On Wednesday we all (Susan, Sally, Henry, and me) went to Tango del Rey for the Rockola show and had the best time! Besides listening and singing along in the audience, we got to perform a little bit! I got to do the “Me and Julio” whistling solo, Henry and I did handclaps on “Stuck in the Middle”, Henry played guitar for “Wish You Were Here” and… something else, I forget what. So much FUN!
On Thursday evening, Bob, Chloe, and Susan all came over to watch Survivor, which was a riot. Dan got a few nice photos; here’s my favorite, but there are a few more on my flickr:
Also I’m knitting a pair of socks for Mom’s friend. Mom chose Felici Sport self-striping sock yarn in the “Ecology” colorway. They’re turning out really nice:
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I’m knitting them both at once on one circ. That way they’ll turn out identical and I don’t have to count rows :)
Aunt Susan is here! Hooray! Chloe, Susan, Mom, and I went to breakfast on Sunday, and on Monday, Bob and Chloe and Susan came over for hours in the afternoon/evening. We all sat around and talked and ate and had such a nice time. I have the best family!
I still feel kind of rotten from that sore throat I had, tired and sniffly and run-down, and in the middle of the night I had a big coughing fit. Ugh.
On Monday my throat felt funny all day, and then at night it turned into a proper sore throat. But not a terrible one. And then by Tuesday afternoon it seemed a lot better but then Tuesday night it came back with a vengeance. And now today it is just tender, but I suppose it will come calling again tonight. And now Henry’s throat feels funny. But we have to get better soon because my dear wonderful Aunt Susan is coming to visit for a whole week on Saturday! Go away, sore throat, go away.
Yesterday was the long-anticipated White Dragon kung fu tournament, Henry’s third tournament since he joined the school. It’s held at this huge gymnasium at USD, and people from all seven branches of the school come to compete all day. We got there at 7:45am because Henry is part of the Lion Dance team, who perform the opening ceremony, so he had to be early to practice. Here’s a video of the lions practicing without costumes; Henry is the tall boy who is usually nearest the camera at the right side of the scene. The back-end of Henry’s lion is a really nice boy named Mister Clements (everyone at the school goes by Mister or Miss).
I tried to film the actual performance but I pressed a wrong button (haven’t used my new camera for video very much yet) and didn’t get it, but the team did very well and Henry and Mister Clements landed all their complicated stacks and everything!
Henry competed in three divisions (based on sash color and age/weight) — Technique, Form, and Continuous Sparring. He did very well in all three and won a Silver Medal for Form! We are so proud of him, so very proud. All three medalists in that division of Form were from Henry’s school. Go Clairemont!
It was a long long long day… Henry’s division of Continuous Sparring was one of the very last ones, so we didn’t leave till nearly 5pm. But I had my book (Busman’s Honeymoon) and my knitting and a big cooler of food, and Henry had his kung fu friends to hang out with, and it was very fun to watch all the other people competing, too.
On Tuesday, I bought a really nice, nearly-new, green La-Z-Boy recliner for Dan from Craigslist and Chloe drove me to pick it up in her van, and then Henry and I hung out at her house for a while so Bob could help Henry learn some tunes to play with the band. Oh, and Dan loves his chair. Happy early birthday, Dan! :)
Then yesterday Henry and I did some good decluttering in the livingroom. I got rid of a ton of old outgrown homeschool materials, which cleared off two shelves, and then Henry organized the DVDs on those shelves so they’re not in a horrible useless pile anymore.
Yesterday evening we picked up Henry’s friend John and went to the Rockola gig at Tango del Rey, which was great fun as usual! Got home at midnight and went right to bed but then I woke up at 6 this morning for no reason at all, grrrrrr. So I’m going to bake some cookies and then go back to bed.
Yesterday morning Henry changed his guitar strings and practiced while I sewed a few new shopping bags, and then he and Dan disappeared to play videogames and I poked around at Netflix.
We suspended our Greencine account a few days ago so we could try Netflix because they offer quite a lot of things to stream instantly, which is, of course, very tempting. I found a BBC miniseries of Gaudy Night, one of my favorite Dorothy Sayers novels and one which I just finished reading for the fourth time (or so). I was pretty worried about watching it because I have such a clear idea of how Lord Peter and Harriet should look, and if the cast was bad it would be so bothersome, but I also knew the BBC would do a good job with costumes and sets and it would look really authentic, and since I have no idea at all of what Oxford looked like in the 30s, I wanted to at least give it a try.
In my opinion, Harriet Walter makes a very good Harriet Vane, and Edward Petherbridge is not a bad Lord Peter. Not quite right, but not terrible. They scrambled the plot but of course they had to compress a 500-page book into just a couple hours of TV, so oh well. They did keep a great many lines verbatim from the book. Anyway I watched about half yesterday and will finish up today when I’m done writing this.
Chloe came over in the afternoon and we knit and watched episode 2 of Wonders of the Solar System and did a bit of gardening, and then Bob came over too and we got started talking about 1970s disaster movies and discovered that Netflix had “Earthquake” for streaming, so we watched that all together. It was just dreadful but very entertaining to make fun of. Take off your pantyhose!
We hope they will come over tonight to watch Breaking Bad, woohoo! Breaking Bad is a close second after Mad Men for Best Thing on TV.
Would you like to help create a public domain German translation of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s “A LIttle Princess”? Elli and I are finishing up with Chapter 1, and we’re ready to start Chapter 2: http://www.bitesizeedits.com/projects/zx0x49/bitesizeedit/
I’m starting a new podcast, “Kayray Reads to You”, in which I will read aloud from some of my very favorite kids’ books, starting off with Elizabeth Enright’s wonderful “The Saturdays”.
I prefer reading to editing so, since I am not making audiobooks here, these podcast episodes will be mostly unedited. If the cat starts yowling, well, you’ll hear her yowl! Here’s the first chapter. Enjoy!
The four Melendy family books, of which this is the first, have recently been reprinted in beautiful hardback editions. I suggest you pick up all four before they go out of print again.
