Things to Do When Home Alone for a Weekend

• on account of being too creeped out in empty house to go to sleep, stay up till two a.m. reading a novel about ninjas
• watch a bunch of school orientation stuff
• practice the heck out of a couple of musical instruments:

Our friends left town and bequeathed us their piano.
I shot out my voice last night singing Evanescence to my own
accompaniment. It was thoroughly enjoyable.

• give t'ai chi a try, with coaching provided by YouTube
• do a week's worth of housecleaning
• clean out the refrigerator
• trim bangs and take selfies with Dante, Dostoevsky, Paolini, and Debussy:

Also, the corner of the piano.
Did I mention that I love this piano?

• accidentally lock the priest out of the parish office (sorry, Father! I don't know what I did to the door...)
• contemplate cleaning old clothes out of dresser drawers
• contemplate the meaning of life (42) and sanity (the number's probably somewhere in the same range)
• contemplate labels, goals, and other forms of life organization
• spontaneously spend an evening listening to Nikki Yanofsky with birthday-girl sister and her family

• do the laundry
• listen to Enya, because seriously, Enya
• listen to random CD bought off random guy on street corner during Lent because he "wanted to have a voice"
• get a hard lemonade and a pint of chocolate gelato and start in on Buffy, the Vampire Slayer
• procrastinate on nearly all of the above by blogging
• contribute to the internet's ever-insatiable need for cat pictures:

I miss Lou a lot, but at least I'm not bored. Cheers, everybody! I miss you, too....

Happy Thanksgiving!

Right now I'm happy—and thankful—because I just made it in and out of Haggen grocery in less than an hour, and all their employees were smiling and making sure people had a non-stressful shopping experience. Two teenage members of the staff asked me warmly if I was finding everything okay, and a checker caught me on my way to the front and took me straight into her aisle, chatting like she was out to make a new friend. I didn't even have to wait in line. Thanks, friendly Haggen people!* I hope you all have a proper holiday tomorrow, and a lovely one. :)

I'm also thankful because I had a quiet hour in Adoration this morning, and because I had a gift card to Woods Coffee and twenty free minutes after Adoration so I got a mocha with whipped cream, and I'm pretty sure it was the best thing ever.

And because I finally got caught up on music filing for choir!! YAY. I suck at being choir librarian—I'm much too prone to leaving octavos in my own book bag. But I'm working on this.

And because made-of-awesome Deborah more or less gave me a camera she couldn't use, and it arrived this afternoon! Which made today feel like Christmas:

Selfie with new camera, taken with old camera...

Thank you, Deborah (and Rick)!!! Pictures with fabulous new camera coming soon.

I'm also grateful because Lou and I both have loving families that want us present for the holiday tomorrow, and with the exception of Lou's older siblings, they live close by. That's not everybody's situation, and it may not always be ours, so I'm enjoying the heck out of it while I have it.

And because we share house space with a completely dopey, sock-eating cat:

Even if she does stand up under my elbows and lay down on my pedal foot
while I'm playing the piano.

Music of the week: Gwyneth Walker's setting of e.e. cummings' "I Thank You God." It seemed appropriate. I've been enjoying Walker's music (thanks for the rec, Jade!); she's done a lot of pieces for women's voices, which I particularly like, a lot of poetry-themed music... which I appreciate despite poetry being my weak spot... and some beautiful sacred music.

Poetry may be my weak spot, but who doesn't love e.e. cummings? Even if my inner English Nazi desperately wants to capitalize those two e's and the c.



Happy Thanksgiving! May you all be blessed and loved. Virtual hug! [[[ <3 ]]]

* As a matter of fact, I do know two out of three names there... I just usually presume people don't want their names on the internet till I know otherwise. :)

Grownups in Cloaks: A Celebration of Dorky Fandoms

For a discussion topic this week, Masha chose literary fandom. I took her cheery post as license to break from heady theoretical essays—or what passes for them on my blog, anyway—and have some fun.

After all, she introduced the topic with anecdotes of her own:

I can catch [an unkind attitude toward fans] in any review of Tolkien because I'm a fan. Not the dorky kind, the one who names her kids after characters or watches the awful movies Peter Jackson made from The Lord of the Rings over and over. I’m the kind that learned elvish and Old English in College, studies the Appendices and can tell you all about the First Age of Middle Earth. So, the dorkier kind, I guess.

To which I must say: How did I not know you studied Elvish, Masha?! Nai i Valar nauvar as elyë.* (All right, I admit I had to look that up. I didn't study that much Quenya.)

Dork on exhibit at a WWU Yule Ball

Anyone who has read this blog for more than a couple of days knows I take Harry Potter fandom very seriously. It's also true that I've got Jane Austen's books half memorized, have written two songs about Wheel of Time characters, have at various points made it through the first chapter of the Council of Elrond's Quenya workbook and most of The Silmarillion, and am only waiting for MissPhotographerB's next visit to buy a jar of glittery makeup and drive to Forks, but none of that quite compares to what happened when I met Harry. More on that later.

Masha notes that devoted fans are responding, in part at least, to the creation of a myth:

...there is something similar in the way all fans relate to their books. For me the real relationship [to Tolkien's work] was possible because there was a whole mythology, there was depth and meaning and intention, along with a story to follow and characters to love.... I like being able to fall into a world that is real enough to believe in.

Nearly all fantasy and science fiction fandoms, from Tolkien's to Trekkies, arise to some extent from just this sentiment. The Wizarding World is certainly part of Harry's appeal. Given an audience, good immersive worldbuilding usually results in at least a cult following.

Commenter BTanaka suggests, over at Masha's, that fans are made when a story generates personal investment during formative reading years:

...I suspect that most 'hardcore fans' of a particular story or character encountered their story early on in their reading/viewing career and found it to be the most engaging story in their experience to date. From then on, it sort of becomes the 'benchmark' by which they judge other stories, and they retain a nostalgic fondness for it even as they develop into a more mature consumer of fiction.

He's right about some of us, anyway, depending on how you define early on. I read Lewis, Grimm, Austen, Dostoevsky and Hemingway before I came across Rowling, but Harry Potter—and literary analysis thereof—transformed me from a passive reader to an active one. Literature, instead of being either museum or playground, became the Hogwarts castle: a massive school full of talking portraits, magic rooms hidden behind doors pretending to be walls, and staircases that go different places at different times—in other words, a living and mysterious world of infinite secrets and endless corridors to explore.

When something opens up your perspective that dramatically, you love it. So yes, I'm a fan of the dorkier kind: a wizard rocking**, trivia-spouting, occasionally costume-wearing, text-analyzing geek. I sit with the Blogengamot at The Hog's Head—my proudest fan moment was joining that circle. I've even threatened to name my kids after some of the characters (not seriously, though. My relatives would kill me. And a name like Hermione or Luna would be rather hard to live up to.)

Dork being unoriginal at Vancouver
HP club's Yule Ball

It's true, as Masha noted, that outsiders often look askance at fandom or condemn it outright. It looks like obsession to the uninitiate, especially if they've heard a news story or two about someone who took fandom from crazy fun to just plain crazy.

To most of us in the cloak-wearing crowds, however—whether the cloaks come with wands, Darth Vader masks, pointed plastic Elf ears, or glittery makeup—fandom simply celebrates something that changed us. It seems no more likely to be harmful than an annual hard-core session of fantasy football, or a willingness to drive a few hundred miles to see a favorite band, or a lifelong quest for the perfect home brew.

But now I've gotten to my own point: the stories that make us into fans change us, I think, or quicken something in us. Sometimes that's quite subtle, but Harry wasn't. To this day, I lean on that boy for some of my relationship to life and faith and books and what it means to be a decent person. It's not that he taught me something I didn't know; it's that he turned knowledge into emotion and planted it in my soul like the astronauts planted the flag on the moon. This ground has been gained.

Sometimes I show my gratitude by blasting wizard rock while I clean house. If the world doesn't understand that, well—I don't understand their love for MTV. So we're even.

Tell me a tale of magic
Carry me away into a land where anything can happen
Anything at all
Tell me a story
Lay adventure like a road before me
Capture me in glory and the wonder of it all

* "May the Valar be with you."
** wizard rock: music inspired by and/or including lyrics based on the Potter stories.

The Modern YA Novelist

It's Reality TV/freebie week over at The Broke and The Bookish, so I'm taking the week off to participate in another internet meme: parodying Gilbert & Sullivan's "I Am The Very Model of a Modern Major-General" from The Pirates of Penzance. (Warning: particularly vicious earworm. Listen at your own risk.) Without further ado, then:

Too Excited Not to Post...

After pulling off three of my best writing days ever—a total of 11,027 words—I've finished the draft of my fairy tale retelling! And I couldn't resist sharing. [EDIT: I'm an idiot. The link won't take you to my story, as my wording suggests. It's just an image. It'll be an indie- or self-published book eventually, if I can pull it off, which I expect to be able to do.]

42933 / 35000 (complete!)

Happy rest of 2011, and happy New Year!

Pumpkin Pictures

As Mr. Pond wasn't able to post last week, and as today is a holiday, we get another week off the blogalectic. And you get pictures of my first pumpkin-carving experience.

But first, Maia and her vanquished enemy (she knocked over the tall pumpkin several times).

Lou, who has some experience with pumpkin-carving, cut into the tall one and cleaned it out for me.

...and I, not being quite confident enough to replicate this sort of thing, drew a simple face on and proceeded.

It didn't turn out half bad, I think.

Also not half bad: the pumpkin spice lattes we made from the cut-out parts.

I'm live-podcasting with The Hog's Head tonight right during trick-or-treating time, so I'm not sure whether I'll manage to dress up or not, but here's Lou and I from last year:

Have a good and safe All Hallows' Eve, and happy All Saints' Day tomorrow!

Various

Re-reading: Twilight. Because I can.

Reading: The Narnia Code, still. It has too many amazing ideas to easily absorb in one sitting.

Failing to read: Finding Happiness by Abbot Jamison. Which I'm supposed to have read for my book club tomorrow night. But I procrastinated too long on getting it, thinking I could just get it for Kindle for PC, and as it turns out, it's not available that way. I am clearly growing overly dependent on the digital age.

Out from the library:

The Goose Girl by Shannon Hale
The Book of Three (Book One of The Chronicles of Prydain) by Lloyd Alexander

Listening to: the furnace roaring and chirping in the kitchen, and Wreckless Eric's I'd Go The Whole Wide World running around in my head.

Writing: making final pre-submission revisions on my first novel, re-plotting the sequel, prepping for Silhouette (which I'm editing for the February-April season), and trying to figure out what to do with Thursdays on my blog. (Suggestions welcome.)

Here's some Chesterton for you.

[T]o a Christian existence is a story, which may end up in any way. In a thrilling novel (that purely Christian product) the hero is not eaten by cannibals; but it is essential to the existence of the thrill that he might be eaten by cannibals. The hero must (so to speak) be an eatable hero. So Christian morals have always said to the man, not that he would lose his soul, but that he must take care that he didn't.
—Orthodoxy, chapter eight

I'd paste in the whole chapter, if it wouldn't make for such a massive blog-post. Oh, I love that book. It takes a great writer to encourage my faith and justify my love of thrilling stories all in one paragraph.

Bright Copper Kettles

The turn of the year seemed like a great time to do a Favorite Things list. I've made this list 2010-specific, mostly... it's hard to hold back the eternally wonderful.

Catch up on back issues:

Raindrops on Roses
Whiskers on Kittens

marriage
my prince among men
parents, regular and in-law
sisters and brothers (ditto)
nieces, nephews, and godchildren
my ink-and-paper children: A.D., L.E., and their beloved ones
baby herbs in tiny pots, $2
polyphony
puns
Lent and Easter
Benedict XVI
blogging
people who comment on my blog
writers' group
alpha, beta, and gamma readers
book club and the blessed ladies who belong
old friends and new friends
best friends
friends that know I'm a big dork and love me anyway
oh, all right... Twitter
creativity
piecing words together
rhythm and melody and harmony
peace and order
ordinary time, with or without the capitalization
capris and sandals
coffee
brownies and chocolate chip cookies
road trips
Yellowstone Park
P.G. Wodehouse and Jon Acuff
Alan Lastufka, Luke Conard, Kristina Horner and John van Deusen
Pikes Peak and the Garden of the Gods
discovering that my husband has (more) awesome friends
time with a forever kindred spirit: Briana
home
The Office
Dorothy Sayers, Shannon Hale, Orson Scott Card, George MacDonald, and C.S. Lewis
a kitten named Maia
Kyrie, Gloria, Sanctus, Agnus Dei, et cetera
the Hallelujah chorus
the Ave Maria: Schubert, Bach/Gounod, pseudo-Arcadelt, all wondrous
choir practice
singing with Lou
singing in the kitchen, which has better acoustics than the shower
re-learning how to sing in front of other people
plants that coexist with the cat
clumping clay litter
Maia killing bugs
Eclipse, Secretariat, and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1
fresh pumpkin
huckleberries, especially in pancakes
ivy turning colors in autumn
falling leaves
visits from family and friends
trick-or-treaters and the Phantom of the Opera
Advent and Christmas
The Hog's Head
Harry Potter fans
hot chocolate
hot tea with lemon and honey
blankets and wool socks
walking in the falling snow
telescopes and star charts and clear skies and Jupiter's moons
constellations
sunrises and sunsets

...did I forget anything?

Merry Christmas

My husband has tomorrow off, and between music to practice and gifts to wrap and other such things, I don't expect much time for blogging. Besides, it's Christmas. I want to spend it with Lou and our families, not my computer. :)

Next week, posting may be a bit unpredictable. I may choose to throw out memes and post randomly, or simply to not blog at all. Fair warning. It's the holidays.

For your enjoyment, here is a song—highly appropriate to these days leading up to the birth of Christ—that Lou and I have loved learning. It took some doing to find a non-buzzy recording on YouTube, but here you go.



Merry Christmas to you and yours!

Love,
Jenna

Photo Break

I have a cold, thanks to which I have done nothing today but read a book, talk to family, put ornaments back on the Christmas tree whenever Maia takes them off, and try to take the edge off the heat in some leftover Indian cuisine. As it turns out, lamb korma is really good when not entirely dominated by capsaicin.

But despite several efforts, I've not come up with a good post on writing for the day. One of these days, maybe I'll get ahead and start doing scheduled posts... till then, when I fail, you get Christmas pictures. Or other such things.

Lou and I, cutting our tree:

We always go with Lou's parents and Andy and Lindsey. Family photo:

Maia caught sight of the Christmas tree in the kitchen, bolted, and hid under the bed for awhile. When she finally came out, she discovered it was just a giant plant:

...at which point it became something to chew on, climb in, bat water away from, and otherwise enjoy to the fullest:

 That became even more exciting when her people hung cat toys on it.

Family photo, in which I am starting to feel sick enough that I fail to hold the smile for ten seconds. Fortunately, I do manage to hang onto the cat, who clearly has places to go and things to do:

Introducing Maia

For anyone who didn't hear this already through Facebook: We have a new family member.

We've called her Maia, because a) it's pretty, b) it's a star name (the eldest of the Seven Sisters) and c) it was used by C.S. Lewis in Till We Have Faces. What's not to like? Besides, it's incredibly easy to call across the house when we don't know where she's hiding.

As the daughter of my parents' mouser (yes, she's one of these), she spent the first four months of her life out of doors, where the chickens decided to give her a rough time of it. She has taken to being an indoor kitty very cheerfully, with only one problem: her favorite place to be is my big Mexican Breadfruit plant, and—after an extensive Google search when she started playing with it—I've learned that those are toxic to cats. I keep having to chase her out of it. It probably won't kill her, but if she eats it, it certainly won't do her any favors.

So far, it's mostly just a place to play. Big leaves, perfect for hiding behind or attacking... long runners, great for pouncing upon... branches big enough to climb around in... she can pretend she's a baby tigress in there.

Crazy plant lady has problems, though, in the form of an even more toxic peace lily, dragon tree, and poinsettia. I may have solved one issue accidentally today by knocking over the vacuum onto my six-year-old poinsettia, breaking off over half of the plant (if I wasn't so worried about her eating it, I'd have cried) but the remaining plants have me a little paranoid. Those plants are big and old and have been with me forever, but I don't want to risk her health. Should I keep them around and just watch her when she has the run of the house, as I have been? Or give away the potentially dangerous ones and find a new way of decorating my living room? Cat owners disagree.

Aside from the breadfruit plant, she likes the toy I made her with an old sock, a rag and a broken shoelace. Likewise, her catnip scratcher, the old chair, the wrist strap on the camera (trying to take pictures of her is challenging), the cursor on my computer screen, and my hair. I'm still waiting for her to discover toilet paper.

But my favorite thing is how she comes and sleeps beside me sometimes when I'm working on the computer. It usually means typing one-handed because she'll drape over one arm, but goodness, it's cute.

Lou likes her, too, which makes me feel better about not only begging him for her but getting him to talk our landlord into allowing a kitten. The landlord's original words had been "A mature cat might be all right." But he was magnanimous. And we are grateful.

Huckleberry Week

The Great Annual St. Hilaire Family Huckleberry Picking Experience happened this week, and I am currently so tired that my most energetic act of the day has been jumping up at the discovery of a spider crawling up the couch next to me. Since I have a mountain of laundry to do, a book club party and a road trip to plan and shop for, and a few pounds of huckleberries to wash and freeze, I'm going to need more motivation than that.

I loved the huckleberry picking party, though. We had perfect weather, comparatively few bees/wasps/hornets, and not a single mosquito that I noticed. This was my first year going at the same time as the majority of the family, too, which made it especially fun. Here are some pictures.

The campground, as people began arriving:

Our little home away from home:

Looking up (my favorite thing to do when camping; I tried to take pictures of the stars, too, but apparently our camera doesn't do night shots):

Me plotting my novel for NaNoWriMo; or, as Uncle Claude called it, doing my homework:

 
 Picking huckleberries:

...and feeding them to my godson:

In the morning of the berry-picking day, I busied myself in a good patch of bushes, picking away and daydreaming about my novel characters. It didn't take me long to fill my little berry bucket, and then I went looking for Lou.

Unfortunately, I'm the sort of person who doesn't dare get out of sight of the trail, because I can get lost anywhere. And I couldn't find Lou. I went as far as I dared in every direction, asked everyone I saw if they'd seen him. Nobody had. I told myself he hadn't gotten lost--unlike me, he can actually be expected to go someplace and find his way back--but the woods are big, and just because I've never seen a bear or cougar up there doesn't mean there aren't any.

After what felt like an hour of searching, someone thought they saw him. It wasn't him, it was his brother, but I ran after Andy and asked if he'd seen Lou, and he pointed further up the ravines. So I had a mini-Gryffindor moment, decided I'd be all right if I followed the ravine, and bolted off into the woods.

Out of sight of everyone, I began to feel eerily alone, so I stopped and looked around. I couldn't see or hear anyone, so I shouted for Lou. Everything was silent for a moment. Then--"Yeah?" He stood up and waved, from across the ravine and further down. And I started running again, scrambled across the first rocky pass I could find, threw my arms around him, and burst into tears. And we were totally fine; no wild animals attacked, and though I was completely lost at that point, he knew exactly where we were.

I stuck with him after that. Which means, since he liked that spot way off by ourselves, that I didn't get any pictures of the group picking. Oh well. Here he is:

and picking down in the ravine again:

Once I found him, I decided it was a beautiful place to stop:

After finishing the day's picking, a group of us went down into a little cave, where the temperature dropped from about ninety to about sixty:

...besides being cool, it was mostly just dark:

Back at camp, we got a sunset so lovely that I had to take a photo:

...and at that point, I proved that I'm not much of a photographer by basically forgetting about the camera. Other adventures included packing five adults, two coolers, and all necessary camping gear into a station wagon for twelve hours, making s'mores out of enormous marshmallows, praying the rosary around the campfire, making a birthday video for Uncle Joey, and guessing at the proper technique for cooking hobo dinners on a campfire. (Maybe that should be my next Tuesday recipe. Hmm.)

At this moment I'm grateful to be home and showered, not to mention within reach of Internet access, but I'm so glad to have gone. Hey, all you cousins who didn't come: I missed you.

Happy Summer

I love summer--and plants. Here are some of my window-herbs, basil and savory:

aloe and rosemary.

My Christmas cactus has decided to take the summer months and grow better than it has in years.

Outside, the tomatoes are ripening...

 ...the first cucumber is growing on its vine

...the potatoes have begun to put on some height

...and we should get a few apples this year.

If all of that weren't enough for cheer, the sky still looks like this.

Good enough for me. :)