A few weeks ago, one of the moms on my homeschool email list asked if anyone could find an online text of “Grammar-Land” by M.L. Nesbitt (published in 1877). I had a look and found the text on Google Books: http://books.google.com/, and after I’d glanced through it I decided I had to read it for LibriVox, since, you know, I’m kind of obsessed with grammar and language, and it looked like a really fun little book.
Elli did the proof-listening for me. We both loved the book. It’s utterly charming, and so lively and interesting! The chapters are nice and short, which didn’t hurt either. It’s a lot easier to find time to record a 10-minute chapter than a 45-minute one.
“They are funny fellows, these nine Parts-of-Speech. You will find out by-and-by which you like best amongst them all. There is rich Mr. Noun, and his useful friend Pronoun; little ragged Article, and talkative Adjective; busy Dr. Verb, and Adverb; perky Preposition, convenient Conjunction, and that tiresome Interjection, the oddest of them all.”
Whom do you like best? Elli and I are both quite fond of Dr. Verb, and we dislike the smooth and slimy Adverb. Notice how the author has each character use his own kind of word as much as possible — very clever. :)
Just finished up a lovely new pair of socks for Dan. They’re the “Gentleman’s Sock with Lozenge Pattern” from Nancy Bush’s “Knitting Vintage Socks“. Great book.
Yarn: Lang Jawoll Superwash
Needles: size 000
I knit the cuffs on 72 stitches and the rest of the sock on 70. I used the cuff pattern and the nifty “lozenge” pattern, and did my own favorite heel and toe. This is a great pattern if you don’t like to count rows! The purl stripe comes every tenth row in the cuff and the lozenge pattern is very easy to memorize and you can just work as many repeats as you need by just counting diamonds.
It seems I started posting Through the Looking-Glass before This Country of Ours Part 3 was quite finished. Oops :) So now I’ll start posting the rest:
Dan and I spent the entire weekend upgrading the librivox forum software. Our forum has a lot of customization so we had to figure out a lot of crazy tricky stuff, which we tested all day yesterday on a dummy install. This afternoon we actually did the upgrade and it all worked and nothing has exploded so far. *whew*
Got my hair cut today and the guy did a pretty bad job, so then Chloe fixed it for me :) It’s quite short now!
Henry and I made a Vault Dweller costume for Halloween:
Henry and I spent hours and hours today working the “Pip-Boy Model 3000” for his Halloween costume. We had so much fun! He’s going as a Vault Dweller from Fallout 3. For those of you who don’t play, the Pip-Boy is a wrist-mounted “Personal Information Processor”. We built ours out of a water bottle, a PSP, several sheets of craft foam, velcro, and some other stuff. It looks so cool!
Last Monday we ordered the necessary navy-blue coveralls, which arrived today and fit him perfectly. Now I need to sew some yellow stripes on them and put “101” on the back.
Photos soon…
Oh, and the White Dragon Kung Fu School banquet was tonight. We had a great time! The food was forgettable, but we sat at a table full of MIss Edwards’ students and had a riot. They were all just as kind and friendly as could be, and I almost didn’t even feel shy (and I had my knitting, which helped). The joke of the evening was how hard it was to get a pitcher of water brought to our table :)
The Apple Stone, by Nicholas Stuart Gray, is very special to me. My sister and I discovered it in the library when we were little, and just devoured it. It is out of print, but I managed to find a nice ex-library hardback on Amazon to read from, since there is not one single copy in the entire San Diego Library system. Grr. It’s a forgotten treasure.
It takes place in England, and there are some elements I definitely didn’t understand when I was little, especially the way the narrator refers to his two Scottish cousins (a MacDonald and a Campbell) as “The Clans”, and why “The Forbidden Word” was so very forbidden. That was the olden days and we didn’t have Google…
This is not a typical “magic adventure” story. It’s beautifully written, and a bit dark, and so poetic. I hope you like it as much as I do.
Yesterday I felt unusually good — so good, in fact, that I did lots of LibriVox work, played Beatles Rockband with Henry, started reading Treasure Island to him, and made two kinds of pie for dinner (a pear galette and a provencal quiche). But today I’m just bone-crunchingly tired. Ugh. Nearly fell asleep in the afternoon.
But I’m happy anyway and here are some of the reasons:
Dan’s working from home today!
I was a Good Granddaughter and ordered some yarn for my 89-yr-old grandma so she can knit a baby blanket. (Brown Sheep Cotton Fleece)
Elli and I had a jolly time watching Mad Men (S04E11), chatting, and goofing around on AIM this morning.
I did not actually fall asleep and forget to pick up Henry from school.
On Henry’s recommendation, I listened to an excellent episode of This American Life while driving around this afternoon. It was a Halloween episode, #319. If you don’t already have it, get the This American Life app and your life will instantly be a little better, I guarantee it.
And I just got a postcard from my dear old lost-then-found penpal Peer, who is on vacation with his family in Italy. It was such fun to see his handwriting again!
Now, because I’m too tired to do anything truly productive, I’m going to log into my neglected google feed reader with its thousands of unread items and delete all the blogs I don’t care about, declare bankruptcy on the ones I do care about, and start fresh. Also maybe I’ll play some WoW. It took nearly a whole day to get the new patch installed and I really would like to find out what’s new. I expect I’ll have to reassign all my talents. Sigh.
Oh, by the way, on Monday it rained, really rained!
I am so fed up with the clutter in this house! It’s time to get rid of some of our junk. Today I managed to come up with a pretty big stack of books that I think we can live without and then I spent several hours cleaning up my hideous yarn mess. There was a big cardboard box of yarn in the closet, and two big project bags full in the living room. I untangled nearly everything, except for a horrible snarl in the middle of the box that just didn’t seem worthwhile (tossed it!), and sorted it all by category and bagged the smaller balls in Ziplocs.
As God is my witness, I’ll never be tangled again. I’ve got a bag full of cottons, one of very special sock yarn, one of worsted scraps, one of hand-spun and hand-dyed yarn, etc. And my Ravelry project bag is empty, so I can take it along to the next Knit @ Night!
Before:
After:
Chloe came over and helped untangle everything, and then she ripped out that purple sweater I got sick of, so that’s no longer weighing on my conscience and taking up space.
I found a brand-new size 0 wooden circ that I didn’t know I had! It’s a good long one, so perfect for two-at-a-time socks.
Also, I baked two batches of banana-oat muffins and burned all the fingers on my left hand when I had a little mishap with the muffin pan. Ow!
Were you glued to the screen to watch the rescue of the 33 Chilean miners last week? I was. The best coverage I found was on the BBC’s website — they had the live TV feed, of course, plus updates in text so I could leave the sound turned down. And, while it was annoying that the reporters had to keep talking so there was never any dead air,at least they had British accents so they sounded intelligent and cultured.
I got teary-eyed every time a miner was freed. Every single time. I saw the first guy come up, and I saw the last guy come up. It was amazing. Scott Simon published a touching little piece this morning:
“Millions of families, including ours, got our children out of bed to watch the men rise from the earth, wave, sing, and blow kisses. We told our children, ‘Remember this night whenever you think something is impossible.'”
I got my hands on an audiobook of “Harry Potter und der Stein der Weisen” (Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone) recently, and even found a copy of the book in hardback at the library! Sometimes I read, sometimes I read and listen at the same time, and sometimes, when I’m very tired, I just listen. I am astonished at how much I understand! Knowing the story well helps, of course, and I can guess a lot of the unknown words by context, and, when I feel like it, I look some of them up on http://www.dict.cc/. For instance, a lovely new word for me is “Gehwegplatten” . At Flourish & Blotts there were leather-bound books as big as “Gehwegplatten”. It means “flagstones”. Isn’t that delightful? It’s like “Go-way-plates”! I’ll never forget that word now.
I’ve also got a library copy of Winnie the Pooh in German (Pu der Bär), and Elli reads chapters to me sometimes, but it’s much, much harder to understand, even though I also know those stories by heart. I think Harry must be a lot more simplistic than Pooh in plot, vocabulary, and sentence structure. That’s not really a very big surprise, though, is it?
This was a very nice day. I woke up a bit before 8, and did some recording right away before the world got noisy, and then Elli and I watched the last two episodes of Mad men Season three, and had a long chat about books and all sorts of things. Then when Dan got up he drove me to Common Threads in Encinitas, where I discovered that my Donated Award (for my best-of-division, prize-winning mittens) was $50 store credit! And the shop owners admired my mittens very much :)
I chose 8 skeins of Lang Jawoll sock yarn, which is very fine but hard-wearing yarn, 75% wool and 25% nylon/acrylic (and comes with a spool of matching nylon reinforcement thread for toes and heels). It’ll become three pairs of work-socks for Dan, and one lovely deep red pair for me.
And then I realized I was very hungry, and I saw Roxy across the street — so we had such a nice lunch. I had the Avocado Sandwich, which was lightly-toasted 7-grain bread with sprouts, tomato, red onion, and avocado. It must have been three inches thick, and so nice and fresh! It was exactly what I was wanting. And then I had a cone of Niederfrank’s ice cream.
After we got home, we went over to Chloe’s to hang out and play with the cat, and then eventually we all came back over here for Mad Men.
Oh! And I discovered a GREAT iPhone game! “Trainyard Express” is free, unique, polished, and really really fun. Give it a try! I love their web integration. It’s simple to upload your solutions to their website, and it’s fun to view the solutions of other users.
Here is my user page: http://www.trainyard.ca/users/6731
Give it a try!
More peculiar weather today — thunder and lightning and even a little bit of rain! I know that it’s normal for other parts of the country to have thunderstorms at this time of year, but it’s not normal here! Rain is rare even in winter, and we almost never get thunder and lighting.
Today I went searching for familiar audiobooks in German. I managed to get my hands on “Harry Potter und der Stein der Weisen”, which is so much fun! When I read along with the German text, I can understand almost everything, which fills me with confidence.
Oh, and I was complaining to Elli about the lack of good EN<>DE dictionaries online and she told me about http://dict.cc, which has made all of my dreams come true. It even remembers which words you’ve looked up recently, and you can add words to a vocabulary list and then it will train you, flash-card style! Super!
Today is Henry’s 15th birthday. Hooray! Happy birthday, sweetie, I hope you had a good day!
We’re having a bizarre and sudden heatwave — it’s 107 today. UGH. Opening the front door is like opening the oven door. So, Henry and Chloe and I had lunch at the Studio Diner which was cooler than at home, anyway. And then we turned the air conditioner on in the very back room and sat in there watching things on the laptop, and then we went over to Chloe’s house for a while and played with the cat.
A short, entertaining, interesting video about each of the chemical elements, plus lots of videos on various molecules and other interesting stuff. (Hit the “Extra Videos” link).
Here, for example, is a video in which one scientist makes a birthday cake in the lab, to celebrate one year of posting their videos, while the main scientist explains all the interesting chemical reactions that go into creating a cake!
Monday was Chloe’s birthday. Happy birthday, Chloe! She requested a very light cake with fresh strawberries and real whipped cream. My cakes never turn out light, so I did some googling and decided on a chiffon cake. I used this recipe for the cake: http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Lemon-Chiffon-Cake/Detail.aspx. We replaced some of the water with lemon juice, following a suggestion from one reviewer. Next time I would add even more lemon juice. I bought actual cake flour and fresh baking powder, just to be sure, and I really did let the eggs come to room temperature before starting.
We baked it in my two round glass cake pans, at 325 degrees for 40 minutes, though 35 would have been fine, I think. The recipe tells you not to grease and flour the pans — that was nerve-wracking, but I was able to pry the cakes out of the pans when they were cool. *whew* Next time I might try greasing just the very bottom of the pan.
For filling between the two layers, I whipped heavy cream with a little sugar and mixed that with chopped strawberries. We topped the cake with more whipped cream, and then Dan decorated it with sliced berries.
When Bob and Chloe came over to watch Mad Men, we devoured almost the whole thing. It was way better than any store-bought cake I’ve ever had, including my fancy bakery birthday cake! We sent the last slice home with Chloe for later.
