First, my scribble. I started out wanting to solve the mystery of Alzheimer’s disease. I thought I’d write about the last time I saw my grandfather. Then I got to thinking about other family members … his wife with the unnamed dementia, haunted by her own mistreatment of him and failure to feel loved by her mother … my dad’s father, withered by Parkinson’s, completely aware of the fact that he could no longer make his body do what he was telling it to … my 20-something cousin, who died a year ago this month, the victim of a brain tumor that spread to her spine … the countless people I know who battle depression, anxiety, ADD, ADHD, obsessive compulsion, anal retention, post traumatic stress, addiction the list goes on and on. I’m beginning to think none of us has an unscarred brain. Think of the lonely people, the people afraid to commit, the people with low self esteem. I stopped wanting to solve the Alzheimer’s mystery and started thinking on an uncontrollably large scale, as I’m often wont to do. Anyway, that’s where that bit of fiction came from ... what if we could get a reliable map that connects the ethereal emotional stuff to the physical bits of nervous system … something concrete that could help us all be healthy and, above all, more understanding of each other?
Next, summer fun, Week 2. I decided before school ended to have a bit of a plan for the summer. Thanks to the library we will visit a new country each week. After Sensei’s birthday party (at which we had a good time getting to know better some of the other families from karate school) I thought Japan would be a good place to start. So we checked out the following books, made our own mini Japanese gardens and carp streamers and tried three new recipes on Japanese Night. (The kids tried chopsticks for the first time!) I’m getting ready to make some pages for the older kids to color/write on to create a “My Library Travels” journal for the summer. It has the potential to be a good boredom fighter. The cookbook I checked out was Japanese Cuisine by Chen Shiu-Lee (1988 Wei-Chuan Publishing) … all the newer ones were checked out, but I liked this one because it is printed in both languages and had pictures. Also, I already had all the ingredients for the dishes I chose to make. Here are the books (with dates and publishers) all from the juvenile non-fiction section of our local library:
On the Map: Japan (1993 Steck-Vaughn Company)
Culture in Japan (2004 Raintree)
Colors of Japan (1997 Carolrhoda Books, Inc.)
Japan: Things to Make; Activities; Facts (1994 Franklin Watts)
So in the past few days we’ve been swimming with friends; done the Japan Night thing; caught some fireflies; built about 50 forts all using the linen from our beds; watched a fair dose of early-morning TV; continued our journey to the Earth’s core; read more books and learned to play Monopoly. BTW … the 5-year-old nearly won … proof it is luck and not skill … and yes, it has rained a bit!
Finally, I want to introduce something that took me much longer than I thought it would. The idea started here and then became a list in my journal. Then I thought about this blog then this blogger and oh, this one and this entry here and thought: “I should try to stretch, maybe make a collage. I used to do that all the time. I should try.”
So I did, but instead of a collage I ended up with more of a slideshow. I started each sentence the same. Some of it’s serious, some of it’s silly, some of it might offend even though I of course don’t mean for it to, some of it was just a way of getting things out that I forgot were there or didn’t want to look at. I hope blogger just lets it be. I think you can click on images to make them larger if you can’t read them. Most all the art is MicroSoft clipart. Some I found on Google images. I provided a link to any specific artist from whom I took work. So, I’ll just start now.
