I’d never heard of such a thing as a stick bomb until a week ago. Now? Holy moley, this is cool!
5 things to do during school vacation week
April 4, 2012 Leave a Comment
Hooray for April vacation week! Here in the Gale household, we aren’t taking school entirely off. Rather, we’re using this time to do some of the more fun activities that often get shunted aside by multiplication drills and phonics lessons. I thought I’d share this list with you. Happy playing!
- Get building with these Lego and engineering challenges (Sir I. is working on a rope bridge right now)
- Make some art! We like the projects at Deep Space Sparkle, and I’m in love with these soft pastels tutorials (scroll to the bottom of the post to links to individual lessons) another homeschooling mom put together.
- Nature study! Take spring scavenger hunt walks, sketch a wildflower, do a leaf rubbing, or just enjoy the great outdoors. The Handbook of Nature Study blog is a great resource.
- Direct their imaginations: ask them to act out a three-minute play (hint: Aesop fables and fairy tales are good fodder for this) or to make something 3D with a box of popsicle sticks and lots of glue.
- Read aloud a classic children’s book. The one I’ve picked for this week is E.B.White’s Stuart Little.
Any other suggestions for fun things to do with the kids during school vacation?
once upon a time, or fluid fairy tales
April 2, 2012 14 Comments
Writers have been retelling or fracturing fairy tales for a long time. Now the film & TV industry have gotten into the fray big time, with two Snow White movies releasing this spring and a couple of fairy tale-inspired TV shows. The one that I’ve been faithfully following is Once Upon A Time.
Storybrooke, Maine is your average idyllic New England small town–with one difference. Every inhabitant is a fairytale character, brought into this world by the Wicked Stepmother from Snow White (Snow White, again! What’s with the popularity of that particular fairy tale this year?). They remember nothing of their former lives, and they’ve been trapped in time for 28 years, ruled over by Mayor Mills, aka Evil Queen. No one comes to Storybook, and bad things happen to anyone who tries to leave. The Evil Queen’s revenge on Snow White (now separated from her Prince, and a school teacher) is complete. Until the day the mayor’s adopted son brings his birth mother into the small town–and time moves forward once more.
Snow White, as she is Fairy Tale Land
Er, I mean this of course:
While the framing story is that of Snow White, Once Upon A Time draws from a number of fairy tales, blending them so that they are all part of the same tapestry of events. These are fluid fairy tales, fairy tales without boundaries, where Hansel and Gretel find themselves at the Gingerbread House on an errand for the Evil Queen, Cinderella bargains away her first-born child to Rumpelstiltskin for a chance to go to the ball, and Beauty’s Beast is–well, I won’t spoil that little detail here. Secondary characters get their own subplots, and backstories are fleshed out. Each episode has a Fairy Tale Land thread and a Storybook thread, which, for the most part, work well together, revealing not only the changes happening in Storybook but also the mysteries of the past (like why the Evil Queen enacted such a bizarre curse on everyone in the first place–which is a season-long, if not series-long, mystery).
The writers pepper the Storybrooke narrative with little clue as to the true identities of its inhabitants. Snow White is Mary Margaret Blanchard, Rumpelstiltskin is Mr. Gold, and the Evil Queen is Regina Mills (thus making me believe that she’s the original miller’s daughter from Rumpelstiltskin, and is yet another indicator of how fluid the boundaries of the fairy tales are in this show). Because the Queen has replaced everyone’s memories (breaking up relationships she found offensive, I suppose), their happy endings have turned into never-afters. Cinderella is a pregnant teen whose boyfriend’s father won’t let him see her. Hansel and Gretel are the results of a brief fling. And Snow White and her prince may feel they belong together, but he’s married to someone else, and their attraction only bring lies, betrayal and heartache.
Snow White, in Storybrooke
There are some parts of the worldbuilding that are hard to swallow. If everything’s stayed the same for 28 years, why has the mayor’s adopted kid managed to grow up while his schoolmates haven’t aged a day? And I only realized a couple of episodes ago that the creators of Lost are behind this series, so I’m not at all confident that they can keep the storylines under control and nail the ending.
Do you watch Once Upon A Time? What do you think of it?
Legend of Korra trailer
March 30, 2012 Leave a Comment
Yes, yes, yes! Can you please hurry up and release this already? [edited to add: squee, april 14th! see teaser below this one.]
the long haul
March 28, 2012 8 Comments
It’s Sunday night. The weekend’s been cold and dreary. Two of my kidlets came down with fever. I’ve been sleeping badly (I don’t deal well with nighttime interruptions). And here I am, cudgeling my brain, trying to come up with an upbeat and uplifting blog post for Wednesday.
Well, I can’t do upbeat, so you might have to settle for thoughtful, with–hopefully–a dash of uplifting.
So, I’m going to write about something that I’ve mulled over a lot in the last few months. It’s the realization that most of what I do–the valuable work of my life (raising children, homeschooling, forging relationships, writing)–take a long long time to bear fruit.
This is completely at odds with the have-it-now messages I’m bombarded with. Technology has made it so much easier to get what I want, when I want it. I finished a book and want the sequel right now? I can download it to my e-reader at any time of day or night. Book not available in digital format? Amazon Prime will have it on my doorstep in two days. I need to quickly put together a unit study, find math drills for the older two kidlets, connect-the-dot worksheets for the Baron, or research a topic? Connect with friends halfway across the world? Find a recipe for tiramisu? Kill time with a fun game? Well, isn’t that why we have wireless high-speed Internet, computers and iDevices?
As a consumer, getting what I want now or soon has been great. But as a creator, as a parent, I need to get out of the want-results-now mindset. I need to accept that every skill has a learning curve, that every craft requires time, patience, nurturing. That parenting three decidedly individual people isn’t as easy or quick as “just add water and mix!” That I can’t spend several weeks reading articles on the craft and art of writing and then bang out the Perfect Novel.
Making peace with this sort of delayed gratification has taught me to celebrate the processes of what I do, as well as the results. It’s not just about the fact that a child learned a skill or internalized a character trait, but the failures and the time and the growth it took him to get there. It’s not just that there’s a finished story on my hard drive, but it’s also about the excitement of the first idea, the fervor of planning, the fallow periods and the angst and the magic when it all came together.
I’m in this–this creating and parenting and learning along with my children–for the long haul. I may as well enjoy the journey.
How about you? How do you enjoy the journey?
avatar the last airbender: fire nation
March 26, 2012 2 Comments
We finished watching the rest of Avatar a couple of weeks before we moved. Unsurprisingly, it’s taken me this long to write my wrap-up post.
So, after the awessome (I mean sad, depressing, horrible for the main characters) finale of Season 2, Aang awakens to find that–he has hair! Oh, and that he’s also on a Fire Navy ship.
Aang with hair! Okay, maybe not *this* kind of hair...
Not to worry–the Fire Navy ship is crewed by his friends and allies. The invasion plan is still on, though the Day of Black Sun (the solar eclipse) during which the firebenders will lose their powers is still some time away. Aang and company separate from the water tribe warriors (the plot contortions to keep the main characters away from adult supervision are rather amusing) and go hide out–wait for it!–in the Fire Nation.
On one hand, I like this twist, because it gives the main characters–and us–a chance to see normal Fire Nation folks (not just power-hungry firebenders and their faceless hordes). On the other hand, the Fire Nation seems to be divided rather sharply into victims and oppressors: dancing-deprived Fire Nation schoolchildren oppressed by stern teachers who won’t even let them have a party, poor villagers poisoned by the toxic waste from a factory run by brutish army-types. But hey, at least they’re not all evil, and Aang gets a chance to see that the Fire Nation needs the Avatar too. Sokka even finds an expert swordsman to train him in one of my favorite pre-invasion episodes of the season.
Sokka takes art lessons... er, swordfighting lessons from a master
In the meantime, Zuko’s finding out that having a girlfriend, the approval of his father, and the adoration of the populace aren’t quite filling up the emptiness within. He’s behaving like a good prince, but it’s not enough. Iroh’s in prison for treason and won’t even give Zuko the satisfaction of a confrontation. Then there’s the niggling suspicion that Aang’s not dead after all, so he sends an assassin after him. Zuko may have everything he wanted–but it’s not what he needed.
Zuko, Zuko. What a painful road you’ve set yourself to walk.
But, anyhow, after some fun incidents, lots of witty banter and repartee, and character development, we finally get to the invasion–which, of course fails.
I love that the good guys showed initiative and took the fight to the bad guys–so many times Good is always on the defensive–but we knew it wouldn’t work. First, we know that Azula learned of the plan when she was disguised as a Kyoshi warrior, and second, it’s only the middle of the season, and third, Zuko hasn’t joined the party of Good yet. But he does! Right around the time the invasion is failing miserably, Zuko confronts his father and tells him whatfor, redirects some lightning dear old Dad throws at him, and leaves. The adult members of the invasion force are captured, but the teens and kids get a ride out of the Fire Nation on Appa.
Zuko sets off to find the Avatar and, as expected, Aang and co. don’t take very easily to his wanting to join them. Zuko has to prove himself first, especially to the hurt and angry Katara who trusted him first in Ba Sing Se, only to be betrayed. This is followed by several fun episodes, in which various members of Aang’s company take field trips… er, have adventures with Zuko: finding the original source of firebending, freeing Sokka’s Dad & Suki from a Fire Nation prison, and confronting the man who killed Katara’s mother. All of these are really well worth watching, especially since we start to see Azula unravel as first Mai, then Ty Lee, betray her. (Mai helps Zuko escape from the Fire Nation prison, and Ty Lee won’t let Azula take her temper out on Mai. This is the episode where I really started liking Mai).
My turn to go on a life-changing field trip with Zuko!
All too soon, the time of Sozin’s Comet draws near and the Fire Nation launches its attack to scorch the entire world (or as much of it as belongs to the Earth Kingdom). Aang doesn’t feel ready to confront the Fire Lord, and his pacifist tendencies come to the fore–he knows he cannot bring himself to kill the Fire Lord. And so he goes looking for an alternative answer, disappearing on his friends, who join up with Iroh and the members of the White Lotus to try to stop the Fire Nation rampage.
What follows is two episodes of coolness, notwithstanding the discussion that David and Sir I. had about comets being mostly ice and rock and how unlikely they were to help firebenders (technically speaking) or a bit of deus ex machina in the guise of a [spoiler]. Those are nitpicks that we certainly didn’t think of till after we were done with the edge-of-your-seat action. Two emotionally intense points for me: Zuko’s reconciliation with Iroh (I love love the portrayal of their relationship throughout the series) and the last agni kai between Azula and Zuko–the utter sadness and brokenness of it, emphasized by a somber, barely-there soundtrack.
My three loved the show, and their parents did too. I wish they’d made shows like these when I was a kid. We’re eager to see the next series, featuring the next Avatar, a girl from the Water Tribe. Miss M. rather anxiously asked if we would still be able to watch it in Virginia when it comes out. I assured her we would.
All my Avatar: The Last Airbender posts in one handy place
- what I’m watching: avatar the last airbender 1
- what I’m watching: avatar the last airbender 2
- what I’m watching: avatar the last airbender 3
- avatar the last airbender: azula and toph
- avatar the last airbender: ba sing se
W.E.L.D.E.R.
March 23, 2012 Leave a Comment
My father-in-law was up visiting a couple weeks ago. Among other things (like hauling boxes of (mostly) books, fixing a toilet, assembling furniture, entertaining the children), he introduced us to the most addictive game on the iPad I’ve ever had the (mis)fortune to encounter (even more of a drug to me than Angry Birds, if that can be believed!): W.E.L.D.E.R.
This totally fun, word-intensive (and highly addictive–did I mention that one yet?) game has been sucking up waaayyy too much of my time. As for what it’s about–well, check out the trailer below (there’s an ad for an app–still tickled pink about it).
a space of my own
March 19, 2012 8 Comments
In this house, I have a desk. My own desk, to fill with my stuff and my stuff only–coupons and catalogs, cardboard rectangles for a school art project, grocery fliers, writing notes, recipes, and cards of all kinds (index cards, postcards, thank- you cards).
In our old house, this used to be our desk. I did a massive revision of Quartz at this desk, manuscript pages and index cards all over the place. Then my husband got a different job and ended up working from home for six months and it became his desk. I don’t begrudge him that at all, because the alternative would’ve been him working and living in Virginia while the kids and I stayed in Vermont. But it did mean that my laptop and I were floaters, sometimes curling up together on the couch or rocking in the glider or working on my bed. None of those places were conducive to work, though. I fear I procrastinated more than I produced.
Then we moved, and this desk–this lovely heavy cherry-and-ash beauty–couldn’t make the trip upstairs into the hideaway room my husband’s chosen for his home office. So he has another desk, and I have this one all to myself. It’s in a great location, off the kitchen, near the school room, in a place from which I can keep an eye on my kidlings when they’re outside, and nowhere near my bedroom. When I sit down at it, my brain thinks “WORK.” I still procrastinate, but it doesn’t happen here quite as much.
So, I’ve been organizing and planning, thinking and writing, adjusting my attitude and breathing fresh air into stale ideas.
Links:
Liana Mir introduced me to M. C. A. Hogarth’s work, especially her Three Micahs articles about being an artist-entrepreneur.
Through M. C. A. Hogarth’s LJ, I found Elizabeth McCoy’s Herb-Witch/Herb-Wife duology, which I’m enjoying a great deal. It’s the kind of fantasy I don’t often see: small-scale, tightly-focused on a few (okay, two) characters, with intense and yet slow-growing relationships.
Joel Friedlander on Seth Godin’s Poke the Box: A great article on doubt and fear, on committing to a project and then sending it out into the world.
On a more practical note, The Notebooking Fairy has some great tips on what to put in a homeschooling mom’s notebook. Ooooh, I so want one now!
moving, baby steps, and new routines
March 13, 2012 6 Comments
We’ve been in Virginia for almost two weeks. After the initial frenzy of packing, selling our house, moving many hundreds of miles, and unpacking many (many, many, many) boxes, life has settled down into a less frantic pace. Instead of trying to do it all and cramming everything into every hour of the day, I’ve decided to pace myself. So, everyday, we do some school (get in math and language arts, ramping up on history, science, and social studies), unpack or organize a little, venture out into our new neighborhood, whether it’s a trip to the grocery store or library or a walk around the neighborhood.
Moving to a new location requires a steep learning curve, and that’s not just for finding my way outside the house. It holds true for indoors, too. My mind and my body are still used to the layout of our old home, and I often find myself reaching for a phantom cabinet or looking for something in the entirely wrong place. Having to think about where the dishes go makes it a lot harder for me to drift off into story land they way I’ve been used to.
Case in point: My bedroom.
Back in our old house, D. and I had the smallest bedroom. In this one, we have the biggest. It’s embarrassingly big and it has five (yes, FIVE doors) leading out of it. One door goes to a walk-in closet, another to a private den/study, one to the corridor, one to a bathroom and one to the laundry area. Strangely enough, the bathroom and the laundry area are in one long narrow room, so that when you’re off to take a shower you have to remember to close both doors. Then there’s the fact that the owners of this house didn;t seem to believe in towel bars (but they believed in two sinks and space galore under them), so one has to wander around disconsolately with a wet towel afterwards (I usually put mine on my clothes drying rack in the laundry part of the space).
We’re so unused to this place that we spend far too long doing something as simple as getting showered and changed for the day, as we traverse the Big Room multiple times from bathroom to closet to laundry area to bathroom to back to the bedroom. My husband confesses that the other day he took three trips to the laundry basket just to get his dirty clothes put away.
All this to say, my head is full of “Where’s the cheese grater?” and “Where do I hang my wet towel?” and not about stories. But I’m beginning to feel that writing itch again (can’t suppress that for too long) and getting back into the game with a revision on Rainbird.
What about you? If you’ve been swamped by life, how do you ease back into writing?
Harry Potter in 60 seconds
March 2, 2012 2 Comments
via SF Signal
(I know, I know, it looks like I’m picking on HP recently, but this is too funny not to share!)
