Damn it’s the end of August already. I want a vacation! We knew one wouldn’t be happening in September this year though so I’ve committed us to some acting classes for H.o.p. He’s not interested in acting but he’s interested in the process. Kind of. He is looking forward to it. I think he has the idea that acting class is going to be him having fun pretending to be a dragon for a couple of hours a week, but with an audience. To that extent he’s interested in playing the actor. So we shall see how that goes. Would be nice if when he was done with the acting classes we could head out west during the cooling days of Autumn, but people need to start feeling better around here first. Was not a good summer. In fact it was a pretty bad summer following a sad spring that followed a miserable winter. We need a stretch of time devoted to nothing but looking at passing countryside, visiting, and introducing H.o.p. to more wonders of the world. A stretch of time away from our kitchen sink stopping up pretty much daily now, which has gotten really annoying. The sink has stopped up every day this week despite Drano used on it last week. I just spent 20 minutes trying to plunge it. I suppose it’s time to give the landlord a call tomorrow morning, which amounts to him coming in and cheering me up over things that are broken. He’s good that way. I like our landlord and appreciate how smoothly he can sometimes make it seem like more of a problem to fix what’s broken. I’m still happy over his getting us a new AC in 24 hours time this summer when ours busted, but I really could use a functional sink again.
At the moment, for the second day in a row, H.o.p.’s busy crafting calavera out of modeling clay. “They’re in all my favorite colors!” I give instruction on how a bit of black detailing here and there will make certain features and ornamentation stand out. So he goes back and outlines the teeth with black. The eyes are more to the side than to the front so I do a quick small skull and show how to fashion it with the eyes in front etc. Oh but he says one of the calaveras he saw in a show that he really liked had the eyes to the side. Now that he’s made six of them he decides that’s enough. He brings them in now and sets them down on my desk to show me how he’s made a calavera family.
We watched “Spirited Away” again. Susan Pleschette is the voice of Yubaba and her flexibility is remarkable. Susan Egan did the voice of Lin and is easily recognizable as the voice of Magera in the cartoon “Hercules”. But Susan Pleschette, I’d never have realized it was her, would never have guessed she’d have a silly putty voice that she could stretch and warp so wildly–such as when she discovers her “baby” is gone, looks for it in the nursery, then confronts Chihiro. This time through I devoted pretty much to appreciating that virtuosity.
Daveigh Chase did a beautiful job with the unaffected voice of Chihiro.
Watched also the short they had on the DVD of some of the problems they had translating the movie to English.
Marty’s been recording a Bluegrass band all week and that’s been enjoyable for him. Me? I’m going to go back in and try plunging the sink some more. And try to figure out why we’re supposed to do a rain gauge for a science lesson on weather. To me it makes no sense trying to speculate the amount of rain fall and then measuring it against the gauge. I’m not crazy in the first place about doing a rain gauge as we have lots of mosquitos. Somehow collecting rain at a city apartment building surrounded by city wildlife (mosquitos, pigeons and rodents) as not very appealing. I pulled out the bottle to cut into a rain guage and started thinking about that and was dissuaded. And the more I thought about it the more I thought this was kind of ridiculous in the first place. Why not just check out the handy dandy NEXRAD radar map which says we’ve had about 2 inches of rainfall?
H.o.p. couldn’t care less. He puts on the Magic School Bus, “Creepy, Crawly Fun” (my Netflix “educational” choice for this week) and listens to Lily Tomlin telling him about sound waves.
Should I feel guilty about not seeing the point in making a rain gauge? Maybe I should just bail out the sink and then ask H.o.p. to estimate how much water will collect in it over a period of the next several hours from our leaky faucet?
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