Good stuff here.
Good things right now:
*Countdown to ski trip now into teeny, tiny single digits.
*Ready to add sleeves to Ashley’s baby cardi (may finish while she is still a baby!)
*Sainsbury’s have actually responded to my note in their drop box with organic flour. It makes me so happy that I can now make completely organic, albeit entirely overpriced, baked goods in my wee little kitchen.
*Stranger Than Fiction is out on DVD in England now. Borders only had two copies yesterday. Now they have none.
*Yes, I went to Borders twice in two days.
*Yes, I babysit my favourite things to see if anyone else is buying them. Who are you other local person who was waiting to pounce on this DVD and found it, hidden out of alphabetical order and not in new releases?
*Finding this website which means yes, once can actually send flours. (I have hinted. He so isn’t getting it.)
*Remembering childhood toys and fashions with girls thinking about maybe growing up.
*Making Alicia’s bread recipe, which is delightful and just sweet enough to go with spicy food.
*Like the root vegetable curry in my new cookbook. (I can’t complain. That one I didn’t even hint about. Bless.)
*Inside info from he who went on a curry cookery course last week.
*Thinking that Alicia’s bread recipe made with cornmeal flour could possibly go so well with chilli.
*But instead just having coffee and blueberries for dinner tonight.
*Having nearly finished this month’s book club book, I brought home this to read on the plane. Because they didn’t have this, which will probably take me most of the next century to read anyway.
*You adding a good thing from your day to the comments.
xlovesx
Comment [17]
Where does it start?
With the new class starting, we’re talking about nostalgia and growing up and lots of little memories. I know that as a kid, I never thought my life would be like this. During my senior year, I had a scrapbook of sorts—one of those ones that you fill in rather than start from scratch—and it had a page of questions about where we thought we would be in ten years. I said I would be living in St. Louis or New York (knew I wanted to be city-bound…but I think I wanted a safety clause) and working as an actor or a writer. Which is funny, because I am neither of those things full time and yet both of things seemingly all the time.
Today I’m asking my students to start a conversation with one of their childhood memories, so I am here to lead by example. Growing up in the states, means we take classes in our state’s history, correct? I went to school in Kansas, so I can tell you that our state bird is the meadowlark, our state animal is the buffalo and we really, really tried to avoid picking sides in the Civil War. I can also tell you a lot about a woman called Carrie Nation. She was born in Kentucky but spent a great deal of her life in Medicine Lodge, Kansas (oh my goodness, do you not love funky names for towns? when I was six, I thought all the medicine in the world came from Medicine Lodge. But it is very small and could never hold that much ibuprofen, I tell you.) where she campaigned for prohibition. Like mega-campaigned. A woman on a mission. Big time. She carried a bible in one hand and a hatchet in the other, yet still had the means to throw rocks over the bars of saloons to save men from the drink.
We studied her for an entire week in the fourth grade, when my class then put on a Kansas Day assembly (which I can still remember falls on the 29th of January). Each member of the class was given an historical figure to portray, and some of us even had to prepare monologues to perform in front of the entire school. (Okay, so entire school meant fewer than 100 students, but as soon as you say entire school life becomes scary! That’s like every single person you know.)
And yes, I played Carrie Nation. Somewhere there is a photo of this, taken by Mrs Peterson (my favourite teacher in the entire world ever) and presented to me on the last day of school. It is a crazy picture that takes a ten year old and makes her look like this. My friend Jenny and I drew giant saloon doors on brown construction paper and taped them to the wall behind where I had to speak. At the end of my monologue, I ripped them with the hatchet. Oh, the drama of full school assembly! The first graders must have thought I had lost my entire mind.
So…if it is hard to pinpoint where this strange combination of acting, writing and education came to life…it may very well be Carrie Nation and Mrs Peterson.
Now please, to save me from my embarrassment: tell me a childhood memory I would never have known about you.
xlovesx
PS: Wikipedia says Carrie was nearly six feet tall. I don’t think we learned that in our Kansas History lessons, or I would never have been cast in such a role!
Comment [19]
Weekend Plans
Don’t get confused: this is not a class teaser. Those will start on Monday though. Giddy!
But this weekend I’ll be at Olympia for Stitch & Craft and if you come along, you can make 6×6 pages galore. I’ll be there along with girls from the SI team—Anne, Cheryl, Jane and Mary Anne.
If you come for the shopping, you better at least stop to say hello!
Have a fab weekend.
xlovesx
Comment [9]
