Archive for July, 2011
It’s Monday, right?
Things happening around here:
* the backyard sunflowers bloomed (front yard getting close)
* cleaned up the front flowerbed, moved a few ailing moss roses out there
* tackled the girls’ closet (oh the horror)
* read aloud: Harold and the Purple Crayon, Hush Little Dragon, Stellaluna (found it!), two chapters of Bake Sale, a new graphic novel from First Second (Rilla wanted to hear it because the main character is a cupcake, and before long we’d drawn a crowd. I saw Beanie finishing it on her own later.)
July 10, 2011 @ 11:05 am | Filed under:
Photos 
July 8, 2011 @ 4:45 pm | Filed under:
Poetry 
The bat-poet remembers his earliest days:
…And then the mother dances through the night
Doubling and looping, soaring, somersaulting—
Her baby hangs on underneath.
All night, in happiness, she hunts and flies.
Her high sharp cries
Like shining needlepoints of sound
Go out into the night and, echoing back,
Tell her what they have touched.
She hears how far it is, how big it is,
Which way it’s going:
She lives by hearing.
More Poetry Friday posts: Wild Rose Reader
More Bat-Poet moments
Rose petal, rock, leaf, bat
Her bat mood
July 8, 2011 @ 6:33 am | Filed under:
Photos 
Huck and Rilla are next to me on the sofa—it’s just past dawn here, and Sesame Street is on—a tangle of limbs and hair. Grabbing each other’s faces and shouting “Eee! Oh!” at each other, for no particular reason. This is one of my favorite sights in the world: small children rolling around like puppies. In my first La Leche League group when Jane was a baby, all the moms would sit in a circle with the babies tumbled on the floor in the middle. They were like lobsters in a tank—an inelegant simile, I know, but that’s what they always made me think of, including the wanting to eat them all up.
Bonus giraffe-in-a-blue-dress photo:
July 7, 2011 @ 2:46 pm | Filed under:
Links The idea behind this project makes me swoon.
“As a birder, Chaya says, he thought it wouldn’t be a hard task to map trees—unlike birds, they don’t move. But as he became more involved in the mapping project, the park changed.
“It was like learning how to see new colors, or textures,” Chaya says. “The park never looked the same again once I began to discover the many, many species of trees.”
“It seems the natural laws of the popular Rovio game’s world do not entirely correspond to real-world physics, and the differences make for some interesting study opportunities.”
ETA two more Angry Birds links:
Here’s one on using Angry Birds to teach math, history, and science.
And this Angry Birds-themed birthday party from GeekMom knocked my socks off the other day.
I was wondering when this would happen. Keyboarding skills are more vital these days. I’m pretty sure Scott hasn’t used cursive since fourth grade…
I knew Rilla was enjoying The Bat-Poet, but I didn’t realize how much until this afternoon, as we neared the end of the book. She turned to me with furrowed brow and said, “When we finish, will we be able to read it again?”
“You mean right away?”
“Yes.”
I told her sure we could, and she heaved a mighty sigh of relief.
I’ve noticed that the older girls can’t help but be drawn into the story if they pass through the room where Rilla and I are reading. It’s a soft and gentle tale, rather quiet, with velvety-rich language. Oh, I just love Randall Jarrell. His mockingbird and chipmunk have such personality, and the introspective, yearning bat is a kindred spirit—really. He composes poems. He longs to be able to pour forth a magical, uplifting song like the mockingbird’s, but he can’t sing. He finds himself fitting observations into words and phrases, lyrical and perceptive lines of poetry. But oh, how he doubts himself. The mockingbird’s cool, clinical analysis—“It was clever of you to have that last line two feet short”—leaves him bewildered and longing for an audience who is moved by his words. When, after hearing the bat’s poem about an owl, the chipmunk shivers and vows to go underground before dark from now on, the little bat is deeply gratified: he knows his words have had an impact.
His poems move and shiver me, too—
All day long the mockingbird has owned the yard.
As light first woke the world, the sparrows trooped
Onto the seedy lawn: the mockingbird
Chased them off shrieking. Hour by hour, fighting hard
To make the world his own, he swooped
On thrushes, thrashers, jays, and chickadees—
At noon he drove away a big black cat.
Now, in the moonlight, he sits here and sings.
A thrush is singing, then a thrasher, then a jay—
Then, all at once, a cat begins meowing.
A mockingbird can sound like anything.
He imitates the world he drove away
So well that for a minute, in the moonlight,
Which one’s the mockingbird? Which one’s the world?
I know that mockingbird.
I know that bat, too.
Related post: Rose petal, rock, leaf, bat
Things I did today (besides that thing I promised I wouldn’t mention this time):
* took a walk with Scott
* took a walk, later, with five of the kids
* read The Ear Book to Huck for the dozenth time this week
* and also that gem, Brave Georgie Goat
* tore my hair out, a little, over some travel plans I’m trying to arrange for Jane (totally worth it)
* dropped Jane and Beanie off at a friend’s house to swim
* played a fierce round of Munchkin with Rilla and Rose (Rilla kicked our elven patooties)
* read more Bat-Poet to Rilla (and Rose listened in because it was the part about the cardinal, her favorite bird)
* spent a perfect half-hour doing dishes while Rose, Rilla, and Wonderboy drew pictures of dolphins for me, and Mahalia Jackson poured out her soul over the speakers
* did not read any of my own books-in-progress
* did not get as much work done as I meant to
* ate scrumptious chicken stovetop-grilled to perfection by my husband
* and some rather excellent three-bean salad leftover from yesterday, which was actually four-bean
* finished an episode of Next Food Network Star (but we’re still a week behind)
* said, after dinner, “Rose, would you mind watering the garden for me?” and AT THAT VERY MOMENT the heavens opened and rain poured down through the still-shining sun
* received the copy of Letters from New York I’ve been eagerly awaiting
* and will (just maybe) read a little of tonight.
I’m going to post twice today: once about Google+, and then another one about ANYTHING BUT Google+ so as not to drive away my non-Plus-interested friends and readers here.
(Heh. Nonplussed.) 😉
But Plus. A few more thoughts. First: if you’re trying to get in and haven’t yet, there are a few things you can do to help. At least—it sure seems like these things help, because everyone I know who has tried them has gotten to that magic Join button. But take my words with grains of salt; the efficacy of these suggestions is speculation.
1) Create or update your Google profile. If you have a Gmail account, you already have a profile: Click your name in the top right of your Gmail screen and you’ll see a link. Even if you don’t use Gmail, you might have created a Google account at some point—for Reader, perhaps? So check, and tweak it.
2) Ask me or another Plus user to add you to a circle. We can send you an invite by simply sending a G+ message via email, but those emails may take 24 hours or more to arrive. Don’t wait for the invitation: go directly to step 3.
3) Visit the Google+ website: plus.google.com. If you see a “we’ve exceeded capacity” message, try again an hour or two later. But if you’ve done step one, you will probably get in within 24 hours. Again, this is anecdotal info only: I’m seeing it happen frequently, so I’m passing the suggestion along, for what it’s worth.
Okay, so you’re in: now what?
You’ll quickly find that Plus’s “Circles” concept is a lot like Facebook friends and Twitter followers. Actually, it combines aspects of each, and once you wrap your head around the distinction between people you share with and people you read, you’ll find Circles are an intuitive and convenient way of organizing your various overlapping circles of friends, colleagues, and acquaintances.
For me, the shape Circles are taking is a distinction between “friends”—reciprocal relationships, people I follow who follow me back, most of whom I already have some kind of real-life or online relationship with—and people I “follow,” Twitter-style: people who don’t necessarily know me and have no real reason to follow me back, but in whose posts I am interested.
I love that Google+ is allowing me to make full use of those nuances. On Facebook, the friends lists are a pain to use, so I wind up posting everything to ALL my friends, and there’s a very complicated dynamic there with all my worlds converging. My relatives don’t necessarily want to be bombarded with my kidlitosphere links, nor do my professional contacts necessarily want to hear every adorable thing Rilla utters. (But my family does, believe you me.)
On Google+, you can easily target the audience of any post, making it Public (like a tweet with no character limit—visible to anyone who follows you as well as on your profile page) or aiming it at a specific circle, or even a single friend. You can even cc people who aren’t on Plus at all; they’ll get the post by email. (A feature I gather most folks are using lightly at the moment.)
Here’s a link to a post I wrote on Google+ this morning, about how I’m using Circles so far.
Other things I really like:
1. Data liberation. You can download all your content. That’s huge!
2. The smart and lively comment-thread discussions, which are unhindered by character limits.
3. But if a thread gets too noisy for you and you don’t want new-reply notifications anymore, you can click a mute button. Think of all those times on Facebook when you joyfully congratulate your friend on her new baby—and then for the next week you’re getting a notification every time someone else says congrats.
4. I can bookmark links and send notes to my Evernote account! (Create an empty circle and add your Evernote email address. Voila. You can access the notes anytime by clicking on the circle within g+, or go to Evernote.)
Hangouts (group chats) sound fun but I haven’t tried one yet ARE SUPER FUN. Most seem to be video chats, so I’d have to brush my hair. (I DIDN’T.)
Okay. Pitch over. We now return to your regularly scheduled Bonny Glen posting. 🙂
Related:
5 Things I Really Like about Google+
Buckle Up, Unette
July 4, 2011 @ 8:17 pm | Filed under:
Photos 
There’s a pair of hummingbirds nesting one of the trees just outside our back fence, and they spend most of their time in our yard. One of them got into the house yesterday, causing quite a stir. Poor little thing. We managed to shoo him out, and Scott refilled the feeder. We didn’t see him all the rest of the day, and we were a bit worried that the stress had been too much for him, but Rilla reported seeing him drink from the feeder while she was riding her bike. She calls them honeybirds. We ate our Fourth of July dinner outside under the trees, and there he was, Rilla’s honeybird, right as rain, darting about the Cape honeysuckle. Which, come to think of it, may be why she thinks he’s called honeybird.
