WATS A Pon A TimE

I was sorting out some old papers and came across stuff I wrote in Montessori and early grade school. They made me very happy. 

My favourite spelling of a word is "chrejerhunt," it says "treasure hunt". Sound it out. It makes more sense than first glance.

Now sit back and let me read you some stories:

WATS A Pon A TimE THER WAR KIS THEAT WAR goWiE To A bRCdAY PRDEY

(Once upon a time there were kids that were going to a birthday party.)

(Please note the one eyed girl)

And THEn THEAE HAd SAm KAKE

(And then they had some cake.)

(Please note how the children merge seamlessly with their chairs :)

And THEn THEAE PLAUDE GAmSE

(And then they played games)

And THEn THEAE WET HOME HOM

(And then they went home. home!)

(Excellent perspectives in the paths, I think).

(The End.)

"hiu my name is Kuoos and how i got my Kron is wen i was rolling i had-a bap and thae is wer i hackt it I pat on it"

(Hi you! My name is Kuoos and how I got my crown is when I was rolling I... had a bump? heard a bap?.... and that is where I got it. I put it on.)

(who cares what it says?! Look at his feet!!)

              

MOM is WTiG FR EVR WN To CM DAWNSTRS

(Mom is waiting for everyone to come downstairs)

(Who needs vowels? :)

 THE KIDS HAV KM DASARS

(The kids have come downstairs)

 THE KiDs R PLAN THE DAD is AT WRK

(The kids are playing the dad is at work)

THE CiDS hAV LEFT THE ROOM

(The kids have left the room)

(The cids!)

(This page is quite deep)

 TO gET JREST AND

(To get dressed and...)

(Great use of suspense, also notice the small piggy child. She's so cute.)

 And goWi to A PDRE

(And going to a party)

(Please note the girl with the balloon coming straight out of the top of her head :)

 And ThEn THEA WET HAM And HAD LOAS OVA FUN

(And then they went home and had loads of fun)

(Wet ham! Fun with eggs!)

(The End)

I also wrote excellent book reports. They have depth and scope and insight. If they were the blurbs on the back of books, I would definitely read those books. (Sometimes Why, the second one is for you!)

Book report

Author: NO

tittle: the great lost treasure hunt

i like all of it

Book report

tittle: a bargain for Frances

Ather: russell Hoban

i like when frances get the china tee set

Book report

Author: barbara cork

tittle: tigers

i like the games

Book report

tittle: miss nelson is back

Ather: james marshall

i like the book bcus it is funny and happy and nothing sad

i didn't like nothing

Finally, a poem about dinosaurs:

Dinosaurs do not count,

Because they are all Dead:

But still they walk about heavily 

In everybody's head.

THE EnD.

Good Morning

I like that I can put Nannermellon to sleep by reading to her. I like her very soft wheezy breathing that whispers down the phone line when after the second chapter I say, "Are you awake?" Revisiting Harry Potter this way is nice too, it goes more slowly, and I get caught up in the story, thinking, "what happens next?"

I like the sun shining in my window this morning, glowing, with shafts of light illuminating my orchids and the chinese animals hanging on my walls.

My orchids are blooming :)

I like this Cul de Sac, and the exchange that followed it:

towerwarlock: "I have never seen a kids room look like that unless it was right after the mom trashed it looking for any narcotics the kid never had in the first place."

Michael Jantze: "Today’s strip was written by my 9-Y-O daughter (who also voices Alice in the animated shorts)…and she wrote the gag from a real conversation she and I had while looking for a sweater in her room…in reality? The candy was still in the bucket, half eatenAND there was a Christmas gift unopened! She took the original cartoon to her fourth grade class today for show and tell. Signed, a proud papa."

Dani Rice: @towerwarlock "You’ve never been to our house! The twins room got so bad my husband actually hung the beds from the ceiling to keep them from putting stuff under them."

.

I like kiddies.

I love this song, and think it is even funnier with the subtitles... and comments.

"Thanks for putting the Lyrics on the screen! I was just getting mixed up at the 45th "Unicorns I love them" verse... :) "

"i like the part where she says unicorns i love them"

I'm also amused by stories from my language acquisition textbook.

"Keenan recorded the conversations that occurred between her twin 2-year-old sons early in the morning while the twins were alone in their room. (Babies of child language researchers should watch out for hidden microphones.) She found that the children did attend to each other's speech and produced related utterances. However, the children's ability to sustain a topic was limited, and the longest stretches of related exchanges between the children consisted of sound play with no semantic content at all:

CHILD 1: wake up

wake up

CHILD 2: hake ut (laughing)

CHILD 1: hake ut

CHILD 2: bake up

CHILD 1: break ut

break up

CHILD 2: wake up

wake up (laughing) "

And an example of a 4-year-olds telling a story: "...I have two sisters, one with blond hair like me 'n the other with long black hair. 'N the one with black hair, when she was four like me, she cut her hair with scissors that aren't for cutting hair. 'N now she has short hair."

(quite advanced :)

Short and Sweet

Lean Jeans and I have been playing a game.

It started out with this tragic short story by Ernest Hemmingway "For sale: baby shoes, never worn."

Then an anecdote about a class that was given an assignment to write an as-short-as-possible story that included romance, religion, and mystery. There was only one that received an A+: "Oh God, I'm pregnant. I wonder who the father is?"

Now we send words back and forth and try to write short-as-possible stories. I rather like them.

Something round. Suspense. Sadness:

The man gazed into the perfectly round puddle his tears had made. He thought he saw a movement in it. He looked up and–

Sunlight. A frog. Paperclips:

The research was finally complete: frogs do not enjoy swimming in detergent. "Please clip these findings together and file everything away", the lab technician asked her assistant while pondering another use for the soap.

Strawberries. Memory. Time travel. Wool. Fear:

The taste of strawberries brought the memory welling up. Her mind travelled back to time to the moment he had surged up from the table because of her silly remark that the sweater he was knitting looked like it could fit an octopus. He had been so angry she had been momentarily afraid he was going to throw the dish of strawberries at her. She laughed inwardly about the fights they used to have. They were so impetuous.

Ripple. Space. Tulip. Music:

Without warning, cosmic waves of colour rippled through the walls. The typically tinny sounding FM radio awoke to fill his ears. He was floating through space with one epiphany after another. Unbeknownst to him, the mushrooms that accompanied dinner at his local steakhouse, were magic.

Tractor. Elegance. Insider trading. Platypus:

The detective scratched his head. The damaged tractor outside, the platypus in the bathtub, the twenty pages of indecipherable notes in elegant handwriting beside the two thick volumes on insider trading left on the desk... the clues just weren't adding up.

I'm in the pursuit of happiness

1. One of Jaja's ladies that she teaches brought her two bunches of flowers from her garden, "One for you, and one for your mother." They look beautiful.

2. In German the word for wife/husband is the same as the word for man/woman. In class today we were learning about possessive forms "mine, yours, his... ect." We were doing an exercise that had the sentence "Wo ist seine Frau? Er sucht siene Frau." and while working on it, one student translated it as "Where is his woman?" which sounds undeniably gangsta and funny. I like this student. He has a habit of saying funny things in a mild way. For example, when we had to draw our family trees it came out that he has 7 or so brothers and sisters. I heard him comment, "You know, I like having all these siblings, but if I had known I was going to have to draw a family tree, I would have left a few more condoms lying around the house."

3. When I do homework sitting in bed Princess Dragon often comes and snuggles up to my legs, using one of them as a pillow.

4. Rafiki called from the grocery store to find out if I had made apple crisp as planned last night, because if not, he explained, we could make it at his house tonight.
Well, I had made apple crisp, I said, but we could make another one.
"Did you eat it already?" he asked.
"Of course we ate it." I told him.
"Well, we could make it and cookies tonight." Cookies was our original plan. "What with the oven being on already."
"Of course we could." I agreed. I like the way he thinks :)

5. Jaja read me a story that made me go "boh" softly because it is so cute and solemn and sweet and true. It is from 'Adventures of a Homebody' by Karen Parker.
"A friend of mine claims she became a changed person the warm October day she saw a red leaf in a brown puddle. She was eight years old, composed - as most women are at that age, ambling aimlessly and happily through life. She stepped in the puddle; the disturbed water moved the leaf and caught her attention.
'It was just a leaf, like many others, and an ordinary everyday mud puddle,' she explained to me with that apologetic note we use when moved to something beyond the mundane, by the mundane. 'But , you know, something stirred in my mind or my heart - oh, I don't know - all I know is that I felt different from then on. I'd seen a leaf in a mud puddle. Really seen it, for the first time.'"

Singing Meat

The first chapter of my textbook finished with a story. Only one more reason for me to love cognitive science. The chapter discussed the possibility of computers having intelligence, and what it means for something to be intelligent rather than being neat and going bing! in interesting ways.
The story was extracted from a longer story by Terry Bisson called "Alien/Nation".

"They're made out of meat."
"Meat?"
"Meat. They're made out of meat."
"Meat?"
"There's no doubt about it. We picked up several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, probed them all the way through. They're completely meat."
"That's impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages to the stars."
"They use radio waves to talk, but the signals don't come from them. The signals come from machines."
"So who made the machines? That's who we want to contact."
"They made the machines. That's what I'm trying to tell you. Meat made the machines."
"That's ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You're asking me to believe in sentient meat."
"I'm not asking you, I'm telling you. These creatures are the only sentient race in the sector and they're made out of meat."
"Maybe they're like the Orfolei. You know, a carbon-based intelligence that goes through a meat stage."
"Nope. They're born meat and they die meat. We studied them for several of their life spans, which didn't take too long. Do you have any idea of the life span of meat?"
"Spare me. Okay, maybe they're only part meat. You know, like the Weddilei. A meat head with an electron plasma brain inside."
"Nope. We thought of they, since they do have meat heads like the Weddelei. But I told you, we probed them. They're meat all the way through."
"No brain?"
"Oh, there's a brain all right. It's just that the brain is made out of meat!"
"So. . . what does the thinking?"
"You're not understanding, are you? The brain does the thinking. The meat."
"Thinking meat! You're asking me to believe in thinking meat!"
"Yes, thinking meat! Concious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal! Are you getting the picture?"
"Omigod. You're serious then. They're made out of meat."
"Finally. Yes. They are indeed made out of meat. And they've been trying to get in touch with us for almost a hundred of their years."
"So what does the meat have in mind?"
"First it wants to talk to us. Then I imagine it wants to explore the universe, contact other sentients, swap ideas and information. The usual."
"We're suppose to talk to meat?"
"That's the idea. That's the message they're sending out by radio. Hello. Anyone out there? Anyone home? That sort of thing."
"They actually do talk, then. They use words, ideas, concepts?"
"Oh, yes. Except they do it with meat."
"I thought you just told me they used the radio."
"They do, but what do you think is on the radio? Meat sounds. You know how when you slap or flap meat it makes a noise? They talk by flapping their meat at each other. They can even sing by squirting air through their meat."
"Omigod. Singing meat. This is altogether too much. So what do you advise?"
"Officially or unofficially?"
"Both."
"Officially, we are required to contact, welcome, and log in any and all sentient races or multi beings in the quadrant, without prejudice, fear, or favour. Unofficially, I advise we erase the records and forget the whole thing."
"I was hoping you would say that."
"It seems harsh, but there is a limit. Do we really want to make contact with meat?"
"I agree one hundred percent. What's there to say? 'Hello, meat. How's it going?' But will this work? How many planets are we dealing with here?"
"Just one. They can travel to other planets in special meat containers, but they can't live on them. And being meat, they travel through C space. Which limits them to the speed of light and makes the possibility of their ever making contact pretty slim. Infinitesimal in fact."
"So we just pretend there's no one home in the universe."
"That's it."
"Cruel. But you said it yourself, who wants to meet meat? And the ones who've been aboard our vessels, the ones you have probed? You're sure they wont remember?"
"They'll be considered crackpots if they do. We went into their heads and smoothed out their meat so we're just a dream to them."
"A dream to meat! How strangely appropriate, that we should be meat's dream."
"And we can mark the sector unoccupied."
"Good. Agreed, officially and unofficially. Case closed. Any others? Anyone interesting on that side of the galaxy?"
"Yes, a rather shy but sweet hydrogen core cluster intelligence in a class nine star in G445 zone. Was in contact two galactic rotations ago, wants to be friendly again."
"They always come around."
"And why not? Imagine how unbearably, how unutterably cold the universe would be if one were all alone."

Happy Birthday Bird!

When Bird turned two, a friend of the family said to her, "So, this is your second birthday!"
"No," Bird corrected, "this is my happy birthday."