- What is your favorite type of literature to read (magazine, newspaper, novels, nonfiction, poetry, etc.)? Favorite novels, good blogs, and entertaining organziation/time management books.
- What is your favorite novel? Rumer Godden’s In This House of Brede. (Close runners-up: Lois McMaster Bujold’s The Curse of Chalion, a 19th-century translation of Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers”;” Steven Brust’s The Phoenix Guards”;” and most of Jane Austen’s novels.)
- Do you have a favorite poem? (Share it!) Varies, but at the moment it’s probably G.K. Chesterton’s “Lepanto”; close runners-up are A. E. Housman’s “Terence, this is stupid stuff”, e. e. cummings’s “what if a much of a which of a wind”, Robert Graves’s “The Naked and the Nude”, and the occasional anonymous English ballad.
- What is one thing you’ve always wanted to read, or wish you had more time to read? Depending on my mood, Francis Child’s ballad collections, the Bible in the original Hebrew/Aramaic/Greek, the Qu’ran in the original Arabic, or various University of Texas Press books on various and sundry topics.
- What are you currently reading? Actually, I’ve finished all the in-progress books, so I haven’t been reading any books for the past 24 hours. (Wait, now that I think about it, I left off my reread of Brust’s Teckla halfway through, so technically I’m reading that.) I’m not sure what I’ll grab off the shelf to read tomorrow at lunch; possibly Barron’s Jane and the Man of the Cloth or Stevemer’s A College of Magics.
28 February 2003
Friday Five: Reading
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27 February 2003
Tolkien’s Still Spinning in His Grave….
Someone did a rap of Lord of the Rings. Oh. My. Goodness.
(Via Perverse Access Memory.)
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25 February 2003
The Hazards of Folksongs
I often sing songs from favorite CDs to my son. I’ll have to watch that , though — a few weeks ago, I caught myself singing along with Old Blind Dogs’ rendition of “Edward”…..
Why does your brand sae drip with blood, young Edward, O young Edward;
Why does your brand sae drip with blood, and why so sad and we-o?[....]
I have killed my father dear, my dear mother, my dear mother
I have killed my father dear, and alas and woe is me-o.[....]
The curse of hell shall you bear, my dear mother, my dear mother,
The curse of hell shall you bear, for such counsels you gave to me-o.
Further proof that Child ballads are poor models for healthy relationships. I think I’d better not sing this one to him 
.
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A New Sewing Record
Two shirts in two days.
A few months back, I’d picked up Butterick 3124 with the intent of making a really dressy shirt from it, and a few weeks ago the sparkly blue knit I liked went on sale. And there they might have sit for several months or years like other pattern purchases, if my brother hadn’t suggested that we go to the Metropolitan Opera on my impending visit to New York.
After all, while I wanted a sparkly evening shirt, these days I don’t have many opportunities for evening outings. Given that this would be the only chance I’d likely have to wear the thing in the next six months, the shirt moved to the top of the list — two days before I was supposed to leave.
At which point I was hit by an unusual burst of common sense — I had a ton of plain cotton knit that I’d bought intending to make maternity clothes. (My only child just turned four.) It would be highly wise, I realized, to make the pattern first in the cheap cotton knit, just to make sure that the pattern fit okay and that adding the View 3 sleeves to the View 1 shirt would work before I cut out the pricier fabric.
So I made a purple shirt, and figured out that the sleeves needed to be a little longer, and cut out the sparkly blue fabric — that was one night. Finished the blue shirt the second night (in breaks from packing) and wore it to the opera two nights later. I’m very pleased.
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A Solemn Vow
“In Life’s name and for Life’s sake….” Wait a minute, wrong one.
“I, N., take thee, M. to be….” No, that’s not it either.
[sound of flipping pages]
“On my honor, I have neither given nor received aid on this exam,” no, “I swear to tell the truth,” no, “poverty, chastity, and obedience,” no, I know it’s in here somewhere…aha!
As God is my witness, I will never hand-quilt again!
Okay, I might hand-embroider my name on a quilt. But never, never again am I going to even attempt to hand-quilt an entire quilt, even a tiny one.
Way back in 1990-1991, I did a quilt block exchange with several people on the predecessor of rec.crafts.textiles.quilting. Once I had all my exchange blocks and had made my own, I sewed them together and decided to quilt them by hand.
There’s no rational reason why I should find hand-quilting so annoying. I like cross-stitch, after all. But I’ve never liked any kind of hand-sewing. (Maybe it’s the counted vs. uncounted distinction. I’m not overly enamored of crewel work either.) Every now and then I’d pick up the quilt and do a few inches of quilting, but invariably I’d set it aside and go work on something more interesting.
At the beginning of this year, I looked at the quilt. One block was completely quilted, one almost finished, and several had small bits done. Over half the quilting still remained for me to do.
Ten years is more than long enough to spend on a project that I don’t like working on.
I started machine-quilting one evening, finished the quilting the next, cut out the binding the third, and sewed the binding on the fourth evening. It’s done. It looks good enough. I’m never hand-quilting again.
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Pervasive Developmental Disorder is a Pain
A.k.a. “autism lite”, a.k.a. “somewhere on the autism spectrum”, a.k.a. “we don’t know what’s wrong, and it’s not full-blown autism, but there’s definitely something weird about the wiring in this kid’s brain.”
My son’s just turning four. He can sometimes echo words, and he can understand some things I say (especially verbs), but he hasn’t gotten the concept of using words to communicate. He might actually use a word once or twice, and then it vanishes from his vocabulary; the only word he’s used consistently over the past year is “dikka dikka”, tickle/good/happy. Lately he’s picked up “tatsa”, which may mean “that’s a”; it could be the first step towards sentences, but I’ve had similar false alarms far too many times by now. He doesn’t say “no”. He’s never pointed at things. He loves to draw, but his drawings are all random scribbles. Potty training? Ha! He’ll sit on a potty, but he has no idea why we’re making him do this. (His method for indicating a dirty diaper: he’ll come stand near you and possibly get a little querulous. If you don’t clue in, he’ll go back to whatever he was doing.) Christmas and birthday are terminally easy to deal with; he’s completely oblivious to them.
PDD is a pain.
Granted, it’s a lot better than full-blown autism, as I’m reminded whenever I read P.L.A. Yes, giving my son a haircut is a two-person job, and I don’t even want to think about what dentist visits will be like, but over all, he’s a very manageable kid. He goes to a normal daycare as well as a special school program. I can leave him in the nursery at church, go out in public with him, and generally live a pretty normal life. Strange places just mean he can enjoy exploring. Restaurants are no problem whatsoever — okay, he gets impatient when he sees another table getting their food, but that’s something I could see happening with a “normal” kid too. You have to watch him a while before you clue in that he’s not quite “neurotypical.”
And for all I know, he may yet turn out to be a functional adult. He might make a fabulous engineer or computer programmer — he loves wheels, and toys that move. He’s the kid who figures out how all the toys work, and when punching a button or twisting a knob produces results. He imitates physical actions fairly well; he’s right handed, but he brushes his teeth left-handed because that’s how I do it. He knows that a key is supposed to go in that lock in the door, even if he isn’t quite coordinated enough to insert it himself. Lately he’s fascinated by the sewing machine — cool moving parts! He likes music and sounds, and definitely recognizes favorite songs (and movie themes!). He’s very good at solving problems — how do I get this open? how do I get that banana off the shelf? I can’t reach this from here; maybe if I stand there? If you throw out the fact that his language and social skills are at about a one-year-old’s level, he’s extremely bright.
But his language and social skills are at about a one-year-old’s level. And the window is closing. If he’s not speaking within the next few years, he’s probably never going to speak at all.
Uncertainty is a pain.
At least if it turns out he’s still non-verbal at seven or eight, I’ll know that he’ll always be that way. Right now, I’m still hoping. I keep remembering other people’s stories of how they didn’t speak until they were four and a half, when they started spouting out whole sentences. And I remember that my son’s great-aunt didn’t talk until she was five, and she’s a perfectly normal adult as far as I can tell. Einstein supposedly didn’t speak until he was four, and look what he did. And many people with autism who can’t speak do nonetheless learn to write, some very well.
Hope is definitely a pain.
Most of the time I manage to ignore the fact that my son is speech-delayed. He’s an energetic and affectionate kid; he’s exhausting, but reasonably fun to be around. I talk to him; I respond to his babbling; I try to read to him (hard to do with a kid who turn the pages too fast to even see what the picture is). I take his hand and help him write letters. Sometimes it doesn’t matter that he’s still nonverbal.
Sometimes, though, when I pick him up from daycare or the church nursery, and see the kids younger than him who can express complex thoughts and who have intricate social interactions, it’s like swallowing sandpaper. This fall I went to a cousin’s wedding, and got to spend some time with several of my little first cousins once-removed. Every single one of them had verbal skills way beyond my son’s, including the youngest, twenty months old at the time.
Dikka dikka dikka.
Four years old.
Waiting is a pain.
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Historic Fabric Widths?
What was the standard width of fabrics in the early 1800s? I’m suddenly curious, after reading a book in which the character receives fifteen yards of muslin for a gown — yes, the dresses of 1802 were longer and perhaps fuller than modern ones, and perhaps there were extra layers, but fifteen yards just seems unusually long. Then again, I’m not a costumer; maybe you really do need that much for a standard dress.
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24 February 2003
“One!”
Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo is the perfect-sized book for a trip. I only got through half of it on the flight up, read a few more chapters over lunches, and finished it on the flight back.
I’d read an abridged version before, but this was my first time through the unabridged. Wow. And everything fits together by the end — I spent about fifteen chapters going “wait a minute! here Bertuccio says he killed Villefort, but over here Villefort’s doing fine — what happened?” but ultimately got the questions answered.
It’s great Dumas — fun and swashbuckling and way larger-than-life. Of course it has some ideas and attitudes that stick in my throat (I’m growing more and more allergic to romantic love), but it’s a grand story.
(I also finished reading Pride and Prejudice just before I left. Yay Elizabeth! Yay Darcy! Yay cool British miniseries edition that I need to watch again!)
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18 February 2003
It’s Officially Spring.
I saw my first bluebonnets of the season on the way to campus yesterday. It’s springtime in Texas.
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14 February 2003
The Jolly Rogers
I love the Internet.
About ten years ago, some friends introduced me to the music of The Jolly Rogers, a pirate/sea shanty/Celtic band they’d heard. They gave me a pirated [heh] tape, which I’ve listened to many times with great enjoyment.
The tape got buried in stuff for some years, but I recently unearthed it and listened to it again. “Dang,” I thought, “these songs are so good; I suppose this was one of those short-lived bands whose recordings are forever lost, but I wish I could get a legal tape, or better yet a CD.”
(One guess where this is going, eh?)
This afternoon, after a discussion of pirates with an officemate, I started trying to sing a traditional song I’d learned through the Jolly Rogers tape; of course, I couldn’t remember the lyrics, so I went Googling.
And then I thought, what the heck? Might as well try it.
They still exist.
Once I’ve paid the bills for the month, I am spending some fun money.
I really, really, REALLY love the Internet.
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