipt and disappeared to the back room. Shuffle, sigh, murmur goes the line. Seconds tick painfully by. This is the kind of situation that makes me squirm; I have a tendency to blurt out inanities in a vain effort to break the tension.

"This is the awful part," I said to the line in general. "When you're the one holding everybody up."

Every single person in that line stared back at me blankly. Not one single commiserating smile, not even a quirked corner of the mouth. Just—blank. Except for the one woman who muttered to the man in front of her, "She picked an interesting time for this."

Which, I couldn't help it, made me chuckle—an interesting time for what? For picking up shipping boxes? In the post office during the holidays? That's an interesting time? I think it's kind of a pedestrian time, an obvious time, don't you? Or maybe it's just that I "picked" a time when the line was very long. Which is to say, I went to the post office in December. Hee. I've stood in no less than four very long lines at three different branches of the post office in the past week, at various times of day. (Y'all are keeping me busy with these book orders!) I feel fairly confident in saying categorically that there is no time the line isn't long, this time of year.

It was funny, the contrast between that P.O. trip (mortifying) and the one I made last Saturday morning, with Stevie along for the ride (amusing). We had three packages to mail and I was hoping to pick up the flat-rate boxes then, but then, too, the display rack was empty. And—ironically—I didn't ask the clerk (different clerk, different P.O.) to fetch me some that day, because the line was moving so very slowly. When Stevie and I got in line, there was a woman finishing up at the counter who had mailed six or seven packages, and I gathered her order had been complicated and had taken a while. The man at the front of the line was clearly at the limits of his patience; he was puffing air out his nose quite angrily, like an irritated bull.

The clerk, a cheerful, portly fellow, seemed to be trying—with much more success than I had a few days later—to lighten the mood with humor. As the six-package lady was packing up her wallet to leave, the clerk announced, "All right, and FIVE..FOUR…THREE…TWO…ONE! We're closed, people!"

Gasps all round—but immediately he was laughing, waving his hand to show he was teasing us. Everyone giggled except the puffing bull-man, who barked, "You're lucky we don't all have pistols!"—which I think was meant to be funny, actually, but came off rather alarming.

Then it was that man's turn at the counter. As he strode forward, he watched the six-package lady exiting and said, loudly, "Doesn't she know they teach remedial math in night school?"

I looked anxiously at the door to see if the woman had heard the insult. I think (hope) she was out of earshot by then.

"Harsh," I murmured, and the woman in line ahead of me, a lovely twinkly-eyed grandmother with fluffy Miss Marple hair, shook her head in agreement.

The bull-man pointed at the angel stamps on the poster and said, "I want 25 of those." But they only come, the clerk explained, in books of 20. Bull-man snorted, exasperated. "Fine. Then give me 25 of those blueberry ones," he grumped, pointing at the juniper-berry stamp in the Evergreens collection.

"I'm sorry, sir," said the clerk. "Those come as a set—the four evergreen designs."

"But I only want the berries."

"I'm sorry, sir, they don't come separately."

"But I don't want the pine cones!"

"I'm sorry, sir…"

By now Miss Marple and I were both giggling, hidden from the bull-man's view by the big empty rack that was supposed to hold my flat-rate boxes. The young guy in front of Miss Marple shot me a grin. There was this ripple of camaraderie all down the line—the bull-man had been so disgusted with the six-package lady for taking so long. He would have hated to be behind his own self in line. It was kind of delicious, this moment.

Now, threaded through the seven or eight minutes it took the man to agree to suffer the pine cones along with the berries, Stevie was chattering to me in his hybrid of English and ASL, and I was speaking-signing back to him, and he was melting the hearts of the other women in line, as he is wont to do. He's just such a cute little guy, you know? Miss Marple loved him. Mrs. Marple, I should say, because she told me all about her granddaughter who is deaf, and she, grandma, signs a little, "but not enough." And we talked about Signing Time and ways to learn ASL.

And it turned out the young guy in front of her was mildly hard of hearing and had worn hearing aids as a child, but didn't wear them any longer. He cracked Stevie up, making eyes at him around the empty box rack. It felt like we were all passengers together on a cruise or something, fellow travelers bonding on a long journey.

At last the bull-man stomped out with his despised pine cones, and the next few transactions moved rapidly. Stevie and I were beckoned forward by the same affable clerk who'd been so patient with bull-man and six-package lady. He greeted me heartily and signed hello to Steve. And proceeded to explain, as he weighed my packages, that he too was hard of hearing. (What are the odds? It was kind of incredible, this convergence of hard-of-hearing men young and old.) I learned to sign when I was little, he signed, and Stevie grinned and got shy, and I was kind of relieved the bull-man wasn't in line anymore because our conversation undeniably added a few extra moments to the transaction.

Good moments. Moments of connection. Everyone in that line was smiling—the bull-man's ironic surliness had put us all in merry spirits, somehow. That and a cute little deaf kid with blue hearing aids.

I guess that sense of connection, that we're-all-in-this-together feeling, is what I was looking for on Monday, three days later, when I babbled my remark to the impatient queue in the other post office. I was a six-package lady myself that time and already self-conscious about that when the whole wrong-kind-of-box thing happened.

I should have brought Stevie with me that day. Or a loud and bitter hater of pine cones.

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