notices connie's tag line

I told you I was going to do that.

I'd hang the poster up in a lovely, appropriately lit spot, and I probably wouldn't burn candles and incense in front of it.

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Hernia. Much pain for the big guy.

Laura, I hope he feels better soon.

Oh Cash... I am so sorry for you, Christopher and his friend's family.

S'all I got. My brain is merely gronking along today. I think it is being controled by the weather today which has been clear and gorgeous, warm, clouded over, windy as hell, cold, raining and raining while the skies are still mostly clear. I want to grind up some lithium and throw it up in the air. Stupid bipolar weather...

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Huh. I was just offline ruminating about books and movies and other entertainments to keep Emmett quiet and resting over the weekend, and went off on a tangent that ties in (vaguely) to the past-eras and oh-how-dead-we'd-all-be discussion.

One of my favorite books as a child, one I read and reread over and over and over whenever I was sick, was a turn-of-the-prior-century book called The Counterpane Fairy, by an author/illustrator named Katherine Pyle who did all the utterly beautiful faintly Art Nouveau/Pre-Raphaelitesque drawings. It's about a boy named Teddy who is very ill, on absolute bedrest and going stir-crazy. On the day when he's both sickest and most wildly itching to be well again and free to run and rove about, he is visited by the Counterpane Fairy, a several-inches-high old woman who laboriously climbs the hill of his legs, creaks her weary bones to rest on top of his knees, and commands him to choose one square of the patchwork quilt he's lying under. He picks one, focuses on it, and is suddenly sucked inside the patchwork square into a fairy tale.

Each square tells a different story, all of them new and unique: Starlein and Silverling and the golden ball and the doves, lost in the marble halls; the Owl who threatened the fairies, and how a mere elf won the hand of Rosina the fairy king's daughter; the cruel ringmaster and the acrobats' rebellion; the Robber-Baron rat; the river that dreams sail down on their way to sleepers' minds.

And as Teddy recovers, the stories get more and more real and closer and closer to his own life; in one of the last stories he's wandering through the isolation ward of the children's wing in his local hospital, watching as the sick children are visited and tended to by all the children who have already died. It's not morbid or frightening, just melancholy and hushed and numinous.

It wasn't until I was a teenager that I really got that the translucent children in the ward were dead, and that this particular fairy tale was about death; when I did, it was a revelation. When this book was written, there wasn't a child in America who would make it to adulthood without losing at least one sibling or cousin or schoolfriend, and certainly some of the children who read it would themselves die. Death in childhood wasn't an unimaginable catastrophe, something that would be the whole point behind writing a book at all, as in Bridge to Terabithia; it was an absolutely predictable, inescapable catastrophe, part of living and growing up and seeing the world around you, and surely at the back of the mind of every child who fell very ill. Unimaginable now, but so much a given in the childhood of my grandparents that there it was, one lovely but unemphatic and unremarkable chapter in a very ordinary children's book.

I have no idea what my point was in writing all this and I'm sure the conversation has moved far, far away by this point, and yet, here I go clicking "Post."

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So. I may be going out to dinner sometime soon on a not quite date. With a co worker's friend. Said friend came by and talked to co worker, I wandered off to the snack machine and when I came back I got put on the spot (co worker apologized) and asked if I would be interested in dinner. I didn't want to be rude and co worker has known him for a long time and so I said yes. It's dinner. Co worker has just informed me that this guy noticed my legs and liked them. This Guy is a librarian (part time right now) and has a car -- so that hits my: must have job, car, like to read requirement. But he's 20 yrs older than me and outside my +/- range for dating. But it's not a date. It's just a getting to know you dinner.

So. Anyway.

Also, I need new lenses for my glasses because they are scratched right in the center. I've only had perscription sunglasses once (and I live in Florida) I need some. I have frames that I like but they are non prescription lenses. I'm thinking about taking those and asking to have lenses put in.

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hope you have fun, Ali, and it's nice to be reminded that one's legs are admired!

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Tragically, they're out of business now, but The Breastee: [link]

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I have no idea what my point was in writing all this

Well you talked beautifully about a book that I don't think I have read, so you added to my Want list. It can be your good deed for the day.

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Gud, you have lovely children and that's some great photography.

Thanks, probably most of the credit goes to Canon though. We got a new camera recently (A Canon EOS 350D), and it takes fantastic pictures.

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I should be cutting up potatoes for the soup. And I have to decide whether or not to slip in the left over Easter Ham DH's mom sent home with us.

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Soup + Ham = Deelish!

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