Waiting at the Window

~ A. A. Milne (1882-1956)

These are my two drops of rain
Waiting on the window-pain.

I am waiting here to see
Which the winning one will be.

Both of them have different names.
One is John and one is James.

All the best and all the worst
Comes from which of them is first.

James has just begun to ooze.
He's the one I want to lose.

John is waiting to begin.
He's the one I want to win.
 
James is going slowly on.
Something sort of sticks to John.

John is moving off at last.
James is going pretty fast.

John is rushing down the pane.
James is going slow again.

James has met a sort of smear.
John is getting very near.

Is he going fast enough?
(James has found a piece of fluff.)

John has hurried quickly by.
(James was talking to a fly.)

John is there, and John has won!
Look!  I told you!  Here's the sun!

The Song of the Jellicles

[My mom's new kitty -- the inspiration for today's poem]


~ T.S. Elliot (1888-1965)

        Jellicle Cats come out to-night
        Jellicle Cats come one come all:
        The Jellicle Moon is shining bright−
        Jellicles come to the Jellicle Ball.

Jellicle Cats are black and white,
Jellicle Cats are rather small;
Jellicle Cats are merry and bright,
And pleasant to hear when they caterwaul.
Jellicle Cats have cheerful faces,
Jellicle Cats have bright black eyes;
They like to practise their airs and graces
And wait for the Jellicle Moon to rise.

Jellicle Cats develop slowly,
Jellicle Cats are not too big;
Jellicle Cats are roly-poly,
They know how to dance a gavotte and a jig.
Until the Jellicle Moon appears
They make their toilette and take their repose:
Jellicle Cats wash behind their ears,
Jellicle dry between their toes.

Jellicle Cats are white and black,
Jellicle Cats are of moderate size;
Jellicle Cats jump like a jumping-jack,
Jellicle Cats have moonlit eyes.
They're quitet enough in the morning hours,
They're quitet enough in the afternoon,
Reserving their terpsichorean powers
To dance by the light of the Jellicle Moon.

Jellicle Cats are black and white,
Jellicle Cats (as I said) are small;
If it happends to be a stormy night
They will practise a caper or two in the hall.
If it happens the sun is shining bright
You would say they had nothing to do at all:
They are resting and saving themselves to be right
For the Jellicle Moon and the Jellicle Ball.

Oh yet we trust that somehow good

~ Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892)

from In Memoriam

     LIV.

Oh yet we trust that somehow good
     Will be the final goal of ill,
     To pangs of nature, sins of will,
Defects of doubt, and taints of blood;

That nothing walks with aimless feet;
     That not one life shall be destroy’d,
     Or cast as rubbish to the void,
When God hath made the pile complete;

That not a worm is cloven in vain;
     That not a moth with vain desire
     Is shrivell’d in a fruitless fire,
Or but subserves another’s gain.

Behold, we know not anything;
     I can but trust that good shall fall
     At last–far off–at last, to all,
And every winter change to spring.

So runs my dream: but what am I?
     An infant crying in the night:
     An infant crying for the light:
And with no language but a cry.

Victimae paschali laudes

~ attributed to Wipo of Burgundy (995? - 1948?)
  tr. The English Hymnal, 1906


Christians, to the Paschal victim
offer your thankful praises!

A lamb the sheep redeemeth:
Christ, who only is sinless,
reconcileth sinners to the Father.

Death and life have contended
in that combat stupendous:
the Prince of life, who died,
reigns immortal.

Speak, Mary, declaring
what thou sawest, wayfaring:

"The tomb of Christ, who is living,
the glory of Jesus' resurrection;
Bright angels attesting,
the shroud and napkin resting.
Yea, Christ my hope is arisen;
to Galilee he will go before you."

Christ indeed from death is risen,
our new life obtaining;
have mercy victor King, ever reigning!

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

We sang this during communion Easter Sunday.  I couldn't find a good recording in English, but here's a nice Latin version:





And here's a luscious improvisation on the organ:

K-drama review: God's Gift — 14 Days

Photo credit:  Dramabeans.com

2014
Genre: Melodrama, crime/mystery
16 episodes
My rating:  4 out of 5 stars

Starring:
Lee Bo Young as Kim Soo Hyun
Cho Seung Woo as Ki Dong Chan
Kim Tae Woo as Han Ji Hoon
Kim Yoo Bin as Han Saet Byul

Plot Summary

Kim Soo Hyun is an investigative journalist who writes for a television show that covers unsolved crimes in an attempt to present all the evidence, expose the perpetrator, and encourage viewers to call if they have any leads.  Her current project involves a serial killer who’s been killing young women in back alleys, and she’s pretty sure she’s found the culprit.  While they are on air, the show’s hotline receives a call from a man who claims to be the killer, but says he’s bored with what he’s been doing and has decided to do something different – this time he has kidnapped a child and she will die, and this will be the president’s fault.  He puts the child on the phone to prove he actually has her... and it’s Soo Hyun’s nine-year-old daughter Saet Byul.

Soo Hyun spends the next week regretting what a lousy mom she’s been and is devastated when her daughter’s body is found in a reservoir.  Apparently she drowned while trying to escape from her captor. At the end of the traditional forty-nine day long period of mourning the police have gotten no closer to finding the culprit, and in a fit of despair Soo Hyun goes down to the place where her daughter died and throws herself in.

At the same time, our other main character, private investigator Ki Dong Chan, has been chased down by goons (long story), tied up and thrown into the reservoir just downhill of where Soo Hyun has thrown herself in.  Somehow his ropes come untied and he’s able to swim over to her and pull her out of the river.  After they get back to their homes they each realize that they’ve been sent back to 14 days before Saet Byul’s death.

The mother is determined to do everything in her power to stop her daughter’s death, but her only ally is Dong Chan, since he’s the only one who knows what’s going to happen – her husband understandably thinks she’s lost her mind when she starts babbling about their daughter being kidnapped and killed.

What I liked about it

The characters are well-written.  They have solid, believable motivations and the conflicts are built in, not ginned up for the sake of furthering the plot or creating emotional tension.  The acting is really good, especially by Cho Seung Woo who plays Dong Chan.  He is a bitter ex-cop, who’s really sweet underneath, and he’s clever and can be funny at the most unexpected times.

There’s lots of politics (which I mostly didn’t understand) and cover-ups and scandals and red herrings, and the mystery begins to seem impossible to unravel.  Obviously there are many layers of intigue or Mom would simply be able to prevent the kidnapping.  I like complications in this kind of show, trying to figure out what was really going on, who was really behind all this, who knew what when.

The pacing was good – the plot kept moving forward, sometimes rapidly, sometimes more slowly, which was a good mix to keep it from getting either overwhelming or boring.

Complaints

Sometimes it was TOO complicated and I lost track of the details and all the sub-plots and sub-sub-plots and who was actually a suspect and who’d been cleared, and sometimes there were plot threads that got dropped and never picked up again. 

I didn’t much care for the end, but that’s a common failing of Korean drama.  It wasn’t a bad ending... it just seems like, given the way things worked out it should have felt inevitable, and it really didn’t. Maybe the writers meant for it to be sort of open-ended, but it didn’t feel that way, either.  But unsatisfactory endings are so common with K-drama that I’ve come to accept them – I just rewrite them in my head if I dislike them enough.

Would you enjoy this show?

If you like crime or mystery shows where you have to pay attention to the clues, this should be a good fit.  There’s no romance and there’s nothing light and fluffy about it except for a few scenes with the little girl and some of her grown up friends, but even those are bittersweet, given the context.

Watch it on DramaFever or Viki.

maggie and milly and molly and may

~ E. E. Cummings (1894-1962)

maggie and milly and molly and may
went down to the beach(to play one day)

and maggie discovered a shell that sang
so sweetly she couldn’t remember her troubles,and

milly befriended a stranded star
whose rays five languid fingers were;

and molly was chased by a horrible thing
which raced sideways while blowing bubble:and

may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world as and large as alone.

For whatever we lose(like a you or a me)
it’s always ourselves we find in the sea

Have you heard of Coursera?

Another new term you might have seen is MOOC:  Massively Open Online Course, which is what Coursera offers.

From the website:  “Coursera is an education platform that partners with top universities and organizations worldwide, to offer courses online for anyone to take, for free.”

I’ve taken three classes over the last couple of years, Introduction to Mathematical Thinking, The Ancient Greeks, and Reason and Persuasion: Thinking Through Three Dialogues by Plato.

The format for each is similar.  There are lecture videos to watch and homework assignments and tests.  There are discussions forums available.  Most classes have some standard you have to meet in order to receive certification. You get out of it what you put into it, and that will vary according to your goals, how much time and effort is demanded by the class, and how much time and effort you can afford to devote to it.

Once you’ve taken a course you’ll always have access to the archives so you don’t have to finish by the deadline, and you can listen to the lectures over again if you like.

The only class for which I met the standard for certification was The Ancient Greeks.  My goal for this class was to get a solid overview of the period – the flow of events and ideas.  Of course, we’ve touched on Ancient Greece over the years in our home school, reading Plutarch’s Lives together and Rosemary Sutcliff’s adaptations of The Illiad and the Odyssey.  I cut my teeth on Edith Hamilton’s Mythology, and I’ve read some of her other books, like The Echo of Greece, but I lacked a cohesive understanding of this period, and that’s what this course offered.  I did not have time to read everything on the syllabus, but I feel like I’ve gotten a decent start on the topic, a foundation to build on in the future, which is what I wanted.

My goals for the Reason and Persuasion course were to read The Meno at a deeper level than my previous effort, to learn more about Socrates and the Socratic Method, and to be introduced to philosophy.  Since the class covered three of Plato’s dialogues and spent two weeks covering recent developments in philosphy, a lot of what was taught was outside the scope of my interest.  I watched all the introductory material, read The Meno and The Euthyphro and listened to their lectures, and listened to the lectures on The Republic. 

I did not write the paper, or listen to the later lectures, and I only took two tests, but I feel the course was a success because I met my own goals.  Near the end of the course, I even decided to buy the textbook.  I really like the translation and I want to reread the dialogues regularly in the future, especially The Meno, since it’s the one that sets the standard for interacting with a student.  Also, I really appreciated the instructor’s style and insight and wanted to finish reading his commentary.  (The textbook was available online for free in PDF format, but I find that a difficult format to get much use out of.  I want a book I can curl up in bed with or carry with me when running errands.  I want to be able to underline and write notes, and flip quickly through pages to find things.  My brain simply has not adapted to e-readers – not for a purpose like this, anyway.)

The one class where I did not meet my own goal was Introduction to Mathematical Thinking.  That class was brutal.  The pace was too rapid for me.  It took me ages to do my homework and the only way I could understand what was going on was by asking the members of my study group to walk me through things.  They were very kind, and one in particular, Denise Gaskins of Let’s Play Math, was very patient and helpful with her clear explanations, but I was falling farther and farther behind everyone else, and I finally gave up. 

I’m not completely discouraged though – I believe that the time I spent in that class won’t go to waste, even it just sits in my mind and turns to compost.  When I took it in the fall of 2012, it was seven weeks long but since then they’ve reformatted it into a ten-week class and have offered it twice more.  I’m interested in trying it again in the future, but that will depend on... well, life.

Dyeing eggs with onion skins

Something to file away for next year.

Last week Elaienar showed me this tutorial on a traditional Eastern European way of dyeing eggs for Easter, first decorating them with flowers, leaves, and feathers, then wrapping them tightly in onion skins and boiling in a pot of water filled with more onion skins.

Sunday afternoon, she and I went around picking pretty things and dyed a few, just to see how it would turn out and whether we would want to do it again next year. Decorating and wrapping them was such clumsy work that we only did a few and left the rest plain just to see how they’d turn out in the dye bath.

Take a look:

We used to have a hen that laid eggs a rich brown like that – I think she was a Wyandotte.



We used several yellow onions, but only had one purple one. Next time I think we’ll use all purple and see if we can get a redder color.

This one featues a dandelion:





And this one a goose feather:





The large pattern on this one was made with a cherry blossom and the smaller one at 11 o’clock was made with a violet. The “latitude” lines are caused by the texture of the onion skin.





In the picture below, the egg on the right features an azalea blossom, the one to the left of that, a few blossoms of lilac. I don’t know what plant caused the bright green leaves – it’s from a tree on our place. I think a sprig of chickweed is what made the fleur-de-lis pattern on the egg in the foreground.



The cracked and misshapen egg at the back happened because the shell crakced while I was wrapping it with string and I decided to carry on just to see how it would turn out. During cooking, the insides ran out and made it really hard to peel off the onions and the cherry blossoms and feathers I’d stuck on. Next time I would just throw an egg like that into the chicken’s scraps bucket and let them deal with it.



We’ll probably do it again next year, and if we get good enough at it, the next time I’ll use eggs that have been dried out first, so the finished eggs will last several years.

What do you think?

Oh, and next year?  I think I should remember to pick only edible plants, if we’ll be planning on boiling and eating the eggs – I don’t know why that didn’t occur to me while we were wandering around, picking things, and while a lot of it isn’t toxic I couldn’t identify some of the things we picked.  I guess we’ll be giving these eggs to the chickens in a couple of days.

La Corona: Ascention

~ John Donne (1572-1631)

7.        Salute the last, and everlasting day.
           Joy at the uprising of this Sunne, and Sonne,
           Yee whose just teares, or tribulation
           Have purely washt, or burnt your drossie clay;
           Behold the Highest, parting hence away,
           Lightens the darke clouds, which hee treads upon,
           Nor doth hee by ascending, show alone,
           But first hee, and hee first enters the way.
           O strong Ramme, which hast batter’d heaven for mee,
           Mild lambe, which with thy blood, hast mark’d the path;
           Bright torch, which shin’st, that I the way may see,
           Oh, with thy owne blood quench thy owne just wrath,
           And if thy holy Spirit, my Muse did raise,
           Deigne at my hands this crown of prayer and praise.

La Corona: Resurrection

~ John Donne (1572-1631)

6.        Moyst with one drop of thy blood, my dry soule,
           Shall (though she now be in extreme degree
           Too stony hard, and yet too fleshly,) bee
           Freed by that drop, from being starv’d, hard, or foule
           And life, by this death abled, shall controule
           Death, whom thy death slue; nor shall to mee
           Feare of first or last death, bring miserie,
           If in thy little booke my name thou enroule,
           Flesh in that long sleep is not putrified,
           But made that there, of which, and for which ’twas;
           Nor can by other meanes be glorified.
           May then sinnes sleep, and deaths soone from me passe,
           That wak’t from both, I againe risen may
           Salute the last, and everlasting day.