The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

I love books, love to read.  I will read just about anything I can get my hands on.  Every once in a awhile, I come across a book that sticks with me.  A book that I want to read over and over again.  A book with lines that make me think, smile, laugh out loud.  The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows, is one of those books.  (Sorry about not underlining the book title - I don't know how. . .)  It's set in the aftermath of World War II, and is as much about healing as it is anything else.  Here are some of the quotes that caught my eye and my heart.

"I should be thrilled.  But the truth is that I'm gloomy - gloomier than I ever was during the war.  Everything is so broken, Sophie: the roads, the buildings, the people.  Especially the people."

"I wonder how the book got to Guernsey?  Perhaps there is some secret sort of homing instinct in books that brings them to their perfect readers.  How delightful if that were true."

"Lamb also taught Hunt's youngest daughter to say the Lord's prayer backward.  You naturally want to learn everything you can about a man like that."

"That's what I love about reading: one tiny thing will interest you in a book, and that tiny thing will lead you onto another book, and another bit there will lead you onto a third book.  It's geometrically progressive - all with no end in sight, and for no other reason than sheer enjoyment."

"I love seeing the bookshops and meeting the booksellers - booksellers really are a special breed.  No one in their right mind would take up clerking in a bookstore for the salary, and no one in his right mind would want to own one - the margin of profit is too small.  So, it has to be a love of readers and reading that makes them do it - along with first dibs on the new books."

"It's amazing to me then, and still is, that so many people who wander into bookshops don't really know what they're after - they only want to look around and hope to see a book that will strike their fancy. . . . Our faces are always a dead giveaway.  A lifted brow or curled lip reveals that it's a poor excuse for a book, and the clever customers ask for a recommendation instead, whereupon we frog-march them over to a particular volume and command them to read it.  If they read it and despise it, they'll never come back.  But if they like it, they're customers for life."

"While I question her taste, her judgment, her misplaced priorities, and her inappropriate sense of humor, she does indeed have one fine quality - she is honest."

"It's death that goes on; Ian is dead now and will be dead tomorrow and next year and forever.  There's no end to that.  But perhaps there will be an end to the sorrow of it.  Sorrow has rushed over the world like the waters of the Deluge, and it will take some time to recede.  But already, there are small islands of - Hope?  Happiness?  Something like them, at any rate."

"Have you ever noticed that when your mind is awakened or drawn to someone new, that person's name suddenly pops up everywhere you go?  My friend Sophie calls it coincidence, and Mr. Simpless, my parson friend, calls it Grace.  He thinks that if one cares deeply about someone or something new one throws a kind of energy out into the world, and 'fruitfulness' is drawn in."

"He's all charm and oil, and he gets what he wants.  It's one of his few principles.  He wants Juliet because she's pretty and 'intellectual' at the same time, and he thinks they'll make an impressive couple.  If she marries him, she'll spend the rest of her life being shown to people at theaters and clubs and weekends and she'll never write another book.  As her editor, I'm dismayed by that prospect, but as her friend, I'm horrified."

"All my life I thought that the story was over when the hero and heroine were safely engaged - after all, what's good enough for Jane Austen ought to be good enough for anyone.  But it's a lie.  The story is about to begin, and every day will be a new piece of the plot."

In-service Result

Due to the city's annual basketball tournament/carnival, we teachers planned an in-service day for today, knowing that attendance would be awful (kids out until well after midnight all weekend).  Our illustrious leader decided that it would be an in-service about art and integrating art with other content areas, and brought in an art instructor from Fairbanks.  I've never been particularly good at art.  Never have, probably never will.  As a result of that, I don't particularly enjoy art projects.  Thus, I wasn't particularly excited about today. 

It wasn't as bad as I envisioned it.  The hours sped by, and while my lack of creativity left me feeling somewhat less than successful, my art samples didn't turn out too horribly.  Right at the end of the day, we did a questioning/writing exercise that was actually kind of fun.  The instructor showed us a picture, we asked questions about it in groups, and then wrote about it, our creative juices fueled by the questions that we had brainstormed/heard from others.  Here's the picture, by Sandy Skoglund:

Depressing cat people, surrounded by radioactive green cats.  Lots of possibilities here.  The writing part of the exercise was open-ended - we could write whatever we wanted, in whatever format/genre we wanted.  Here is the beginning of a story that I would finish if I had any literary talent:

"As hard as he tried, he couldn't remember a life without cats. Harry sat in his chair with the broken slat. A cat had once tried to squeeze between the slats, but hadn't quite fit. Harry hadn't bothered to fix it, figuring it would probably break again soon, anyway. He and his wife, Bertha, hadn't always lived this life, this life consumed by the abnormally green cats. They used to have the perfect life: a nice clean house, children, a pet dog, white picket fence - the American dream. If only he hadn't stopped to help that poor, "injured" cat on the way home from work on that fateful day. If only they hadn't been sucked up into this nightmare. . . ."

And from there, it goes into a mystery of epic proportions, involving alien cats invading Earth. . . telling the back-story of poor Harry and Bertha. . . how the cats came to take-over the lives of poor, innocent civilians like the ones pictured above. A tragic tale, really. And it's begging to be written. So, if you have literary talent and would like to continue this train of thought, please feel free. Take it with my compliments. Change it, make it better, finish it. Consider it my anonymous contribution to the field of (bad) literature.

Spelling

Apparently, b,d,p, and q are interchangeable letters.  G and q can also be swapped.  According to my kids, if they come to those sounds, they can just guess at which one belongs.  Yesterday, we were learning about using "tch" to make the /ch/ sound.  One of the words the students had to write was the word, "ditch."  You can probably guess what I saw written down in the book of one of the most notorious guessers.  I made sure he fixed it before he went home with a dirty word written in his Partner Practice Book.

Sights of Elim

Taking advantage of the sunshine and spring break, I went for a walk this morning.  It felt good to get out and breathe some fresh air after being cooped up for so many months inside.

I don't know why this caught my eye, but I was struck by the sight of just the tips of the crosses sticking out of the snow.

I don't know why it struck me as such a striking sight.

You can see in all these pictures that, judging from the tracks, the rabbits were frollicking amongst the crosses.

I also saw this interesting sight.  A boat.  On the ice.  Nowhere remotely near any water.  Just sitting there for no apparent reason.

The bottom dark spot is the boat.  The top dark spot is the used straw and other "rubbish" (read: dog poo) from the Iditarod checkpoint.  They haul it all out onto the ice and burn the pile periodically.  The smell is positively delightful. 

I thought these rocks at first, but they are huge chunks of ice that were pushed and bunched up against the ice on the shoreline.

What a wonderful place to live!  I can see so many interesting sights within the space of 30 minutes on a beautiful sunny (albeit cold) morning!

I need an explanation

I'm starting to actually like math.  Now that I'm seeing the relationships and patterns that permeate the subject, it all makes a lot more sense.  I came across this neat number trick, and I want to know how it works.

Multiply 37,037 by any single digit, multiply by 3, and the answer is a string of digits that is the same as the first single digit multiplied by at the beginning.

Try it.  It works.  But I don't know why, and I'm insanely curious.  Anybody want to take a stab at explaining to me why it works?

Iditarod 2010

Oh, how I love the Iditarod!  It is the perfect distraction to get us through the month of March.  I doubt the original organizers thought about this, but the race comes at exactly the right time of year.  January and February are dark and cold, obviously winter months.  Spring doesn't really come until April.  March is lighter, but not significantly warmer.  We are done with winter, but winter isn't done with us.  We need something to carry us through until the ice starts melting.

My class always tracks the Iditarod.  I provide a list of mushers and a map of the trail, each student chooses a musher, and we update where each musher is each day.  The kids really get into it, especially because the list I provide is composed of mushers who finished well the year before.  There were times when all they did was stand and contemplate the map posted on the wall.

This year's race was a close one.  Lance Mackey and Jeff King kept flip-flopping as leader.  Mackey took the lead in Kaltag, and never relinquished it.  Usually, the front-runner camps out in Koyuk for the better part of a day, and then comes through Elim in the middle of the night.  With such a close race, though, nobody was camping out anywhere.  Mackey left Koyuk Monday morning, and we expected him sometime in the early afternoon.  At lunch, I heard that he was about 10 miles out.  When my kids came back from lunch, we bundled up and headed for the checkpoint.  I love spontaneous field trips!  About 5 minutes behind us, came the rest of the school.  It was like a school-wide field trip.  Even the principal was out there, taking in the sight.  The kids were running around in the beautiful sunshine, climbing up and falling down the snowdrifts, enjoying being outside in such wonderful weather.  They claimed this snowdrift as having the best view of anybody coming down the hill.

Luckily, we didn't have to wait longer than about 10 minutes.  As Mackey came around the bend at the top of the hill, a cheer rose up and we cheering him into the village.

If you look closely, you can see the team coming down the hill. 

It was obvious that he wasn't going to spend much time here.  He came down the line, checking each dog and dropping a food dish in front of each one, and then came down the line again, putting a ladle-full of food in each dish.  About 5 minutes later, he came through picking up each dish, dumping out any uneaten food.

Mackey looked beat, but the dogs didn't look too bad.  The dogs are better taken care of than the mushers.

Mackey packed himself back up and prepared to head out.  He spent a grand total of about 15 minutes in Elim.

That trip was the only thing my kids talked about for the rest of Monday and all of today.  They were bubbling over with enthusiasm and smiles.  It was exactly what we needed to get through the last two days before spring break.

We figured that Mackey pretty much had the race sewn up, but it wasn't over until it was over.  At that point, the first three mushers were a possible 4-time Iditarod champion (Mackey), a possible 5-time Iditarod champion (Jeff King - good musher, but not very nice), and this year's Yukon Quest champion.  (Yukon Quest is a race run less than a month before the Iditarod, is almost as long, and is seen by mushers as a harder race.)  Whatever Mackey's strategy was, it paid off in the end.  He was the first musher down Front Street in Nome, becoming the first musher ever to win 4 consecutive Iditarods. 

Reality

This is my reality right now. . . .

White Horse
by Taylor Swift

Say you're sorry
That face of an angel
Comes out just when you need it to.
As I paced back and forth all this time
Because I honestly believed in you.
Holding on,
The days drag on.
Stupid girl,
I should have known.  I should have known.

I'm not a princess; this ain't a fairy tale.
I'm not the one you'll sweep off her feet,
Lead her up a stairwell.
This ain't Hollywood; this is small town,
I was a dreamer before you went and let me down.
Now it's too late for you and your white horse
To come around.

Baby, I was naive,
Got lost in your eyes
And never really had a chance.
My mistake, I didn't know to be in love
You had to fight to have the upper hand.
I had so many dreams
About you and me.
Happy endings,
Now I know

I'm not a princess; this ain't a fairy tale.
I'm not the one you'll sweep off her feet,
Lead her up the stairwell.
This ain't Hollywood; this is a small town.
I was a dreamer before you went and let me down.
Now it's too late for you and your white horse
To come around.

And there you are on your knees,
Begging for forgiveness, begging for me,
Just like I always wanted, but I'm so sorry. . .

'Cause I'm not your princess; this ain't a fairy tale.
I'm gonna find someone, someday, who might actually treat me well.
This is a big world; that was a small town
There in my rear-view mirror disappearing now.
And it's too late for you and your white horse
To catch me now.