The Films of Covid

I've reached a new level of book insanity.  Now I see a book and I think "Do I already own this book?  Wait, is it that this book is on order somewhere for me?  I feel like I know this book.  I really want it.  Is it that I've bought it for someone else?"

But it's okay because today I discovered that there is a four year long forum on Ravelry dedicated exclusively to pictures of cats sitting on knitting.  I always feel a guilty sense of satisfaction when I find these sorts of oddities; it's like the world is murmuring in my ear "shhhhh.  It's okay.  It could be worse.  It could be heroin!  It could be...I mean...you could take pictures of your cat sitting on a scarf for four consecutive years!"

Right.  I'm not crazy, you're crazy.

In other news, what are we calling this time now?  I've heard quarantine, crisis, lockdown, pandemic, etc., but then I've heard people say those are inaccurate.  I don't know.  I don't know anything anymore.  How about pre-armageddon?  That seems level-headed.  Anyway, during This Time, my husband and I have been watching allllll the movies we've recorded (I almost dated myself and said 'taped') with the plan to watch them sometime in the future. The future is now!  Here's a look at a few we've seen.

Is this by Disney?  I have to look but I have a pretty big suspicion that this is by Disney.  Oh!  It's by Universal!  Well, anyway, this is just like A Dolphin's Tale or Free Willy or any other of those animals plus a kid plus environmentalism = Only People Can Save The Day And We Must Band Together type movies.  Seriously, Barrymore?  You just happened to have a wet suit handy on the ice?  Well thank goodness for that, eh?  Honestly.  What nonsense.

Amazing!  We'd been reading Kipling when we came across this film but, sob, I hadn't finished the book yet!  Do you want it spoiled for you?  I'm going to spoil it.  It's my blog, anyway.  So the guy dies!!  Oh my land I ugly cried and the children asked worriedly if I was okay.  Despite that this is a fantastic family film with lots of adventure and some important lessons learned in interesting and non-preachy ways.

This has got to be one of the all time weirdest film versions of Austen's gothic novel that I've ever come across.  Honestly, the only people I liked in the whole thing were the elderly couple who brought whatsername to Bath.  As one does.  And the music was out of Labyrinth.  Which is really where it should have stayed.

I could not remember for the life of me if I'd seen this movie before.  I thought I had, but I think I was mixing up Nineteen-Eighty-Four and the one with the people living in tunnels with this one.  Anyway, it was a first for me!  Not maybe the best choice of film for my tastes, which tend towards the obscure or artsy, but I could see the social commentary would appeal to people.  I mean, it would kind of have to appeal to someone because you literally get the stuffing kicked out of you by the social commentary each and every minute of the film.  Lotta commentary.  Much commentary.  Don't really want to eat while you watch this one.  Also, is it just me or could Charleton Heston totally play a cannibal?

Prayers For Those Who Bring Fear

I recently had a minor medical procedure done.  Very minor, really, and nothing worth commenting on, except that it hurt.  And in the human mind, pain is a memory maker, which is right and good because otherwise a whole lot of us would be touching the still-hot stovetop even more than we already do.

I had spoken to another woman before the procedure, who had had it done as well in the past, and she had warned me about the pain.  I'm sure she meant well in telling me.  And I had laughed a bit in a nervous way and made the comment I always make, which essentially goes something like "I've had three children.  I'll be fine."

And I was.  I was fine.  And I knew I would be fine.  I knew it would hurt and then it would hurt a bit more, and then it would hurt less and eventually it wouldn't hurt at all anymore and everything would go back to normal.  I knew this, because I am an adult and I've had many medical indignities done to me in the *mumble mumble* years I've been on the Earth.  And unlike a child, the thought of pain is an okay thought for me; not a pleasant thought, by any means, but sort of a resigned, okay thought.

When I was very little the thought of having a needle could cause me to panic.  I didn't have the vocabulary to express that, but I knew that if I thought about the upcoming needle, I would get this sick 'run away' feeling and start to feel my thoughts spin out of control and my body break out in a sweat.  None of the things anyone would say to me about not being afraid would help.  None of the techniques, none of the reassurance would make me want to walk into that room, would make me not feel a flushed, dizzy feeling come over me.

I remember when I was newly married, and pregnant, and I had to go to a clinic for one of the innumerable blood draws a pregnant woman is subjected to.  My husband was working, and I was as afraid of that needle as I had ever been of any needle, perhaps more so because this was a needle from a complete stranger, in a strange clinic, for a strange, new reason, and I was by myself; as I sat in the chair I felt lightheaded and like crying.  I want very much to tell you that I did not collapse, all *mumble mumble* pounds of Scots-Canadian pregnant lass that I was, on the tiny Asian nurse...but that would be a lie.  I went down like a tonne of bricks.

That remains the only time I've ever fainted, and I have no desire to repeat the experience, thank you very much.  Maybe it was the heat, or the build up of tension, or my blood pressure or any number of other reasonable factors - but in my memory it is burned in as The Time Fear Won.

I assure you, that was not the last time fear of pain won with me.  The difference between the me of that first pregnancy and the me who dealt with the recent pain and fear was as simple as exposure - I have felt a lot of pain, and I have not died.  This most recent little pain can't scare me like it could before because I've met its cousin, Big Pain, and I have won.

When the tunnel vision recedes, there is an unexpected benefit - suddenly the pain makers swim into focus.  With the overwhelmed and fearful, they blur into 'the person to avoid', but with the eventual submission of a more fearful part of yourself, the people behind the needles appear once more.

Dr. T was slender, with tired eyes and greying hair, and after our unpleasant time together (I'm sure she's lovely at parties)  we talked for a few minutes about follow-up sorts of things, as one does.  And I asked her if I could pray for her - for her work, which must contribute to those eyes, for her patients, and whatever other unspoken sorts of things weigh on all of us.  There was a time I would never have been so bold as to ask that, and it is still a very infrequent offer of mine, but this...was the right time.  When we got home, the pastor and I did pray for her, but I will continue to remember her in my own prayers, and here is what I will say:

Thank you, Lord, for bravely allowing your children to feel pain and fear, so that we may one day not be ruled by those things.  Thank you for clearing our minds and steadying our steps and hands.  Thank you, Lord, for those who cause pain for good purpose, and give them the strength to bear their work, as you give us the strength to endure it. 

World without end.
Amen.

Four Things I'm Complaining About (they are all about new homeschoolers)

You are looking into the maw of homeschooling, gazing into its dark soul, as it were, and you're bleating in every group 'help!  help!  I need to know what to do!'  Listen, dear, we're all doing that.  Everyone. Is. Doing. That.  This is what regular homeschoolers do every single year!  

1.  I really wish that people would stop asking, in almost every homeschool group I'm a part of, how to deal with socialization of their kids in September in the light of the worldwide pandemic.  Listen, these are your options:

a) you can meet with people.
b) you can continue to not meet with people, but interact with them not in-person.

So to recap, you can go see people/places/whatever, following the guidelines set out.  Or breaking the rules, I suppose, although I like to think this isn't what these parents are asking about.  Or, you can not do that, and rely on online classes, Zoom meetings, and whatever else is out there.

I'm not sure if all of these parents are looking for some unheard of magical third way to socialize that is neither in person nor through technology, or what?  Two hot air balloons side by side?  The tin-can telephone?  Yodelling?  Stop asking this question, though.  It's very aggravating.

2.  I'm going to say this one pretty slowly here, because I didn't realize it was a question that so very many people had, but here you go:

If your kid cannot do A, then you should teach them A, and not move on to B. Here are some ways that works!  If your 9 year old cannot read, as one concerned parent in a group recently mentioned, then what you do 'for school' is teach your child how to read.  No, put the geography curriculum down.

3.  For the love of pete can we all please agree to pause the conversation about how Tasha is going to get into college as a homeschooler?  Tasha is seven.

4.  Here is an example of something that is not appropriate for a homeschooling discussion group:

Hi, parents!  My name is Jeff Jefferjeff and I'm a licensed teacher.  Would anyone be interested in having me teach an online Zoom class for elementary students?

Hi, Mr. Jefferjeff!  Just fyi, this is a homeschooling group.  While homeschoolers come in all flavours, this may not be the best place to advertise your distance ed services!

Book Review - Wingfeather Saga (Books 1-4)

I have heard a lot about the Wingfeather saga, and 99% of it has been glowing.   I have read people comparing it to Narnia, claiming it was a favourite story, calling themselves 'fangirls' over this thing.  I'm almost always disappointed when I get around to reading hyped-up books, but when our family friends said it was their favourite family read aloud and even the teens in the family were obsessed with it and they named their cats after characters. ..okay.  Okay, I will buy the books.  I got the first two, NEW IN HARDCOVER so I couldn't not read them because I'm very cheap, and here we go.

On The Edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness is book one.  Various people, apparently including the author himself (I have not verified this - it is just hearsay), say that this is the weakest book.  It is, I'm just letting you know, very weak.  The writing is amateurish and very long-winded and there are many little rabbit trails that lead nowhere.  It is also full of potty humour.  References to 'snot' candles, people peeing themselves, etc.  While I liked the cover art, the interior illustrations were at the caliber of your friend's 12yo who is 'super talented!'.  It's a little painful.  The entire story is just chock-a-block full of silly words, bumbling, jovial characters, and nonsense.  And the footnotes!  They almost did me in, guys.  Sometimes up to a third of the page filled with obscure details of the fantasy realm and the items within.  All, again, using as much made up and silly language as possible.  The same adjectives and verbs used to describe the same people - the red faced, one-legged sailor is always roaring, the little girl is always squeaking and squealing...it is very, and I mean very, tiresome.

Also a warning, besides the potty humour and the bad writing and the stock characters - there is also a lot of violence in this book.  People getting cracked across the skull by the butts of spears and such.  

My kids thought it was okay.  They didn't ask to hear me read it, but they didn't fight it or groan when I pulled out the book.  No one seemed particularly invested in the story, which follows the three Igiby children - Janner, Tink and Leeli - through their world of Skree, infested a few decades past now with giant lizard people called Fangs.  Who are obviously evil and also venomous and fat and stupid and lazy and greedy.  Obviously.  It's so nice when evil is just so easy to recognize. 

I was, and it is hard to overstate this, not keen to keep going.  But I was told there was a certain scene in book two that I absolutely had to read to.  So, fine.

North! Or Be Eaten is the second book.  I like the title, and I like the cover.  (Actually, this is my favourite cover of the four books.) So fa, so gud.  Going on the promise that the first book is not indicative of the series as a whole I went ahead and ordered the third and fourth books to finish my series and force myself to read to the bitter end.  Friends - people said they cried over the ending of this series.  Cried.  

Book two had the advantage over book one in that the storyline of the Igiby's fate had already started in book one, so we didn't need to repeat the 30-odd chapters of prequel type writing.  It moved preeeeeeetty slowly in the first half, though.  By chapter 29 [134 pages in] the family had still not reached the first village they were heading to on their journey.  As the book progressed, the story started to move along faster.

The writing did not initially improve; Peterson needed an editor very badly.  In some cases the same adjective was used in two consecutive sentences, which made reading aloud cumbersome.

The formulaic characters continued, and I started to actively dislike the two main adults.  The grandfather, Podo, who had seemed protective, blustering and weighed down by a heavy past in the first book, was much more antagonistic, irrational and angry in this book.  The mother, Nia, who had been caring and motherly but pretty unimportant to the plot of book one, was now essentially completely unnecessary in book two except to reinforce archaic feminine stereotypes.  I also feel like I need to repeat how incredibly violent and sad these stories become at times - there is a lot of punching, kicking, and blood.  A child is whipped and then locked in a coffin as punishment, feet are run over by carriages, children are forced into servitude and their parents into madness and extreme poverty, characters die in very dramatic ways; it's not an easy story to read aloud.

However, my children liked this book much better!  Bad guys chasing good guys, good guys making daring escapes, excitement, deception of dear friends and then intrigue!  And about two thirds of the way in the story really started to pick up and appeal more to me as well.  Also, fewer insane footnotes.  By the end of the book we were really engaged.

 

The Monster In The Hollows is book three.  In this book we finally have the family away from Skree, where they were living before, and 'safely' housed in the Green Hollows, where the mom character was from originally.  Before she married the king.  Anyway, if you thought the previous two books were violent and depressing, you're going to Not Like This One Very Much!  At this point pretty much everyone is mean to everyone else.  The girl character, Leeli, and Grandfather Podo, are both essentially absent from the story.  Nia, the mom, is just sort of...well she's just sort of there.  She doesn't seem to show much of any real growth in any of the books up to and including this one - she's the 'mourning' mom, the 'strong, silent queenly mom', and the person who does a lot of cooking, I guess.  

This story focuses mostly on the relationship between the two boys, Janner and Kalmar.  And it's a weird one, I'm not going to lie.  Janner has always been frustrated and short-tempered with his brother, and Kalmar is consistently immature and irresponsible.  It was like this in book one, book two, and now book three!  Again, no character growth.  Kalmar is depressed and self-sabotaging, and Janner is somehow expected to just act like he doesn't deserve to have things he loves.  The boys get to go to 'school', (Nia is not at ALLLLLLLL supportive.  It's sort of like 'well, make people like you.  Enjoy fighting!' Then just ignoring their bruises when they come home) which in the Green Hollows appears to consist of being beat up.  I'm not exaggerating here - this is school.  The boys join the Durgan Guild class (Janner doesn't want to, but no one cares what Janner wants to do with his life) and they spend a lot of time fighting.  There are bullies.  The teachers are weird and ugly and unsympathetic.  

Oh, and I don't want to totally ruin the book, so I won't spoil the story completely, but something happens at one point in the book that makes me realize that Nia is in the book solely to provide a sacrifice, one way or another.  

My children reacted to this third volume similarly to volume two - they were interested in the story - I mean it IS a story written with children in mind, odd as that may sound with these reviews.  We finished it, and they haven't asked for book four to start, but at this point, we're finishing the series if it kills us!

The Warden and The Wolf King is the fourth, and final, book in the Wingfeather Saga.  Review to come when we've finished it!

The salvaged plants

As children my sister and I learned quickly that one of the most exciting days of the week was garbage day, because you never knew what treasures would appear on the curbs of our middle-class neighborhood.  If you were especially fortunate, there would be a mostly dead plant.

I say fortunate because my mother loved nursing those dying little green things back to life and she was skilled at it.  We lugged home a potted palm once that remains, in my memory, a giant of a tree; my mother repotted it and it lived very happily for years behind my sister's kitchen chair - the receptacle for all the things she didn't want to eat for supper.

Mom couldn't resist the charm of needy plants, or even potentially needy plants.  Once I discovered a grocery store booklet on a shelf that explained how to grow a luscious indoor jungle out of food scraps and seeds.  At the time, this booklet was utterly captivating and made me think of lemon trees in the house and cucumber vines pinned along the ceiling, dripping fruit.

One does not simply grow out of the joy of sticking bits of your lunch in the dirt!  And this mild insanity much be hereditary since my middle daughter has joined the ranks of the afflicted.  Our windowsill holds three grapefruit trees and my Northern Ontario porch contains an enthusiastic mango tree( all courtesy of my daughter's penchant for making a hole and popping in a seed.

I can't point a finger, though, since alongside those grapefruit trees is an Aleppo pepper, a rosemary bush growing from a grocery store sprig, and a two foot tall avocado, all of which are my fault.  I'm also to blame for the African violet, which I was plant-sitting for a neighbor who said I may as well keep it since she didn't have luck with plants.  (Is there a sentence more likely to rustle the savior complex of the devout plant enthusiast?)  I couldn't let it go home to die, I insisted!

The little, unnamed succulent was salvaged (at $2.99!  What a bargain!) from the sale rack at the grocery store.  Oh, that we could all save a life for such a reasonable price!  The miniature orchid was carried hospital-bound as a gift, but the patient had been released, and the orchid just...never moved on from my shelf.  The spider plant was a cutting, and so was the other spider plant (And the third one, as well.  Shhhhh, hush now; it's fine, everything is fine.)

It spreads outward, this leafy desire of mine, into the garden filled with bulbs plucked from spoil heaps and peonies my father didn't want anymore and sweet peas grown from dried peas handed to me in a Ziploc bag from a friend.  At one point I had lettuce growing in the lawn, which is what happens if you don't pick your lettuce in time and it goes to seed and then you refuse to mow it down.  Lettuce makes such pretty lawn.

I have no logical reason for this.  I can't think why I do it, besides the tiny thrill of joy that comes from one, perfect, new leaf.

The Hundred Dresses

Estes wrote this Newberry Honor story in 1944, and it stands the test of time, remaining a heart-rending, yet child-friendly, look at the big issues of bullying, poverty, inequality, immigration and prejudice.  Although the story centers around the treatment of Wanda, a motherless Polish immigrant who lives in a shack in the rough end of town, in reality it's the story of Maddie, who realizes that while Wanda suffered at the hands of Peggy the bully, she stood by doing nothing.

Wanda's troubles start well before the incident of the hundred dresses - in truth she's never 'fit in'.  She is relegated to the back of the classroom, she has no friends, she stands alone in the schoolyard, and while no one is physically cruel to her - they don't have to be.

And then one day Wanda, desperate for attention, lies to the girls.  She claims she has a hundred dresses in her closet, all lined up.  Peggy finds this hilarious, and teases Wanda mercilessly, since it is obvious that Wanda has only the single, raggedy dress she wears everyday.

Children might relate to Maddie, who illustrates so many of us who hurt others simply by standing by and allowing injustice, but who pride themselves on never being the perpetrator.  Or they may relate to Peggy, who is a kind person at heart, who loves animals and is a good friend, but who teases Wanda because she thinks it is funny - who has no concept of Wanda's reality.  Or they might see themselves in Wanda, outcast, alone, trying clumsily to fit in.

I read this title to the 8yo and 6yo in one go.  It's a bit long for an easy bedtime read, but I think it's important to finish this story all at once to get the full benefit from it.  There's a lot to unpack in the book, and it can be a beautifully illustrated story of being a good person to those who are less fortunate, or it can be a jumping off point to deeper topics, depending on how you choose to use it.

Reading Notes - June

Still catching up on my backlog of notes.  Let's see if I actually wrote down what I read in June!  Ah, it looks like I only accomplished three adult books and the rest were read-alouds for the children.  Never mind, here they are anyway.

Four Girls At Chautauqua - Pansy (aka Isabella MacDonald Alden)

A ubiquitous Pansy book, one of a series set in or around the Chautauqua Christian Camp.  Did you know that Alden was Grace Livingston Hill's aunt?!  Apparently Hill continued some of the storylines.  I found the book in a junk shop years ago and finally picked it up last month to see what it was about.

Sometimes The Stones Are Very Lively - Jean Shaw

Terribly funny 1970s style Christian humor.  If you liked Adrian Plass, you'd like this.

Confessions Of A Common Reader - Anne Fadiman

One of two Fadiman books I bought myself as a birthday gift after having stared at them for ages online.  Her essays are little jewels and should be read by book lovers everywhere.