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Sunday, August first
We dropped Sylvia off today for her first vacation away from home -- she's spending the next two weeks at Journey's End Farm Camp in Sterling, PA. Here she is with her bunkhouse counselor Michaela, in the sunflower patch just outside her door... (Click the image for more camp photos.)
posted afternoon of August first: Respond
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Thursday, July first
Thanks to a note at The Wooster Collective, I see that Hampton Beach, NH held its annual sand-castle competition last week; pictures of the winning sculptures are up at hamptonbeach.org. My favorite is Marielle Heesels' entry, "Drowning in Love": Bonus readin Family Album content below the fold.
 As it turns out, we were in Hampton Beach once, about 8 years back. In July, 2002 I took a chair-building class at Mike Dunbar's Windsor Institute, just down the road from there in Hampton. One of the earliest pictures from our family album, Sylvia on the beach mugging for the camera:
↻...done
posted afternoon of July first: Respond
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Saturday, May 15th
I wonder how much J.K. Rowling's diction actually resembles Charles Dickens', and how much that is a figment of my imagination inspired by their nationality and by the audio book format. I've been listening to Bleak House on tape for the last few days, and loving it (though to be honest, I don't think I would be digging it as much if I had not read the book already); my previous experience with audio books is mostly overhearing the Harry Potter books that Sylvia listens to from noon to night... but the expressions (and the characters' names) in Bleak House are definitely reminding me of Rowling! To be sure, Robert Whitfield (who is reading Bleak House) has a similar voice to Jim Dale's, and similar affectations -- I wonder if the creaky old-person's voice is a standard element of audiobook-reader training... Anyway, I got the idea that Sylvia might enjoy reading Dickens. So when we were at the bookstore today, I bought her a copy of David Copperfield, which neither of us has read, which I am hoping she will read and recommend to me... Virginia Woolf called it, in a pull-quote on the back cover, "the most perfect of all the Dickens novels."
posted afternoon of May 15th: Respond
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Sunday, March 14th
I went to see Alice in Wonderland with Sylvia this afternoon. (That is to say, "Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland in 3-D"...) I was kind of expecting not to like it, based on a general inbred aversion to commercializing the classics and on a negative review I had read in the NY Times; but it won me over, mostly. Burton really succeeded in completely imagining the world of the movie, with gorgeous photography and animation; the world of Carroll's books was present but Burton was not tied in to imitating it, and there was a reason given in the screenplay for why this was so -- the world of the books was assumed as part of the background of the world of the movie. (I also really enjoyed the use of 3-D in this film, maybe moreso than any other 3-D movie I've been to so far.) I had a hard time getting fully inside the movie, but I'm blaming my own blinders for that rather than the director's vision -- I set out trying to find fault, and spent too much of my time internally carping about how it was not that way in the book, instead of letting myself go. (And to be sure, the adaptation of the elements of Carroll's plot to a Narnia-style battle between forces of good and evil is heavy-handed, there's no getting around that -- part of the letting myself go that I did intermittently was laughing at the sillyness of this, so that I could get into it.) Sylvia was not doing this kind of nit-picking, and she paid it what seems to me like the ultimate compliment on our way out of the theater, that you could really tell Burton had read the book before he made the movie.
posted afternoon of March 14th: Respond
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Sunday, February 28th
Sylvia and I spent some time this weekend reading stories from a college book of mine, Rhoda Hendricks' 1972 edition Classical Gods and Heroes: Myths as told by the ancient authors -- a good resource although I don't love her translations. Looks like we should find some good translations of Hesiod's Theogony and Works and Days to learn more about the early Greek myths. It will probably be a lot more difficult to learn anything about the early Roman myths, since all the Roman writing about mythology seems to come from well after the Hellenization process was underway. I would like to pick up a good translation of Metamorphoses though, Ovid seems to be a good story-teller. Anyone who is interested in this stuff and has not read the comments to the previous post should do so -- Randolph reposted a great writeup there from Bryon Boyce.
posted afternoon of February 28th: Respond
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Wednesday, February 24th
Sylvia has gotten pretty interested in learning about the gods and heroes of Greece and Rome -- prompted in part by a study unit her class did and in part by Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson and the Olympians books; and one thing that has occupied a bit of her attention lately is learning which Latin names correspond to which Greek names. I remember doing this too, probably at about the same age; and ever since I've walked around with a sort of simple equivalence in my head, Zeus is Jupiter, Ares is Mars, Venus is Aphrodite, etc. -- that the two names identify the same entity. But I wonder how this could be? Recently I have formed a sort of vague notion that the Greeks  and the Romans, living close to each other over the millenia, had developed their mythologies roughly in parallel -- that there were two separate entities named Athena and Minerva who featured in similar stories. But how closely similar could they have been? In The Golden Bough, Frazer seems to refer to Diana and Artemis almost interchangeably, and not only that but likewise to Hippolytus and Virbius. Not only does it seem strange that the legends would be so similar that you could do this, it seems like it would be sloppy on Frazer's part to confuse two different god-and-hero pairs like this -- which brings me back to my old way of thinking, that Diana and Artemis are just two different names for the same figure. I'm puzzled though, trying to see a mechanism for this to come about -- it seems like if the religion was imparted from one group (I guess I would assume from the Greeks) to the other, the names would go along with it. I sort of thought a tribal religion was a sine qua non of a Classical civilisation, I guess.
Also kind of interesting, Frazer seems to imply at the outset that the story of Diana and Hippolytus was made up to account for the tradition of Rex Nemorensis, that this was an ancient tradition incorporated into the Greek/Roman religion à la Solstice rituals into Christianity.
posted evening of February 24th: 9 responses
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Sunday, November 29th, 2009
 Ellen's project for the last couple of months has been organizing with the South Orange/Maplewood Bicycle Coalition -- the goal is to make our towns a better, friendlier place for riding. The group hosted its first community ride today, from Meadowbrook Park in South Orange to Maplewood town center, and it went off without a hitch.
Turnout was huge, about twice as many people as expected -- Ellen thinks there were at least 50 people riding. It was a real kick to be riding down the street in such a big pack. This should definitely get us noticed -- time to push for more bike lanes!
posted afternoon of November 29th, 2009: Respond
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Sunday, November 22nd, 2009
Spent the weekend in Atlantic City with Ellen's family -- happy 90th birthday, Lou! Here is a picture I took of Ellen and Sylvia on the boardwalk last night, that I'm pretty happy with: This reminds me a lot of the picture I took of Sylvia early last year:...Leads me to the conclusion that sunsets are just generally very pretty and a very good subject for photography.
posted afternoon of November 22nd, 2009: Respond
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Sunday, November 8th, 2009
On the approximate spur of the moment, Sylvia and I went to Brooklyn today, to have lunch on the boardwalk with some relatives and to walk around. I don't think I've been in Coney Island since the last time I took Sylvia there, 5 years ago; and have not been there off-season in probably 10 years or more. What a lovely place to be! The sun was confused, shining as bright and as warm as if it were June rather than November. The amusement park is closed; but the aquarium is open -- we saw walruses, and seals, and sharks, and seductive, luminous jellyfish. Hot rock band playing on the boardwalk outside Ruby's. We walked a whole lot, probably 4 or 5 miles all told, and ate tasty snacks to keep us refreshed, and played in the sand among the wheeling gulls. It was a satisfactory day.
posted evening of November 8th, 2009: Respond
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Saturday, October 31st, 2009
Only comes around once a year... Here's Sylvia dressed for the occasion, with her friends Kaydi, Jazmyn and Emma: 
posted morning of October 31st, 2009: Respond
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John Emerson, Jeremy on Beat (2 comments)