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Pyramid of skulls
2006-06-12 - 10:47 a.m. Yikes. My head is hurting. Here's the deal. Saturday, I went to Ikea and got many things. Many useful and attractive things. This was good. Then I came home and took M shopping for some shoes to go with her graduation dress. Success! She wanted wedgie espadrilles, and that's what we got -- a white pair and a pink pair. They're high heels. She loves them (what a nut.) She's 5'11" in them. She pretends that this bothers her. Then, I took her to play in a recital, and left (to continue packing). Apparently it went quite well! Then she went to a graduation party. What a lot of stuff! The amazing thing is that she enjoyed all this stuff -- usually she is not a fan of stuff. Sunday, N's friend K came over and they assembled their firework. It's called a fountain, and it's like a roman candle, but we really had no idea what it would be like. It was perfect! They made one and set it off and it was just a little fountain of sparks. Perfect -- not big enough to be terrifying, but definitely big enough to feel like a real thing. They saved four more -- three to let off Sunday night and one to bring to class, if their teacher will let them. They also made a power point thingy of the whole process. Hooray! And that is pretty much over. Yay. While all this was going on, I cleaned out the house and assembled the new furniture and put up the new curtains and vacuumed. Much better. Everything really does seem to be coming together. K and I took a load of stuff over to the new house, which is actually coming along, and then walked to the store to get champagne to go with the fireworks. It's quite pleasant to walk to the store! Then we came home and it was dark and the laundry was laundering away in the clean basement and we invited E's family to come over, and the A's from across the street and we hung out on the lovely new deck and watched the fireworks, which were really impressive! And drank champagne and ate strawberries and grapes and pirouettes. It was quite pleasant. Then we stayed up way too late, but such is life. Okay. That is all. Oh wait, there's a little more. Apparently the new plan for teaching history is to teach the total history of the world.I have sort of mixed feelings about this. It's really cool to actually learn what's going on in the 17th c. in India and Peria and Turkey. I never ever learned any of this, and I do wish I had. But it is really really hard to cram everything in to one year and have the kids actually come out feeling like they know much about anything. N is learning a lot more history, really, in Latin, because it's just a more manageable amount of material. But anyway, she does have to know a sort of sketchy history of the Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal empires, so I was reading it to her. It's actually kind of interesting. I thought of metonym when I was reading about Babur's son (I've forgotton his name, but it starts with an H) importing miniaturists from the Safavid empire to paint those really lovely miniatures. Now I know how come they appear in Persia and India! And then, in the NYT book review there was a review of a book by a man who walked through Afghanistan accompanied by a dog named Babur. !!! And I knew who Babur was! Okay, really that is all. Bye.
find me! - 2008-02-12 |
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