Will There Still Be Sugar After The Rebellion?

The kids get (by the time you're reading this, GOT) out of school at one-fifteen today due to a teachers' conference in Bismarck and don't go back to school until Monday. To say my kids (especially Sarah) are excited might be an understatement. I dropped Sarah and Jeffrey off this morning – I'm still proud of replacing the end of the chain Jeffrey has to pull to turn his bedroom light on and off with the weight of one of his circular race tracks (I admit it, I'm NOT an uber-handy person around the house) – and then took some “off” time myself before work today. Last night Jeffrey's mom Martha took him to his biweekly Cub Scout meeting held at Longfellow. We've worked with him the last several days on what he needs to know and do for his Bobcat badge, and he does well at home but when at the meeting I heard not so well. They did get to make some ornaments and set up an annual fundraiser where they'll be selling popcorn starting next week. They need to get more out of what they do than being there.

But I bet my dad did not either.

He'd have been eighty-seven years
     wise the day Bre turned eighteen,
his view unexploded by
God's glory yet here –
well, there to call
just to hear
my dad's
voice.

My as-yet-untitled poem I've been excerpting for I'm still writing it and telling a story in the process. Please see my last two entries for more and the next few – well, minus Ensign that I bring out on Fridays – for the complete text. Two weeks from Friday the National Novel Writing Month begins, and I still need to outline just what will happen and who will act to make it happen in “The Judgment of London”, my contribution to alternate history where, as a result of Paris prince of Troy and shepherd who judged which goddess among Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite was the most beautiful did not choose Aphrodite (thereby leading to Paris kidnapping Helen of Sparta, bringing about the Trojan War and in my view the genesis of the ongoing conflict between East and West; the Greek myth does have basis in fact) but instead one of the others brought about a to-us changed world, in some ways not in others. Now can I do this – or at least a passable first draft – in thirty days? Ask me. WHILE I'm writing.

“My life is a lovely story,

happy and full of incident.”
May I be able to say what
H. C. Andersen begins his
account, the fairy tale of his
      life
with, without quite so much fanfare.

And we close today with an explanation of today's title, excerpted from George Orwell's 1945 novel Animal Farm. Some people are very hard to convince of the need for a change, or to do the work that's needed to effect it. Chapter II, paragraphs three through seven. It will not take much more to convince us, I think.

David