Moby-Dickulous

For some bizarre reason, Sonlight American Lit spends 5 weeks on Moby-Dick.

I actually like this book. It’s a bit of a slow read, I can’t read more than a few chapters at a time before I get distracted, but it is well written and interesting.

Honestly though. If you saw a whale would you really name it “Moby-Dick”?

Moreover, if you got your leg chewed off by a whale, a giant scary albino whale, and then made it your life goal to kill this whale because you had a twisted god-complex type thing going on, would you name it Moby-Dick? Really?

I recently asked on my Facebook what people would named whales if they had them. The results were: Humphrey, Willy, Phil, Oswald, Astrid, Morgan, Danielle, Obie, Woody, and Sparkles. Ben informed me that he would have two whales: Yesterday’s Lunch, his food whale, and Money Money Money, his cash whale.

I would name my whale Snowball.

ATTACK RABBIT!

Did you know that Jimmy Carter, a former president of the United States of America, once got attacked by a giant swimming rabbit?

 

 

Really. Read about it here. The incident described by Carter’s press secretary: The animal was clearly in distress, or perhaps berserk. The President confessed to having had limited experience with enraged rabbits. He was unable to reach a definite conclusion about its state of mind. What was obvious, however, was that this large, wet animal, making strange hissing noises and gnashing its teeth, was intent upon climbing into the Presidential boat.

The way it happened, apparently, is he’s out in this boat…and he got randomly attacked by an enormous swamp rabbit. Now, if this happened to me, and I was, or was on my way to being, the leader of the free world, I would not have told reporters about this. Photo courtesy of the Jimmy Carter Library. If you look, you can see Jimmy hitting the water with his oar and the rabbit (on the right) swimming away.

 

A large…wet…berserk animal! Attacking the President!

Imagine.

The only equivalent my generation has is the George Bush Pretzel Incident, which is not the same inasmuch as that was pretty much a stupid accident, whereas you haven’t got any control over a giant insane swimming rabbit.

 

What has America come to?

I plan to write more on the peaceful transition of power later…but a bit tired right now, and tomorrow’s a school day and I have auditions to practice for. Plus I can’t find the picture  I want to use.

But I’m sure you all wait in eager anticipation for my political judgements, which of course I am making based on dinner-table conversations, a lifetime of newspaper reading, and half a year of American Government. Happy Chinese New Year!!

Christmas is coming…

The goose is getting fat

Please to put a penny in the old straw hat

If you have no penny a ha’penny will do

If you have no ha’penny then God bless you.

 

I am pleased to announce that the holiday season has officially begun! We recieved our first Christmas catalog last week! (order now before it’s too late?)

Congratulations to LTD Commodities for having a strange sense of timing!

I am pschying myself up by finishing Week 2 of my school year and listening to the Chieftains, a cool Irish folk group that put out a Christmas CD.

Hark the herald angels sing….

Randomness

The Friar Chuck Update: Friar Chuck versions 1,2, and 3 have been dispatched. Dad finally bought a Havahart trap to catch them. They promptly figured out how to lift up the trap and get the bait. It’s a constant battle.

In other news, Mom is in the process of staining the armoire, which is a long hard slog. Our kitchen is stain central, and the fumes are going to everybody’s heads.

Last weekend Mom took me to see Mamma Mia, which is a musical based on the songs of ABBA. Mom and Dad went to see it for their anniversary this year, and she liked it so much she took me too. It’s actually a really cute movie. Plus, it has Meryl Streep, and Peirce Brosnan, and Colin Firth* and Julie Walters, so how can you NOT see it? Dad got Mom the soundtrack, so now we are all listening to ABBA nonstop. Mom has even decreed that it’s unamerican not to like ABBA.Take a chance on meeeee….

I have gotten Facebook and become addicted.

I have also started school. Grr. BUT, hopefully I will be able to take December off the way I did last year! A&P is going super so far, and so is Latin. Math is just really really annoying, especially today’s lesson where all Dr. Shorman is was yak on and on about the area of transversal laterals or something. Brit Lit is OK, but Sonlight, so involved. I’m done with Beowulf and onto Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I just started Logic, and I haven’t begun French yet, although I have a new resolution to work harder at it after being to Taize. It comes easily to me but I haven’t been studying it the way I should. Orchestra and whatever band I end up with starts next week.

More on Taize tomorrow.

Um, that’s all the news from here I guess…boring boring end of summer…

*Incidentally, he has a really high voice. Like in Manly Men, the first verse, only actually very true.

Ethel the Singing Cow Goes to Paris

There is this children’s book called “The Cows are Going to Paris”. So naturally, I had to take our very own Ethel to Paris with me and do pictures of her in front of touristy places!

This is on the first day on the bus, right after we’d gotten off the plane. Yes, my hair is in braids; I know that I never, ever, ever, braid my hair, but I did at Taize. It’s still me, OK? My brother kept squinting at photos and saying, “Which one are you again?”. It’s embarrassing.

We then did about a week’s worth of touring in 2 days with very little sleep, so consequently I have no idea what order these were taken in. This is Ethel in front of Notre Dame.

All the carvings on Notre Dame were amazing. Also, I had no idea that The Hunchback of Notre Dame was written to raise money for the reconstruction of the cathedral! Also, our guide would point to a carved person and say something like, “This is Saint Dennis of so-and-so, who did something famous and then had his head chopped off in Ireland or somewhere and walked 25 miles holding his head in his hands and was canonized in 1873 under the reign of Pope Urban the 16th” and I wished that I was Catholic. But only shortly. (I know that the real phrase is “only briefly” but I met non-American people who said “only shortly” and I found it rather charming. More translation stories to come.)

This is Ethel and my hand on TOP of Notre Dame. We got to climb all the way up, something like 844 stairs on a teeny winding stone staircase, which was very cool but I would not do it again unless there was an elevator. Whatever tour we were on should have been called “The Steps of Paris”. My legs hurt a lot by the time we got to Taize, and then the first afternoon we did a hike involving steps.

But back to Paris.

This is Ethel in front of Sacre Coure. I’m not sure if I’m spelling that right but it’s a cathedral built on the biggest hill in Paris, apparently. They call it a hill, but it’s about 40 times bigger than Mount Sunflower, so that shows you cultural differences right there! We climbed the hill, and then we climbed about 30 million steps to get to the actual cathedral. (hyperbole: gross exaggeration for comic effect) (just in case you are one of those irritatingly technical people who are always saying things like, “well, actually, it’s roughly 437 steps”) (man, that bugs me)

One thing I found interesting about Sacre Coure is that there were breakdancers on the way up, which sounds reasonable, except that they were dancing to Britney Spears. Foreign people like the worst of our music. That comes in later in my post entitled, “Oyak”.

Eiffel Tower Ethel!!!!

This is Ethel (duh) on a boat cruise of the Seine. If you look closely you’ll be able to spot the Bishop’s head in the background!

I Did It!

See! I figured out how to convert a movie file ending in letters to a different type of movie file ending in different letters! I am some kind of techie genius!

This is what happened after dinner, when Ben got out his lightsaber and insisted that we all watch him do cool stuff with it instead of productive things like washing the supper dishes or teaching yourself Bach’s Cantata no. 140 or watching our current NetFlix, NEWHART. And because blogging has this effect on your brain where you see everything as potential material, you whip out the camera and set it to video.

And once Ben finshed demonstrating lightsaber techniques….well, you’ll see.

Without further ado, I present:

Fish

Yesterday our church had its somethingth annual Strawberry Festival. So we went. And we weren’t there long when Ben won a fish! And then Sophie won a fish! And then Dad found out that these were REAL fish rather that nice easy-to-care for plastic or clay fish, and had a minor freak-out.

And then we went home for fear the fish would die of heatstroke, which frankly was the least of our worries, because Ben and Sophie both managed to drop the Ziploc baggies containing the fish at least once. And then Ben had a total loss of sense and opened the baggie, right in the car, and Dad really  freaked out then. So Ben closed the baggie, and held it up to the air-conditioning vent so the fish would “have air”, and he periodically made observations such as, “Hey….I think his gills just fell off!”.

Our family frankly does not have good luck with fish. When I was three, my parents got me three goldfish, two of which immediately died. The other one lived about four years relatively happily, except for the time my parents thought I was trying to feed it a cereal bar. Its name was Otto. Then it died.

Two summers ago we bought a plastic pond for the garden, and filled it with fish. We have gone through about seventy-five fish in the last two years. Most of them died right away, or got eaten by a raccoon when someone would forget to cover them. Only three ever survived to see winter, which is when they got put in a bucket of water in our basement, and there they died one by one.

Around that time we also bought a rainbow betta fish which we named Joseph, after the biblical Joseph. We thought that was apt because the biblical Joseph lived in Egypt and was a tribe of Israel through Rachel.

Just kidding! The real reason it was named Joseph was because of the coat of many colors.  

It lived for a year or two before dying.

The current fish are still alive, as yet unnamed. I think we should go with Issachar and Naphtali, after the tribes of Israel theme, plus those are cool names but not names you would ever use for children.

Interesting aside: I know a girl who used to have a betta fish called Sushi. Is that the greatest name or what?

Friar Chuck Redux/Recital Time

Friar Chuck!!! Adorable, but unfortunately he has been eating most of Mom’s garden over the last few days. Any advice on how to get rid of woodchucks would be appreciated; we’ve already spread pepper around. Plus, we have a pellet gun and a pellet pistol at the ready. Plus, rodent eradicating gas bomb things, PLUS Ben and his slingshot. Mom was talking to someone today whose friend caught them in HavaHart traps and then shot them.

Interesting shot of Ben and I on a hammock, pointing in a strange, semideranged manner.

And the recital photos I promised on Wednesday:

This is me doing my solo piece, Adagio from Handel’s Fourth Violin Sonata. I hit the fourth note wrong, but other than that it was pretty good.

The BACH DOUBLE!!!! Which was relatively mistake-free! We stayed together during the entire thing, which was practically a first. I had one major rhythm mistake but that was it. So happy to be done with that!

Hopefully, some type of contest thing coming tomorrow. Or this weekend at least. Or, possibly next month, unless I get my butt in gear.

Various

Guess why this is named “various”?

 

That’s right! It’s a completely random collection of thoughts and scenes from my day!

Ben and I were messing around in the kitchen, and I asked him a question about a drill bit. Something really inquisitive and thoughtful, such as, “Is that a drill bit?”. To which he replied, “No duh, Taylor!”, so that is my new catchphrase. It stems from the movie Drillbit Taylor, which we haven’t seen, but hey, it’s a change from plain “No duh” or the more-used “No duh, Sherlock”, so what the heck?

Dad taught Ben and I to shoot a pellet gun tonight. (goodbye, Friar Chuck) On my first try I don’t even think I hit the target, but on my last one it was right on the edge of the smallest little yellow circle. Pellet guns require an insane amount of pumping and adjusting of bolts, etc, before you can fire, so if you were in a situation in which you were being attacked and you had to defend yourself with a pellet gun, you had better aim carefully the first time. By the time you reloaded you would be dead. Hey, that’s probably why soldiers don’t use pellet guns, right?

Recital tommorow! Pictures will be coming on Friday, assuming I like the way I look in them. Otherwise, you’ll just have to take my word for it. Friday the Thirteenth is graduation in our town, which seems kind of forboding to me. Friday the thirteenth, I mean, not graduation itself. There were photos of the graduates in the paper today, accompanied by amusing advertisments that say things such as, “Chili’s wishes to extend best wishes to the class of 2008″ and “the Crew at Balch’s Family Fish House Congratulates Jamie, Ryan, Anthony, and the entire Class of 2008″, and a great one from the county electric company urging all graduates to replace their lightbulbs with new energy efficient ones, and best of luck in all future endeavors. Sophie went through all the pictures and assigned animals to various people (if Bob were an animal, he would be a shark, and so on).

This afternoon I was singing the Oscar Mayer Song (yes, I have too much time on my hands). When I got to, “And if you ask me, why I’ll say……” but before I could yell “B-O-L-O-G-N-A” Ben screamed, “BOOYAH!!!”.

And JK Rowling’s prequel came out!!!!! It’s only two pages but you can read it typed here, and in Jo’s handwriting here.

Genius.

 

Go Red Sox!

 

Friar Chuck

This is one of a pair of woodchucks that has taken up residence in our woodpile. They are incredibly cute and we have become attached to them, although the google toolbar shows a recent search query for “woodchuck pellet gun kill”, so whether they have a secure future I’m not sure.

Also, Dad came home with bullets.

They are both named Friar Chuck, cause I think they look like they’re praying.