The Former Anne Spollen's Author Blog Is Being Retitled to "Notes from Living Upghetto": Snow Days and Scientific Inquiry

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Snow Days and Scientific Inquiry

The big news here is the weather. I'm trying to type as fast as I can as the Internet keeps dropping and the power is blinking on and off. It's kind of like living in post-war London. This is our backyard:

and the view from the table where we usually eat (sort of a breakfast nook)

Of course, the kittens have never experienced winter, but I like their take on the cold and the snow:

The kids are, of course, home. I walked by Emma's room a few minutes ago and heard this conversation:

Christopher: Why do you want me to light a candle for you?
Emma: To see if gum is flammable or not.
Christopher: What would you possibly do with that information once you found out? That's an entirely useless thing to want to figure out.

I didn't worry too much about Philip because he was on Facebook, and at least he was doing something relatively normal even if it is cyber-socializing. Then he sent me this picture:

What is that? It's the Asian version of a baby I would have if my genes were mated with Cami's - one of our kittens. Apparently, there's a Facebook application that does such a thing.

I keep telling myself that spring is really just around the corner.

12 comments:

Jemi Fraser said...: Yikes! Kids are great - even when it's a loooooong winter :); Wednesday, 10 February, 2010
Anonymous said...: Too funny.; Wednesday, 10 February, 2010
Anonymous said...: Oh wow,
Thank you for sharing. The funny things children do & say!
All the best,
RKCharron; Thursday, 11 February, 2010
Bish Denham said...: ROFL! At least you know where your kids are and what they're doing! I do hope the power stays on.; Thursday, 11 February, 2010
Mary Witzl said...: Hahahaha. Now I've got to see what my cat-babies would look like.

And I wonder if chewing gum IS flammable?; Thursday, 11 February, 2010
Anne Spollen said...: Well, thanks, guys. I keep thinking other people's kids are inside putting molecule models together or practicing the violin (we have both those opportunities here, but no takers - though the drum set is used pretty regularly)

We DID lose power last night. It was sort of fun with candles and flashlights. At least Emma decided she wouldn't have done well in the Middle Ages.

Now we are iced in. No school again, and the power is pretty much on, just surges. No tv, and the Internet keeps dropping. We'll see how today goes; it's one day closer to spring --; Thursday, 11 February, 2010
K.C. Shaw said...: Want to see what your baby would look like if you were mated with a cat, and also Asian? There's an app for that. :p

I love those snow pictures! So much more pleasant to look at pictures of snow than to have to deal with the snow myself. Stay warm!; Thursday, 11 February, 2010
Elizabeth Bradley said...: So much snow! Glad I don't have to live in it though, but I'd love to visit.; Thursday, 11 February, 2010
Nora MacFarlane said...: LOL! Never a dull moment in your home!; Friday, 12 February, 2010
Katie Anderson said...: OMG I have been away from your blog for far too long. This is hysterical!!!!!

So is gum flammable?; Sunday, 14 February, 2010
Liz @ Cleverly Inked said...: LOL.. Disturbing; Monday, 15 February, 2010
Glynis Peters said...: OH boy did you make me giggle!; Tuesday, 16 February, 2010

Books

Light Beneath Ferns

"I have this strange sense that my silence is preparing me for something I can't name . ."

Elizah Rayne is nothing like other fourteen-year-old girls. More interested in bird bones than people, she wraps herself in silence. Trying to escape the shadow of her gambler father, Elizah and her mother move into an old house that borders a cemetery. All her mother wants is for them to have "normal" lives. But that becomes impossible for Elizah when she finds a human jawbone by the river and meets Nathaniel, a strangely hypnotic boy who draws Elizah into his dreamlike and mysterious world.

Only by forgetting everything she knows can Elizah understand the truth about Nathaniel—and discover an unimaginable secret.

Teen made trailer for Light Beneath Ferns.

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Foreword Magazine's Review of Light Beneath Ferns

Excerpt from THE SHAPE OF WATER

CHAPTER ONE
I discovered windows one afternoon and after that, nothing was ever the same. They had always been there, of course, glass panes shimmering in the color of rain, but that spring for the first time, I was able to open the windows in my room. For years, the locks had been painted stuck, and during the winter, heat from the radiator beneath my windows finally steamed off enough paint off the metal wings of the locks could be twirled open. Knowing that I could open the windows attracted me to them, and I began sitting under the windows, staring through the glass at the sky. From that position, on a chair in my room, the sky did not seem real; it seemed a place I was making up, so I watched it.
The white wood of the window panes acted as frames so the sky came to me slowly, and the huge openness of its space did not touch me. All the window glass in our old house had wavers and bubbles inside it, so at times the clouds moved like water, melting and blurring until they passed outside of the warp. After a few afternoons of sitting, the heavens seemed too quiet to keep watching so I began watching a small patch of woods next to our yard that housed little more than trees and a scatter of bony, mean-looking rabbits.
I started gazing at the sky and the woods in March when the branches were still wet and it was then, with nothing outside my window but trees and rain, that I noticed a shine inside darkness, I noticed colors glimmering within the darkness of the wood. I watched birds come and go, I watched rain nipple down from buds to the grass. The water dripping from branch edges and leaves created optical tricks; I could see that as I watched leaves melt.
Then one day I ventured into the space outside. I did not think about doing this much beforehand. I simply opened the window and dropped to the ground below, uncertain as to why this should be such a more satisfying exit than simply using the door; my father worked until seven o’clock and I could do whatever I wanted until then. But I liked the solid sound my legs made when I landed. Leaving via a five foot drop seemed so much more a decision than just using a door. The sense of escape made my heart pound, though all I escaped was the soundless spread of moss-colored light inside my house and the silence.
I had come to know silence well during those months after my mother died. When you sit in silence long enough, you learn that silence has a motion. It glides over you without shape or form, but with weight, exactly like water. Its color is silver. And silence has a sound you hear only after hours of wading inside it. The sound is soft, flute notes rising up like the words of glass speaking. There comes a point when you must shatter the silence, when you must shatter the blindness of its words, the blindness of its light. I did this by going into the yard. Once I stood there, in the grass next to the trees I had been watching, I found silence outside as well. But I was happier outside than I had been in the house, so I stayed for a bit. I stood beneath my bedroom window for a few minutes, looking up at the branches and the crooked pieces of sky colliding between the branches. I believed I could identify the scent of the sky as I stood there, a blue menthol fragrance similar to the scent of seawater that sprayed into my face when I first dove into the ocean. That initial scent smelled much more subtle than the ocean’s heavy, fishy aroma, a whiff of salt and mint that warned a more powerful scent would enter my nose just as I approached the water on a dive. It was the scent I dreamed in. And it was the scent of that spring sky as I stood in my yard.

***