Melissa Wiley's Blog, page 184

Auditioning for a Role in Two Bad Mice?

I hate to break it to him, but I think he's a little too big to play Tom Thumb.

"I see a mermaid riding on a unicorn…"

Here's something fun: the Cloud Appreciation Society. Float on over to check out some amazing photos, learn about the different types of clouds, and marvel at the Cloud of the Month. I particularly enjoyed the Society's manifesto:

WE BELIEVE that clouds are unjustly maligned

We think that they are Nature's poetry,

We pledge to fight 'blue-sky...

This Week in Ancient Greece

The Parthenon. Photo by Kallistos (Creative Commons license).

"It was built about 2,500 years ago and stands on a white marble hill in Greece. Because it too is made of white marble, it seems to grow out of that hill as though it were a group of great trees standing in a small forest."



—from Round Buildings, Square Buildings, Buildings that Wiggle Like a Fish by Philip M. Isaacson, a book I wrote about in this post long ago

The Acropolis. Photo by Adam Carr, released to the public domain at a

Literalist

A conversation reported to me by the 14-year-old:

Wonderboy (looking at book): "Biscuit is spelled B-I-S-C-U-I-T."

Jane (hiding book): "That's right! What does B-I-S-C-U-I-T spell?"

Wonderboy: "Biscuit!"

Jane (still hiding book): "That's right! How do you spell Biscuit?"

Wonderboy: "With letters!"

Indeed They Do

Overheard: the three-year-old exclaiming over the nine-month-old, "Oh, they just grow up so quickly!"

Good Listener

During yesterday's evening tidy, Jane asked Wonderboy to put a pair of shoes away in the cubby.

Wonderboy, as many of you know, is hard of hearing. Even with his hearing aids in, he cannot pick up soft unvoiced consonant sounds such as those made by the letters C and T.

Which may explain why, this morning, we discovered that pair of shoes in the kids' bathroom—in the tubby.

A Bright Light

"You, child. What do you know of Greece?"

Betsy had not understood much of what had passed, but she remembered her nursery night-light burning in a little pan of grease and she said, "It is a bright light."

Uncle Ambrose leaned back in his chair and stared at her and his jaw dropped. Then an expression of great tenderness came over his face and he said, "Child, you are right. A bright light. One of the brightest the world has known. But that you should know that, a child of your age. I am...

A Bright Light

"You, child. What do you know of Greece?"

Betsy had not understood much of what had passed, but she remembered her nursery night-light burning in a little pan and she said, "It is a bright light."

Uncle Ambrose leaned back in his chair and stared at her and his jaw dropped. Then an expression of great tenderness came over his face and he said, "Child, you are right. A bright light. One of the brightest the world has known. But that you should know that, a child of your age. I am astonished...

Balboa Park Posts

Perusing my archives, I see I've got more than a few.

• Helixes (viewing mummies at the Museum of Man)

We counted koi in the long lily pond outside the Botanical Building, their splotched orange-and-cream bodies undulating beneath spiky, ladylike blossoms and the notched round leaves that reminded us of Thumbelina's prison and Mr. Jeremy Fisher's raft. We peered inside the deep wells of pitcher-plant blossoms, angling to see if any hapless insects lay dissolving inside. How surreal, this eager...

The Definition of Shudder

Banded Garden Spider. Legspan: three inches.

That hole at the tob of the web?

Is where I stuck my hand.