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Reading life review: July

■ The Maze Runner (James Dashner)
YA fiction. Meh. Great (if derivative) idea predictably executed. Will not be seeking out the next books in the series.

■ DMZ Vol. 8: Hearts and Minds (Brian Wood)
Graphic series. As I mentioned in May's entry, this is one compelling story.

■ Ex Machina, Vol. 5: Smoke, Smoke (Brian K. Vaughan)
■ Ex Machina, Vol. 6: Power Down (Brian K. Vaughan)
■ Ex Machina, Vol. 7: Ex Cathedra (Brian K. Vaughan)
■ Ex Machina, Vol. 8: Dirty Tricks (Brian K. Vaughan)
■ Ex Machina, Vol. 9: Ring Out the Old (Brian K. Vaughan)
Graphic series. And as I mentioned in last month's entry, I loved Y: The Last Man (related entries here and here) so I thought I'd give this a go. Volume 10 is due out in November.

■ The Gold-Bug and Other Tales (Edgar Allan Poe)
Classic. With the Misses. Naturally, we held an Edgar Allan Poe-Vincent Price film fest once we completed our reading. We also discovered Professor Elliot Engel during our Poe unit: Edgar Allan Poe: A Light and Enlightening Look. Great stuff.

■ To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
Classic. With the Misses. And, yes, we also revisited the film. (Related entry here.)

■ The Tempest (William Shakespeare)
■ William Shakespeare's The Tempest (Bruce Coville)
Play, classic. With Mr. M-mv and the Misses, in preparation for our trip to the Illinois Shakespeare Festival. (Related entries here and here.) By the way, Professor Elliot Engel's William Shakespeare: A Light and Enlightening Look was a fun complement to this month's reading. It's pitched toward those newer to bardolatry, but we still enjoyed it.

■ The Wednesday Wars (Gary Schmidt)
YA fiction, audiobook. I actually read The Wednesday Wars two years ago: In fact, it made my list of best books read in 2008 -- as much for the many Shakespeare references as for the Richard Peck-like narrative sensibility. I was delighted, then, to read Book Moot's recommendation of the audiobook. Ahhh! I thought. I now know how to fill the hours of our long drive to and from the Illinois Shakespeare Festival. Imagine my delight on (re)discovering Sycorax and Caliban (the rats and the mystical beings). Re-entering Schmidt's world was a wonderful bit of that ol' synchronicity / serendipity / synthesis magic, I'll tell you. But don't just take my word for it: Mr. M-mv and the Misses give The Wednesday Wars their enthusiastic thumbs-up, too. Highly recommended, both text and audiobook.

That a tempest preceded The Tempest...

will not surprise even one of M-mv's regular readers.

The morning performance of As You Like It (related entry here) was held on the courtyard stage in full sun and a 105-degree index, so naturally we were delighted by the cool air that greeted us as we walked from the hotel to the car for the evening performance of The Tempest, which was to be held in the 438-seat, open-air theater.

And then we looked up.

Blow, till thou burst thy wind, if room enough!

We had been watching the weather predictions for ten days and had known for that long that thunderstorms were in the forecast. The dark clouds and cool breeze announced that the foul weather had, indeed, arrived.

The sky, it seems, would pour down stinking pitch....

The rain -- the tempest -- arrived shortly after we were ushered into shelter on the Ewing Manor grounds.

I pray now, keep below....

Do you not hear him? You mar our labour: keep your
cabins: you do assist the storm.

"We've only had to cancel once this season," a Festival worker cheerfully announced to any among the earlier arrivals who needed reassurance. "It's a fast-moving storm. We'll be fine."

Be collected:
No more amazement: tell your piteous heart
There's no harm done.

And they were... as was the performance.

With the help of your good hands:
Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails,
Which was to please. Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardon'd be,
Let your indulgence set me free.

In fact, our hands did give more than gentle breath to the company, particularly to crowd favorites Ariel (Gerson Dacanay) and Caliban (Kareem Bandealy).

"We're idealistic of course."

From "What's Wrong With the American University System," an interview with Andrew Hacker, professor emeritus at Queens College in New York and co-author of Higher Education?

[L]iberal arts, properly conceived, means wrestling with issues and ideas, putting the mind to work in a way these young people will only be able to do for these four years. And we'd like this for everyone. They can always learn vocational things later, on the job. They can even get an engineering degree later—by the way, in two years rather than four.

And later:

Good teaching is not just imparting knowledge, like pouring milk into a jug. It's the job of the teacher to get students interested and turned on no matter what the subject is. Every student can be turned on if teachers really engage in this way.

Scenes from the Illinois Shakespeare Festival

The Misses are pictured behind As You Like It cast members Rhys Lowell and Max Ganet, and Jake Olbert, a splendid guitar player and singer.

Steve Wojtas portrayed Oliver, Adam, and Jaques
-- and acquitted himself fabulously in all three roles.

Megan Sorti offered a memorable Rosalind.

It's not saying much for Branagh's (re)envisioning that we greatly preferred the Theater for Young Audiences Production to his 2007 film. The interpretations of Celia and Jaques deserve a special shout-out: Magdalyn Donnelley ensures that Rosalind's coz and dear friend is not dismissed as a ninny; and Steve Wojta (pictured in the third image above) offers wit that is neither wry nor overwrought.

Great stuff.

Miranda was, of course, homeschooled.

From The Tempest, Act I, Scene 2

PROSPERO
Now I arise:
[Resumes his mantle]
Sit still, and hear the last of our sea-sorrow.
Here in this island we arrived; and here
Have I, thy schoolmaster, made thee more profit
Than other princesses can that have more time
For vainer hours and tutors not so careful.

As to his methodology, well, one much wonders at Prospero's liberal use of magic. See, for example, how he bids his daughter to sleep when he must attend to his work:

Here cease more questions:
Thou art inclined to sleep; 'tis a good dulness,
And give it way: I know thou canst not choose.
[MIRANDA sleeps]
Come away, servant, come. I am ready now.
Approach, my Ariel, come.

And down she goes until her teacher is ready to instruct her again. I don't know, folks. At fifteen, there is no "good dulness." At three? Maybe. Maybe one might be tempted to employ a spell or two during those preschool years: Cease more questions! For that matter, Cease more noise! Cease more mess! Cease it ALL for thirty minutes or so, all right? Yes, one begins to appreciate a periodic "good dulness." In the twenty-first century, we call it television. But during the high school years? Nope. No time for dullness, good or otherwise. Prospero the schoolmaster is serving his own needs at the expense of his student's when he sends Miranda to Zs.

And then there his troubling use of "wench" as term of endearment: Well demanded, wench and No, wench and foolish, wench. Enough, already. She's the daughter of a duke, not Mistress Quickly's sister. Sheesh.

You know what? I think a number of homeschooling mothers might be less than enamored of Prospero's style. Heh, heh, heh.

Still, homeschooling as depicted by Shakespeare. Talk about synchronicity / serendipity / synthesis, eh?

"LOST" humor

Hat tip: PFC M-mv, who found the clip at Fork Party (funny but periodically raunchy -- you've been warned).

"My library was dukedom large enough."

The finale of "LOST" coincided with the beginning of summer swim season and our summer schedule of practices, music, and studies. The Misses had been clamoring to watch for a couple of years, so while many people closed the book on this much-discussed series and eventually found other entertainments, I decided to turn back to the beginning and reread it, this time with the Misses. Usually we watch with our midday meal, dubbing it "'LOST' lunch."

We arrived at Season 4, Episode 6 ("The Other Woman," in which Daniel disarms the Tempest station) just as we began our study of Shakespeare's The Tempest. A jolt of synchronicity / serendipity / synthesis, a pleasant shock of recognition.

Earlier that same week, I had completed a massive shifting / reshelving project, during which I familiarized myself with friends -- subjects, old and new. One of newest of these companions opens with a quote from The Tempest, though which one -- which book, which quote -- I no longer remember.* I just remember that jolt of synchronicity / serendipity / synthesis, that pleasant shock of recognition upon seeing the quote.

I last read and studied The Tempest nearly five years ago, with Master M-mv. Returning to such books as this and To Kill a Mockingbird and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and the stories of Edgar Allan Poe is alternately sweet -- the Misses bring fresh eyes and new ideas to the material -- and, yes, somewhat bitter -- it all goes too, too fast, doesn't it?

Enough of that. We have just returned from an nine-mile bike ride, a ride that brings our summer season total to 221 miles. Coupled with swimming (the Misses), stair-climbing (Mr.), and an exercise DVD and yard work (me), this amounts to a fairly active summer, I'd say. Good for us! Yes, good for us.

Now it's time to complete a few daily chores and then enjoy some French toast, after which we will look to music, The Tempest, and, yes, maybe a bit of "LOST" to round out our day.

Happy weekending, folks.

* Added later: It was Lev Grossman's The Magicians.

I'll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I'll drown my book.

~ The Tempest, Act V, Scene I

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School of one

On reading the title, "The Littlest Schoolhouse" (The Atlantic, July/August 2010), my first thought was, Homeschooling? But, no. Not that. Something different.

From the article:

Teachers generally work on a mass-production model—if 30 kids are in the class, the goal is to find a method that will allow the highest percentage of them to succeed. A great teacher can employ secondary methods to get through to laggards, but given the variables that individual students bring to the class, a handful of kids will inevitably be shortchanged. Teaching each child at his or her optimal level with the optimal technique has traditionally been left to private schools and expensive tutors. But with more schools employing computers, Rose saw a chance to bring boutique education to a mass public-school audience.

He envisioned a classroom broken down into stations, each one designed to teach specific skills in different ways. A kid who needs to learn how to calculate the area of a circle could be taught in a group with a teacher, with a virtual tutor, or with a computer program. “The vision I had was a large open space with different modalities happening at the same time,” Rose told me. “I don’t know a lot about technology. But I did talk to people who know a lot about technology. I said, ‘I’ve got this crazy idea. Is this even doable?’ And they said, ‘Yeah.’”

Can machines think?

From David Gelernter's essay "Dream-Logic, the Internet and Artificial Thought":

As far as we know, there is no way to achieve consciousness on a computer or any collection of computers. However — and this is the interesting (or dangerous) part — the cognitive spectrum, once we understand its operation and fill in the details, is a guide to the construction of simulated or artificial thought. We can build software models of Consciousness and Memory, and then set them in rhythmic motion.

The result would be a computer that seems to think. [Emphasis added] It would be a zombie (a word philosophers have borrowed from science fiction and movies): the computer would have no inner mental world; would in fact be unconscious. But in practical terms, that would make no difference. The computer would ponder, converse and solve problems just as a man would. And we would have achieved artificial or simulated thought, "artificial intelligence."

On the nightstand

■ WWW : Wake (Robert J. Sawyer)

■ The Idle Parent (Tom Hodgkinson; related entry here)

■ One Day (David Nichols)

■ The Wisdom of Birds (Tim Birkhead)

■ Ship Breaker (Paolo Bacigalupi)

■ The Windup Girl (Paolo Bacigalupi)

"[S]low reading is not so much about unleashing the reader's creativity, as uncovering the author's."

From "The art of slow reading" (The Guardian, July 15):

[A] literary revolution is at hand. First we had slow food, then slow travel. Now, those campaigns are joined by a slow-reading movement – a disparate bunch of academics and intellectuals who want us to take our time while reading, and re-reading. They ask us to switch off our computers every so often and rediscover both the joy of personal engagement with physical texts, and the ability to process them fully.

And later:

But what's clear is that our era's technological diarrhoea is bringing more and more slow readers to the fore. Keith Thomas, the Oxford history professor, is one such reader. He doesn't see himself as part of a wider slow community, but has nevertheless recently written – in the London Review of Books – about his bewilderment at the hasty reading techniques in contemporary academia. "I don't think using a search engine to find certain key words in a text is a substitute for reading it properly," he says. "You don't get a proper sense of the work, or understand its context. And there's no serendipity – half the things I've found in my research have come when I've luckily stumbled across something I wasn't expecting."

Related entries
■ Good question

■ The question is...

Related article
■ "Linked In With: a Writer Who Questions the Wisdom of Teaching With Technology" (The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 4)

Another summer swim season, come and gone

As seen on TV

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A helpful resource

Fine Art... Thursday?

Well, sure. Why not? It's been a month since I posted a Fine Art Friday entry, so I'm not going to quibble about the day of the week, all right? All right. On to the featured artist, then.

We were already familiar with the work of the Field Museum's artist-in-residence Peggy MacNamara when we visited her office at this year's behind-the-scenes event. Her Illinois Insects and Spiders had engaged and delighted the young naturalists / artists who call the little house in the tiny woods on the prairie home. And Miss M-mv(i) had had the pleasure of speaking with the artist at a behind-the-scenes event several years ago. At that time, MacNamara was working in watercolor beside the table where folks from the zoology department were discussing the bird specimens. In the time between that encounter and the one just a few hallways and offices earlier -- when we met a scientific illustrator intent on his work -- a much younger Miss M-mv(i) mentally married her art talent to her abiding interest in birds and nature.

And she hasn't looked back.

Good stuff.

The images below were taken at this year's event. You can probably imagine the Misses' faces when they saw MacNamara's office at the Field. "The only thing she needs is a window. Otherwise, it's perfect," declared Miss M-mv(i). I thoroughly agree.

Visit the artist's website to see more of her work. (If you have a slower connection, allow a bit of time for the galleries to load. Trust us: It's worth the wait.)

From the archives: Being idle

Note: This entry first appeared on a summer Wednesday four years ago. I went off in search of it after receiving a recommendation for Tom Hodgkinson's The Idle Parent. I read Hodgkinson's How to Be Idle in October 2005 and promptly developed a crush on it akin to my crush on Barbara Holland's Endangered Pleasures: In Defense of Naps, Bacon, Martinis, Profanity, and Other Indulgences (and if that's not a hearty recommendation -- for both books -- I don't what is).

My mother-in-law had finished reading her August Ladies' Home Journal before the end of her visit with us, so she tucked it into the reading rack. I grabbed it for poolside companionship yesterday.

In "The Rewards of Relaxation," Margaret Renkl quotes from two books I've pressed on M-mv readers: How to Be Idle (Tom Hodgkinson; in this entry) and In Praise of Slowness: How a Worldwide Movement Is Challenging the Cult of Speed (Carl Honore; in this entry).

If you haven't had time for these two volumes, at least read Renkl's piece:

For starters, the problem-solving mind actually functions best during unstructured time. Think of the resting brain as an automated version of an old-fashioned card catalog: When we're engaged in "mindless" activities -- taking a stroll, listening to music, soaking our feet -- our minds are free to sort through the accumulated information stored there, making connections and finding answers that a focused, directed mind is too busy to make. That's why that bit of data you've been struggling to recall -- the name of a childhood friend, a song lyric -- often comes to you as you're falling asleep or taking a shower.
...

The idle mind literally pulls together seemingly unrelated fragments of information stored in disparate regions of the brain and combines them in a way the focused mind can't.

Of course, not all idle moments result in creative genius, and sometimes we squander them... but there's something liberating in the idea that I've been espousing for three years: Stop being a slave to the to-do lists and chore charts and schedules and just, oh, look up! Dream! Think. Breathe deeply. Take a nap. Wonder.

Happy Wednesday, folks.

Added later: The incomparable R.T. writes:

Related to your "Being idle" post today, I recently read this poem by Mary Oliver, "The Summer Day." If you haven't read it, she reminds us of what we might miss through our business, stated in an unassuming and universal way.

From Oliver's poem:

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.

Something original and useful

M-mv faves Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman offer yet another thought-provoking piece of research. From "The Creativity Crisis" (Newsweek, July 10):

Having studied the childhoods of highly creative people for decades, Claremont Graduate University’s Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and University of Northern Iowa’s Gary G. Gute found highly creative adults tended to grow up in families embodying opposites. Parents encouraged uniqueness, yet provided stability. They were highly responsive to kids’ needs, yet challenged kids to develop skills. This resulted in a sort of adaptability: in times of anxiousness, clear rules could reduce chaos—yet when kids were bored, they could seek change, too. In the space between anxiety and boredom was where creativity flourished.

It’s also true that highly creative adults frequently grew up with hardship. Hardship by itself doesn’t lead to creativity, but it does force kids to become more flexible—and flexibility helps with creativity.

Related entries
● "The irony of lying is that it’s both normal and abnormal behavior at the same time." (2.13.2008)

● Snooze or lose (10.10.2007)

● Praiseworthy (2.12.2007)

● Chapbook entry (2.03.2006)

● Debra Pickett interviewed Po Bronson (1.30.2006)

● Po Bronson (1.15.2006)

● On the nightstand (under the pillow, in the knapsack, etc.) (1.14.2006)

Get to work!

In 2006, I offered a series of posts informed by Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World, Linda Hirshman's slim polemic about women and work. Given the number of recent newspaper and magazine articles revisiting such familiar topics as parenting and (un)happiness, women and work, and gender roles in marriage, I thought these entries might interest some of M-mv's newer readers.

Get to work!
Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV

The thing is? As I've so often conceded, my life has a certain Tom Sawyerish quality, doesn't it? (Related entries here, here, here, here, and here.)

From Get to Work (chapbook entry here):

p. 34
Assuming she is telling the truth, and she does live in the perfect land of a Walgreen's ad, is not all this biking and tree climbing a bit too much of the inner child for any normal adult? Although child rearing, unlike housework, is important and can be difficult, it does not take well-developed political skills to rule over creatures smaller than you are, weaker than you are, and completely dependent on you for survival or thriving. Certainly, it's not using your reason to do repetitive, physical tasks, whether it's cleaning or driving the car pool. My correspondent's life does have a certain Tom Sawyerish quality to it, but she has no power in the world. Why would the congressmen she writes to listen to someone whose life so resembles that of a toddler's, Harvard degree or no?

It would probably be bad form to point out that Tom was a tween, not a toddler, eh?

Hey, I just got back from a 9.1-mile bike ride, but now I need to change a bed, polish a query letter, and finish marking papers. How's that for mixing up the inner child with "any normal adult"? Heh, heh, heh.

Read. Think. Learn. Work and play.

Play it by heart.

Whether they ever needed me poolside is, I know, a point of debate. While many participants, older, younger, and the same age, swam under the vigilant and/or critical gaze of never-miss-a-practice parents, other participants, older, younger, and the same age, were simply deposited at the main entrance and picked up a couple of hours later. What is the so-called “happy medium”?

I still haven’t figured that out.

Master (now PFC) M-mv was already working for the head coach when he began swimming competitively. The pool was his work as well as his workout. We knew without discussion that he neither needed nor wanted a parent in the stands during practice.

But his sisters? They were just nine and eleven when they joined the team, and even though their brother was, by then, one of the coaches, they simply assumed that I would be there, too.

So I went.

A summer season and a winter season. It was all new to them, and at their ages, they appreciated someone handing them dry towels after practice and responding to “Did you see...?” and “What did think of my...?”

And then another summer, another winter. Sure, they were older, but we womenfolk were accustomed to hanging together. Where else would I be, right?

Still another summer.

Still another winter. And this was their brother’s last with the team. He left for boot camp just before their first meet of 2010. Initiating a new routine then would have been cold, right?

At some point during the spring stroke clinic, though, I looked around and wondered, Why am I here? Really? They don’t need me. Maybe they never did. They’re in able hands, and they’re beyond responsible. Why am I here?

I picked up my knapsack, shoved my novel and reading glasses into the front pouch, minced along the narrow, wet stretch from the bleachers to the door, and paused only long enough to tell the Misses, “If you have any concerns, talk with Coach. I’ll see you folks at the main entrance at 7:50 p.m. Love you.”

And I haven’t been back since.

As I have already conceded, I may well have overstayed my usefulness. Perhaps if the Misses attended school, peer influences might have prompted one or the other of them to say, “You can pick us up at the door, Mom,” or “Just drop us here, okay, Mom?” Without that brand of socialization, though, they looked to me, as children do, to be as I have always been – someone who lends support and finds the missing flipper, someone who will hold their coats and their hands. Perhaps they looked to me in this way for a longer time than your children looked to you; perhaps not. It doesn’t matter. In a parent-child relationship that works, that really, really works, there are no drop-dead deadlines for ceasing to be one sort of parent and becoming another. It just... happens. It emerges from the situations in which you and your family find yourselves.

So, this past spring, in an evening in the making for longer than I realized, I ceased to be a parent of children to my daughters and became the parent of young adults.

And it was good. And it was right. And no dishes were broken in the process. And no voices were raised. No feelings were hurt. No hands were wrung. Or navels gazed upon. We all just arrived at that next stage.

Simply. Healthily. Happily.

Until one of them maintains that “Baywatch” made her do it, that is. Or that all she’s ever really wanted is to join the Marines.

But those are stories, worries, for another time, aren’t they?

Folks, it’s all over much too fast to spend time doubting and comparing and complaining and consulting everyone else and her mother about parenting.

Love them.

Parent them.

Teach them.

Be good to them, encourage them in their efforts to be good to others, and let them see you being good to yourselves.

Ensure that they work and then let them play.

And when the time comes, let them go. After all, if you’ve been doing anything right at all, you’ve been letting them go since the moment they arrived.

The rest of it? Play it by ear. No, no. That’s not it. Play it by heart. Yes. By heart.

Play it by heart.

File this under N, for "No explanation offered"

Read. Think. Learn. Without studying?

The central bargain of a college education — that students have fairly light classloads because they’re independent enough to be learning outside the classroom — can no longer be taken for granted.

Really? Hmmmm.

From William Armstrong's Study Is Hard Work, a book I have pressed on anyone who would listen:

What is study? Study is, above everything else, hard work. It has always been hard work, and there are no indications at present which hint that science is going to accomplish a vitamin-capsule method of learning that will eliminate study. Study is the total of all the habits, determined purposes, and enforced practices that the individual uses in order to learn. People have objected to study for a long time.

Related entry: "[W]e underestimate our students' capacity for comprehending complex literature."

Children as "projects to be perfected"

From "All Joy and No Fun" (New York Magazine, July 4):

“I don’t mean to idealize the lives of the Namibian women,” she says. “But it was hard not to notice how calm they were. They were beading their children’s ankles and decorating them with sienna, clearly enjoying just sitting and playing with them, and we’re here often thinking of all of this stuff as labor.”

This is especially true in middle- and upper-income families, which are far more apt than their working-class counterparts to see their children as projects to be perfected. (Children of women with bachelor degrees spend almost five hours on “organized activities” per week, as opposed to children of high-school dropouts, who spend two.) Annette Lareau, the sociologist who coined the term “concerted cultivation” to describe the aggressive nurturing of economically advantaged children, puts it this way: “Middle-class parents spend much more time talking to children, answering questions with questions, and treating each child’s thought as a special contribution. And this is very tiring work.” Yet it’s work few parents feel that they can in good conscience neglect, says Lareau, “lest they put their children at risk by not giving them every advantage.”

This, of course, contradicts the WSJ piece I linked last month. What do you think? I'm in the "It's less work and more fun than folks think" camp. That's not to say parenting is necessarily easy or that it doesn't involve work -- just that it's nowhere near the dreary, painful, boring, bleak experience that some would have you believe.

"Virtuously dull"? Really?

Fifty years later, we can concede both that Harper Lee's novel inspired a generation of adolescents and that Flannery O'Connor was right.

We will begin this novel later in the week. It will be my fourth time reading it; my second, teaching it. I'm going to confine my response to the linked WSJ piece to one remark: I thoroughly agree with O'Connor's observation: "It's interesting that all the folks that are buying it don't know they are reading a children's book."

By the numbers

21
The number of miles we covered in two early-morning bike rides this weekend.
We rose early to avoid the heat.

13
The number of episodes in Season 2 of "Damages," which I began watching Friday evening.
Glenn Close. William Hurt. Marcia Gay Harden. Ted Danson. Sharp writing. Clever twists.
What's not to like?

4
The number of short stories we read before scheduling our Poe-themed family film night.
The stories?
"The Tell-Tale Heart"
"The Masque of the Red Death"
"The Cask of Amontillado"
"The Pit and the Pendulum"
And, yes, of course. Vincent Price.

1
The number of graphic novels I've read this weekend: DMZ Vol. 8: Hearts and Minds (Brian Wood).
I had hoped to read several more, but Volumes 6, 7, and 9 of Ex Machina (Brian K. Vaughan) arrived at the library before Volume 5.

19
The number of hours the central air conditioning has run this weekend.
The warm-up began last night.

2
The number of white grubs we discovered under the broken pot in our tiny but pretty container garden.
One word: Gross!

30
The number of dollars spent on Shake-Away for said container garden.
Worth every penny. We love our chipmunks and squirrels -- most days -- but we don't want them eating the marigold and vinca heads.

63
The number of tomatoes growing in our great Topsy-Turvy experiment.

2
The number of dual meets remaining in the summer swim season.
Wow! Where did those weeks go?

16
The number of blue ribbons the Misses have earned this season.
Between them, they have competed in 22 events and earned three second-place ribbons and one third-place ribbon in addition to the 16 blue.
(Miss M-mv(i)'s medley relay team was disqualified twice this season -- but not on her stroke, thank goodness.)

2.25
The number of hours the Misses were in music lessons this weekend.
Their teacher is gifted and generous, and, yes, they know how very lucky they are.

2
The number of times I've teared up recounting the basic plot of Toy Story 3.
"Let's face it. When the trash bags come out, we army guys are the first to go."

23
The greatest number of birds I've observed in the backyard at any one moment today.

7,998
The number of miles on my "new" car (which will actually be a year old in September).
This number seems a little high.

A dozen or more
The number of times we've spoken with Master (now PFC) M-mv this week.
Now that he's in the fleet, he's able to call regularly.
And he does.
We hear about the mundane and the new-to-us and accept each call as the gift it is.
We know how very lucky we are -- and have been.

5
The number of +2.00 reading glasses scattered around the house.
When they went, these eyes went quickly, didn't they?

3
The number of unfinished (abandoned?) projects I'll confess to.

15
The number of items checked out on my library card.
Includes audiobook version of Andrew Clements' Extra Credit, which will be Family M-mv's accompaniment on the long drive to the conference meet in a couple of weeks. (Related entry here.)

8.5
The number of hours of sleep I plan to get tonight.
The Misses arrive at swim practice at 6:15 a.m. each weekday morning, which means I've been getting up by 5:20. Bike rides are nice -- very nice -- but I'm going to sleep in a bit tomorrow.
Even mothers get a holiday. Heh, heh, heh.

3
The number of pages Mr. M-mv read in Faith of Our Sons before tossing it aside.
It seems that Frank Schaeffer has annoyed him nearly as much as he annoyed me.
(Related entry here.)

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