Sparkly Things

Is there anybody out there?

I’m listening to a Recorded Books lecture on tape about the Epic in literature and the professor throws out this great new term, “sneer quotes”. Those are the quote marks smarmy types put around information they deem to be specious. Some people make sneer quotes in the air with their fingers, too. I’m so going to be using sneer quotes in all of my “writing” in the future.

Bwah-ha-ha!

If you haven’t seen or read Louis Sachar’s “Holes” yet, you’re missing a great experience. The film is a great adaptaion of the book, they had Louis Scahar write the script, so he preserved the important parts of the story. Tom and I watched it last night and enjoyed it tremendously. Go see it!

So here’s my weird symptom of the week. I woke up yesterday with itchy eyes. Therefore I rubbed my right eye a bit because it made the itching stop. Then I thought to go and take some Benadryl as the itching was probably allergy related. As I was sitting watching my movie (Chicago, in case you were wondering), I had this persistent feeling like there was something in my eye, not painful, just kind of scratchy and my vision was a little blurry. So I went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror and noticed that my eyeball was red and swollen. the iris was in a little dip of eyeball flesh and the ball was overlapping the rim of my lower eyelid a bit. Eeeww! I figured it was from the rubbing, so I got a wet washcloth and some ice and I iced down my eye while I chilled out on the couch. Tom brought home some Visine, so I rinsed out my eye. When I did so, I noticed some cloudy stuff, like mucous, come off of the eye. At this point the blurryness cleared up. It felt a lot better too.

This morning when I woke up, my eye is back to the right size and color, and there was a lot of sandy sleep on my eyelashes. I’ll continue to monitor it, but I wonder what caused it. I hope I just have a little allergy related conjunctivitis and not something contagious like pink eye.

The beginning of the storytime season is always tough for me. The kids are still getting into the conventions (sitting still, listening, etc…) and I’m still finding the level of books for them. I’ve noticed that the kids at my current library won’t put up with a story heavy book, they need interaction with every page, or I lose them. Today was rough. I had a pretty articulate 4 year old who wasn’t getting into the books. He started out by getting up and going back to the caregiver (not his mother who was elsewhere in the library and therefore not there to keep him on task, but the mother of his friend who was passive to the point of being non-exsistent) every few pages. Then we moved to a fingerplay, and he was jumping up and down in front of me trying to snatch the puppet I was using off of my hand. He settled down ok for the next book (Yo! Yes! by Chris Rascha a surefire hit), but came up and stopped me in the middle of my action song to tell me one of the other kids had “tapped his shirt”. We stopped there and talked briefly about this issue (while the other kids wandered away). At this point I ended storytime with our last song, “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes” and mom came back in the room. He did fine with the craft, but mom was giving him the attention he wanted at that point.

I don’t expect every kid to love every thing I do. We get such a wide range of ages and abilities it’s almost impossible, but parents need to expect, enforce and model good behavior. I’m thinking about requiring parents to stay with their child for the duration of storytime, although I can anticipate complaints as some of our kids come in a group with a sitter or day care mom. I don’t want to discourage anyone from attending but I feel I am justified in expecting a certain level of courtesy from my young attendees.

I’ll have to work on my format.

(All lines call and respond)

There was a moose,
And he drank a lot of juice.
There was a moose,
And he drank a lot of juice.
Woah oh oh oh oooh.
Woah wee oh ee oh ee oh.
Whee-ooo, whee-ooo
Whoa wee oh ee oh ee oh.

The moose’s name was Fred,
And he drank his juice in bed.
The moose’s name was Fred,
And he drank his juice in bed.
Woah oh oh oh oooh.
Woah wee oh ee oh ee oh.
Whee-ooo, whee-ooo
Whoa wee oh ee oh ee oh.

He drank his juice with care,
But he got some in his hair.
He drank his juice with care,
But he got some in his hair.
Woah oh oh oh oooh.
Woah wee oh ee oh ee oh.
Whee-ooo, whee-ooo
Whoa wee oh ee oh ee oh.

There was a moose,
Full of juice…yeah!

On MSN, Bob Denver (TV’s Maynard G. Krebs and Gilligan) died today at 70. So long, little buddy.

We had a nice time at Coronation. Tiernen got to fence a lot, and I enjoyed seeing our SCA friends, good food and a great Bardic circle. I’ve decided to get more involved in A&S stuff though. I’m getting kind of tired of going to events just to attend. I’d like to have something to do. I think I’m going to put something together for the competitions at Celtic Cattle Raids.

Last night we played Star Wars with Charlie (who is back for a little while from the Army). Anthony said it felt like all was right with the universe again. I must agree. It’s a good group and we always have a good time. We got ambushed of course, but what can you expect from a Dark Jedi. We’re going to play again twice this week, so we can complete this part of the story before Charlie leaves for his school in Oklahoma for six months.

We have decided to go to Coronation. Gas prices didn’t get as bad as rumor had predicted, but we’re going straight there and straight back, no crazy side trips. On the plus side, the event site is actually an hour closer to our house than to Fayetteville, so we won’t have to drive quite as far coming back.

I’m looking forward to having a nice time, doing some window shopping and enjoying court and etc. I think the feast will be fun and a few other people from our local group will be there as well.

Long live Atlantia Rex and Regina!

I’m wondering if we should go to Coronation this weekend or not. I think it might be a smarter move to stay at home and conserve gas, not necessarily because I think we’re going to use a tremendous amount going back and forth to the site. Our car is pretty fuel efficient, but I’d hate to be stuck out in unfamiliar territory and find that the source of supply there is worse than the source of supply here. harleenquinzell makes a good point that the gas stations are probably not going to run out of gas, but who wants to run the risk. If only we could be more confident about the predictions being made by our government and industry leaders. They have been working pretty hard to build up mistrust lately.

I’ll discuss it with tiernen and I’m sure we’ll decide by tomorrow.