Toddled Dredge

Some days things just don’t go right.

I had a nifty schedule of post subjects all written up, ready to be consulted so I could post every day for two whole weeks.  But we have been teaching my oldest daughter a few basics about using the computer, and apparently I had not been careful to log off when I finished.  As far as we can tell, she dragged several folders to the trash and deleted them.  It included blog stuff, recipes that I had accumulated over the last five years, and other things that we will only discover as we miss them.

Boo hoo.

You may have noticed I have gussied up the blog a bit.  I read the comments at BooMama’s on this post, and when I saw how many people refused to read a blog that wasn’t pretty, I think I made a sound like “Yawp!” I decided I had better get crackin’ on beautifying the place.

I switched around the fonts and chose a color scheme. The banner photo on the homepage is a collection of books and crayons.  If you click on an individual post, the banner photo is Sweetpea’s foot in a sandbox.  If you click on the About or Blogroll pages, the banner photo is the bottom of a rocky pool.  All of those are ideas I got from you, my lovely readers.

I tried to take some pictures of crackers, but have you ever tried to get a decent picture of a saltine?  Definitely beyond my skill.

Toddled Dredge has always made me think of the hot toddies that Az the Husband made  for me one month when I had a horrible throat thing that would not go away.  Honey, lemon and scotch, warm and sliding over my raw and ragged throat - it was the closest I think I have ever come as an adult to the soothing comfort of mother’s milk.  So I wanted those colors - amber and sand and toast and orange like a crackling fire.

So let me know if you have any trouble with the pages loading or with the way they show up on your browser.   I still have not settled on an avatar, and I may do a little tweaking, but this is basically the look of the blog for the foreseeable future.  Let me know what you think.

Outside my study window is a catalpa tree. It is tall and twisted, a survivor of a lightning strike long ago that left a scarred branch turned in on itself before sprouting new greenery.

Every spring this tree blooms, frilly white blossoms rising above the leaves, tall panicles of blooms like the towers of Khmerian architecture. The flowers have a sweet scent that is barely there. It catches me unaware on breezy days, sudden and unfamiliar, so light that it leaves me certain that lilacs and honeysuckle are merely pushy.

I have wanted to catch a photo of this tree in bloom for you, but it lasts only a few days, and I always seem to miss my chance. This year I was sure I would get the photo just in time, but a thunderstorm blew through, and the next day the blossoms were on the ground, covering the driveway, where they rotted into a brown paste that the rain washed away the next week.

Once, people planted Catalpas all over North America. The tree will grow almost anywhere, and it grows quickly.  It was affordable and hardy and tall and inexpensive, a boon to working class families longing for a little green.  It was called Catalpa, Indian Bean or Cigar tree.

They were once planted for their wood - a fence post made from a catalpa and set in the ground will grow harder over the years rather than softly rotting away. They are still desirable wood for carvers, but nowadays the wood is hard to find.

I have fallen in love with this beautiful, useful tree and its enormous leaves, smooth and heart-shaped, shady and perfect.

But trees have fashions just like every thing else, and catalpas have fallen out of favor. Catalpas are too inconvenient for the modern homeowner. Their beauty comes at the price of mess and disorder, and treelovers turn their noses up at them.

Catalpas make long bean pods, sometimes 18 inches long. The pods dry and fall and litter the lawn, looking like snakes. At our house, my daughter chooses the straightest to be her playtime swords, racing around the yard, slaying imaginary dragons. When we build campfires, the dried, slightly oily pods make great kindling.  The fallen pods seem just one more way to appreciate this lovely old grandmother of a tree.

But to consumers looking for a tree to plant, this tree is sloppy, unnecessary and extra work.

I can’t help but take it personally.

Az the Husband watched the kids today while I ran some errands. When I came home, we could not find Sweetpea. She can’t open the front door yet, so we knew she was inside somewhere, but she did not answer when we called.

Finally, we found her. She was curled up in the ratty old glider in my room, which was facing the window. She was completely hidden from view, fast asleep.

And she is sleeping still, even after I took this picture.

After the range of responses I received when I linked to criticisms of the movie Prince Caspian, I decided I would see the movie after all.  In particular, I was intrigued by the link Emily left to Frederica Mathewes-Green’s review, where she claimed that the movie was better than the book.  I read a few more reviews, and went into the movie prepared to see something different than the book, but willing to give it a chance.

And the first half went well.  Lewis’ novel is full of characters telling stories to other characters, which muddies the timeline, and the initial obvious changes the movie made  streamlined the narrative, choosing instead a straightforward linear sequence, fleshing out some details that were only casually mentioned in the book and inventing others.

In Lewis’ novel, the movement from doubt to faith is a significant part of each character’s development.  Several characters doubt the existence of Aslan, or doubt the reality of a particular action of Aslan’s.  In the movie the director has changed this from the intellectual doubt in Aslan’s existence to the personal lack of trust in Aslan’s faithfulness.  Trumpkin the dwarf objects not so much that Aslan isn’t real, but that Aslan abandoned Narnia long ago, and therefore cannot be relied on.

All of these were changes I could handle, though not enjoy.

But then.

A persistent question in the movie is “Why doesn’t Aslan appear to us?”  In Lewis’ novel this question is left more or less unanswered, but in the movie Lucy finally gives her own explanation.  “Perhaps he needs us to prove ourselves to him first,” she says.

And then I threw up.

Okay, not really.  But that was the point where my impatience with this movie began to grow.  When filming a Christian classic written by a devout Protestant, it is perhaps less than honest to your source material to make the spiritual explanation of the movie a statement so hostile to Reformation theology.

Maybe Dawn Treader will have a scene where the characters burn William Tyndale in effigy.  Just to be consistent.

Like the first movie, this one focuses more on the character of Peter than Lewis’ novels did.  Peter is much more conflicted in this film than in the novel - not only conflicted, but pouty.  And selfish.  And angry.  It is as though Lewis’ Peter Pevensie had all his goodness surgically removed.

And I think that is the basic problem with the movie.  Yes, it is visually gorgeous.  Yes, its narrative structure is more direct and appeals more to a generation raised on movies than the quiet meanderings of storytelling.  Yes, its pacing is far more exciting than the novel.  But whether it is Peter’s relationship with Caspian, his reconciliation with Aslan or his battle with Miraz, the director’s changes to Peter’s character do not make him more complex, only shabbier.

Goodness is missing from this movie.  You can bring it with you; you can find in Aslan all the things that you know are supposed to be in Aslan, but the nobility of spirit that existed in many of the original characters is gone.

And I’m not sure the director even recognized it was missing.

I mentioned in a previous post that I use brown sugar to get rid of product build-up in my hair. “Tell us more,” you all said. “What is this homemade miracle of which you speak?”

For the last seven years I have been using Lorraine Massey’s regimen for curly hair, which she describes in her book Curly Girl. You can find it in my Amazon link on my sidebar (there are five “pages” of links in that Amazon box, so you might have to click the numbers at the bottom of the box to see it). Her hair care methods allow us curly girls to keep our hair’s natural oils, which might not sound like much, but has been THE DIFFERENCE that means I have decent looking hair on rainy days. When it storms, I no longer need to choose between a brown halo of frizz around my head or hair so gel-covered it looks shellacked.

I cannot speak highly enough about her book.

Anyway, since I no longer strip my hair with detergents, I have to take measures against the build-up of product on my hair. Product build-up looks dull and makes hair heavier, and sometimes flakes off and looks like dandruff. The very best way I have found to get rid of build-up without returning to the crispy days of yore is do the following occasionally in the shower:

1. Skip the shampoo.

2. Instead, slather your hair thoroughly with conditioner.

3. Open the little tupperware container of brown sugar that you brought to the bathroom just for this purpose. Scoop some into your fingers and rub it into the roots of your conditioner-slathered hair. Go lock by lock until you have brown sugar evenly distributed all over your scalp. Rub it in with your fingers.

4. Rinse thoroughly. Make sure you get behind your ears. You do not want to be pestered by insects all day because they discovered a secret stash of sweetness by your ear.

That’s it. The slight abrasiveness of the brown sugar scrubs all the build-up off my roots like a tiny gentle brillo pad, and it melts in the warm water to rinse away clean. It works for me.

This is modified from Massey’s original idea, which was to mix brown sugar in your conditioner. That does not work. If you pre-mix it into your conditioner, the brown sugar just dissolves and it doesn’t scrub.

In a pinch, you can use white sugar instead, but it is much harder to hold, and more likely to make a mess in your bathroom.

I do this once every other week or so. My curls are usually extra shiny and manageable on my brown sugar days.

You can find more helpful ideas for making life easier at Shannon’s Works-for-Me Wednesday.