The Horse and His Boy

Note: This is probably my favorite title of all the Chronicles. My second favorite title being The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, cuz those three things just sound funny together. The other titles tell you something basic about the books, but I like how these two leave you wondering a little bit. And so, for a few quotes:

"Your Majesty would have a perfect right to strike off his head," said Peridan. "Such an assault as he made puts him on a level with assassins."
"It is very true," said Edmund. "But even a traitor may mend. I have known one that did." And he looked very thoughtful.

Second note: I also love how in every book that Edmund is in (or very nearly every book, I can't at the moment remember a specific moment in The Last Battle as I haven't read it recently) Edmund himself makes some mention of his time as a traitor. The book Prince Caspian has Edmund talking about how on their first trip to Narnia he was the worst of the lot. It is also mentioned that the reason Edumnd didn't have a Christmas gift was his own fault. In The Voyage of the "Dawn Treader" Edmund tells Eustace "You were just an ass, but I was a traitor." Here we have a reference again. Aslan never mentions it though. Indeed, in Prince Casian the very first thing he says to Edmund is "Well done." Can you imagine anything better to hear from Aslan than that? Also, Edmund is my very favorite character in this series. People only read the first book and hate him, and I just wish I could make them all see that they are, in a way, really just hating themselves.

"I hear no conditions from barbarians and sorcerers," said Rabadash. "Not one of you daretouch a hair of my head. Every insult you have heaped on me shall be paid with oceans of Narnian and Archenland blood. Terrible shall the vengeance of the Tisroc be: even now. But kill me, and the burnings and torturings in these northern lands shall become a tale to frighten the world a thousand years hence. Beware! Beware! Beware! The bolt of Tash falls from above!"
"Does it ever get caught on a hook half way?" asked Corin.

"I was the lion." And as Shasta gaped with open mouth and said nothin, the Voice continued. "I was the lion who forced you to join with Aravis. I was the cat who comforted you among the houses of the dead. I was the lion who drove the jackals from you while you slept. I was the lion who gave the Horses the new strength of fear for the last mile so that you should reach King Lune in time. And I was the lion you do not remember who pushed the boat in which you lay, a child near death, so that it came to shore where a man sat, wakeful at midnight, to receive you."

"Child," said the Lion, "I am telling you your story, not hers. No one is told any story but their own."

The Silver Chair

"One word, Ma'am," he said, coming back from the fire; limping, because of the pain. "One word. All you've been saying is quite right, I shouldn't wonder. I'm a chap who always liked to know the worst an then put the best face I can on it. So I won't deny any of what you said. But there's one thing more to be said, even so. Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things -- trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that's a funny thing when you come to think of it. We're just babies making up a game, if you're right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That's why I'm going to stand by the play world. I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia. So, thanking you kindly for our supper, if these two gentlemen and the young lady are ready, we're leaving your court at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for Overland. Not that or lives will be very long, I should think; but that's small loss if the world's as dull a place as you say."

(Oh, hurrah! Good old Puddleglum!)

The Voyage of the "Dawn Treader"

There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.

"I wonder," said Reepicheep, "do they become visible when you drive a sword into them?"

"Please, Aslan," said Lucy, "what do you call soon?"
"I call all times soon," said Aslan...

And just as the girl, gliding in the shallow water, and Lucy, leaning over the bulwark, came opposite to one another, the girl looked up and stared straight into Lucy's face. Neither could speak to the other and in a moment the Sea Girl dropped astern. But Lucy will never forget her face. It did not look frightened or angry like those of the other Sea People. Lucy had liked that girl and she felt certain the girl had liked her. In that one moment they had somehow become friends. There does not seem to be much chance of their meeting again in that world or any other. But if ever they do they will rush together with their hands held out.

"Your Majesty promised," said Reepicheep, "to be good lord to the Talking Beasts of Narnia."
"Talking Beasts, yes," said Caspian. "I said nothing about beasts that never stop talking."

"It isn't Narnia, you know," sobbed Lucy. "It's you. We shan't meet you there. And how can we live, never meeting you?"
"But you shall meet me, dear one," said Aslan.
"Are-are you there too, Sir?" said Edmund.
"I am," said Aslan. "But there I have another name. You must learn to know me by that name. This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there."

Zooillogical

The only problem with our snake is that it refuses to eat anything but live mice. So, we have a routine, that every week or so we go to the pet store and buy one smallish female mouse to feed the snake immediately. This is very important so that we don't get attached to the tiny cute rodents.

However, Nick's mom works with someone who owns several snakes, and therefore breeds rats to feed them. Apparently all of this person's snakes went into hibernation just as the rats gave birth to a whole bunch of babies, so we were offered free rats to feed our snake.
Cool. However - the first rat we were given, although still young and small for a rat, was too big for our six month old ball python to eat. And after about twenty minutes of having it home it was too cute too. Enter baby rat number one.

We were given three more rats to feed our snake. One was a hairless variety just small enough for Indy to eat. The other two I was told not to look at because they were still extremely small and fuzzy and adorable. So I didn't look. The hairless one was dinner, the two babies were put into the rat cage for safe-keeping till Indy was hungry again.

This was a friday.

Saturday morning I woke up thinking I heard a squeaking. (The faint of heart should read no further.) After a few minutes I was quite positive I heard a squeaking and it was in our bedroom and it was frantic. I dashed out of bed only to discover that one of the babies had escaped the cage (more on this later) and scurried into our bedroom where Rumpelstiltskitty found her. Rumpels did what all cats do and batted her around a bit and when we caught her was carrying the baby rat in her mouth. It was too late to save the rat.

To this day we have absolutely no idea how the rat got out of the cage. I know that animals can get out of areas that you would think are too small for them to manage, but this is incredible. It just isn't possible. So it's really unfortunate that the mysterious rat with teleportion abilities had to meet such a terrible end.

The good thing though is that a little bit later that morning Nick was sitting in my chair at my desk next to the rat cage holding the surviving baby. He's cradling it in his hands and looks up at me and says in a small voice: "So... can we keep her?"

Thus we now have to rats by accident. Their names are either Reep and Rose or Misao and Petra depending on who you ask and will probably end up some mixture of the two. And here are some pictures, though they are already growing like crazy. (Rather, there will be pictures as soon as blogger lets me load them)

Rumpels and the rats are friends now, by the way. She looks at them, and they look at her, and they all seem to enjoy the company.

Movies

I watched all of these relatively recently. I don't much feel like doing big reviews of them, so here are some blurbs:

August Rush: I really enjoyed this the first time I saw it. It was amazing and beautiful and sad. Then I saw it a second time and had the same five songs from it playing in my car for a couple of weeks. Now it needs to rest for a bit before I watch it again.

Horton Hears a Who!: I saw this with my husband and four other people in the theatre. My husband was the only one who didn't think it was wonderful. Since my husband generally has good taste we'll just have to forgive him for his lapse in judgement. Also, the only recent movie based on a Dr. Seuss to actually be good or respect the source material.

The Illusionist: Interesting movie. Good too. I watched it at my parent's house on Easter morning while I was waiting for everyone else to wake up. If you like magicians and movies that you have to watch over again after you know the ending so you can see all the clues along the way then this is a good movie for you. But The Prestige is a much better movie about similar things. So even if you don't like magicians or don't like The Illusionist, you should still watch The Prestige. Plus, it has David Bowie in it. I dare you to recognize him though. (Un?)Fortunately there's no Dance Magic Dance.

Clue: I was certain this movie was going to be lame. A movie based on a board game? Please! That's almost as lame as a movie based on a Disney theme park ride, with twelve different writers working on it, there's no way that could actually be any good... okay okay, Pirates of the Carribean (the first one anyway) was brilliant against all odds, and Clue is pretty darn funny. Nick has it on dvd and we finally watched it together with a bunch of friends the other night. We all laughed an awful lot. Tim Curry really is pretty brilliant. Of course he voiced a character on Gargoyles so what else would you expect? It's weird/fun seeing Christopher Lloyd so young too. And the three different endings are enjoyable.

Marathon Man: Not sure what i think of this movie. I enjoyed it, but I don't know that I would want to watch it again. It was written by William Goldman though, and based on his book, so if nothing else you can definitely say that he has major range in what he's capable of. I mean, the man writes Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (brilliant), the Princess Bride (even more brilliant), and then this movie that is deliberately sly in its intentions with hard edges and a Nazi war criminal at its center. I think I'm going to have to read the book sometime.

No Country for Old Men: I always like Tommy Lee Jones, and he's good in this as a small county sheriff. The other two main characters, a cold blooded killer and the trailer park veteran who pursues/is pursed by him kept reminding me of the older brother on Everybody Loves Raymond and Tom Selleck, respectively. It was interesting, but in the long run didn't really make enough sense to be enjoyable. Some things just aren't properly explained, and they are things that it seems ought to have been explained. If I had know it was based on a book by Cormac McCarthy I may not have wanted to watch it. I read All the Pretty Horses by him in the eleventh grade and it didn't really make a favorable impression as a coherent whole.

Kung-Fu Hustle: Ya gotta love subtitled kung-fu. Especially when it's funny subtitled kung-fu. I enjoy the character design and costumes in this movie, and how the kung-fu masters look nothing like kung-fu masters. And since none of the spectacular stunts in this type of movie look real anyway, I like how this movie goes ahead and pushes them to such silly extremes. Plus, I really like the mute girl and her lollipop.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Being a big fan of the tv show, I thought I should watch the movie. THANK YOU SO MUCH, JOSS WHEDON, FOR THE TV SHOW!!! Now can we please just forget the movie ever existed?

The Pursuit of Happyness: I've been wanting to watch this for a while, and finally decided to just sit down and do it on my day off. It was good. Sad and happy and good. I don't really have that much more to say about it, and I thought I would. Go figure. Oh, Will Smith must have gotten really in shape from having to do that much running around with a bone density scanner though.

Amish

The common names in my town are not the common names of most other towns. Example:

Last Names:

• Chupp
• Hershberger
• Hostetler (or Hochstetler)
• Keim
• Mast
• Miller
• Schlabach
• Troyer
• Weaver
• Yoder

First Names:

• Adonia (these are guy names, btw)
• Atlee
• Eli
• Jonas
• Mervin
• Melvin
• Mose

Window

Proud

Henry Jones Jr. (aka Indiana Jones aka Indiana aka Indy aka our cute ball python) just shed his skin in one long piece for the first time today! The first time it was in little pieces, and then in bigger pieces, and then in pieces and a half long piece, and now nose to tail! I'm so proud of him!

Prince Caspian

Recently whenever I have started to reread the Chronicles of Narnia I have read The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe and then Prince Caspian and then had to stop so I could read something else for school or a book club or what have you. So it has been a few years since I last read the series in its entirety. Ergo, Prince Caspian has been my favorite of late. The writing style improves dramatically between the two books and there are dozens of wonderful lines I could quote to you from the latter. And although we see the ultimate depth of Aslan's love in the first book, it is in this one and the following books that I feel we begin to know him better.
......

"It is my sword Rhindon," he said. "With it I killed the Wolf." There was a new tone in his voice, and the others all felt that he was really Peter the High King again. Then, after a little pause, everyone remembered that they must save the battery.

"You mean you think we're no good," said Edmund, getting red in the face.
"Now pray don't be offended," interrupted the Dwarf. "I assure you, my dear little friends--"
"Little from you is really a bit too much," said Edmund. ...

Yet Lucy had the feeling (as you sometimes have when you are trying to remember a name or a date and almost get it, but it vanishes before you really do) that she had just missed something: as if she had spoken to the trees a split second too soon or a split second too late, or used all the right words except one: or put in one word that was just wrong.

"Aslan," said Lucy, "you're bigger."
"That is because you are older, little one," answered he.
"Not because you are?"
"I am not. But every year you grow, you will find me bigger."

"Now you are a lioness," said Aslan. "And now all Narnia will be renewed."

It is a terrible thing to have to wake four people, all older than yourself and all very tired, for the purpose of telling them something they probably won't believe and making them do something they certainly won't like.

But all night Aslan and the Moon gazed upon each other with joyful and unblinking eyes.

....

There are so many more I would like to include, but then I would just end up retyping the entire book. So I'll just say Reepicheep and be done.

Reepicheep!!!

Leaves

On Saturday, March 29th, my Nick and I woke up early and wound our way down worn back roads to Mt. Vernon where SST Studios is. We arrived at nine in the morning, and Nick left me there while he continued on to Oxford in a quest for various computer bits and pieces from a friend of his. I wandered around to the back of the house and down to the basement level where the studio was split between a large basement room and a barn off to the side of the house. Inside was what Howard Carter would have called "Wonderful things!"

There were kilns, and enamels, and copper, and jeweler's saws, and piles of half-finished projects, and a sink caked with years of copper grime, and respirator masks, and blow-torches, and drills, and fluz, and forging tools, and cats that wound their way through it all. Two of them were named Sherlock and Watson.

I got to stay there from nine in the morning until seven at night creating a shiny branch with leaves on it. The branch is a copper tube that I bent to my specifications and then flattened to hold shape. I then drilled holes into it where I wanted the leaf offshoots to be. I soldered round copper disks to copper wire, and then fed the wires through the branch and soldered them to the back to have a stable base to attach the leaves to. The leaves are pieces of copper that have been both stamped out and then finished off with a jeweler's saw for details. The leaves were then scrubbed and dried and hammered with forging tools to create the veins and more natural bends of the leaf. Then the leaves were sprayed front and back with a flux and coated with a background base enamel on the back and clear glass enamel on the front side. Each leaf was then fired and allowed to cool. After cooling, the front side was sprayed with flux again and color was sifted on in whatever pattern or design desired. And when they were fired again the color layer blended in with the glass layer and the end result is a leaf that looks like it was plucked from the tree just as it began to turn colors and then encased in glass. Each leaf was then attached to the copper branch with silicone. And if I sound extroardinarily detailed and excited it's because I had such a wonderful time getting to work with my hands in a large well-equipped studio again. Plus I got such a nifty project to take home and put on my wall out of it :)

See! There it is on my wall! Between the bookshelf my da made for me and my lamp-post! Also, glass enamel is very difficult to photograph and my walls are not nearly so pink as they look in these pictures. They have a very pleasant brownish reddish look in real life.

Also the artist I was learning glass enamel from made the most wonderful lunch for us. Really delicious. So all in all a pretty much perfect day. Just wanted to share it with all of you.

China

My brother went to China on a mission trip a few years ago. He had about twenty dvds with him when he came home. Two of them were Kill Bill Volumes 1 and 2.

I love the Kill Bill movies. To be honest, I could probably say that they are up there with some of my very favorites. Certainly they are some of the movies that I find most rewatchable. I like the non-linear time storytelling, the interesting film angles, the fight sequences, the blend of anime and live action, the multiple credit sequences, the music, the fact that it starts with an old Klingon proverb, the fact that it exists simply for the sake of existing, the whole bit. So I'm borrowing my brother's made in china copies right now, because I don't own the movies myself yet.

This is what the back of Vol. 1 says:

In Quentin Tarantino's latest film about a former assassin betrayed by her boss Bill (David Carradine).Four yearsafter suriving a bullet in thehead, the bride (Thurman) emerges from a coma and sewears revengej on her former master and his deadly squad pf onternationasl assassons, played by sometting aside from those aspects wasthe music, whoch grabbed me and wouldn't letgo There were so many yariekties on the soundteraci, from techno pumpin themes, to punk music.to quitt flute harmonies. Spme pf the music was even done by Wu Tang Clan' RZA,and he did an exceptiona; ob artist has done this well on a aoundtrack since Eminem did soundtrack,which is another terific aoundtrack.

I think we all know how .... official this copy really is. Oh yeah. The movie plays great though :)

Update: I hadn't even finished reading all the details on the back when I first posted this. If I had I would have definitely included what the special features are. Are you ready? Remember these are the features listed for Kill Bill, a Quentin Tarantino martial arts revenge movie that is rated R.

• Color,Closed-captioned
• Theatrical(PG-13) version of the film
• -"The Quest for the Ring (as debuted on the FBC Network)
• -"A Passage to Middle-earth"(as premiered on the SCI-FI Channel)
• Elijah Wood,Ian McKellen,Viggo Mortensen,Liv Tyler,and others

I won't even go into all the mess-ups listed in the technical details at the bottom. Oy.

Cold

No spoiler alerts here, because I have told you all about a gajillion times to go read the Chronicles of Narnia. So.

Anyone else been feeling like they are in Narnia lately? With the White Witch making it so that it is always winter and never Christmas? That's what I've been feeling like. I'm not sure I remember what it is like to feel properly warm anymore. I go outside, and it is always cold. There is frost on the ground (and all over my car). The plants won't grow. There are no leaves on the trees. Everything seems dead. It makes me feel like a dead slug. Ugh.

Fortunately, I am finally starting to feel like Aslan is on the move. It makes me joyful. I cannot wait for spring!

Time

Isn't it amazing how quickly time passes? I would have sworn I had posted on here more recently, but it looks like my last post was on March 12. Oops. Guess I shall have to fix that.