I tweeted a request for computer programming tutorial recommendations (for Jane), and a number of useful suggestions came pouring in via Twitter and Facebook. We’ve not had time to investigate them yet—we are busy enjoying a grandparent visit for a couple of days—but I thought I’d post the list here for others who may be interested.
Alice (object-oriented programming, creating animations, video games)
• Spring cleaning. I know, I know, I’m six months late. Or six months early: maybe that’s a better way to look at it. Besides, I once heard a chaparral expert mention that Southern California’s true spring is in November (going by plant dormancy cycles, I think, or maybe it had to do with the timing of our rainy season). At any rate, I spent the entire week attacking closets and cupboards, purging bags and bags of stuff, and it feels marvelous. Oh my. I keep opening the hall closet just to admire it and then ...
We’re lying side by side, reading. A book for him, a screen for me.
Me: I want a cupcake.
Him: What? Where’d that come from?
Me: This post I’m reading. See?
I point at the word. CUPCAKE. It looks somehow magical, evocative, as if it were spelled out in actual cupcakes instead of plain old letters of the alphabet.
Me: I think cupcake is one of my ten favorite words.
(And yes, we can communicate in sign language as well, but during this conversation I was holding a plate in one hand and a giant slice of pizza in the other. Priorities.)
“It’s rather an unusual case,” said Madam Chairwoman blandly. “The prisoner is a poet. You will all, I know, cast your minds back to the many poets who have written favorably of our race—’Her feet beneath her petticoat, like little mice stole in and out’—Suckling, the Englishman—what a charming compliment! Thus do not poets deserve specially well of us?”
—from The Rescuers by Margery Sharp
The esteemed and sleek-whiskered Mouse Chairwoman is quoting from “Ballad Upon a Wedding” by Sir John Suckling, one of the English “Cavalier poets,” those dashing, witty, and sensitive 17th-century Carpe Diem fellows who came out in support ...
What I should probably try to chronicle tonight is how Jane, Beanie, and I came to the conclusion this morning that Plutarch is garlic. (That’s a compliment.)
But it’s late, and I only have a few minutes here, and the pieces of today that might disappear if I don’t write them down are small moments, not big conversations.
Teenagers playing Rock Band in my living room with abandon and zest; I loved that.
Rilla screaming, squealing, shrieking, scurrying the loop of kitchen and living room, daring (begging) one of our visitors—a tender-hearted eleven-year-old who is wise in the ways of big-brotherhood—to chase and ...
Drove to children’s hospital for Wonderboy’s appointment with our favorite specialist, the esteemed yet down-to-earth doctor of genetics. Only one of my boy’s many many physical anomalies seems to be genetic—the albinism—but Dr. J is also a dysmorphologist, which means she takes an interest any kind of birth defect or abnormality, whether its origins are chromosomal or developmental-in-utero. She’s the doctor who laughed at my possibly insulting analogy two years ago, when I said that dealing with specialists in so many different departments of the hospital was like trying to walk a bunch of ...
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“It’s rather an unusual case,” said Madam Chairwoman blandly. “The prisoner is a poet. You will all, I know, cast your minds back to the many poets who have written favorably of our race—’Her feet beneath her petticoat, like little mice stole in and out’—Suckling, the Englishman—what a charming compliment! Thus do not poets deserve specially well of us?”
