Music in Kids' Shows

I was watching the Backyardigans with Elizabeth just now. It's a Treehouse show with cute CG animals who imagine their backyard to be all kinds of different places. I think it's where she learned the word "pirate". Anyway, these characters were singing a song about how it was raining. Elizabeth started singing along by the second verse - she knows about rhyming now, she realized that every line was going to end in "ain". The melody they were using seemed very familiar to me, so I started sorting through my musical memory to place it. I went through every kids' song - no match. Then I went through common melodies that everyone seems to know. Still no match. Then I moved to musicals. And that's when it hit me.

A kids' show had taken the music from H.M.S. Pinafore and changed the words. They were singing, "I'm Called Little Buttercup".

I like the quality of Treehouse programming, overall. I always appreciate shows that bring non-kids' music into play on a regular basis. When I was little, it was the Smurfs. I still equate the third movement of the Pathetique Sonata with Gargamel's chase music, and "Morning" from the Pier Gynt Suite always conjures up images of Smurf Village for me. I'm very glad to see the new generation of children's programming does this, too.

Time for Jewelry

I am now the proud owner of a watch.

Not just any watch is this one, oh, no. It cost me $20.70 after a discount and sales tax, and it has one extremely important feature. There is no metal in any place that will touch my skin. The watch band - made of leather - runs right behind the watch face and snaps onto one's wrist, bangle-style.

It's quite a clunky watch, actually. The face is square, with a purple undertone to it, and the numbers and metal are silvertone. The band is navy blue. For now, it will do nicely, but by the summer I want another one. I'm thinking pink. At this price, there's no reason not to have a few different ones.

This is really nice. Since the day I realized that every metal I tried was giving me a rash, except of course for the ones I couldn't afford, I've never worn a watch. Or rather, never for more than a few hours, followed by days of scratching and applications of hydrocortisone cream. I don't wear hardly any jewelry, for that reason. Even the stuff that says "solid gold" on it usually gives me a reaction. So I wear clip-on earrings on special occasions, usually taking them off after two hours or so. The last time I wore pierced earrings was my wedding day. By dinnertime, my ears were itching and swelling, but I didn't take the earrings out because I knew the ears would bleed if I did.

The next trick will be training myself to wear a watch after years of training myself to look for clocks everywhere I went!

Mood swings

Minor, but still there.

Earlier today, and most of yesterday, passed very well. I was in a generally good mood. I got a lot of writing done - see riddocksdawn if you've got it friended for details. I was considering how to approach the Treeden-overboard chapter. I read quite a bit of "Master and Commander", out of which I wrote down a whole slew of ship vocabulary for insertion into my book. I crocheted a foot or so of lace - I'm about half done now. I spent some time looking up Mesopotamia units online, so as to have some kind of resource - my usual teacher store had absolutely nothing before Egypt, and I didn't like the Egypt or Greece ones.

Now I've got a Sunday-night lethargy coming on. I don't want to stay up, I don't want to sleep, I can't find those ideas for my Treeden scene (they're sitting at the back of my psyche playing hide-and-seek and laughing at me) and I have no real desire to do anything else. If I were well-prepared for school tomorrow, I'd consider calling in sick, but the prep time required to make that happen also requires that I get off my butt right now. Since that isn't likely to happen, I guess I'm going to work tomorrow.

As usually happens at this time of year, I've started making future plans. They include a baby, as they always have, but they also include some plans for the maternity leave that goes with the baby. I intend to have this book done within a couple more months. The goal then is to write a second novel while on mat leave. I may do a sequel to this one, if we've played it at all in that time. I may go back to the other idea I had bumming around in my head two years ago. I got two good chapters and a solid outline done on that, before getting bogged down and giving up. The concept was excellent, but I need to change the narrative approach and take a long, hard look at the voice of it. As it is, it wasn't working for me. There are a few other possibilities sitting, shallow-rooted and vulnerable, in my brain. I don't know if they'll ever be more than literary dandelions, but my brain has enough room to host them right now. The more I dwell on pleasant remote possibilities, the less energy I have for the more immediate, not so nice probabilities, like strikes and workplace discord.

It's amazing how much a mood can swing in a few minutes. I'm ready to think about sleep now. The baby's quiet, though she wasn't pleased at having to say prayers without Daddy and cried for a few minutes after I left. I need to stop calling her the baby. Anyone who can talk in sentences of three to five words most of the time is no longer a baby. I have a feeling I'll be calling her that until the day I have to clarify which baby I mean, though. She'll always be my baby.

Piet said the weather forecast was calling for freezing rain later in the week. I wonder if I dare hope for a snow day. We haven't had one yet, and we're due.

Okay, I'm going to bed now. G'night.