James-A-Day: Wrapup

By -
I just realized that the James event is over.  I thought I had one more day to go!  But no, it is 10:30 PM on Halloween, and October is pretty much over now.  So I missed doing "The Fenstanton Witch" after all.  I was so busy today that I didn't even get past the first two pages.

Here's what I did instead of reading one more MRJ story: made the kids do 3 hours of school in the morning ("But Mom!  It's a holiday AND your birthday!  You deserve the day off!"  Nice try, kiddo.  Now tidy the schoolroom.)  Took the kids to the ever-marvelous Annual Pumpkin Drop at the college, in which we test various theories of gravity by dropping pumpkins off the 6th-floor balcony.  Igor was kind of off this year, BUT they also threw 250 super-bouncy-balls all at once, which was very cool and resulted in utter chaos.  Went out to lunch with two good friends, yum.  Carved jack-o-lanterns (I'm always late), fetched pizza for dinner, spent at least half an hour doing 12-year-old's hair in about 25 braids, grandparents arrived, worried about the rain, took the kids trick-or-treating for over an hour anyway, dragged home to find that we still have most of our candy supply because hardly anyone went out tonight.  Oh, so tired.

Said 12-year-old was the hit of the neighborhood in her jellyfish costume.  9-year-old was adorable in her forest elf outfit (she imagines herself adventuring with Legolas).  Pictures available on the Howling Frog Facebook page.

I hope you all enjoyed reading MRJ this month; I certainly did and I learned a lot too.

I think this is what I want to be for Halloween next year.  It's certainly kind of scary.


Comments

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the source of the s
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he defeats or avoids th
Read more