Andy and Darcy’s Blog

This book was reported to be “high fantasy” by someone on amazon. I don’t know what defines “high fantasy”, but it sounded like something I would really enjoy! So I checked it out of the library.

I was well into this book and enjoying it greatly before I knew what the plot was all about. I was enjoying it so much that I was getting a little worried that the author was going to let me down with a mediocre plot. When I was over 200 hundred pages (of almost 500) into the book, I was still wondering what it was about! And then, finally! There was a prophecy mentioned.

Here’s a short summary of what I read. Rhapsody is about a singer of that name who has the power of using a thing’s true name for magical purposes. There is also some time travel that happens in this fantasy world. The main characters leave their own time, and it doesn’t appear that their going to go back. When the D&D twins got lost in Time Of The Twins/Test of the Twins, I was very uneasy about them getting back. I had no such feeling in this book.

As far as the prophecy goes, not a lot happens in this book. Stuff is conquered, a king is made, etc. But at the end of this book, I was like, What is this series all about? I still have no idea. The only other series that was able to confuse me like this was The Golden Compass.

Well, I went to the library to get #2 because I am intrigued. Maybe I’ll eventually find out.

Well, I have to say kudos to the U.S. passport people. It was around September 10 that Andy and I were inspired to start planning our honeymoon, and all of a sudden there was the possibility of us going out of the country. So I expedited my passport. It was in the mail (first class which takes 3 days) on Saturday, September 15. And today it has arrived. That was fast!!!

Now we can go on our honeymoon! Whereever that may be.

I have read some literature! I can tell that its literature because there is a theme. This book is about a man, Roger, and his three grown daughters who are all at different points in their lives. The theme is “You live on through your children”. Roger’s wife told him those words before she died (before the story begins). Roger’s disposition sometimes settles into a melancholy state of disbelief and loss of faith. Other times he remembers his wife’s words and then he makes an effort to know his daughters better.

One of his daughters is the stereotype of the traditional mother. Another of his daughters is a single teacher in New York that is working day and night to improve the education of the poor. And his other daughter is a newly married society-seeking sybarite. There are other themes in this book that I won’t mention. If you like themes and discussions with the literary elite, then this book may be for you.

This book paints a vivid picture of New York in the early 20th century. There aren’t any sky scrapers, but it is a very crowded city of immigrants. The second half of the book describes the situation the families dealt with as Europe entered into WWI.

I think the thing I enjoyed most about this book was the descriptions of New York, but I will probably never read it again. This book was a lot better than The Shroud of the Thwacker that I have been ready concurrently. Here is the one word that sums it all up…hopefully I’m using it properly: Eh.

I’m too lazy to get all my pictures together so I’m just going to blog about our last two weeks, text only.

We have drafted our fantasy football teams and we are 2 weeks into football season. I got the first draft pick, so naturally, I drafted LaDainian Tomlinson. He hasn’t been scoring me a lot of points, so it hasn’t been that exciting. My team is doing so so and Andy’s might be doing a little better than that. Even though my team isn’t the best, the food is spectacular. Amber’s cheese dip from week 1 was awesome. And Andy’s barbequed pork sandwiches from Week 2 were really good as well.

It’s been getting colder out, and we’ve had to make some adjustments biking to work. There has been at least one time when I have had to wear a hat under my helmet and another time when I’ve had to wear a headband. Grasshoppers are seemly offering themselves up for sacrifice on the bike path, and while I’m looking down a lot more than I should, I can’t seem to avoid all of them. And the wind…in the morning it is in my face on the way to work, and by the late afternoon, it has changed to be in my face again on the ride home.

We had a viewing of Pan’s Labyrinth. It was a weird movie, and everyone thinks I got bored and stopped watching the movie just before the point where I would have been too mortified to watch any more of it anyway. I ended up reading the synopsis on wikipedia for some closure and it seemed like an interesting ending. I’ll wait for the censored version, which is hopefully shorter.

We’re planning on watching Full Metal Alchemist Disk 2 soon. It has just arrived.

And one more thing! Yarr! I hope everyone had a really great Talk Like A Pirate Day.

We recently Netflixed our first anime show, and now we can say that we’ve watched the first episode of Full Metal Alchemist. It was an amazing coincidence that my sister called while we were watching the show. I knew she would be so happy that we were finally watching it. Our conversation went like this:

Darcy: Hey, Kristi! We’re watching Full Metal Alchemy.
Kristi: It’s not Full Metal Alchemy. It’s Full Metal AlcheMIST.
Darcy: (thinking “That was snooty!”) Oh, ok. We’re watching it. How are you?
Kristi: Fine. I’m letting you go. It’s more important that you watch Full Metal Alchemist. Bye.
Darcy: Ok, whatever. Bye.

This show definitely had its quirks. You know how George Lucas always throws something into his movies that annoys you a lot but is too minor to really matter in the end? The most obvious example is, of course, Jar Jar Binks. Well, they threw a little something like that in Full Metal Alchemist as well. The Full Metal Alchemist character had some mannerisms that really annoyed me. Whenever he would get mad, he would go into what I would call “Calvin (of Calvin and Hobbes) animation mode”. The beautiful animation that they worked so hard on was interrupted by this cartoonish, jittery, childish temper-tantrum. Oh well. You can’t have everything in the fantasy world. That was just that one minor thing I was talking about. The story is really unique (to me, anyway), and I was pleased with it.

Here’s the verdict. We liked it, and we’re going to get disk 2. It’s like an entire new fantasy genre!

I haven’t been to a Renaissance Festival for many years, and this one exceeded my expectations in every way. This fair wasn’t set in a dusty field like I expected. The site was dedicated to the festival and had permanent structures painted in vivid colors in many different archaic architecture styles. The festival is set amid leafy shade trees, and it is landscaped with greenery, ivy, and flowers. The paths are covered in wood chips. There are colorful banners, flags, and an equal amount of real and tasteful fake flowers everywhere. And everyone’s costumes were really cool and very colorful.

There were a lot of shows that you could watch, and we watched two of them. We watched the Vilefication Tennis, where teams of 2 would fling insults across a row of peasants. The moderator awarded points. The insults were raunchy, and many of them consisted of yo mama jokes. We also watched a sheepdog demonstration. The sheep were released and they started eating grass as fast as they could (this was entertaining in itself). The first sheep dog demonstrated to us all that a sheep dog was meant to do in life. That dog herded sheep extremely well. There were 4 other sheep dogs that demonstrated what can go wrong with a sheep dog demonstration. We got to pet one of the dogs during the demonstration, but that was one of those things that went wrong.

We spent most of our time browsing. The artisans and their wares were spectacular. The chain mail was very fun to look at, and I was amazed with what people came up with. The glass blowing was also really cool. We watched a glass blower make a glass fish. There were medieval costumes, swords and weapons, hair braiding, and hats as well.

Here are a few more details about the Renaissance Festival.

If you want a pickle, be prepared to be publicly humiliated by this guy who strides around and gestures with his tongs. Once you get your pickle, he is going to make lewd comments about “your pickle”. I don’t know if it was worth it. The pickle wasn’t anything special.

You can get married at the Renaissance Festival. I heard they reached their 1000th Renaissance wedding recently.

• If you wanted a turkey drumstick, the wait (at all times of the day) was at least 20 minutes. We might have missed an important part of the Renaissance Festival, but we didn’t wait.

There were always a few things holding me back from reading this book. One of those things was that it had characters that were animals. I really tend to dislike books about animals. I don’t like to empathize with animals. Another thing was that it was a child’s book.

This books is really not bad, even for someone like me. The chapters are short but entertaining. The plot is obviously going somewhere, although it is not easy to see from the beginning. There is excellent description of all things and interesting dialogue between the characters. It’s really quite well done for a child’s book.

Here is one drawback to this book. This book was written a really long time ago. And this book assumes that people of different races dress differently, have a different culture, etc. I haven’t been offended or anything, but it is very apparent and quite surprising. If I were going to read this to a child, I would hope there is a newer, more politically correct version. Or I would re-edit it myself.

This book won a Newberry Award in the 1920’s, and it is well deserved even today. Read it.

On a side note, as you can see I am blogging about another book I have liked. Well, just so you know, there are books that I don’t like. They just take me longer to read. Speaking of books that I don’t enjoy, today I have plunged into Shroud of the Thwacker. This book has been our book club book selection for about the last 6 months because no one has the will to read it. (Except for Andy who has been done for so long he probably doesn’t even remember it). We need to schedule another book club and choose a new book if nothing else.

The Castle of Otranto is another gothic novel, but it is rather short so I think “novella” may be more appropriate. It is like The Mysteries of Udolpho, and again, it is quite good. And it took me less than 3 days to read so it must be short!

I don’t know where the castle of Otranto is located, but Wikipedia alleges there is a real place called Otranto. I imagine that it is in Italy somewhere. In this book, there are ghostly apparitions, secret passages, and chance encounters. It is the story of a rich family for whom an ancient prophecy foretells the removal of their family from the estate. Manfred, the prince and father figure for that family, succumbs to some of his unworthier vices upon the death of his only son. He seeks to divorce his wife and marry the young girl betrothed to his late son. Not everyone is happy at the prospect of this arrangement so you can imagine where the subsequent plot turns.

There are more gothic novels that are mentioned in Northanger Abbey, and all that I have read have been good so far. Wikipedia reports that the gothic novels in Northanger Abbey are called the ‘Northanger Horrid Novels’ (search for ‘gothic fiction’), and there are several more in that list! I’m out of gothic novels that are available at gutenberg.org, so I’m going to have to follow up with the library if I want to read anymore. And I do.

Ivanhoe is about a knight named Ivanhoe who precedes King Richard coming back from the crusades. Sound familiar? This book somewhat resembles the story of Robin Hood, as told by Disney in the Robin Hood cartoon made in the 80’s. However, the plot is completely different and there is no maid Marian or sheriff of Nottingham. The character of Ivanhoe is not reflected in any of the Disney characters. There is an archery contest so that is one similarity. And there is the heroic bandit Robin Hood, who leads his banditti against the evil nobility and collects a few taxes as well. Disney left out the seige of the castle, the near burning of a Jewish woman (at the stake), the Templar knights, and the Norman vs. Saxon tension throughout this book. And there is a lot of discussion about the parts that make up armor. I probably would have learned a lot, if I had only looked up the meaning of the words.

But this book is good! The (fuzzy) history is interesting, the characters are very likeable or dislikeable, and this book had one of the most entertaining battles I have ever read (I hate most of them). And I really liked the way Sir Walter Scott would cut to the next scene for a “here’s what’s going on all at once effect”. Just so you know, this book is also available for free on the internet, since it was written in the 1800’s.

Actually, I find myself thinking of a quote from the Simpson’s a lot. It’s pretty juvenile, but I can’t help it: “The story of Ivanhoe is about a Russian farmer and his tool”. Funny, ya?

This really looked like a movie that was made for PBS. Although I think, in fact, that it was made for A & E. This movie came out in 1995, and at that time I would have never watched it. This movie is incredibly true to the book. It is even paced like the book. If I had not been well versed with this story, I would never have known where this movie was going. But I think that any fan of Pride and Prejudice would really really like it. And I think there are a lot of Pride and Prejudice fans out there.

I saw the 2006 Pride and Prejudice first, so I have to make some comparisons. Colin Firth really portrays pride, much better than that guy in the the 2006 Pride and Prejudice. He is very moody and unlikeable. He’s really quite perfect. I think the Elizabeths are about the same. I think Keira Knightly was a little more haughty and offended, which is something I thought was fitting. The 1995 Elizabeth was more knowing, understanding, but still full of prejudice. And Mr. Bennet was really witty in this film (its so amusing I can’t leave it out!). Between the two movies, I can’t clearly pick a winner. I like both a lot.

I watched this miniseries twice and loved it both times.