Mila's daydreams

This blog is just too fabulous. What is her baby dreaming about?

...Look and see.

Hat tip: Design Mom.

The smell of summer

Dad photographed this mushroom-stand just after a rain at Rabbit Ridge, across from the Valle Caldera in New Mexico. You can see droplets still trickling down that green leaf. Aren't they delicate, dainty little fungi? His photography impresses me.

Here in Richmond, just before dinner, we had quite the thunderstorm, with downpours, power outages, fried internet, the works. Meg (miraculously) slept through it all. Jonathan dodged dead stoplights and fallen trees on the road home, and I had to light a candle to find the peanut butter.

Summer smells like wet air after a rain, and it tastes like peaches, bacon, and coffee. I'm excited because for breakfast tomorrow, we actually have all three of those. The peaches are even sliced already.

Eureka - season 4, episode 3

In Eureka 4.2 last week, mostly we watched the characters grapple with their new situation. Deputy Andy (the robot sheriff from a previous season) figured out that they'd been in the forties, but his memory got wiped, so it was still a secret. The five travelers decided to keep it that way.

They posted Eureka 4.3 today. Spoilers ahead! Fargo got to celebrate his (parallel) ascension to lab directorship by dealing with an enraged zombie infestation, but unfortunately, he got zombified too. So did Jo, but she held it together quite well, considering. She not only didn't kill Zane several times, but her last action before losing her mind completely was to handcuff herself to a pillar so she wouldn't accidentally kill anyone else. I love Eureka. She did pull a gun on Jack, but no harm, no foul, I guess? Jack did, incidentally, save the world again, with Tess and Allison's help.

We got further confirmation that Henry's parallel wife is awesome. Grace pulled a really great prank on Henry and Dr. Grant and made all their tools disappear as they touched them. They were convinced they'd ruined time-space somehow and were sending pliers and screwdrivers back to the forties. It's hard to do, but every single scene she's in confirms that she's just right for him. I love it. Dr. Grant even teased him about developing a crush on his wife. Henry's in good shape if they never make it back.

I was so proud of Jack! He ended the episode by breaking up with Tess. I hadn't expected the writers would let him deal with that for several more episodes. He did it really well, and told her that they shouldn't move in together (so true, for so many reasons), that he knew that job in Australia would be perfect for her, and that she'd be really happy there. He may have even managed it so as not to have a mortal enemy for the next few episodes, but I wouldn't bank on it.

Scary things

Meg has officially reached mobility. She's been pretty active for a while. The other day, for instance, I was lying on the floor of her room trying to nap, and she would roll into the desk, wail, roll back my direction and kick me, roll off into a corner, wail, and come back and kick me some more. It was not a successful nap, though it was pretty funny. Then last night while we ate dinner, she amused herself by rolling around the kitchen floor and finding things she oughtn't have, like dryer sheets and paper towels, which she shredded very efficiently.

But today she showed off for Kay by sitting up - not remaining when put into a sitting position, but actually going from lying down to sitting up - and none of us even saw it happen. ("Jonathan, did you sit her up? Kay, did you? Well, I didn't either!") We think she went through a kind of sideways crunch and then rolling up to do it. And not ten minutes later, she made her first official hands-and-knees, forward-motion, crawl. It was only one step - but crawling it was.

So I had a mild meltdown this evening. She was sitting up, holding a plastic comb like a guitar, and chattering/singing away to herself, and I just slightly lost it.

To top it off, Wal-Mart was out of baby gates. Uh-oh.

Slimming my closet

Meggie and I went shopping yesterday with a friend, and I found an adorable blouse. It's tomato red with cream polka dots, short puffed sleeves, and a V-neck with a dainty Peter Pan collar. It looks exactly like a forties or fifties garden party. And it was on really good clearance - even better than the tag claimed. Happiness!

I was especially excited because it qualified as the "cute top I can dress up or down" that was on my List for the fall. Items like "khaki pants" might be hard to find, but at least they're straightforward, but a really great shirt is elusive. What with changing sizes post-Meggie, my small closet, normal wearing-out-as-garments, and just trying to be organized and thrifty, I'm trying to make my wardrobe streamlined and really awesome. I don't want fifty boring sweaters. I want a few perfect pieces so I'll look fabulous at all times!

In that context, I was interested to come across this article in the New York Times about "shopping diets" and the "six items or less" project. Basically, a bunch of people are deciding for one reason or another that they have entirely enough clothes. Some decide not to buy anything for a year, and others want to see if they can wear six items or fewer for a whole month. Not only can they... but their near and dear don't even notice!

I think this is culturally a very healthy impulse. Interestingly, they found that modern clothes don't hold up well under that kind of frequent wear. The lady interviewed mentioned that as a challenge to clothes makers. I'm reminded of Tom Sawyer, whose Sunday best was referred to as his "other clothes," from which you learned the size of his wardrobe.

Readers, do you have a wardrobe plan or fall shopping list? What's on it?

To think that I should live to see this day!

"A Christian endeavor of almost 2,000 years could be substantially completed by 2025. Protestant translators expect to have the Bible - or at least some of it - written in every one of the world's 6,909 living languages." Read the full Denver Post article here.

Talk about high adventure. Talk about projects worth doing. Talk about prophecies being fulfilled. Come soon, Lord Jesus.


Hat tip to Brandywine Books. They find the coolest news, seriously.

Mystery cleared up

When we watched the Eureka 4-1, it started with "previously in Eureka" that Jack and Tess broke up. I figured I'd just missed that episode, because there were one or two I hadn't seen, but we just watched them (re-watched, in one case), and sure enough, it hadn't happened. Season 3 ended with Tess giving Jack a ticket to Australia to come visit her.

However, someone linked writer Jamie Paglia's twitter post about it. The break-up was in a deleted scene and will be on the DVD. There we are. In any case, it wasn't much of a break-up, since they were back together by the end of 4.1.

And... it's been confirmed that James Callis, playing Dr. Trevor Grant, is in (at least) ten episodes. Paglia goes on to say that the parallel story arc will be twenty episodes long - quite a season. Yes!

Eureka - Founder's Day

Eureka season 4 is here! The first episode is up on Hulu, and what an opening it was. They've set up a situation with plenty of plot for the whole season, and I really hope they string it out for a few episodes, because it's a fun one. And we have an awesome new character. He's on the new title banner even, which gives me hope that he's here to stay. He's got a great hat.

Okay, go watch the episode now if you object to spoilers, and then come back and read the rest of this post. ;-) First of all: Tess. I didn't like Tess when she first turned up. She wasn't right for Jack. I still think she isn't right for Jack. He needed to get together with Alison, which could have been okay after Nathan heroically melted or de-timed or whatever it was (and I was just getting reconciled to him), and then everybody would have been happy. Well, Jack and Alison and I would have been happy. Only that didn't happen. I was finally getting reconciled to this Tess character when they got rid of her and I was rooting for Alison again. And NOW THEY BROUGHT TESS BACK. Aargh!

Second: Fargo. Who in their right mind would have put him in charge? This can only end in disaster - very humorous disaster, probably involving a swing dance since he didn't get to go to that other one. Incidentally, I want to see Pierre Fargo, Fargo's grandfather who was resurrected from cryogenic sleep in whatever episode that was. He would be perfect in season 4. I predict he hangs out with the new guy, though if I'm remembering the chronology, he didn't go to Eureka until the fifties, so that might not have worked. But now that we're in that parallel universe, all bets on chronology are off. Who knows what's going to have changed. Maybe Fargo got put in charge in the parallel world because Pierre Fargo rose to importance after Dr. Trevor Grant was out of the way.

We thought the time travel itself was quite well handled. Eureka is still so Eureka, even sixty years ago. You've got the scientists, and the overbearing military types, and very similar jail cells, and Jo can still mop the floor with mere military men, no matter their credentials. The contemps were just as smart and well characterized as the moderns, which was nice. The time-travel science was a little hazy, but at this point, we don't really care. Eureka has earned its scientific stripes, so to speak, and we're willing it to run with it.

They've set up several bittersweet plots in the parallel universe. Jack will, of course, just be confused about the Tess/Alison thing, but he needed to make up his mind anyway. Henry will likely be anxious to go back to the original universe, though it depends on Grace. Unless, oh no, what if parallel Kim isn't dead?? And poor Jo, about Zane! Parallel Zane is so not an improvement. Who knows what Fargo will do. He might decide he prefers the bronze Archimedes, or get drunk on power, or something. Alison might decide she likes the parallel universe better because of her son, whose name I can't remember. And Trevor... what if he decides to stick around for Alison?

Mall-shoppers beware

She really tried to talk me into believing in God the Mother. She also believed in the Trinity, consisting of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, so I'm not quite clear where the Mother fit into all this - shape-shifting, maybe?

To her credit, she had an actual Bible with her, of reputable translation, and kept thrusting verses under my nose. She assured me that she was only saying what Scripture said, and she wouldn't say it if it wasn't in there! I really tried to make sense of her claims. I think she was arguing that:

a) when God created male and female in His image, that proved His image was female;

b) that we're living in the end times, so the verses about mysteries being revealed in the end refer specifically to God being female;

c) the verse in Galatians about "if anyone preaches a different Gospel, he is to be accursed" doesn't apply to this new revelation because it's the same gospel;

d) When Paul is talking about the Jerusalem that is above and the earthly Jerusalem, the heavenly Jerusalem is female, so God is female.

e) Something about "elohim" being plural, and sure that might refer to the Trinity, but it could also be interpreted as referring to His/Her femininity.

A lot of other things came into it too, like the order of Melchizedek, though I have no idea what he did to deserve that. Nobody had ever taught this poor girl how to construct a coherent argument.

I could have escaped more quickly, but I figured that if she was talking to me, at least she wasn't talking to someone else. She was so enthusiastic, so dressed up, and so utterly lacking in theology and logic. I encouraged her to keep reading her Bible, and said I thought that she would find it wasn't really saying what she thought it said...