Waking the moon

I'm 10+ years late to the party, but I'm finally getting around to reading The Red Pencil (aloud with the kids) and I am so hung up on these moon rituals mentioned at the beginning of the book (and, as far as I can surmise, are mentioned later in the book). Granted, we are only on page 115, so we still have a ways to go but, like...what?

So apparently there is a tradition of "waking the moon" in...whatever village our protagonist, Amira, is from...where a "hiding moon" is considered "a curse" so when clouds threaten to cover the moon the people assemble to collectively "wake her" by yelling, banging drums, shaking bells, beating pans. 

And I just...have so many questions about this. 

Is this a special ritual? Like, are there only certain nights that it's important to keep the moon unveiled? Or is it important that she is always free from cloud cover?

Who is keeping tabs on the moon? From what I can tell from the book (and from, you know, life experience), these are all very hardworking people (aren't we all?). So who is assigned moon-watching duty after working the land so hard all day long? Is this task accomplished in shifts? It seems like it would be difficult to stay awake long enough to keep the moon in "view / until sunrise announces / night's farewell" (p. 36), especially if this is a constant thing.

And, again, we're just waking up the entire village to conjure a cacophony every time the moon slips behind a cloud? 

When, then, do the people sleep?

I know the moon wasn't visible when I went to bed last night. The roaring wind, pouring rain, and crashing thunder made enough of a ruckus that I'm not sure any of my hollers would have been heard over the noise of it all. Perhaps that's why cloud cover is bad luck. Who knows?

I don't. 

Stats

Last night I asked Andrew to pull together some statistics for my blog. Like, I could tell that my total posts per year had gone down over time, peaking at 539 (in 2008, the year I was raising only one baby and moved to Egypt) and dropping down to 231 (in 2022, the year I was raising my sixth baby and finishing my master's degree). There are many other reasons for my total number of posts dropping over time, especially since 2010—Rachel offered the fact that I've had, like, four babies between 2010 and now (and mentioned that she was going for an absurd number of babies...but then realized that four was accurate in my case) and Andrew offered the fact that we moved from Egypt to, uh, Orem (which kind of dialed back our "excitement" level). 

Still, I wondered whether my post length had increased (it had) and whether that would even out my total word count—like, I wanted to know whether I was writing fewer posts (obviously) but ultimately hitting the same word count annually. The answer is, that my post length is up on average but my word count is trending downward.

Memorized Scriptures 2024

We had 22 scriptures on our list of scriptures to memorize this year and while I'm not sure everyone memorized every scripture, we certainly made a valiant effort. We officially crossed off 19 of them and are still working on 3. Perhaps we'll cross off more tomorrow.

Beautiful things in my world

On Monday I went out walking with the kids. Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday has been such a slog this semester. But on Mondays we can take things a little slower. 

We had time to admire the leaves.

Space heater

It's mid-October and sometimes chilly, but we're firmly decided on not turning the heater on until November. Just to see if we can (we totally can). 

Andrew (the cheater) moved a space heater into his office and when he turns that puppy on and closes his office door, things get pretty roasty-toasty inside. 

I was in the kitchen just now and he left his roasty-toasty office, leaving the door wide open. 

When I left the kitchen I had a moment of panic when I was hit by a waft of warm air, right in the face. 

"What in the world?!" I asked to no one in particular, sniffing the air. "Is the heater on? What is going on?"

Rachel and Miriam came to investigate with me (the little kids, the younger kids, the kids from Benjamin on down were taking care of Luna) and they agreed that the air was certainly much warmer at head level than ground level. 

This makes sense...because hot air rises. 

But where was the air coming from?!

It was Miriam who pointed out that Andrew's office heater was on and that air was spilling out of his office into the hallway. On his way back to his office he encountered us all bobbing up and down in the hallway, "Warm. Cold. Warm. Cold. Warm. Cold."

The difference was astounding. 

Watching the April 8, 2024 Eclipse

We had a lovely time watching the eclipse this afternoon. While we weren't in the path of totality (we were about 85%), we did notice a significant gloaming effect (another vocabulary word from today) as well as an accompanied decrease in overall temperature. 

Consonant clusters

I'm not taking Paxlovid. I thought about trying it this time around, but it just didn't feel right to completely wean Phoebe while she's trying to get over COVID as well (though I'm sure she'll finish up weaning in the next few weeks, anyway, and then I might have wished that I had just cut her off and taken the medicine). Andrew is taking Paxlovid, however.

Oh, by the way, Andrew and Alexander tested positive today so obviously we've done a bang up job at containing this virus. 

Anyway, Andrew went ahead and got a prescription for Paxlovid. He just had to take a picture of his positive rapid-test and a random doctor online wrote out a script. 

On the one hand, I think that's approaching accessibility (and that's good). On the other hand, why don't we just make it over-the-counter at this point? I mean, it's not like the doctor is doing any actual safe-guarding in this situation. 

We have so many positive tests sitting on our counter...Andrew didn't have to take a picture of his own test. I mean, he did because...honesty is...good. But, I mean, come on... I guess I'm just team "make it over-the-counter." That said, I have no knowledge of how these decisions are made, so I guess I'll let those more knowledgable than me hash it out (but if they're looking for opinions, there's mine). 

Paxlovid.

The first time Andrew used it was when we had COVID the first time and I, honestly, was about 100 times sicker than I was this time around. I was miserable. But, I also had a baby who was still nursing full time, so Paxlovid wasn't even a consideration. But it worked really well for Andrew, who hardly got sick (comparatively speaking). 

I called the drug pax-LO-vid. 

He teased me for pronouncing it wrong, telling me it sounded far too Russian—pax-LO-vid, with a rich liquid /l/ following the tricky /sk/ of the x. Because here's the thing: you look at the word paxlovid and you think to yourself that there's only an "xl" consonant blend, just two little letters. And how hard can that be to pronounce? We have a billion consonant blends in English. I'll share some examples of blends below from this very paragraph:

sounded: nd

tricky: tr

think: nk

consonant: nt (and kind of ns, I guess, though that's a syllable break, so...I dunno)

blend: bl and nd

hard: rd

pronounce: nc
from: fr
paragraph: gr

English: Now, that one is pretty tricky since it looks like "ngl" is three consonants together, which is a somewhat unusual occurrence in English. However, the /ng/ is technically a single sound (/ŋ/ in the IPA), so it's still just a two-consonant blend. Think is technically /ŋ+k/, so that is two sounds.

Tricky, on the other hand, clearly has a two-consonant blend at the beginning of the word /tr/, but although it looks like that /ck/ at the end is another consonant blend, it's really not, phonetically speaking. We've just doubled the orthography representing one sound...so...it's not any different from any other /k/ sound and is not a phonetic blend; it's a digraph.

Same thing with that /ph/ in paragraph. That's a digraph, not a consonant blend. /Th/ is also a digraph—two letters coming together to form a single sound. 

X is tricky in English because it is a single letter representing two sounds /k+s/, so it alone qualifies as a consonant cluster, phonetically speaking, even though it's made up of a single letter.

I'm getting to the story, guys, I promise. 

A day in my life as the wife of a data scientist...

Andrew—of course—went all in on keeping statistics as we made our way across the country and back. He started out keeping copious notes about start and stop times...before he realized that our cell phones track all that information anyway and he could simply harvest that data and analyze it later. 

And that's exactly what he did, which is equal parts fascinating and terrifying. 

Our phones have information about where we are right down to the millisecond of every day, right down to the latitude and longitude of every footstep. It's...wild...and fascinating.

Anyway, if you want to read about all the statistics of our trip (including about the moment I cut the kids off from (sugary) beverages because we were stopping for potty breaks every half hour) you can read Andrew's blog post here.

That link will skip you right past all the coding tutorials he included at the top (so you don't have to wade through those). 

One secret to life, revealed (<--clickbait title)

It'll be our little secret

Don't tell anyone, but when I am suffering from writer's block (when I'm majorly psyched out about my thesis, for example), I open up a Blogger draft and type in there. Because it's soothing somehow. 

I may or may not have 655 words of my thesis saved in a Blogger draft right now. Those 655 words are just a drop in the bucket—for reference, my thesis prospectus is 17566 words (including my references). That translates into 76 pages (and I don't really want to talk about it because writing those 76 pages was hard and made me feel like I wasn't really a writer, or a reader, or a scholar, which is why my thesis itself is only 655 words from today plus the 566 words I wrote a few days ago, so 1221 words total)—but they exist now and they didn't before, so that feels like a victory tonight and so I'm allowing myself to blog about my children...as a treat. 

Will my thesis be finished by next month? Probably not. 

But we're going to just keep putting drops in the bucket—and by "we," I mean "me"—because that's how things get done.

While we were at the park today, Alexander was determined to go across the monkey bars by himself. I helped him across a couple of times, spotting him while coaching him to swing and reach. Then Rachel coached him for a while. And then he attempted it on his own. 

FHE Poetry

I'm taking a poetry class right now, which is wonderful and stressful at the same time. Mostly wonderful, I think.

One of the books I read recently—The Triggering Town by Richard Hugo—had an exercise inside (p. 30) that gave the reader a list of 10 nouns, 10 verbs, and 10 adjectives, and challenged them to write a poem using 5 of each of the nouns, verbs, and adjectives to craft a poem that:

1. is three stanzas long with six lines per stanza, four beats per line (with some wiggle room)
2. includes at least two internal and one external slant rhyme per stanza
3. has only two end stops per stanza
4. makes grammatical sense
5. but is, on the whole, meaningless

Part of the lesson here is that even when you try to write something meaningless, meaning will be there nonetheless, but it can help you approach poetry without a predetermined agenda, focusing more on the sound of things rather than a "message" you want to communicate. 

Þe Olde Poetry Club

Last year a friend of mine was displaced from her home due to the pandemic. She had been living in China, where both she and her husband were teaching English, but they had gone on vacation over the Chinese New Year (I believe they were enjoying Portugal) when China shut down. At first they hung out, having an "extended vacation" of sorts, but soon it became clear that this was not something that they'd be able to "wait out" on vacation. Since China was closed to them, they decided to fly to the States while they could. 

So on a whim, with nothing but the belongings they'd packed for a week-long vacation, they (and their two children) moved in with her parents in Florida. And then they just...stuck around...not knowing what they were going to do or supposed to do or what.

She felt hopeless and lonely and a little bit shattered. 

So she hopped online and asked if any of her friends wanted to be in a poetry club. Specifically she just wanted to share Mary Oliver poems, bask in their beauty, and discuss. 

I had never heard of Mary Oliver (oops?) but I like my friend and was feeling like I could use a community as well, so I said that I was in...depending on the schedule because...life was feeling topsy-turvy for us, too! We were still settling in here in Georgia, figuring out homeschooling, and...I was starting a master's degree.

My friend assured me that it would be 100% asynchronous. We'd just post things on a forum and respond to each other and get to know each other and enjoy some beautiful words. Her friends were just as scattered around the world as mine were, anyway, so planning any sort of virtual meet-up would likely be impossible. 

Sounded good to me.

A "brush" with regional variation

I've lived in the United States for several years now—nearly 20!—and my language has adapted accordingly. Now when I go back to my small town I can hear an accent that I couldn't hear before, that I didn't realize I had. So I know that I've been...gulp...Americanized. But I also know that I don't quite sound American because there are some Canadianisms that I've clung to (or that have clung to me). 

I feel comfortable, for example, calling markers 'markers' (even though I grew up calling them 'felts' or 'felt-tipped pens' or 'felt-tipped markers'), but I just can't say (or even spell) 'coloured pencils' without cringing (because I have to stick that /u/ in there, which, yes...is an active choice I made years ago). 

They are 'pencil crayons,' and always will be.

I am not even sure if that's one that I'm clinging to purposely or if it's just so ingrained in my mind that I the new word hasn't been able to unroot it. 

Another word Americans find strange, which I know I've kept, is 'housecoat.' It's not a word that's used often enough that I've replaced it in my lexicon. If I go to Amazon.com and look up 'housecoat,' I will only see American-style 'housecoats,' which...is not necessarily what I mean when I say 'housecoat.' Because what I mean, according to Americans, is 'robe.'

On the Canadian website, I immediately see what I'm thinking about when I say 'housecoat':

I can do...stuff.

I'm a bit of a perfectionist. I like to do things right and the idea of not doing something right stresses me out. This, oddly, doesn't necessarily apply to my housekeeping skills. It does however apply to academia. So grad school's been fun so far, obviously.

Along with perfectionism comes a healthy dose of imposter syndrome. 

Andrew is getting awfully good at routinely telling me that I can do "this thing," whatever "this thing" is at the time (a paper, a presentation, an entire degree) and know to talk me down when I talk about needing to figure out "my life" (like, the whole thing). 

A friend today posted a little meme on facebook that said something about not expecting yourself to perform at your best all the time because then it's no longer your best; it's your norm. So it's fine to sometimes not do your Very Best Work. 

I believe this could be a rather dangerous idea in the mind of someone who's already okay not doing their very best work, but I think it's excellent advice for a perfectionist and I've been trying to remind myself that this paper I'm working on, for example, doesn't have to be The Best Paper Ever Written. Like, it honestly just doesn't. And I know that. But if it isn't, then do I really deserve to be in school? (See, that's where the imposter syndrome kicks in).

So I'm going to vainly list a few kind things people have said or done for me this past semester that have helped me feel more real (ie. less of an imposter):

Rain, rain, go away

With Rachel being so involved with YW camp this week, we were on the fence about whether to have the rest of the kids do a week of school without her (having all the children be on the same schedule is a big perk to homeschooling, right?) but also part of the reason I'm trying to front load the school year is because I'm nervous about having to juggle their education with my education. Rachel is much better at managing her studies on her own than, say, for example, Benjamin or Zoë, so in theory she could still complete her studies in the future if I'm having a particularly busy week, while Benjamin and Zoë definitely could not.

So we took Monday (Rachel's birthday) off and went ahead and schooled (mostly) without her today (though she was present for our morning reading and I might count her drawing classes this week as school time since the kids did some drawing lessons this afternoon as well, which we counted toward school time).

We did not get any playtime outside today because it was raining all day. And not just raining—we had a torrential downpour, with thunder and lightning and dropping tree branches. The whole nine yards. It was a terrific storm; it was dark and cloudy all day.

This was unfortunate for two reasons. First of all, as Benjamin explained to me around 10:30 this evening, it's easier for him to fall asleep if he's had a productive day.

That's the sound of the...

We have spent literal hours at the park this week. Probably close to eight hours, if I'm being honest. The weather has just been so fantastic that we've hardly been able to help ourselves (but don't worry—we're still getting all our schoolwork done). It's supposed to rain for the rest of the week—we're supposed to get 3 inches of rain tomorrow, for example—so that will keep us indoors, I'm sure. But the lovely spring-like days have been a wonderful reprieve from the wet and gloomy weather we've been having.

Today when we were driving to the orthodontist we came across a row of trees (possibly okame cherries) all bedazzled with pink blossoms—on February 5th! I didn't take a picture because I was driving, but there they were, looking all beautiful as we zoomed on past. 

Here's Miriam with more braces instead of fewer (which had been her hope). She had thought she was finished with "phase 1" but we finally found an orthodontist who would take her and we found—surprise!—that one of the teeth we were told she was missing had grown in, so they decided to put some more brackets on and force her to live in braces for a few months more rather than removing them right away. But she's still happy to have a removal date at the end of the tunnel.

The way books are

"What was your favourite part of the day?" I asked Rachel at the dinner table a couple of nights ago. It's a question she's heard hundreds of times in her life and it's a question she knows she's not allowed to answer with "I dunno" or "Nuthin'" so it's a question that I love (not that I really have a problem with my kids answering me with "I dunno" or "Nuthin'"; they tend to be expounders).

"I dunno," she said.

I realize I just told you that Rachel doesn't answer my question with "I dunno," but to be completely transparent she always answers with "I dunno" or "That's a good question" whenever she's asked a question...even if she knows what the answer is immediately. It gives her time to process the question fully before spitting out her answer.

"I dunno," she said. "We started reading Frankenstein in class today. It's pretty cool. It's formatted the same way as Dracula at the beginning—just a bunch of letters."

I have never read Frankenstein or Dracula. The horror genre isn't really my scene. I can think of plenty of things to be afraid of without anyone telling me more things to be afraid of, thank you very much.

But Andrew read Dracula just before Rachel did this past October, so he immediately understood what she meant. I did not. Her statement went right over my head.

"All books are just a bunch of letters..." I pointed out, thinking, of course, of letters arranged (or formatted) on a page to form words.

"Yeah," Rachel said, "But these are back-and-forth letters between two different people, so..."

"Oh, I see," I said, somewhat embarrassed.

It's fine.

Just some boring stuff

I'm not very good at keeping secrets.

At least, I'm not very good at keeping my own secrets. I can't help it! I just get so excited about things. I'm not very good at surprising people because (a) I'm either really boring or (b) I just get so excited about things that I can't not talk about them. Or (c) all of the above, I suppose.

I don't know if this is a boring thing or not. Maybe it is.

It's not boring to me, so to that particular end...it's not boring. But I'm afraid it might be boring for other people, so then perhaps it's just boring.

But sometimes the boring work is the important work. Hear me out.

I'm doing some boring research right now for a different boring project, not the one I'm excited about (even though this research could be classified as boring as well, even though it's not necessarily boring to me) and I've recently been reading a paper by Thomas Röhlinger, who joined the democratic party in Germany (more on his history later) and teaches students that "democracy needs democrats that work for and defend it," though he doesn't use the party name in his lectures. I'm not sure how he manages that, but whatever.

Vulnerability

I've had a "book deal" for ten days now and I haven't quite managed to celebrate that because instead of feeling happy, I feel gripped with anxiety. I mean, I did feel happy, I think, though perhaps shocked is a better word for it. I got the email while we were in downtown Atlanta at the playground outside of the MLK museum and I just walked over to Andrew with my phone to show him what the email said. So he hugged me and congratulated me, while I just felt dazed.

Poetry is weird.

Notes

I'm reading Inspired by Rachel Held Evans (who tragically passed away earlier this year, leaving behind two young children) right now (among a few other things) and it almost has me wishing I was a person who could highlight passages in a book. But can't bring myself to do that (unless, oddly enough, it's the scriptures). It feels too much like desecration. I suppose that's what being raised in a houseful of librarians will do to you.

So instead of highlighting passages, I began sticking bookmarks (read: scraps of paper) in to mark passages, which was a great idea until the book was thick with extra paper (I'm only halfway through) and now I have to reread each page I've marked (and sometimes the next page) to find the passage I'd liked in the first place. But, it's a good book so it's not too much of a burden.

Some passages are about scripture, some are about the act of writing itself (which Rachel Held Evans believes, and which I believe, is a holy act).

p. 11 to 12: "....one of the most central themes of Scripture itself [is that] God stoops. From walking with Adam and Eve...to slipping into flesh and eating, laughing, suffering, healing, weeping, and dying among us as a part of humanity, the God of Scripture stoops and stoops and stoops and stoops. At the heart of the gospel message is the story of a God who stoops to the point of death on a cross.... It is no more beneath God to speak to us using poetry, proverb, letters, and legend than it is for a mother to read storybooks to her daughter at bedtime."

p. 48 to 49 : "Storytelling always has been, and always will be, one of humanity's greatest tools for survival." And, "...be warned. in Scripture, and in life, the road to deliverance nearly always takes a detour. ... Indeed, some of Scripture's most momentous events occur not at the start of a journey, nor at the destination, but in between, in the wilderness."

p. 70: "People take extraordinary risks to be part of a story that will outlive them."

Swell Foop

I went to a Relief Society dessert night a couple of weeks ago—and it was great because the unintended theme (it was potluck, and, boy, did we get lucky?!) of the desserts was lemon and blueberry and it was divine. There was a sister there, who was telling about her baptism sixty years ago. Her family lived out in the country and didn't make it to the church building very often, so her mother had her wait until her little brother turned eight (and she, herself, was twelve) and had them baptized together in "one swell swoop!"

She said "swell swoop" a couple more times that evening and every time I did a mental jaw drop.

Swell swoop!

Why hadn't I ever thought of saying that? Do you say that?

A quick Google search reveals that it's...not really a thing. But how incredible that she says that.

The saying, of course, is "fell swoop," first appearing in MacBeth, where fell means fierce, sinister or deadly and swoop means "a single concentrated and quickly effective effort." But, honestly, people rarely use that aspect of fell these days. In fact, a friend of mine repeatedly used the adjective "fell" in a book he's getting published and his editor repeatedly removed it because "fell creature" is...a little...archaic. This friend put it back in, though, because he was going for an archaic feel.

Fell comes from the Latin root fello, meaning "villain," which is related to the word "felon" in English (from fel (or "poison" or "bitter" or, aptly, "one full of bitterness") in Latin).

It's understandable that this woman, who grew up in rural Georgia some 60 years ago, might have figured the saying was "swell swoop" since fell...fell...out of use quite some time ago (as in, like, Shakespeare may have used it knowing what it meant back in the 16th/17th century, but the average English speaker today, in the 21st century, probably wouldn't pick up on that meaning).