Sounds Like Mowgli

5: The number of pages in each story Sarah and Jeffrey read to me to round out their out-of-school reading requirements for the day this morning. Of course I want reading to be something they WANT to do and not resent me for asking of it for them, so I try for something exciting, and I think Usborne Books' Stories from Around the World has some pretty exciting offerings from around the world, as retold by Heather Amery. This morning Jeffrey regaled me with “Nail Soup”, the Czech Republic version of “Stone Soup” I expect we heard as kids, where the soup is made delectable by everything around it, not the nail – or stone – itself and some Boys' Life readings while Sarah went to the same book for “Stealing the Sun”, a story from Africa.





6: When I read that last part … ugh. You try convincing a South African, a Gambian, and a Tunisian that they're all the same people, “African”. I need specificity, people. But the important thing about this story that inspired today's title for me was how Sarah pronounced the main character's name, the chief's son Mokele. As long as they get the words right, proper names – especially unfamiliar proper names – get a bit of leeway with me. It took a minute after breakfast before the kids got ready for school for me to grasp that Sarah was saying Mokele's name as she read it, pronouncing it “Mowgli” and inspired by the lost boy in The Jungle Book! (Though she got it from the Disney animated adaptation, not the Rudyard Kipling original.) 

56: The previous Sunday's episode of Once Upon A Time, so not last Sunday's but the Sunday before, was the fifty-sixth episode of that series, the mid-season premiere. All the fairy tale characters – Prince Charming, Snow White, the seven dwarfs, etc. – had the curse which first placed them in Storybrooke, Maine undone and then the action picks up, or should I say alternates between our world and the Enchanted Forest one year later. Emma Swann, the now-adult daughter of Charming and Snow who originally helped them to break the curse but left them all in Storybrooke, is about to accept a marriage proposal only to find out she doesn't remember her time in Storybrooke AND Charming, Snow, and the rest don't remember their time in the Forest, apparently courtesy of a new player in the game. And I hate to say this, but this show going on character overload may have lost me and I won't want it back. But that might just be my mood, anything can happen!

65: The rounded dollar amount that our monthly auto insurance payment is slated to go down as of next month, fair enough.

79: We made it to the seventy-ninth day in the calendar year, people, be proud! (And exactly one month until Easter, I just realized.)

135: The rounded dollar amount that our monthly mortgage payment has gone up as of next month, enough said.

2053: For Star Trek fans, particular those who've seen the eighth film of the franchise Star Trek: First Contact, it's the year humanity courtesy of warp drive makes first contact with an alien (read nonhuman, not illegal) race. And according to my friend Alan Walter, our city's former director of public works and fellow attendee of Coffee With The Boys at Bethany Lutheran on Thursday mornings, he got word from a professional acquaintance of his that the floods in our area occur in forty-two year cycles. (So maybe somewhere here in Minot is The Question To The Ultimate Answer, but I digress.) The last one was three years ago in 2011, the flood before that which is still talked about by many people I know was in 1969, which would put the flood before that in 1927, and so on. Hurm. By the time of the next flood if this holds true, assuming it occurs in June as well, I will be eighty-one, Martha will be seventy-six, Sarah will be forty-seven, and Jeffrey will forty-five years old. I have some time.

And good night, Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are.

David