Fostering Talent

I'm so excited to have a great illustrator tutoring Jared for a few days this summer in art!

Brent Webster
He's well-known for his "Tennis Shoes Among the Nephites" book-series illustrations.

Dirt

I ate dirt.
Apparently those peanuts I bought were not specially flavored on the outside for my sucking pleasure.  It was just dirt.  Too bad it's all in Chinese, so I didn't know.  Crazy that this food-buying-eating-not-understanding path hasn't led me here before now.  Guess I'm just lucky!

Happy Mom Day!

Great day to remember some fun times lately!  My hubby got me the perfect present: a new e-book.  My kids got me the perfect presents: pictures and things they wrote about loving me.  I got delicious crepes for dinner, and didn't have to stick to our diet :)  Hope you all have a Happy Mother's Day, too!

The receipts bonfire was a fun addition to one of our days off last month.

A fun branch Fiesta game.

I lost my spoon and went a little crazy.  Sadly that lost me the delicious Almond Joy prize.... stinky rules!

Ella gets homework help from a kind coworker of ours.  We're fairly useless as Chinese language coaches.

This is a sweet pic Ella drew after meeting her new best friend, Elena.  The two girls are pictured next to the two mommies.

So it's the end of April, and quite cold, but my little fish are not discouraged!

The next day, even the lifeguard thought it was too cold to come.

So our kids had a fun time running around and pretending to lifeguard eachother.

ROFL Vocab

I assigned a vocabulary exercise to my 8th grade Literature class.  Here’s what two of my students came up with:

One day, there’s a man called big John who fanciful very well.  It’s sensation was very bad.  Suddenly a colossal woodsman with a hearty enormous mammoth said cordially, “I am barren, so I need your help.”  Big John use his power to help him.  They lived together, and became good friend.

I really love grading sometimes.

Qing Ming (Tomb Sweeping) Festival

We visited our friend’s family for our vacation this long weekend.  After driving to Changning, Hunan (620 km away), which took a long time since we had to fight the other billion people travelling, we paid respects to the relatives that had passed on.  At first it seemed like a sweet flower planting, weed-pulling time.  Then they turned on the miniature explosions, and Jared was worried that the skeletons were going to be unearthed.

That evening, as some of the relatives went to visit other relatives, we stayed to play on the roof of Amy’s parent’s very large (9-bedroom?) home.  There was plenty of dirt and wooden planks and such to keep an 8-year old boy quite happy.  The only thing threatening to sour the mood was the setting sun.  Here, Jared started with an innocent scale, and then began to catapult small chairs at the unsuspecting Brickuns (creatures that apparently live in the lower part of the brick wall behind him).

The next day, after waking up early, we went to Hengshen Mountain, where many similar minded folk ventured to pray to Buddha and other statues built for specific family names and occupations.  Before we boarded the bus to go part-way up the monstrous mountain, Jared enjoyed climbing everything in sight.

Amy and I are ringing the bell to get Buddha’s attention.

Here’s the scary bus that almost flung us off the mountainside.

Jared got a 1 yuan whistle, and tried to train me on it (here’s what I’ll whistle if I need you, this one means come, this one means go away, this one means yes, this one means no…)

This is pretty much everybody that came in the two cars.  Karl and Ella couldn’t join us because Ella decided to catch a cold a few days before the (hastily) [un]scheduled trip.

I’m trying to keep up with my energetic and adventurous kid, here.  This was really steep, and if I didn’t have that sense of love and obligation, I probably wouldn’t have tried to follow.  He was really happy to get to the top, and not even need a path.

Jared and his friend (Amy’s neice) YaoHui got to be royal part-way up and down the mountain.  He loved helping his “subjects” get exercise.  The two of them also enjoyed getting their pants massively dirty on the gutter-slides next to the temple steps.

Such a beautiful hike.

Some of us got tired (this is BenBen, Amy’s cousin’s kid), so we went back down by bus again, instead of hiking for 3 more hours.  Before crashing at another hotel, we made a side-trip to drop off Amy’s cousin’s dad to spend a few days with her mom (house in ZhuZhou).

This toilet pic is worth a few more words than I care to put down.

Dinner was cooked for us over a dry-leaf-fed fire.  There’s her dad feeding the fire.  The pot is on the other side with her mom cooking the food.

The food was mostly fine.  Jared was such a good sport about eating whatever I put into his bowl after various people commented on how he should try this or that.  I tried to put it into my bowl usually, but sometimes they were more persistent about having him try it, too.

We passed a lot of farming land on the way home.  I loved getting so many gorgeous pictures portraying the life here.  It was also fun to see others enjoying their festival in the same surprising firecracker-on-the-graves manner.  Maybe you can see a little smoke in the distance.  I also observed a very large fire in the middle of a forested area.  Besides being sad to miss that photo, I hope everything was under control.

Hunger Games Review–by Karl

I got the chance this past Monday to see "The Hunger Games" in the theater. Having never read any of the books and only knowing a little bit about the premise I thought this would be an interesting experiment for me to watch a movie based on a popular book series and see how well the adaptation works on its own without being encumbered with "background" information. Watching something like Harry Potter, or the Lord of the Rings is difficult because I have a hard time separating my knowledge of the source material with what I'm seeing on screen. That's probably why "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban" is still one of my favorite Harry Potter movies. I loved the book so much that it's easy for me to overlook some of the obvious flaws it has. But in this case I would be able to walk into the theater having no preconceived ideas of what would happen and just enjoy it as a cinematic experience.

First off, I really liked this movie. The story was exciting and I thought that it was pleasantly dramatic and appropriately suspenseful. Where the main story revolves around the experiences of one young woman I thought that the focus was kept nice and tight. The audience was given enough information about the world to know what was going on without boring us with exposition. I thought the dialogue was generally well written and I like that fact that some things were shown to us or left for us to infer rather than being spoon fed.

That being said, I thought there were a few things that would have been better with a little more clarification. Some things took me a while to figure out like the nature of the arena and how things come to exist within it. Even just one exterior establishing shot would have help me understand it better from the outset. But then again maybe that was the point; we're left as in the dark as Katniss. I also thought the mechanics and some of the rules of the game were a little unclear. At first I thought some of the things in the arena were holograms until people started being injured by them. Then I started to wonder by what physical means were the game operators able to create the obstacles. Some of them seemed to appear out of thin air. I liked being able to see control room but I would have liked seeing a bit of the "backstage" just for clarification. This and other missing details of the general world created don't really detract from Katniss's story but they did distract me while I was trying to understand them.

It also took me quite a while to find out what the big deal with the sponsors was. They kept talking about them like they would be the difference between life and death but then two things happened. One: we never actually got to meet any sponsors or watch our main characters interact with them and two: a long time passes in the game before we see the effect the sponsors can have. And frankly when it did happen I couldn't help think "That's it?" A tiny little tub of cream or soup is the best you can do? I thought they'd be sending weapons and big packs of food and fresh water and other supplies. It just seemed like a big deal was made out of something that for as much as I cared could have been left out of the movie altogether without materially affecting Katniss's story. But now that I think about it maybe I'm saying it the wrong way. I think the idea is a good one because it encourages Katniss to go against her nature to try to impress people she doesn't care about which was important to her character development. The problem lies in the fact that it ultimately felt like it didn't really matter.

Overall I thought everything that was important to understanding and enjoying Katniss's story was present and accounted for. The ending felt resolved enough that I didn't have many lingering questions but open ended enough that it's obvious the story isn't over yet. To be very honest when I walked out of the theater I felt satisfied to the point that reading the book would be unnecessary. I'm sure there are things that are missing that would be cool and add another dimension to the story but I didn't FEEL like they were missing. The story felt complete.

With one glaring exception. Now I think my wife and I were watching pretty closely and neither of us noticed an explanation for something that seemed fairly important. There's a question of loyalty that comes into play just after the game begins. I won't give any more details than that for the sake of those who haven't read the book or seen the movie but the motivation behind the traitorous(?)/loyal(?) behavior is not explained. Or maybe it was and I just missed it but like I said, I was paying pretty close attention to the film. While most character actions throughout the story seemed pretty clear this one just didn't make any sense to me. It's all the more frustrating because I've been informed (without details seeing as I still haven't read the book) that it's something that could easily have been explained with just a shot or two or a quick line of dialogue. Now it may not be that big a deal and I may just be nitpicking but this was kind of the point of trying out this experiment: to find out if this movie stands alone as a movie or if knowledge of the book is required to fully appreciate it.

So my answer is, it comes awfully dang close. Where we are understanding things basically from Katniss's point of view and maybe she doesn't have all the answers and we learn them as she does, the movie does a fine job of alternatively enlightening us and keeping us in the dark. But when a is a character running around doing things that don't make sense I would think she, as a character, would take the time to ask and find out what's going on. Again, this is not a huge deal but it seems all the more confusing in a movie that does so many things right.

Since I'm not writing this as a review of the film but rather as an observation of its effectiveness I'll stay most of my other comments about it. I'll just add these two things: shaky cam = slow, sad head shake; and Jennifer Lawrence = yes please and can we have some more?

Confused Fate

I generally work to music of the Hymn and EFY variety, but I’m flexible.  My playlist includes all types, so when something else pops up, I’ll gauge my mood and see if it gets played or skipped over.  Some of the generally lucky ones include Christmas music and classical (I don’t even notice the existence of music when classical is on), but lately I’ve noticed a trend.  Whenever a Chinese song creeps in, I find myself quite upset with how it could possibly be so presumptuous as to even exist on my playlist.  Maybe I need to fix that, or maybe there’s a deeper meaning here.

I want this time to be enriching and wonderful for the whole family, but I also want this time to be over.  I’m conflicted, though, because there are still opportunities for growth.  These soul-chipping opportunities may be necessary.

Hey… there’s another Chinese song!  Stop it!