Three sentence movie reviews: The Lego Movie

While I was tortured with a few days of the relentlessly perky “Everything is Awesome” theme song stuck in my head, it was worth it, due to the general hilarity of this film.  It was fun to see the different Lego worlds and the many famous Legos were enjoyable.*  As someone who liked to assemble my legos as instructed and leave them that way forever, I wasn’t a huge fan of the third act, but I didn’t disagree with their message.

Cost: $5.00
Where watched:  St. John’s Theater

*My favorite being the “1980-something space guy,” but Batman was hilarious.

poster from: http://www.impawards.com/2014/lego_movie.html

Postcards from Korea & Belarus

I really must speak to Postcrossing about the fact that I send off two postcards per week (on Monday and Wednesday) but often the postcards sent to me arrive on the same day!
This is from Oksana who tells me these three facts:
I’m from Russia, but now I live in Korea
I’m married and having daughter
My hobbies are reading, cooking, baking and postcrossing and stamp collector-ing.

This is from Katerina who is 23 years old and live in a small town called Smolerichi.
I love this little bird. He’s super cute!

Three sentence movie reviews: Downton Abbey Season 4

I didn’t take well to the BIG THING that happened at the end of the second episode, and thus was not really enthralled with the whole shebang.  However, the season did have its charming moments, like the scene with Mary, Tom and Isobel sitting in the nursery, talking about when they knew they were in love.  They managed to wrap everything up nicely in the end and I’m interested in seeing what season five brings.

Cost: free for me
Where watched: mom’s house, because she DVR’d the season, thus sparing me from late Sunday nights

poster from: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/programs/series/downton-abbey-s4/

Oscar Party Food

Kelly provided the house and the TV plus the prize for correctly predicting and the Oscar BINGO. I provided the food.  We had one item for each best picture.
For Dallas Buyer’s Club: an antioxidant salad
For Nebraska: Mac & Cheese
For Philomena:  Buttered Cabbage
For Captain Phillips:  a traditional Somali Lentil dish
For American Hustle: Vegetarian Pigs in a Blanket
For 12 Years a Slave: Vegetarian Collard Greens
For Her: Jello Jigglers cut in heart shapes
For Gravity:  the Cosmonaut, which was Tang and Vodka, shaken.
For Wolf of Wall Street: Mini Quiche 
(which were not available, so I bought Nancy’s Quiche and cut them up)

Books read in February 2014

Not a huge turnout this month, due to falling into Veronica Mars, Season 2 and not climbing out until a few episodes into Season 3.  Also not a huge month for really awesome things.  I read some solid reads, but nothing I raved about.

YA Fiction
Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass
Meg Medina
I read this at the same time I was reading Sonia Sotomayor’s book and kept confusing the two, which was both amusing and maddening.  Aside from this book’s awesome title, it really hit on the many ways a threat by a peer can affect a teenager’s life. It was interesting to see how the main character’s responses were interpreted by the adults in her life, as well as the role that social media played in the attack.  Very well done, if hard to read at times.

Dr. Bird’s Advice for Sad Poets
Evan Roskos
Read for Librarian Book Group
I love this title and I love this main character who was so willing to YAWP (as Walt Whitman did) through his troubles.

Midwinter Blood
Marcus Sedwick
Read for Librarian Book Group
This was the Printz award winner and I think I was grumpy when I read it because I kept thinking, “they picked THIS?”  However, grumpiness aside, it’s kind of a cool book which begins in the far future and works its way back to the distant past.  Each chapter is a different era with new characters, however, all the characters are linked.

The Living
Matt De La Pena
Read for Librarian Book Group
This book has everything!  Let’s make a list right now:  class commentary, racial tension, smidgen of romance, strange illness, natural disaster (s!), survivor tale, heartbreaking sadness, corporate malfeasance, horrible destruction, rogue players, and escape.  And it all worked!  At least for me.  It was fast and fun to read and I’ll just tell you right now, there is a second book to look forward too.

Mister Orange
Truus Marri
Read for Librarian Book Group
The story of a boy living in New York City during World War II.  His father is a grocer, and, as delivery boy for the grocery, he makes friends with an artist he calls Mr. Orange.  Nice setting, good insight into living in a large family.

Divergent
Veronica Roth
Expectations were low, and I enjoyed this distopian novel about a girl who must prove herself.  It’s kind of every “good” girl’s dream: to go off and join a band of fighting ruffians who get around town by jumping on and off freight trains.  Plus, there’s a hot guy.  Not the best I’ve read, but not the worst, either.

“Grownup” Nonfiction
My Beloved World
Sonia Sotomayor
Read for Library Book Group
One of the book group participants observed that he never imagined he would read about a Supreme Court justice buying underwear.  This was a very good point, and the charm of this book.  You get all sorts of insights into Sotomayor’s world and I’ve never had that kind of insight into other members of the court.  I especially appreciated hearing her views about affirmative action, which is a topic I feel like I hear white people complain about a lot, but the people benefiting from the programs voices are often squelched.

I was often confused about which person in her life she was referring.  There were a ton of aunts, uncles, cousins and friends that were briefly described and then not mentioned again for some time.

Essay: Portrait of a teacher who hated me.

She was my eleventh grade Accelerated English teacher and the rumor was that if you were in her regular English classes, she wasn’t great, but she loved her accelerated students and it would be just fine.  Ms. P. was tall and well kempt, a no-nonsense woman who got things done.  She had five children, and that, in combination with how early they all got married, probably means she was a Mormon, though of the rare sub-types that used “Ms.” and worked for pay.
The rumors weren’t wrong about her preference for her accelerated classes, she sparkled as the year got going.  We proceeded at a fast clip, blasting through the Scarlet Letter, the Crucible and Huckleberry Finn in no time at all.  The two of us shared the same first name, and I made some rather wise observations at the beginning of the year, so things started out okay, but the ardor faded at least on her part.
I hadn’t always been tracked into the smart English class.  Most of junior high had been spent in regular English with the ambivalent readers and disinterested learners, but my ninth grade teacher had been impressed by my writing and suggested I change things for second semester, so I made the switch.  Accelerated English was more fun because people wanted to be there and we could have actual discussions.  And I read and wrote well enough to keep up with the others.  Things were fine that year and in tenth grade.
But ultimately, I was a lazy student.  I did my homework, but didn’t go out of my way to shine things up.  This worked well for other classes, but not for Ms. P’s Accelerated English.  She wanted blood, sweat and tears and I wasn’t really interested in providing any of those things.  Junior year was also a rough time in my mental health world, and the creeping depression that followed me around that year probably didn’t help endear her to me.
I can’t remember an official moment when I realized she didn’t like me, it was more of a gradual process.  There were comments on my work that struck me as rather harsh, and she didn’t choose me for reading aloud anymore.  I think subconsciously I started slacking off and developed an odd habit of forgetting things were due, which meant scrambling to complete assignments 15 minutes before school started.
When the semester changed over, she started bugging me about assignments not turned in.  I had no idea what she was talking about, but agreed to get them to her.  As far as I knew, I had completed everything, but she was the teacher, so who was I to disagree?  I limped through that quarter, not really sure what to do.  I dreaded going to the class, just as much as she seemed to resent me taking up space, but she was the only Accelerated English teacher, so I was stuck with her.  I can still remember the feeling of freedom that came with the sudden realization that I could transfer to a regular English class.
I did just that, explaining to the counselor that things weren’t working so well in my current class.  The counselor spoke with Ms. P. who agreed to let me switch once I had all my work turned in.  There was a tense day or two when I worried what would happen, because I didn’t know what assignments I had missed. My mother finally called Ms. P. directly and asked what I was missing.  There was a silence while she consulted her gradebook and then a longer silence before she finally said, “She seems to have turned everything in.”  When my mother repeated the conversation, I felt like I’d won, but my mother said we’d both lost.
Regular English was spectacularly easy.  We took an entire quarter to read (re-read, in my case) Huckleberry Finn.  Most people couldn’t finish two short chapters per night and the discussion was anemic, but the teacher was impressed by me and I felt happier there than with the strivers.
Despite my frustration with her, I felt oddly connected to Ms. P.  She was kind of like the bad boyfriend you spend too much time trying to figure out.  Why was she so mean to me?  Did I remind her too much of herself?  Was she taking a strict line to motivate me, and that failed spectacularly?  And why did she think I hadn’t turned in assignments I had completed?
After leaving her class, I avoided her, though I saw her in the spring down on the Greenbelt by the river.  She was riding her bike and I was watching my boyfriend skate, which was an activity I both loved and loathed doing.  I remember feeling embarrassed she saw me taking part in such a traditional girlfriend role.  We both pretended not to see each other.
My senior year she was the editor of the school literary magazine and I remember being very surprised when something I submitted won first prize—I figured she would sink anything from me, she was the kind of teacher who was overly involved in the student activities she supervised.  Was she more hands-off than I thought, or was the writing really that good?  It sent me back to puzzling.  One of my friends told me she had asked where I was going to college and seemed pleased to hear I was heading off to a women’s college.  That she would even ask also confused me.

It’s a teacher’s job to get their students to learn, ideally by connecting them with things to love about the subject.  Even then I understood that it is an impossible task to like all your students, so it seemed reasonable—though embarrassing—that this teacher in particular would dislike me.  As an adult, I still wonder what she was thinking, but I don’t fault her for her actions.  She provided a good lesson in searching for what I needed and that sometimes giving up is the best course of action.  It’s not the American tale of striving that we’re all supposed to believe, but it is something that needs to be learned at some time.

Card from Russia

What’s weird about this card is that it is a Papyrus card, that looks exactly like any Papyrus card I could buy in any store that sells cards here in the USA.

But inside (and apologies, Picasa isn’t uploading to blogs anymore so I have to do it myself and sometimes the orientation thing is off) is Cyrillic!  Crazy!
What was written inside said, “Here is written: harmony and piece!”
So great!

Postcards from Russia, Virgina and Virginia

This is from Vladimir.  He hopes I like his postcard.  I do!

This is from my friend Sara (of Pike Schemes fame) to represent the “real” postcard world.

She also sent this postcard, which she made herself.  Astute readers with long memories might remember this picture from this post back in 2012.  I had the photo displayed prominently at my house because I loved it so, but Matt was not as much of a fan and was making noises about throwing it away, so I tucked it into Sara’s Christmas present that year.  And she loved it too.  But now it has come back to me as a beautiful postcard I can hang on my wall.  I love it!
Note from the future.  Several WEEKS after I received this post card, I was weeding out front when the mail carrier came by.  “I just loved that picture of you in the denim overalls at the wedding!” she told me. “I laughed and laughed.”  It took me a moment to figure out what she was talking about, but then I put it together and told her that it wasn’t me in the short-alls, and then gave her the background.  Well done Sara!