I Read Pitch Perfect and Compared it to the Movie

Pitch Perfect: The Quest for Collegiate A Cappella Glory by Mickey Rapkin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

“It is Saturday evening, April 30, 2005, and the stage is empty save for twelve women dressed in identical black pants, buttoned-up black shirts, and red ties. Evynne describes their look as ‘sexy stewardess.’”

So begins the non-fiction book that’s the basis of one of my favorite film trilogies, Pitch Perfect!

I do like this type of non-fiction, and I’ve read several similar titles (Pledged - Secret Life Of Sororities and The Class are two recent books that come to mind), but for me, quite a lot of the charm of the book Pitch Perfect is picking out all the little references that show up in the film Pitch Perfect. I already knew (Thank you, Dr. Google!) that all the competitions were real competitions, but it was super cute to see that Divisi, the female a cappella group from the University of Oregon, IS the Barden Bellas! The movie picked up so many Divisi details, from their “sexy stewardess” outfits with “unfortunate-looking green-and-yellow scarves” to the attrition in numbers that led to their desperation early one fall semester to pick up new recruits, ANY recruits… and then in walks a plucky new girl. When I found their album, Undivided, on Spotify and played it? 

It was like the Barden Bellas were singing to me! In later parts of the book, there’s a very node-like tonsillectomy! There’s a weirdly mean rival group! Even Divisi's much-touted performance of “Yeah,” when I found it on YouTube, had some similar choreography to the Bellas’ show-stopping number at the end of Pitch Perfect.

Here's the famous Divisi number, "Yeah," at the 2005 International Championship of Collegiate A Cappella:

For a fun comparison, here's the Bellas' Pitch Perfect performance:

The chapters on the male a cappella groups didn’t excite me nearly as much, although I still found them interesting to read. Yes, the album Code Red by the Tufts Beelzebubs is impressive--

--and it was interesting to read about the controversy, but… then there’s another whole discussion of their next album, Shedding, and how IT was made, and a list of all the awards that IT won, and we’ve just really gotten into the weeds of collegiate a cappella album creation here.

The chapters on the Hullabahoos were more compelling, probably because Rapkin depicted them as being a LOT more fun… or a lot more of a hot mess. Whichever. Like, a Hullabahoo member literally peed on the Beelzebubs’ car?!? A Hullabahoo knocked into the CEO of the major company they’d been flown out to perform for. The Hullabahoos were invited to sing the national anthem at a Lakers game--and then piddled around their hotel for so long that when they finally left they got caught in a traffic jam and THEY MISSED IT. Just, OMG you guys.

I had a lot of fun ready referencing the groups and performances throughout the book, and I’d totally have paid for an accompanying CD/DVD, even though many of the performances that I found were so impossibly corny that I couldn’t actually watch them. Is there a word for someone singing and performing so earnestly that you high-key want to die while you watch them? But the ready-reference was important research, because some groups were so awesome that I didn’t want to die watching them! “Yeah” is fun and adorable, and the Hullabahoos’ “Royals” is well-sung and surprisingly understated, considering the singers are all wearing voluminous robes in cartoonish prints.

  

While I enjoyed what I read, I really wished we could have dug deeper into the inner workings of some of these musicians, something that I totally get possibly wasn’t an option, because, you know, they’re real humans and we don’t necessarily get to own their thoughts. But some of these singers clearly had a LOT going on that impacted and was impacted by their a cappella passion, and I’d love to hear more about how an obsessive passion like that affected them. Lisa Forkish turned down her dream school for YEARS to sing with Divisi, but then later… she finally went to that dream school! What helped her decide to move on? Ben Appel was the music director of the Beelzebubs, and then all of a sudden, he had to leave the entire school to get help with his mental health. Surely, his all-consuming a cappella commitments did NOT help with his struggles… or did they? I’m very interested in the world of extreme hobbies, and I would LOVE to know.

The only real problem with Pitch Perfect, and the reason why it’s a three-star book instead of a five-star one for me, is Rapkin’s use of offensive language regarding gender expression and sexual identity. There's a whole "funny" story that hinges on a homophobic slur that Rapkin himself writes--he's not even quoting anyone!--and Rapkin really needs to say that he’s sorry. Just because of that, I was stoked to see that in chapter eight, he makes fun of a poster that a Divisi member makes by hand, in which “a cappella” is spelled incorrectly--and then in chapter twelve, who is it who writes the word “a capella” in his very own book? Why, none other than Rapkin himself! Check your spelling AND your homophobic language, Mister!

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Homeschool Science: How to Grow a Pumpkin out of Another Pumpkin

 

This tutorial was originally posted on Crafting a Green World way back in 2015!

My kids just harvested the pumpkin plants that they've been nurturing all spring and summer. It was quite an exciting achievement for them, and even more so because they've actually been following this process for almost a full year now. 

Almost a full year ago, they first picked out some organically-grown, heirloom pumpkins, and these newly harvested pumpkins came directly out of the body of those. It was a fascinating process, a pretty easy way to grow pumpkins, and a great way for a kid studying botany to follow the life cycle of a plant throughout its entire lifespan. 

Here's what we did: 

1. In the fall or winter, choose your pumpkins. Have the kids look for organically-grown, locally-raised, heirloom pumpkins. We found ours about this time of year--I can tell, because the kids drew Jack-o-lantern faces on them in Sharpie, since of course we weren't going to cut them. 

2. Store them all winter. I don't have any great tips for this, and our own storage didn't go perfectly. The kids had chosen several, and we kept them all winter on our nature table. Every now and then, I'd walk by and notice that a pumpkin was starting to rot, and so I'd toss it out in the bushes for the chickens to eat. Now that I think about it... THAT'S why we have two volunteer pumpkin plants in those bushes this year! We actually got loads of pumpkins from those two vines! 

This winter, I plan to store our pumpkins in our root cellar. We'll lose the opportunity to have all those conversations that naturally occurred as the sight of a pumpkin caused a question to pop into a kid's head, but more pumpkins should survive the winter that way. 

3. In the spring, cut them open and fill them with dirt. Set up a work space outside, give the kid a knife, and have her cut open the top of her pumpkin. Note all of the seeds inside, chat about it, remove a seed for dissection and study under the microscope, etc. 

Have the kid fill her pumpkin all the way to the top with good-quality potting soil, then water it. 

These pumpkins are a little tricky to put under grow lights, since they're so much taller than the other seed flats that you'll also have under there, but if you can manage to start them indoors, it'll be well worth it. On the other hand, this year I deliberately had the kids choose small varieties of pumpkins, so that they could plant them directly in the garden and still have time for the pumpkins to mature. 

4. Plant the pumpkins. Have the kid dig a hole deep enough to cover the entire pumpkin, and then plant it. You don't want any pumpkin sticking up out of the soil to rot, but covering it with dirt will allow it to decompose in the ground and turn into lovely nutrients for the pumpkin seedlings.  

5. Cull the weaklings. One of the coolest things about this project is that your kids will see a LOT of pumpkin sprouts coming out of that pumpkin! Even at nine and eleven, my two thought that this was pretty awesome. 

Of course, they'll have to continually pinch off the weaker ones--I had mine pinch off half of the seedlings at a time, every time, until they were left with one lone winner. 

This step does take supervision. My younger daughter accidentally pinched off her best seedling pretty late in the game, and ended up not getting a pumpkin at all from that particular plant. She was SUPER bummed! 

6. Weed and water. For the rest of the summer, the kids can care for their pumpkins just as they do the rest of their garden. This is a great opportunity for a garden journal, or weekly measurement, or other monitoring of the plant's progress. 

7. Harvest. In the late summer or early fall, your kid can harvest her pumpkin, knowing that she not only grew it herself, and not only from seed, but actually from last year's pumpkin that she also picked out. Does she want to make it into a pie, or save it to make a pumpkin next year?

The Post-Girl Scout Cookie Season Cookie Prep Meeting

Every year, the most annoying thing about Girl Scout cookie season is figuring out how to fit in a Girl Scout troop meeting to prep for it. My troop has been selling cookies so long that they don't need a training meeting, just an email with relevant dates and any changes from last year. But every year we always DO need something new prepped, new donation cans or signage or other marketing materials--and who has time for that between Winter Break and a cookie sale start date of early January?

This year, we had a collective revelation: why not have a post-Girl Scout cookie season meeting to prep for the next year's sale? We know exactly what materials we need to replace, we've got brand-new marketing ideas fresh in our minds, and we won't have to rush or be stressed out. As an added bonus, we've got a full stash of empty cookie boxes to use as crafting supplies. 

Y'all, our plan worked BRILLIANTLY! The meeting was relaxed and low-stress, the kids had tons of ideas, and I've got the comfy feeling of knowing that we'll be going into our next cookie season with almost all of our materials already created and ready to go.

During this post-cookie season meeting, Seniors earned the My Cookie Network badge and Ambassadors earned the Cookie Influencer badge.

Pre-Meeting Prep Work

Before the meeting, I ordered the badges, printed photos of the troop doing cool stuff over the years, bought postcard stamps, formed an agreement with our local animal shelter that they would love to have the corrugated cardboard cat scratchers we wanted to make, and met up with various other troop leaders here and anon to take their empty corrugated cardboard cookie cases off their hands. 

As a Little Brownie Bakers troop, the kids really wanted to taste-test the ABC Bakers cookies. We also had a brand-new cookie this year, the Raspberry Rally, that NOBODY had tasted because it hadn't been available for in-person sales! Raspberry Rally was only available as a shipped cookie, during a specific ordering window only, so my night owl teenager got onto the troop's Digital Cookie site at 12:01 am opening day and ordered us some Raspberry Rallies.

Good thing she did, because by 9:00 am other parents and troop leaders were already in the Facebook group griping that it was sold out!

I asked around my Craft Knife Facebook page to find someone whose kid was an ABC Bakers Girl Scout, and I bought the troop a selection of ABC Bakers cookies that we could compare to our Little Brownie Bakers cookies.

My own Girl Scout had to miss most of this meeting, so to earn the part of the Cookie Influencer badge that she'd miss, she baked the Original Girl Scout Cookie, using the original recipe, to share with the rest of the troop during the meeting.

Step 1: Become an authority in your cookie business.

Because kids were earning two levels of badges simultaneously, we ended up doing activities somewhere in the middle. When these Girl Scout Seniors level up and want to earn the Ambassador badge, we'll just do different activities!

To be an expert in the Girl Scout cookie business, you need to know all about your cookies--how they look, how they smell, how they taste. You should also know how to compare/contrast them with other cookies from the same bakery and the other bakery, and other commercial and homemade cookies.

We taste-tested my teenager's homemade original recipe Girl Scout cookies, both so we would know how those original cookies tasted and how they compare to their closest cousin, the Trefoil. 

Here's the original Girl Scout cookie recipe. The dough wants to be sticky, but refrigerate it instead of adding extra flour, or your finished cookies will be bland. It's impossible to make a truly authentic recreation, however, and your Girl Scouts should try to guess why!

Do YOU know? It's because none of these ingredients are the same as they were way back in 1922! Your eggs, milk, and butter were farm-fresh and unpasteurized, organic and grass-fed. Your sugar was made from beets, not sugar cane. Even flour manufacturing has changed numerous times since then. Also, ovens! This cookie recipe calls for a "quick oven," which most modern interpretations set at about 350 degrees, but there weren't thermometers, so cooks just sort of figured out a method and used their own experiences to set the temperature, which would also have fluctuated constantly.

We also taste-tested the Raspberry Rallies, and surprisingly, nobody was a fan! Some kids thought they would taste better frozen (we LOVE frozen Thin Mints in this troop!), and I personally thought they would have been delicious with a raspberry jam layer. But alas, they were just Thin Mints with raspberry flavoring instead of mint. And interestingly, my council has ALREADY sent out an announcement that we won't be selling them next year! Goodbye, Raspberry Rallies--we hardly knew ye!

The main event, however, was the Blindfolded Taste Test. I brought enough bandanas so that each person who wanted to play could have their own, and a couple of kids who didn't want to play helped me. The taste-testers blindfolded themselves, and the helpers and I donned disposable gloves (we use these for all our Girl Scout food prep!) and set dueling cookies before each taste-tester. The only tricky thing to remember is which baker you put on which side! When we'd handed out the two cookies for that round, the taste-testers sampled them both and announced 1) which cookie was more delicious, and 2) which cookie they thought was our Little Brownie Baker version vs. which was the ABC Baker version.

This activity was so fun for everyone! Of course, it only works when the cookies from different bakeries look identical, so it didn't work for, say, Thin Mints, which are smooth when they come from Little Brownie Bakers but crinkly when they come from ABC Bakers--

--but for Trefoils, Do-Si-Dos vs. Peanut Butter Sandwiches, Samoas vs. Caramel deLites, Tagalongs vs. Peanut Butter Patties, and Adventurefuls, they're similar enough that you can't tell them apart without looking very closely... which you can't do when you're blindfolded, mwa-ha-ha!

Our troop of cookie experts had a lot of fun comparing and contrasting and mostly--but not always!--guessing our own cookies correctly, and we had plenty of leftovers so that everyone could take more samples to taste-test home with them.

Step 2: Set cookie business goals and develop a new skill.

After the taste-testing, we spent the rest of the meeting working on these various projects while chatting and munching cookies!

At our Girl Scout cookie booths, the kids sometimes use posters and sometimes don't, but unlike some of our other decorations, we don't really have a good stash of ready-to-go posters. Time to fix that! I set out quarter-sheets of posterboard, along with lots of photos of our troop doing cool stuff over the years, and markers, pencils, glue sticks, etc. The kids could work individually or in groups, with the goal of making posters each tightly focused on one NON-COOKIE theme. 

Because do you know why people buy Girl Scout cookies even if they're not super revved up about the cookies?

They buy cookies to support Girl Scouts! So kids who can talk confidently about what they want to do with their cookie profits, as well as show off all the cool stuff they've already done with their cookie profits, inspire the people who want to support Girl Scouts to support them even more. It's also good for the kids to remember the purpose of all the hard work they put in selling cookies, as well as to celebrate all their awesome adventures.

And on this day, the kids made some great posters! Now we've got posters about camping, about high adventure, about friendship, and about our troop trip to Mexico that we can mix and match at cookie booths. Since they're smaller, we can set up a couple at a time, even, and I think they'll be interesting enough to draw eyes to them... and over to the kids' cookie booth!

Step 3: Create and share your value proposition.

The activities we did for Steps 2-4 could be swapped to meet any of these steps, to be honest, because a good marketing campaign is multi-faceted. So just as those posters do a wonderful job sharing the kids' value propositions, it turned out that making, writing, and sending postcards made from upcycled Girl Scout cookie boxes enabled many of the kids to learn a new skill!

Tell me: do YOUR Girl Scouts know how to write, address, and stamp a postcard? Because many of mine didn't! It took some of them a few tries to get everything laid out properly, so even better that we were using perfectly free, easily recyclable materials!

For this activity, the kids each picked a couple of the troop's shipped cookies customers and wrote them a personal thank-you note. They thanked them, said something they learned during cookie sales or something they'd use their cookie profits for, and finished with something else thankful that wasn't a thank-you. This was also a good time to sign the troop thank-you notes that we give, along with a box of Girl Scout cookies, to businesses that let us have a cookie booth on their property. For those thank-you notes, I mount a cute troop photo to a trefoil that I cut out of green paper, then just have the kids sign the back. It's cute, quick, and easy!

Step 4: Create a marketing campaign.

All of this is part of an integrated marketing campaign, but for this specific step, I got the kids to stock the troop back up with decorated donation cans. At each cookie booth we have one donation can for donating cookies to charity (for the past couple of years, our troop has been donating cookies to the city's emergency youth shelter), and one donation can for donating money straight to our troop. I don't understand why these donation cans get SO beat up over the course of a Girl Scout cookie season, but OMG we are constantly needing to replace donation cans! On top of that, we try to keep at least two full cookie booth set-ups to make busy selling weekends easier, so we're looking at six new donation cans nearly every single year.

Fun fact: the only correct donation cans are either 1) a plastic protein powder canister or 2) a giant plastic peanut butter jar. In my top photo, I don't know what that can on the right is, but it's not going to last, sigh.

Step 5: Leave a legacy.

It's important to pay good works forward, so just as the community supports these kids by buying Girl Scout cookies from them, the kids also give back to the community in other ways. We've got our yearly cookie donation to the youth emergency shelter, but this year, I also thought it would be nice to upcycle some of our massive pile of cardboard waste by creating these corrugated cardboard cat scratchers for our local animal shelter.

Look how many the kids were able to make during the course of just one meeting!

I'd love to find a way to encourage the troop to make more cat scratchers independently during the course of the next cookie season, because we have SO much cardboard waste, but I don't know--they're pretty time-consuming, and teenagers are the busiest people I know!

The kids LOVED this meeting, and it worked really well in so many ways: we got a lot of genuinely productive work done, we did some charity work, we ate delicious snacks, we got to be creative, we looked at cute pictures of our troop over the years and went, "Awww!", we had plenty of time to chat while our hands were busy, and we learned new things like how to address a postcard and how Peanut Butter Patties taste just a little different from Tagalongs. 

I hope our upcoming meeting, in which we're going to plan a Harvest badge to earn, start planning a big 2024 troop trip, and get several kids started on their Gold Award paperwork, goes just as well!

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Homeschool High School Biology: The ProtistsThat Live in the Local Lake

You will never want to even touch pond water again after completing this biology lab.

But you WILL want to have an aquarium full of pond water living in your home so you can keep hundreds of thousands of microscopic protozoa pets!

This lab is a companion to CK-12 Biology 8.4, which is the chapter on protists.

Observing prepared slides of protists is a good preliminary lab, because it allows your high schooler to review proper microscope usage and how to make microscope drawings, and to get an idea what the live protists might look like. 

Here are the lab instructions that I wrote for my teenager, and here are the materials that we used for the lab:

• packaged sterile sample container
• eyedropper
• microscope
• (optional) microscope digital camera and software
• protist diagrams
• blank microscope slide and blank slide covers
• lens cloth

There was a blast from the past on the package of microscope slides:

I used to shop in that independent educational toys and teaching supplies store ALL THE TIME when my children were wee. The dollhouse I bought one toddler to celebrate her toilet training came from there, as did the PlaySkool circus set that the other kid picked out for her sixth birthday present, about an hour before she broke her leg on the playground and it turned out that a huge Playskool set was absolutely the perfect thing for a kid with a cast on her leg to play with for a solid month!

Fifteen years after picking out that dollhouse, my teenager collected water from a local lake, brought it home, dropped a single drop onto a microscope slide, and put it under the microscope to see what lives there.

A lot, it turned out!

In the above video, I think I see an amoeba, but I think that all the larger creatures are perhaps nematodes? I haven't even looked to see what the teenager identified them as in her lab notebook, but I'm sure her guess is better than mine!

The next video is by far my coolest:

I'm pretty sure those are stalked ciliates! The teenagers and I have done this lab several times, and I've only seen these particular critters once! I'm think all the critters swimming around them are Euglenae. Or maybe Paramecia? 

Those two videos are taken at just 100x, so you can see how much you can see even at that low magnitude. 400x, below, gives you more detail, but we don't use any additives to slow down our protists, so anything speedier than that oozy amoeba at the bottom right is hard to see.

This is a different water sample on a different day. I think that might be another Euglenoid because of its chloroplasts, which perhaps makes the critters that I previously thought were Euglenae actually Paramecia. I should probably get off my butt and go see what the teenager identified everything as, because I'm sure that she did more research than I'm currently doing!

The identities might be a bit sketchy, but the point of this particular lab isn't specifically to correctly identify every protist. Think of how much the teenager learned about sample collecting, microscope usage, and protists in general, as well as the practice that she got writing a lab report, problem-solving in science, and making decisions about identification. 

And most importantly, she got to see all the magic that lives out of sight in our local lake!

This protist lab pairs well with this macroinvertebrate identification lab, as well as this larger Water unit. 

DIY Cat Scratcher from Upcycled Corrugated Cardboard Boxes

This tutorial was originally posted on Crafting a Green World.

This upcycled cardboard cat scratcher is a great way to use up all your corrugated cardboard boxes. Cats love it, and it's a useful donation to your local animal shelter.

There comes a time in every person's life when they find themselves simply awash with cardboard. Maybe you just finished unpacking from your latest move. Maybe you went a little too ham on the most recent gift-giving holiday. Maybe your Girl Scout troop sold 2,000 boxes of Girl Scout cookies and now you have 250 empty cookie cases to show for it.

Whatever the situation that has left you with too much corrugated cardboard, I have the perfect solution: an upcycled cardboard cat scratcher!

Cats LOVE this style of cat scratcher, and it's a great one to make for them because it's eco-friendly on both ends: use upcycled cardboard to make it, and recycle it when you're done with it. Make a few of these cat scratchers and tuck them around your space so your cat never has an excuse to sharpen their claws on your furniture. If you don't have cats, make these cat scratchers anyway and donate them to your local animal shelter. My local animal shelter specifically requests this style, and my Girl Scout troop enjoys making and donating them.

This cat scratcher is an improved version of the two types that I made back in 2020. In the years since, I've refined my style to what my own cats and the animal shelter prefer, and redesigned the scratcher to be sturdier and more easily recyclable. My own cats do still really like that round one from the 2020 tutorial, and that's a great style if you've got a lot of room to devote to a nice, big cat scratcher. This version here, though, has a more inconspicuous profile, transports better, and my local animal shelter says it works better in their cat enclosures.

To make this upcycled cardboard cat scratcher, you will need:

• lots of corrugated cardboard. If you're using Girl Scout cookie cases, you'll need about five per cat scratcher. Otherwise, prepare to cut up more cardboard than you thought you'd need--this cat scratcher uses a LOT!
• measuring and cutting tools. At the minimum, you need a ruler and a pair of sturdy scissors. The work will go quicker with a quilting ruler, self-healing cutting mat, and craft knife.
• hot glue gun and hot glue. You're not going to use much, but this is still an essential component.

Step 1: Cut the bottom off of a box.

Choose a cardboard box whose area at the bottom has the dimensions that you're looking for in a cat scratcher.

Measure 2" up from the bottom of the box all the way around, then cut. Reserve the rest of the box for Step 2.

The bottom of this box will be the base for your cat scratcher.

If necessary, reinforce the bottom box flaps with hot glue.

Step 2: Cut corrugated cardboard into strips.

Flatten and/or disassemble a corrugated cardboard box, then examine it to see which way to cut. You want to cut across the corrugations, not parallel to them. When you cut, the cut edge of the box should show a cross-section of the corrugations--that's what the kitties love to dig their claws into!

Use a ruler and craft knife to cut a 2" wide strip down the cardboard, then repeat until you've cut up the entire box. Recycle or repurpose any leftover cardboard.

Measure the length of your box bottom, and cut the cardboard strips to this length. Recycle/repurpose any end pieces that don't reach the correct length.

Continue cutting cardboard into strips until you have enough strips to completely fill the box bottom. If you're making these from Girl Scout cookie cases, it takes about five cases, including the one you cut the box bottom from, to make this cat scratcher.

Step 3: Insert strips into the box bottom, gluing as you go.

After you've got enough strips, dump them all out of the box bottom and set up the hot glue gun. Lightly glue the strips together as you reinsert them.

This is my biggest improvement over the 2020 version of this cat scratcher; when the strips weren't glued together, I found that occasionally my cats would snag their claws into one and pull it out of the box! THIS cat scratcher keeps all its strips nice and snug inside for ultimate cat scratching perfection.

Step 4 (optional): Glue the cat scratcher to the base.

If you want to make the cat scratcher REALLY sturdy, then after all the strips are glued together, carefully pry the whole thing out of the box bottom, then use hot glue to lightly glue it back in. This will keep even the most enthusiastic cat from pulling the entire cat scratcher out of its base.

Either way, the added beauty of this corrugated cardboard cat scratcher is that it's DOUBLE-SIDED! When a cat has worn one side of the scratcher down, carefully pry it out of the base (the hot glue should peel away fairly easily, if you weren't too enthusiastic when you glued it), flip it over, and reinsert it, re-gluing it as necessary.

The model for this tutorial is Dill, one of the three-week-old kittens plus mama cat (also in some pics) that I'm currently fostering for my local animal shelter. I'll keep them safe and happy here with me until the kittens weigh at least two pounds and are at least eight weeks old, and then I'll bring everyone back to be speutered and adopted. Kittens this young don't do well in a shelter setting, and foster families are crucial to their survival, well-being, and proper socialization. If you've got space in your living area and your heart, please reach out to your local shelter and ask about their foster programs

This is one of my all-time favorite upcycling projects. It's a nearly-waste-free way to turn trash into treasure, it fills an incredibly useful niche in cat gear that you'd otherwise have to buy new, and it's a simple, cheap donation project that directly benefits the most innocent creatures in your local community.

I challenge you (and me!) to make every unwanted corrugated cardboard box that comes into our lives into a cat scratcher for use or donation.

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A Tree Fell on My House

 

Have you ever heard of a derecho? I'm positive I had at some point, maybe during a grade school science class, but I couldn't have told you what it was.

I can now!

Here's a radar image of the straight-line wind that came through my yard in late June:

The official report is that this derecho had top wind speeds of over 100 mph in some places. I don't know the top wind speed in my yard, since it destroyed the anemometer on my roof (it's this one, and it's so good!) AND knocked the power out for over two days, but I can say that visually, my partner and I were outside puttering in my garden when I saw a line of dark clouds appear on the western horizon. 

I was all, "Shoot, a storm is coming," and decided I had time to just finish putting the last few shovels of compost in my raised bed before heading in.

I swear it was just seconds later that the sky was black, the wind was INSANE, and I was running into the house. My partner had for some reason decided to run around the house and go in a different door, because the man, unlike a derecho, clearly cannot take a straight line if his life depended on it, so he was still outside when my second-favorite elm tree hit the house so hard that it shook. 

A second later, my partner wandered in the back door and was all, "It's so windy out!" 

Like, yeah, DO YOU THINK? 

Ugh, my beautiful backyard elm tree! The one with the kids' tree house in it! AND it took out our Covid lockdown trampoline on the way down!

I mean, I know my kids are grown/nearly grown, but did it really have to destroy so many of their outdoor playthings? This used to be a yard that kids played in constantly, and now not only are those children too grown-up to play there, but the only evidence that kids ever once did play there is the back deck slide.

But at least for a while, the fallen tree, itself, did make a good piece of outdoor climbing equipment!

Actually, it was also a great setting for some outdoor family portraits. If you like taking family photos, I highly recommend finding an elevated spot like this, where you can take interesting photos from below of your family silhouetted by the sky.

Look at that identical body language, lol. Can you tell that these two are related?

We climbed around and posed dangerously in a short break between near-constant storms for the next two days, so constant that the tree removal people also had to keep taking breaks to go sit in their trucks while storms blew over. They'd cut and haul some tree branches--

--it would start to rain and they'd ignore it, it would start to pour and they'd ignore it, lightning would strike so they'd go sit in their trucks, then it would calm down so they'd drag all their stuff back out and work for another thirty minutes while racing the next storm:

Goodbye, DIY Tree House! It's probably for the best that they removed you before the insurance adjustor arrived!

This is what the outside of our house has looked like, then, for the past two months:

I don't know where the chickens were during the derecho, but they were fine!

I don't know if we accidentally picked a shitty construction company, or if they all move this slowly, but I *think* they might finally start work next week? They've got to rebuild some of the framing on that part of the house, and roof it, of course, and then they've got to tear out and rebuild the inside walls and floors and ceilings because of all the water damage. Those ceilings, in particular, now look like this:

Here's a photo of me taking a photo of the ceiling, because for some reason my phone is always in selfie mode?

More selfie mode!

This is the really bad one, and is probably why I've had a low-grade cold for the past several weeks despite having an air purifier running continuously:

Also, for those of you who've been playing along at home for a while, this is in my bedroom closet. You know, part of the space that WE ALREADY HAD COMPLETELY REDONE IN 2022?!?

Yeah, that space. Two new sets of flooring in two years; how fun is that?

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

And on Day 14, We Went Home

No more fish and chips and Cornish pasties and full English breakfasts--somehow we managed to eat McDonald's three meals in a row on the way home.

The McDonald's UK menu is slightly novel, at least...

Anyway, during our trip home most of my brain power was focused not on nutrition, but on this:

Tangent: the Gatwick Airport Facebook page is weirdly really entertaining? They mow the lawns around the runways with sheep!

I have the WORST time with airport security! They always hassle me, it's so ridiculous, but this time I didn't even care if they hassled ME--I just wanted my precious fossils and rocks and bits of sea glass and chunks of chalk to make it safely home with me!

I was a little nervous about this clause, because ALL of my rocks and fossils and chalky bits were exceedingly dirty... as were the clothes I'd been digging them up with:

But nevertheless, I fitted all my rocks and fossils and chalky bits into my carry-on luggage, padded with filthy T-shirts and joggers, and hoped for the best.

And then was immediately stopped by airport security and held for nearly 30 minutes while the Gatwick agent picked up every. Individual. Rock. I thought she was being a bit overdramatic in her examination of most of them--I mean, does nobody at all ever fly home with fossils? The Jurassic Coast is RIGHT THERE!!!--but even I admit that the rock that she actually took into the back to consult with the other security people about, the one approximately the size of three stacked paperback novels and with a tantalizing fossil just peeking out of it, might have been overkill on my part. When she struggled to heft it with one hand, I could sort of see her point about its appropriateness on an airplane where you can't even take thread scissors. I was prepared to give it up without a fuss, but the people in the back room eventually decided that even though it was big and heavy enough to brain someone with, I guess it wasn't technically forbidden, and so off it went with me to New York!

Where I was held up by security for nearly an hour, this time, for the exact same examination of all my rocks and fossils. The bad news is that there was only one inspector, and she took her sweet time on each of the massive pile of bags lined up for her to inspect, while all of us travelers shifted from foot to foot and checked our phones anxiously in hopes that our connecting flights had been delayed. The good news is that since we were all just standing there, we all got to see everyone's contraband. When the inspector unzipped one old guy's suitcase and revealed a giant water bottle FULL of water inside, I gasped out loud! Water is FORBIDDEN to cross the security line! 

In an airport, one finds one's entertainment where one can. Case in point: the family in the row ahead of us on our London to New York flight played Encanto on the seatback TV for their toddler FOR THE ENTIRE FLIGHT. Whenever the movie's ending would draw near, one parent would rewind it to the beginning and the toddler would go back to bopping along to "The Family Madrigal." It was awesome.

Finally, though, we only had one last leg of our flight left to fly--

--then just one last hour of driving left to drive, during which it turned out that it was equally terrifying to drive on the right side of the road after you'd been driving on the left all week, and back home we were, safe and sound.

A certain ginger gentleman was VERY happy to see us!

• Day 1: We made it to England!
• Day 2: Westminster Abbey, National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, and Six
• Day 3: British Museum and Buckingham Palace
• Day 4: Mudlarks and Southwark
• Day 5: Natural History Museum and Victoria and Albert Museum
• Day 6: Pax Lodge, the Tower of London, and Afternoon Tea
• Day 7: Back and Forth by Boat to Greenwich
• Day 8: We Careen Our Way to Canterbury Cathedral and Dover Beach
• Day 9: Dover, Hastings, and a Holloway
• Day 10, Part 1: All the Giant Rocks
• Day 10, Part 2: Stonehenge, At Last!
• Day 11: To Avalon with King Arthur
• Day 12: Tintagel
• Day 13: In the Footsteps of Mary Anning
• Day 14: Homewards!