Visitor

Came home from church today to find this fellow catchin' some ZZZ's right beside our front door. Not a good place for the kids to find him.

I began to nudge him gently with a stick to encourage him to find another place to rest.


This appeared to rile him a bit.


With some more encouragement, he crawled up to the top of the window...


...and then copped this whole, "This good enough for ya!?" attitude.

But it wasn't.

After some slightly less gentle prodding, he flew away. Very neat to watch.

Birthdays

This week my amazingly creative wife threw together a double birthday bash for the kids and their friends. Brayden is presently in the grips of a renewed planet obsession, and Corina is really into Pooh. The party was planned accordingly.

Hundred Acre Crib


Solar System Race Track (complete with asteroid belt)


Planetary Grub (Yes, we know Pluto has been disqualified)


Food for the Pooh-Crew


Orbiting Planeteers (Samantha wanted to be the Sun.
Surprisingly enough, Brayden insisted on being Mercury)


Pooh-Crew Rockin' Out the Rosie


Whole Gang Chowin' Down


Quite a time.

A Thousand Words

Yeah, this pretty much sums up my life right now.

Perhaps I'm Completely Missing Something

Screenit has given the new movie 300 an "extreme" rating for sex and nudity. Its stated reasons for doing so are too embarrassing for me to even summarize in this post. If you're even considering going to see the movie, I would recommend checking out the review. If you're not thinking of seeing it, I would recommend not even reading the review.

Would anyone mind sharing his thoughts as to how a Christian man can justify going to see such a movie? You can post anonymously if you wish.

Sweet Surprise

Last week, I broke a branch off of one of our silver maples in order to hang up a finch feeder. A couple of hours later, the broken branch was dripping like a leaky faucet. I tasted the sap and was surprised to find it very sweet. Just for kicks, I placed a small metal bowl under the drip and was again surprised to find it half full in just under two hours. After a little online reading, I learned that even though the best sap is found in sugars and blacks, silver maples can produce a decent syrup as well--I had always considered the trees overgrown weeds. Very excited with my new discovery, I brought the sap in and boiled it in a skillet-- over-boiled it, as it turned out, and instead of syrup, ended up with a wonderfully tasty hard candy. The next morning I set out another bowl, and this time was able to boil my three cup harvest into just enough syrup for one glorious pancake.

I'm hooked. Yesterday I ordered my first set of taps from Yankee Grocery . I don't know if they'll arrive before the flow starches up, but at least I'll have them for next year.

Translating Poetry into Prose

Another exercise we do in rhetoric is to translate a piece of poetry into prose. This helps students develop a better sense of the differences between the two forms, gives them practice at creating prose apart from having also to generate the ideas, and allows them to develop better insight into the poetic piece itself. Recently, I had the seniors write a prose rendition of Ben Jonson’s poem, “On My First Son,” a marvelously moving piece in its own right. Here is the original:

Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;
My sin was too much hope of thee, lov'd boy.
Seven years thou wert lent to me, and I thee pay,
Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.
Oh, could I lose all father now! For why
Will man lament the state he should envy?
To have so soon 'scaped world's and flesh's rage,
And if no other misery, yet age!
Rest in soft peace, and, asked, say, Here doth lie
Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry.
For whose sake henceforth all his vows be such
As what he loves may never like too much.

And here is a conglomeration of what struck me as the best student adaptations of each line:

Goodbye, my son, my Benjamin, and all my joy. I always dreamed of what you would be, what you would accomplish, and in this I sinned. God lent you to me for seven years, and now I must return to him what is His. Today he requires payment of your life, and it must be given back to Him. Oh, if only I could lose all fatherly instincts and feelings. Why am I sorrowing for you when I should be jealous of your state? You were so fortunate to have escaped the world young and without experiencing its miseries. Rest in peace and quiet, my son, and know that you are and will forever remain my greatest and most prized piece of poetry. For your sake, I promise that I will never again love anything too much.

The 100 Acre Fireswamp

One of the exercises I like to do with rhetoric students is to have them imitate sentence patterns. For this exercise, we take sentences or group of sentences and break them into their various clauses and phrases, then we write a new sentence that uses the same structures and order to express entirely different ideas.

Many times, we take these models from the grand speeches we're analyzing, other times (as will soon be evident) we adopt prose that, if somewhat more lighthearted, is at least very well known. In fact, the following adaptation (by one of my lovely seniors) is based on a passage so familiar, I think I shan't post the original.

Piglet, friendship is the most important thing in the 100 Acre Wood-- except for eating honey: ooey, gooey, and golden, where the honey is fresh and the bees are angry, it's amazing, so good-- but that's not what was talking about; I was talking about having friends, and as we all know, to have friends is to be happy.

The original?