Today's A Snow Day!

Or as Stephanie who recommended new eyeglass frames for me to my wife Martha and I (having my wife Martha there was important, for someone she works with got new glasses without his wife and she is NOT a fan of them) said, "frozen liquid sunshine" day. But no frost, though. At least, not today. But after Martha and I had our little confab to determine, in addition to the bifocal lenses I will be sporting in a few weeks, what frames I'll be surrounding them with -- and it's all paid for by insurance, hallelujah! -- I took our van to get an oil change done and get gas in it (since my wife Martha had to go back to her work day and I hadn't started mine yet) before arriving at the office myself!


Last night my boss relieved me early so I could pick up Sarah and Jeffrey at Longfellow after school and then head across the street to Christ Lutheran where Jeffrey's Cub Scout den is meeting throughout this year for their annual Halloween Havoc -- essentially the Halloween party for the Cub Scouts and whoever else with their parents chooses to come. Jeffrey dressed as a banana and Sarah as the Minion King Bob and many of their friends had so much fun and have so much sugary treats to fill (one volunteer who makes many of the cupcakes will be answering to several dozen parents, lol) after some award ceremonies for the Scouts, in Jeffrey's Bear Scout pack's case one of their belt clips for tying double-hitch knots and assembling tents and another one they'll get this Tuesday ...


I really should have wung that, but I'm still getting used to this den leader/den leading/pretending I know what I'm doing and delegating authority with Scouting ... and after the party last night we went to see my wife Martha down at Burger King where she was working. It was slow, so she with her "pack" (as one of the nineteen-year-olds who works there called us) was let off early and we got dinner to go, eating that as we caught this week's Once Upon A Time, the fairy tale characters in the real world series which is still segueing right now between Camelot in the distant past, Camelot in the six weeks Storybrooke characters spent there that they're slowly beginning to remember, and Storybrooke present day where Emma's the Dark One, Rumple's helpless, and Henry's experiencing first love ...


Halley & His Comet (ISBN 0713714476) by Peter Lancaster-Brown I truly expected to be more of a biography of the man Halley's Comet -- long a -- is named for, but the 1985 book is more of an intersection of his life with Isaac Newton's the vastly more famous mathematician. And a good deal of seventeenth century England, I might add. The fact is, Halley's Comet is not named for Edmund Halley because he ever saw it; it's named for him because he predicted when it would appear again. Halley was born in 1656 ... the comet had been seen in 1682 ... Halley predicted it would appear again in 1758 based on its motion, determined by Newton ... Halley died sixteen years before that. And next time barring catastrophe we'll see "Halley's Comet" is in forty-seven years....


Piers Anthony's Hasan (ISBN 0893702153) that retells an Arabian legend of a merchant's son who is kidnapped, frees himself, captures a bride who two sons later leaves him and makes Hasan have to go to the ends of the world to get her back I hadn't read in decades! But at Minot Public Library's weekend book sale I found this original edition and couldn't pass it up, even with the post 9/11 mindset I'm supposed to have about it. Before that I learned through Jo Cugnet-Bannatyne and Song Nan Zhang's From Far and Wide: A Canadian Citizenship Scrapbook (ISBN 0887764436) just what the subtitle says -- how to become a Canadian citizen. I'd never known all the words to "O Canada!" and Martha still knows most of it ... not that we're planning on moving.


Other than forward, David

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