another year, another kub kar race

 

someone loves her new shoes

 
 
 
wait long enough and everything comes back in style.
tonight, on pepper and my 'date', we trolled the mall and saw argyle knee sox, pom-pom hair ties, sneaker change purses, and fushia, fingerless gloves.
thank goodness, pepper gravitated to the converse high tops.

but it also begs the question:
if my daughter adopts a fashion style i used to like/wear, does that mean i'm too old to wear it now????

vietnam

 
you'd think vietnam, as such a small skinny country, would be a quick stop. but we found wonder in many things:

novice monks have to wait until they are at least 20 yo before they can write an exam about Buddhist beliefs and advance. more years of study, and another exam, to reach the 3rd level means they are allowed to add the title 'thich' to their name. this fact made me look up Thích Nhất Hạnh, and lo and behold - yup, he's vietnamese.
china ruled vietnam for hundreds of years, so there are many similarities in their cultures but we noticed korean influences too (which, knowing their history, may have indirectly come from china too)
Tết, the vietnamese new year is the same day as chinese new year (since they both follow the lunisolar calendar) and adults hand out money to children in red envelopes, visiting friends and family plays an integral role, and of course the concept of manipulating good or bad luck for the year to come
but all vietnamese people celebrate their birthday on tết - just like the korans add to their age every january 1st. and their pottery - blue and white - is alot like korean pottery.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -


The Buddha's Diamonds was a bit of a strange book for us; the tone and pace was unlike anything i've read before - especially within the junior fiction realm. we could have easily dismissed it as boring, i guess. but instead, reading it in one go and staying immersed, i felt like i WAS buddhist: evenly, methodically, reacting to events. it was so inward thinking...

in opposition, Cracker was a wild ride and actually a pretty gentle jump off point to the vietnam war. war is so complex; it's difficult to approach it as a lineal thing - this book stayed in it's amercian and non-retrospective viewpoint, so it provided a framework to start with. but small mentions of his initial emotional detachment after making contact with the enemy, the draft (he volunteered), or war protesters, allowed me to control the content (as in: there's no need to see or hear the full 'Platoon' to get the point across) of tangents into PTSD, draft dodgers and war crimes.

oh - that fact that was a quite a discussion as well - that we have set 'rules' to follow in a war!

anyhow - we learned alot of things that worked synergistically: like the terrain of the mountains (geography) isolating certain tribes (culture) that influenced how the 'american war' (history) played out.

and we had ruth's emailed 'letter' from her family's vacation to vietnam last year to bring the Mekong delta, water puppetry, and Ho Chi Minh City to life.

year of the 虎 (tiger)

here's my little tiger:
 
did you know tigers are famous for not getting along with monkeys? (that's me: boo-hoo)
fierce is a dragon, bosco is a goat
on the 5th day of the new year - feb 19 - people eat dumplings. since there's no way we can squeeze in a chinese restaurant tonight, we'll aim for that instead.
福

goofy

we got to attend an animator workshop hosted by Disney staff and they took us through the process of drawing a character,
which just happened to be my favorite:

goofy

it was fun to just follow the simple instructions (make a 'six' for the mouth, etc)

since we all did it at the same time, and it was dark in the room except for our individual desks/workspaces, it was cool to see what each other did when it was over.

pepper so loved the process that she returned for another class
and 'did' stitch

i'm glad i skipped that one;

i hate that stinky bugger

holiday snaps

we're back from our visit with the mouse.
it feels like it's been months, not weeks... probably because it's the longest time i've spent (continously) living in the moment. i spend so much my day-to-day life trying to keep myself and everyone on schedule:
piano lessons, cubs & beavers, co-ops and classes, laundry, groceries, library due dates, suppper on the table, hurry: you'll miss the bus, how much allowance do i have left?
being at an amusement park almost everyday forces you to just BE
even the driving had to be taken as it came - watching the road, speed limits, seeing if this next exit would be a pit stop for gas or food or restrooms.

a change is as good as a rest, and i feel my head lived somewhere far, far away from where it usually resides. here's small taste of our fantasyland:


our pirate hostel in st augustine was a blast...

...with an old fashioned telephone box, and a common room full of toys






finally someone's calling it like it is:

although i think fierce believed this is where all his old toys were now being 'stored'

 
 
 
 
'uncle travelling matt'
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
and then there was that unfortunate mishap
 
 
what's disney without a parade?
 
 
 
 

water dance

we couldn't get enough of this fountain where the water looked at if it could bounce from platform to platform
 

 

 

 

pants on the ground

you had to be there...
 

 
 

 

holiday snaps part 2

 
soda pop from around the world - cheers
 
powering a city - together:
 
 
picked from the crowd -
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
more parades:
 
 

 
 
 
 
we find ourselves in the midst of the fireworks...
 
 


 
 
 
among the 500 or so folks there, rob gets chosen to be the villian in the indiana jones movie shoot
 
 
 
 
 
so, now it appears we've been to san francisco too
 
and that's what we did - go, go, go
our first totally uneducational trip. even the historical aspects of st augustine were largely ignored as we drank and shopped and ate through the oldest city in the north america. and if we happened to notice that georgia likes the secret word spa - which sure didn't mean spa - or that tennessee wants to be the firework capital of the world,
well, that was purely accidental