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1. The other day, one of our friends moved to the States, and they gave us their two budgies, since they couldn't bring them and we had a budgie, too. This is Ray. (Sadly, my skills with a camera do not produce photos like this).
He used to be very scared of everyone (still is), but after a party in which we left the cage door open and let little boys play with him, he's become very aggressive, and he bites.
Enter two new birds, Mango and Pearl, who like to bicker, too. It's turned into a three-bird circus show, with fights erupting once in awhile over who gets what perch (Ray is very jealous) and because I like to anthropomorphize, it looks almost as though they're giving each other attitude (and then sometimes falling asleep right after). Never mind Mango's perhaps twice as big as Ray. They squabble all the time, and the house sounds like the outdoors with all the chirping.
2. I love it when random numbers are perfect squares. Did you know the squares of 100 and 75 added together is a perfect square? (It's part of the 3-4-5 triangle [multiply each by 25], but as I didn't realize at first).
3. The weather is out of whack here. This is the fourth thunderstorm in July, I think--rain is usually in June (flooding, more like, for the people by the river). Last week the thunderstorm gifted us with golf ball sized hail.
4. I wish that the concept of significant figures wasn't invented. Okay, not really. But it's a pain.
5. The nice thing about pop songs is that they're frequently in a very small range. Singing songs in West Side Story (I mean, "Tonight") is an exercise in trying both extremes of your range. (Unless, of course, you've got an incredible four-octave range, which means I am very jealous.) Also, I think I am mangling the pronunciation in the Erlkönig.
6. My resolve to write a post each day is slowly weakening, but I assure you, the last two days I didn't say anything was partly because I wanted anyone visiting my journal to see the entry about the little sparkly trout who deteriorated into a stinky mess. (This silence was also because I was lazy.)
7. I finished re-reading (it's been a few years now) Lucrezia Borgia, by John Faunce. Even a cursory Wikipedia search has turned up information that runs completely counter to what Faunce claims, but I really enjoyed this book. I'm sure it's due in part to nostalgia, but I genuinely liked Lucrezia (the elder; there are two Lucrezia Borgias). After reading this, I realize I understand far more references, but I still with I'd had a classical education. In fact, while the post-Medieval Western-Europe themes and politics are very interesting, so are the ancient Greek and Roman cultures, which this book refers to. I like the way Faunce shows the Pope's court, which, at the time, was extremely corrupt. What stuck with me the first time I read this (in a pool of summer sunshine at camp) was the gold. Cesare Borgia (or as he prefers, Cæsar) loved gold, and these quick allusions make me think of gold dust whenever I think of this book.
Review is being written.
Enter two new birds, Mango and Pearl, who like to bicker, too. It's turned into a three-bird circus show, with fights erupting once in awhile over who gets what perch (Ray is very jealous) and because I like to anthropomorphize, it looks almost as though they're giving each other attitude (and then sometimes falling asleep right after). Never mind Mango's perhaps twice as big as Ray. They squabble all the time, and the house sounds like the outdoors with all the chirping.
2. I love it when random numbers are perfect squares. Did you know the squares of 100 and 75 added together is a perfect square? (It's part of the 3-4-5 triangle [multiply each by 25], but as I didn't realize at first).
3. The weather is out of whack here. This is the fourth thunderstorm in July, I think--rain is usually in June (flooding, more like, for the people by the river). Last week the thunderstorm gifted us with golf ball sized hail.
4. I wish that the concept of significant figures wasn't invented. Okay, not really. But it's a pain.
5. The nice thing about pop songs is that they're frequently in a very small range. Singing songs in West Side Story (I mean, "Tonight") is an exercise in trying both extremes of your range. (Unless, of course, you've got an incredible four-octave range, which means I am very jealous.) Also, I think I am mangling the pronunciation in the Erlkönig.
6. My resolve to write a post each day is slowly weakening, but I assure you, the last two days I didn't say anything was partly because I wanted anyone visiting my journal to see the entry about the little sparkly trout who deteriorated into a stinky mess. (This silence was also because I was lazy.)
7. I finished re-reading (it's been a few years now) Lucrezia Borgia, by John Faunce. Even a cursory Wikipedia search has turned up information that runs completely counter to what Faunce claims, but I really enjoyed this book. I'm sure it's due in part to nostalgia, but I genuinely liked Lucrezia (the elder; there are two Lucrezia Borgias). After reading this, I realize I understand far more references, but I still with I'd had a classical education. In fact, while the post-Medieval Western-Europe themes and politics are very interesting, so are the ancient Greek and Roman cultures, which this book refers to. I like the way Faunce shows the Pope's court, which, at the time, was extremely corrupt. What stuck with me the first time I read this (in a pool of summer sunshine at camp) was the gold. Cesare Borgia (or as he prefers, Cæsar) loved gold, and these quick allusions make me think of gold dust whenever I think of this book.
Review is being written.
Bookworlds
Apr. 20th, 2010 11:55 pmI think it was Harry Potter first.
I read it at ten or so, and for the longest time wanted desperately, desperately to go to Hogwarts and learn magic. In the daytime, I knew that I was being silly, but I would think: "Well, I'm not eleven yet--maybe I just might get that owl when I'm eleven..." No owl arrived, I went on with life with a tinge of disappointment, but by then I'd found other books that I could immerse myself in.
I used to live in a prairie town--big town as far as the prairies were concerned, but no more than fifty thousand people at the last count. I read Laura Ingalls Wilder's novels, the almost-autobiographies of the author when she was a young girl on the prairies. I identified with her, and knowing that she'd been real was astonishing: there was a real, live girl who used to live in the same general area (never mind I was in North Dakota, and she lived in South Dakota). She lived almost on the land, with her family claiming a small homestead far out west, while I was living in an apartment, but her life was fascinating. For years after, I would comb through atlases looking for the town she grew up in.
After I read particularly good books, I would walk around in a daze. Only part of my mind was on the real world around me--most of me was still in the bookworld, fighting alongside characters, or just imagining what would happen if....
Many of those childrens' books I read: Lord of the Rings, Chronicles of Narnia, Chronicles of Prydain, Earthsea Trilogy, A Wrinkle in Time--they were beautifully detailed worlds with realistic characters, and I loved that. That's the thing about reading: the more you read, the more worlds are opened up, and you can carry them around with you, escape into them when you like. No-one can take those away from you. That song from the Reading Rainbow sums it up: "Butterfly in the sky, I can go twice as high/Take a look, it's in a book/A reading rainbow."
(I'm afraid my internet connection isn't working quite well enough to link it to the actual song, but a quick Youtube search should bring up plenty of hits).
I read it at ten or so, and for the longest time wanted desperately, desperately to go to Hogwarts and learn magic. In the daytime, I knew that I was being silly, but I would think: "Well, I'm not eleven yet--maybe I just might get that owl when I'm eleven..." No owl arrived, I went on with life with a tinge of disappointment, but by then I'd found other books that I could immerse myself in.
I used to live in a prairie town--big town as far as the prairies were concerned, but no more than fifty thousand people at the last count. I read Laura Ingalls Wilder's novels, the almost-autobiographies of the author when she was a young girl on the prairies. I identified with her, and knowing that she'd been real was astonishing: there was a real, live girl who used to live in the same general area (never mind I was in North Dakota, and she lived in South Dakota). She lived almost on the land, with her family claiming a small homestead far out west, while I was living in an apartment, but her life was fascinating. For years after, I would comb through atlases looking for the town she grew up in.
After I read particularly good books, I would walk around in a daze. Only part of my mind was on the real world around me--most of me was still in the bookworld, fighting alongside characters, or just imagining what would happen if....
Many of those childrens' books I read: Lord of the Rings, Chronicles of Narnia, Chronicles of Prydain, Earthsea Trilogy, A Wrinkle in Time--they were beautifully detailed worlds with realistic characters, and I loved that. That's the thing about reading: the more you read, the more worlds are opened up, and you can carry them around with you, escape into them when you like. No-one can take those away from you. That song from the Reading Rainbow sums it up: "Butterfly in the sky, I can go twice as high/Take a look, it's in a book/A reading rainbow."
(I'm afraid my internet connection isn't working quite well enough to link it to the actual song, but a quick Youtube search should bring up plenty of hits).
