August 25, 2008 @ 7:38 pm | Filed under: Blog
I’m still missing some three hundred subscribers…if you’re reading this on the blog and wondering why my recent posts haven’t popped up in your feed reader, it probably means you’re among the people who were suddenly unsubscribed by my Feedburner snafu last week.
And I’m still hearing from readers whose IP addresses have been blocked from loading the site, for reasons neither I nor my hardworking web person can fathom. If you are one of those people, send me your IP address and we’ll get you unblocked. (But how will you know to do this, if you can’t load the blog AND have been unsubbed? I wonder if there will be people out there who think I just stopped blogging one day?)
So I’ve got the SURPRISE! YOU’VE BEEN UNSUBSCRIBED problem. And the SURPRISE! YOUR IP ADDRESS HAS BEEN BLOCKED problem. And let us not forget the WHOOPSIE, YOUR BROWSER IS SHOWING YOU A CACHED VERSION OF THIS SITE WHICH MEANS YOU AREN’T SEEING THE MOST RECENT POSTS problem which has been plaguing some readers for a while. (At least we know a solution to that problem. Register for the site and as long as you’re logged in, you will always see the most recent posts. Only—for Pete’s sake don’t forget your password because if you try to log in with the wrong password, my hypervigilant spam filter will label you a Suspicious Character and block your IP address. See problem #2, subset A.)
Thanks, friends, for hanging in here with me while I continue to try to sort out these obnoxious problems. I’m sorry some of you are having to work so hard to make it past the goblins to new posts. And then I go and reward your trouble with a boring post like this?! Heck, the goblins are more interesting!
August 25, 2008 @ 6:34 am | Filed under: Books, Picture Book Spotlight
Is that not the best title ever? I originally posted this picture book review in February, 2005. I’m reposting it now because this book is no longer in print, and I want you to grab it if you ever spot it in a library sale. (I believe you can still get it through the author’s website, too, and there’s even a version on CD which includes other stories and music. Note to self: remember this at Christmastime.)
It’s Not My Turn to Look for Grandma by April Halprin Wayland, illustrated by George Booth. George Booth!
Dawn was just cracking over the hills. Ma was splitting kindling on the back porch.
“Woolie!” she called out. “Where in the hickory stick is Grandma?”
“Dunno,” said Woolie. “It’s not my turn to look for Grandma!”
I’ve been reading this book to my kids for eight or nine eleven or twelve years, and it still makes us all giggle. April Halprin Wayland (author of another of our family favorites, the quiet and lovely To Rabbittown), depicts this quirky backwoods family with wit and warmth, and George Booth’s illustrations are a hoot. Ma, a hardworking backwoods mother, needs Grandma’s help and keeps sending the kids to fetch her—but Grandma’s too busy sliding down the haystack with her dirty old dog, or doing something similarly outlandish. She’s never too busy, however, for a banjo band…
The rollicking text is a joy to read aloud. The writing is fresh and lively, and the characters are pure originals—especially that dirty old dog and a pair of disreputable porcupines. George Booth’s art, which would be hilarious even without the words, captures them perfectly. If I had to narrow down our picture book collection to ten titles (horrific thought!), this one would make the cut for its never-fail ability to invoke the belly-laughs I love.
August 24, 2008 @ 6:15 am | Filed under: Links
(New del.icio.us links appear in my sidebar daily, but I thought I’d round up the past week’s worth here in one post.)
- Children’s knitting group turfed from library under new craft ban - Sounds like Mary Gildersleeve’s book, Great Yarns for the Close-Knit Family, would be just the thing to solve the problem!
- Protect Our Kids from Preschool - WSJ.com - “Why don’t preschool gains stick? Possibly because the K-12 system is too dysfunctional to maintain them. More likely, because early education in general is not so crucial to the long-term intellectual growth of children. Finland offers strong evidence for this view. Its kids consistently outperform their global peers in reading, math and science on international assessments even though they don’t begin formal education until they are 7.”
- Don’t Get Too Comfortable, California « Just Enough, and Nothing More - Yup, I’ve been saying pretty much the same thing ever since the ruling came out.
- RPO — A Time-Line of Poetry in English - HT: Ambleside Online
- StudentNewsDaily.com - Make sense of current events! - Current events site for kids. HT Lindafay at Higher Up and Further In. Jane has been really enjoying reading the articles here and her visits to the site have sparked some great discussions.
- About That ADHD Serving a Purpose Thing - Throwing Marshmallows - Journal - Michael Phelps, ADHD, Homeschooling. HT: Chris O’Donnell.
August 22, 2008 @ 6:58 am | Filed under: Poetry, Scottish folksongs
Another old Scots ballad I’ve been humming almost incessantly lately.
The water is wide,
I canna cross o’er.
Neither have I wings to fly.
Give me a boat that can carry two,
And both shall row,
my love and I.A ship there is,
And she sails the sea.
She’s loaded deep as deep can be.
But not so deep
As the love I’m in…
I know not if I sink or swim.
I love these old songs so very much. This one goes way, way back, and has many variations, some Scottish, some English. The most common version, the one I’ve quoted above, goes on to tell a very sad tale of love lost, betrayal, faithlessness. But I like the song best just like this: these two simple verses, which by themselves seem to me to speak to a true love, a real love, the kind between two people who, pulling together, can navigate stormy waters no matter how burdened the boat.
If you’d like to listen to the melody—perhaps even more beautiful than the lyrics—here’s a lovely version by Jewel, Sarah MacLachlan, and The Indigo Girls. (YouTube clip.)
Or here’s James Taylor.
The singer in this YouTube clip sounds like Charlotte Church to me, though she isn’t credited. The visuals are scenery.
This week’s Poetry Friday round-up can be found at Read. Imagine. Talk.
August 21, 2008 @ 5:40 pm | Filed under: Blog
I’ve just discovered that over half of my subscribers have been unsubbed. I don’t know why or how, but there it is. If you wouldn’t mind resubbing, that would be ducky. Thanks so much.
Of course here again we have the problem of the people who need the message not being able to see the message. If any of you feel like spreading the news, I would really appreciate it!
August 21, 2008 @ 6:34 am | Filed under: Blog, Family
Well, in addition to the Mystery of the Blocked IPs, we now get to add the Mystery of the Wonky Feeds on Bloglines to this week’s blog drama. It seems some Bloglines users are finding that when they click through from my feed in their reader, they wind up at Old Bonny Glen (Typepad) instead of here at New Bonny Glen (Wordpress). As best I can figure, this is the result of my having accidentally and for two minutes only reconnected the Typepad blog to my Feedburner feed, which blunder I discovered immediately, because suddenly a six-month-old Typepad post (the one announcing the launch of this here website) reappeared in my Google Reader.
It’s all very strange. I didn’t actually reconnect the Typepad blog to the Feedburner feed for this blog—what I did was create a new Feedburner feed for Old Bonny Glen, but for inscrutable and maddening reasons, Feedburner ignored the new feed and hooked the Typepad blog back up to my original Feedburner feed instead. And so I changed it right back and said argh a lot and have been scratching my head in befuddlement ever since.
But none of it matters because this post is so boring all my subscribers are going to unsub in disgust anyway. It was lovely knowing all of you, really. I’ll miss you.
Meanwhile (she says, speaking to the empty room), life! is! so! busy! And these are supposed to be the lazy days of summer? Ha! Appointments, appointments, appointments. ‘Tis eval season for my boy: OT, PT, you name it. Speech therapy resumed yesterday after a two-month hiatus. He receives it through the local public school district (but not OT/PT; I’m going through medical for those), and the schools here started back up on Monday! August 18th! They didn’t let out for the summer until late June. Which was last week, I’m pretty sure. The calendar claims there was something called “July” in the middle but I didn’t see it, did you?
So anyway, it’s appointment season for my lad. And for me: all the OB stuff. (I miss my Virginia midwife, sob.) And Jane: Jane is getting braces. Probably next week. So that’s kind of exciting. Today is x-ray and tooth-molds day for her. (See how clever I am? Scheduling it for back-to-school week? When, for once, the orthodontist has no other patients? OK, fine, it was a total accident caused by my procrastinating all summer, but if I HAD planned it this way, I would be a genius.)
A nice thing that has been happening lately is we’ve got our read-aloud groove back. For the past year, the Rilla-and-Wonderboy combination has made peaceful reading aloud, um, challenging. I have missed it! I gnash my teeth in jealousy in the quiet evenings when the little ones are asleep and Scott stretches out in the cool, breezy sunroom with a bevy of eagerly listening girls for uninterrupted reading time. OK, I’m not really gnashing my teeth—because I know, now, what my parents paid for the braces that made them nice and straight.
About which, by the way: um, thanks for that, Mom and Dad.
But anyway, recently I got it into my head that I wanted a return to happy readalouding (hush) of my own, so we’ve been working on it, working out ways to keep the little ones happy while I dust off all my best accents for the big girls. And it’s working, sometimes. Enough of the time. I’m satisfyingly deep into Understood Betsy with Rose and Beanie—Beanie was two years old last time we read this book aloud, so it’s new for her, and of course Rose is right there hanging on every word, because how can you not be? It’s one of the best read-alouds ever, and I don’t say that lightly. And you already know about my Austen revels with Jane. (Jane and Jane, ha!)
Nothing could be more delightful, to quote Jane the elder.
August 20, 2008 @ 9:54 am | Filed under: Blog
If you are reading this in a reader but are unable to get the site to load when you click through, it means your IP address is suddenly being blocked for some mysterious reason. Email me your IP address and I’ll get you unblocked posthaste. (You can look up your IP address at http://whatismyip.com.)
Now: what to do about people who are being blocked but don’t subscribe to my feed, and therefore won’t have any way to see this message??? I sure hope they will send me a note to say they can’t get the site to load.
In the meantime, I’m double-posting all new material at the old Typepad site. But keep commenting here, if you can get through.
Thanks!
August 19, 2008 @ 7:03 pm | Filed under: Books
Would it surprise you to hear that this was the declaration of my amiable thirteen-year-old daughter—about one of my favorite books—and her words delighted me?
Because what Jane meant, what she followed this adamant statement with, was that she wants me to read the rest of Sense and Sensibility to her, because she so enjoyed hearing the first two chapters read aloud this afternoon. I admit I’m a bit of a ham and I tackle the accents with immense relish. (Former drama major, what can I say?)
She hasn’t read any Jane Austen yet (I think she tried Pride and Prejudice a year or two ago and it didn’t grab her at the time), and I had a hunch that if I read a chapter or two aloud to her she would get sucked in and devour the rest, and then we could have all kinds of girlish gabfests about Elinor and Marianne and that absolute pill, Fanny. And I was mostly right: Jane howled in all the right places and we had ourselves a fine old time. So fine that she wants to continue on as we’ve begun.
Which is aces with me, because I can’t wait to try my hand at Lucy Steele.
August 19, 2008 @ 4:51 am | Filed under: Blog
This is one of those posts that makes no sense, because the people who could use the information are the very ones who won’t be able to see it. I’ve heard from a few readers that they have been unable to load Bonny Glen for the past few weeks. I’m working on discovering and solving the problem, but in the meantime, if you do see this post and know anyone who is having trouble, here’s a temporary solution you could share (and I’d be ever so grateful):
Try this link instead: http://feeds.feedburner.com/bonnyglen
That should load my blog’s feed, which is a stripped-down, no bells-and-whistles version of the site. Posts only, no sidebars. (Of course you may also subscribe to this feed in a reader like Bloglines or Google Reader, and then you’ll never miss a post!)
If the problem persists here on the blog, I may consider double-posting at the Typepad site and having that be a mirror of this one. Not an ideal solution, but it’s the back-up plan if we can’t figure out what’s wrong.
Thanks, everyone.
August 18, 2008 @ 5:46 am | Filed under: Uncategorized
Edited: Did I say July? See what happens when you get up too early?
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