kara heart art

I think it is official: Kara LOVES her art class! What? You didn't hear? Yeah, Kara is taking art lessons for two weeks this summer. She is one of about six other girls being taught by a middle-school art teacher named Ms. Rita. The class meets in a plantation house in an upstairs room that is altogether art. Ms. Rita has schooled her pupils in landscape, in warm and cool colors, and in the difference between fore-, middle-, and background. I'm sure they've covered more, but it isn't always easy to pull information from Kara by the time I get home. You can already see the effects in the drawing and coloring she is doing at home in her room.

Caleb is screetching. You know that stage that kids go through where they just screetch? Awful, isn't it? L. calls me at work and I can barely hear her over the squeek, shreik, eeek.

L and I sat up last night until midnight. She was scrapbooking and I played guitar for awhile and then just talked. Kara has been listening to an instrumental CD of acoustic Christmas music lately. It seems strange, I guess, but it is really very pretty. Hearing snatches of it gets those advent hymns going in my head, and I was thinking last night about the value of "owned" hymnody.

How many hymns can you sing full out? I can stumble through a few. With the change to the Anglican tradition, the hymn tradition changed as well. Gone are many of the "Would you be free of your burden of sin?" camp-meeting era songs of the second great awakening. They've been replaced by a, frankly, richer fare--some of the hymns going back as far as the Church Fathers. But, though of better quality, it is still a strange soup.

I pulled the guitar out last night just to pick my way through a number of the hymns set aside for use during vespers, and discovered a nice setting of "O Glorious Light." The problem with hymns is, in many cases, they are set in the most boring quarter note common time sort of way. Or they have no time setting or key signature and resemble open-ended medieval plainchant. How does one make sense of that?

Chattanooga girl slow routed to a blue dog

Kara came home today. She's been away with her Grandparents visiting the sights in Chattanooga, TN. She rode the incline to the summit of Lookout Mountain. She wandered the warrens of Rock City. She gazed on the over-hyped-but-yet-still-pretty Ruby Falls. And she did lots of other things, such as the aquarium and the children's museum. She came back buzzing and brown as a nut. She and I sorted through the stack of brochures she brought home, and, at 10:49 p.m., she still isn't sleeping. L. says she's older. "She's been away from Mommy and Daddy. She's seen things we didn't see." She does seem taller, I suppose.

Caleb could watch Blue's Clues every minute of the day. And, strangely enough, he actually learns something from watching. To be honest, I thought that whole thing about children's television being educational was a load of crap to make parents feel better. Yet, Caleb truly picks things up from this show, words and shapes. The other day, he pointed at a circle and said "serkul!" (He talks like his mom: fast!) And now "cookie!" And when he says, "I-doo" when you ask him if he wants something . . . well, its is pretty darn sweet.

L. and I have been fighting the computer wars. First, our e-machines motherboard fried, and it took the power suppply with it. And then our router freaked out. Routers, despite their ubiquity, are still like black boxes. A friend said to me, "They are like printers. When something goes wrong, you don't fix it. You just throw them away and buy another one." (How American.) Determined--and poor--I swore at it for two nights and managed to get the thing working. Turns out, it was working fine, I just hadn't read the manual closely enough. And finally, the laptop started working as if we'd poured Vermont maple syrup in through the UBS ports. The problem has something to do with the router. Yeah, better not get going on that one.

Finally, two changes for me this week: a new pair of glasses, and a gleaming silver iPod Nano. I'm a 24/7 lecture-listening machine now; hear me learn! (I also put some Hendrix, Cash, and Bach on there.) By the way, I saw this cool video on CNet today about mashups, the future is looking cooler than ever. Almost makes me want to learn C++.