Cower Not, Jedi!

These are Jack's latest Lego obsession. He calls them Jedi Huts.
He has run out of little square bases. Otherwise, he says, he would make a whole city of them. Each one is customized and has a lot of luxury details.


But my favourite is the simplest one, the one he made for "Luke's nephew". As Jack explained: "Most of them are open all the way across the front but this one - see? has this little bit of wall at the front that makes a little corner that you can cower in. I call it a Cower Corner."
Because everybody needs a corner to cower in sometimes, non?


Fear not the Rat, O Jedi but fear the Google Eyed Bookworm!

snow splosions

Wow, that haiku from my last post is still really speaking to me. I just read from the point of view of writing report cards which is a really onerous task (that's my word of the week, onerous). Yes, onerous, except when I am actually writing them. Then I get into the flow of writing, saying things in just the right way, selecting words that actually mean something and I stop being stressed about it. Mostly, anyway. Thankfully the trend in reporting seems to be away from robot speak and back to talking about real live kids doing real live things. Anyhoo, the point is that when I stop thinking about the snow (i.e. onerous task) as a burden and think about it as something that I can and must own, it all lightens.

I have to admit that I really enjoy messing around with words, crafting the old sentences. So pickle me this, reader(s?). Do you have a word problem that needs solving? Send it my way. I'm your gal. After January 27th, anyway (Report Card Due Date.)
I was out in the snow tonight with the fam and was mostly lost in thought about the dance lessons that I'm working on for tomorrow. They are going to be about making dances about snow and winter poems, carving pathways in snow and space, and lightness, and bound and free energy (tobogganing!) and I am really excited about them. I found a couple of beautiful pomes in David Booth's anthology of poems for kids , Til All the Stars Have Fallen (which i love love). The poems are My toboggan and I carve winter by Jane Wadley and Winter walk in forest by George Swede. If I could build every lesson around a poem, I would.



I also remembered how much I like looking into my house from the backyard at night.

hi, ku!

waga yuki to/ omoebo karushi /kasa no ue

'It's my snow"
I think
And the weight on my hat lightens.

-Kikaku, trans. by Alex Kerr

I have been enjoying following several beautiful blogs by friends, family and strangers this year:
(soulemama, PhilOlogy, and Life in Colour) and recently I have been missing keeping my own record here. My paper systems (ahem, I use the term "systems" lightly) are always so haphazard and difficult to maneuver. I like the clarity and linear nature of a blog, even while lamenting the slow death of cursive and the general unstinting shift from analog to digital.

So, I am moving back again to naming my own snow, the soft quiet white noise of my life, observed.