Soccer Math
June 16, 2010 @ 6:15 pm | Filed under: Links
At io9: The physics behind Roberto Carlos’s “Impossible Goal.”
Archive for June, 2010
Notes on June 2010 (First Half)
So I’ll remember, and since you asked…
Various interests swirling here:
The orthodontist’s office is holding a contest. The person who comes up with the best name for the betta fish on the counter wins the fish. Rose’s entry: Kalliope. (Get it? A Greek name? Betta sounds like beta, a Greek letter?) She has high hopes of winning. This has spawned (ba dum bum) discussions on odds/probability, subjective vs objective criteria, and breeds of fish. The latter necessitated a library trip yesterday, and this morning I have been regaled with tidbits about various breeds of freshwater aquarium fish.
The orthodontist and his assistant were greatly intrigued by Rose’s account of the middle-grade graphic novel, Smile, Raina Telgemaier’s award-winning account of her personal orthodontic ordeal in junior high. This came up when Dr. G mentioned bonding as the final step in Rose’s treatment plan (two years from now), and Rose volunteered that she had learned all about that in “this really great book I read.” She continued to explain that she had been “terrified about getting braces, but after I read Smile I was reassured.” Dr. G got quite excited and had his assistant write down all the information about the book.
We’ll be spending most of July at Dr. G’s office: two of the girls are getting braces.
So: fish, orthodontia, what else?
Jane is absorbed with practicing for piano guild and Shakespeare Club. (Reminds me: we need to create a human thumb out of Sculpey.) Recent reading has included Dorothy Sayers mysteries; Musashi (a manga series); L. M. Montgomery short stories; a collection of Best American Short Stories; Betsy and the Great World (again); various Caroline Cooney novels; Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, As You Like It, Othello, and a bit of Henry IV, with corresponding sections in Bloom’s Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (which we are grateful to Mental Multivitamin for bringing to our attention). Oh, also the book she got for her birthday: A User’s Guide to the Universe.
Jane and I are going to work through Memoria Press’s Classical Rhetoric course together. Readings from: Aristotle’s Rhetoric; Adler’s How to Read a Book; Cochran’s Traditional Logic; and Figures of Speech. We’re going to start in a leisurely way this summer. Both of us are excited. Looks like some excellent discussion fodder.
Scott and Jane have been doing a kind of informal Film Club in the evenings. Recent viewings include: Men in Black, In the Line of Fire, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, A Few Good Men, The Natural, The Sixth Sense.
Bean and Rose spend a lot of time scootering in circles on the back patio, narrating adventures in a long-running fantasy story they play. Then Rose will disappear to the back room to write up the latest chapter on the computer. The subject matter shifts every week or so: sometimes a Warriors-inspired cat saga; lately the dramatic doings of a pair of princesses, one an ancient Egyptian and one Japanese. A set of Dover costume coloring books have provided necessary reference material. Beanie very earnestly desires to learn Japanese. Our library used to have a partnership with Rosetta Stone, but no longer, alas. I’m sure there must be some good resources online, but I haven’t done the homework yet.
Current favorite Wii game: Spectrobes (the older girls); Mario Kart (Wonderboy and Rilla).
I haven’t spent as much time in the back yard as I usually do this time of year. I think it’s because I’m sad about the absence of Monarchs. Everything else is lovely out there, though. A zillion bees (including honeybee and native species). Mourning cloaks, goldfinches, hummingbirds. A profusion of bloom. Jasmine breezes. Tomatoes in abundance. A great many weeds needing my attention.
Wonderboy has a new watch which affords him great delight. If you need to know the exact minute everything happens, every day, every minute, he’s your man.
Rilla lost her pink parkly shoes, we thought. This was high tragedy. Yesterday, oh the joy!, a friend kindly dropped them off—they had been left in her yard at last week’s Shakespeare/choir practice. Of course they had!
This missive just in from Rose:
Mommy, can you send me information and pictures about the Rosy Red Minnow?
Thanks, and love.
Gotta run.
Instead of Posting Tonight
June 15, 2010 @ 7:48 pm | Filed under: Books
I got caught up in the most excellent #booksthatchangedmyworld meme over on Twitter. I was honest! A number of my Maudly books made my list, but I tried to include less exalted but seriously influential reads as well.
Booknotes: Last Week’s Reading
June 14, 2010 @ 7:37 pm | Filed under: Books
Finished The Whisper of Glocken, Carol Kendall’s sequel to The Gammage Cup. It was even better than Gammage, though The Firelings still holds the top spot in my heart. I want to write at more length about Kendall’s beguiling, quirky, suspenseful books, especially her fondness for bands of unlikely heroes whose faults turn out, Meg Murry-like, to be their strengths. For now I’ll just say that I highly recommend all three of these novels as family read-alouds or as satisfying read-alones for boys, girls, and fantasy-loving adults.
Received an advance review copy of Mindblind, a new YA novel by Jennifer Roy about a 14-year-old boy with Asperger’s and a genius-level intellect. I enjoyed it, was fascinated by the way Nathaniel’s mind works, and simultaneously appreciated and felt wistful over the general awesomeness of his mother and circle of friends. It is clearly a book with a mission, seeking to help readers understand Asperger’s and autism, but it mostly puts story first. Anyway, I’m all for helping readers (including me) better understand Asperger’s and autism. Once again, I’m working on a better, deeper-digging post about this book and a few others that have moved me recently: Kathy Erskine’s brilliant and powerful Mockingbird; Cynthia Lord’s Rules; Charlotte Moore’s memoir about her sons George and Sam. All enthusiastically recommended. (But George and Sam is not for younger readers.)
River in the Desert, that book about the LA aqueduct I’ve been dabbling in for two months. I’m not going to finish it (I see that now), but I’ve learned a lot and it’s certainly a fascinating piece of history, with far-reaching consequences.
And then Scott brought home A.S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book, which I’ve been in line for at the library for months and months. When did it pub? Since that day. It’s as big as my first NYC apartment, so yeah, there goes the rest of my summer reading plans. LIKE I CARE. Two chapters in, I’m riveted, and I have very high hopes.
Saturday Snapshot: Cute Boys
June 12, 2010 @ 7:58 am | Filed under: Photos
Aesop, Shakespeare, Hucklebaby, Ben
June 11, 2010 @ 8:12 pm | Filed under: Family
Well, I just wrote a post-length comment on yesterday’s post, so I probably don’t have much more to say tonight. (Of course, having said that, I’ll write a novel.)
Today was a good day. One of the things I got to do was direct a couple of very short skits based on Aesop’s fables, to be performed by a small group of six-to-nine-year-old girls after their older siblings’ Shakespeare scenes next weekend. None of the younger-sib boys wanted in. Hee. I had the BEST time working with these girls, none of whom happen to be mine. They dove into the scenes with such zest and commitment. I am absolutely beside myself with eagerness to watch them perform for their parents next weekend.
And I’m so proud of my Shakespeare gang. They have worked really hard, and they are going to rock.
Over Memorial Day weekend, my own family started a group reading of The Tempest. Scott is Prospero; Beanie is Miranda. Jane was extremely sporting about that; she took Ferdinand and I’m the uncle. Rose is reading Ariel. The challenge will be finding time to keep going—we sort of need the younger set to be sleeping, or deeply absorbed in something else, so as to avoid interruptions every thirty seconds. But when Huck naps on weekends, I write. Scott holds that time sacred. And at night, we have this whole other rhythm going. So I don’t know when we’ll get to Act 2. But Act 1 was awesome.
Huck is lying here beside me, asleep, and I’m looking at him and realizing he takes up fully half the width of this king-sized bed. Someone called him “a year and a half” yesterday and I was like: SHUT UP! He’s a BABY! But he’s totally this little man trucking around the house, these days. Throwing all manner of valuables in the trash can. Unspooling the toilet paper. Carrying my Tupperware into the back yard and stepping on it, or sitting in it, or throwing it over the fence.
In other news? I miss LOST.
(But did you hear about this? It’s exactly what I was hoping they would do. Jane and anyone else who isn’t caught up to the series finale, DO NOT CLICK this link.)
In Which I Use a Lot of Capital Letters
June 10, 2010 @ 7:22 pm | Filed under: Family
Our Season of Becky is just beginning. Summertime kicks off with Jane’s birthday—she turned 15 on Monday, and a splendid day it was, even if something did go amiss with my frosting for the Rocky Road Sheet Cake. (Wasn’t enough to cover the cake. Mom, where’d I go wrong?) Scott took the day off work; Jane and I stole away to go shopping, just the two of us—quite a treat! And then came the fun of a visit from Scott’s brother John, who was in town for a convention. And later still, that delicious if unsightly cake. A good day.
Our various activities are winding down for the summer—just a few biggies left to go, most particularly our Shakespeare Club performance of scenes from the Scottish play. Next week will be full of rehearsals. Our group piano classes keep going year-round, but apart from those, our time will be pretty much uncommitted until Comic-Con.
And it’s funny: no sooner had I breathed my usual deep sigh of relief over the End of the Activities than I noticed a certain, erm, restlessness attacking the occupants of this little house in the afternoons. Suddenly, my mental declaration to Park Myself and Go Nowhere seemed a bit, well, mental—especially around 5pm when there are still two long hours to go before Scott gets home. By last week, the kids were starting to get under each other’s skin something fierce. So I’ve been scooping up the three youngest a few evenings a week and heading to the YMCA, where we have a family membership.
I was actually on the verge of canceling the membership—we got it when Rose was taking gymnastics, but around Easter she decided to take a break, and after we paid for May without going one single time the whole month, I figured it was time to bail. But fortunately (as it turns out), you have to actually go there in person to cancel, and I was too lazy to go. (Which is almost certainly their diabolical plan. The people who are not too lazy to go the Y to cancel a membership are probably the kind of people who go to the Y to use their membership. Either way, the membership doesn’t get canceled.)
So last week when the afternoon crazies hit my children, I suddenly remembered: oh RIGHT, we still have that Y membership, and there’s a really nice playroom there. So I took the littles to the playroom, where they are ecstatically happy playing with the nice college girls who work there, and the big kids got a much needed respite at home without small peoples clamoring for their attention and Wii remotes.
And there I was at the Y, with nothing to do. So I went into the gym and got on the treadmill (because why not), and then I found out there’s a free-for-members personal-exercise-program-planning thing, so I signed up for that (because why not), now I have this whole Official Exercise Plan mapped out, which is, if you know me, hilarious. The young personal trainer guy asked me what my “fitness goals” are, and I was like: Um, uh, well….I would like stronger arms. So I can open jars instead of having to wait for my husband to come home from work. So now I have a Fitness Goal of Getting Arm Muscles.
I am hoping to achieve this goal by August, when we will be going to a Big Family Gathering back East. You never know when you will need to impress the in-laws by opening jars.
Goldfinch
June 9, 2010 @ 10:53 am | Filed under: Nature Study, Photos
He was gone before I could get a non-blurry photo. A pity—he was posing so nicely!
“For them all is done.”
June 8, 2010 @ 7:38 pm | Filed under: Books
Scott brought home a library book I had requested, though my memory of doing so is fuzzy. Someone, somewhere, mentioned something about Rebecca West, and I looked her up and couldn’t find the book the someone was talking about (and I’ve since forgotten what it was), but there was this other book by West, and, well, you know how easy it is to click that “request a copy” box.
So here it is, a hulk of a book, approximately the size of my first car. Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey through Yugoslavia. Will I read it? Seems unlikely that I’ll finish: if I do, it knocks my summer reading plans pretty well to smithereens. But I opened it, because it is here, and it feels like reading a letter from someone you like very much indeed, someone smart and perceptive and pleasantly obsessive.
“My dear,” she tells her husband in the prologue,
“I know I have inconvenienced you terribly by making you take your holiday now, and I know you did not really want to come to Yugoslavia at all. But when you get there you will see why it was so important that we should make this journey, and that we should make it now, at Easter. It will all be quite clear, once we are in Yugoslavia.”
These words are lost on her husband, who is asleep in his train berth. But she certainly has me at hello. And then this:
It was perhaps as well. I could not have gone on to justify my certainty that this train was taking us to a land where everything was comprehensible, where the mode of life was so honest that it put an end to perplexity.
About this, I must hear. Where the mode of life was so honest that it put an end to perplexity. She’s writing in 1940 (the book was first published in 1940 1941) about a journey undertaken in 1937, following a visit the previous year.
One the train from Salzburg (Austria) to Zagreb (Croatia), West and her husband share a car with two German couples, and the conversation turns to various difficulties the businessmen are suffering in the maze of new tax laws and red tape. One of the German women tells a story about her hairdresser’s assistant, who tearfully expresses a fear that she hasn’t passed an examination she was required to take in order to continue at her job:
She had said to the girl, “But I am sure you will pass your examination, for you are so very good at your work.” But the girl had answered, “Yes, I am good at my work. Shampooing can I do, and water-waving can I do, and marcelling can I do, and oil massage can I do, and hair-dyeing can I do, but keep from mixing up Goring’s and Goebbels’s birthday, that I cannot do.” They had all laughed at this, and then again fell silent.
The business man said, “But all the young people, they are solid for Hitler. For them all is done.”
The others said, “Ja, das ist so!” and the business woman began, “Yes, our sons,” and then stopped.
This is an 1150 page book. I need to read more of them.