Aerin passed her Wicked Big Math Test courtesy of a pile of her own hard work and intensive help from her dad. She is good to go ahead a year to Algebra this year. I am anticipating a year of grumbling about new and hard stuff rather than grumbling about repeating old stuff ad nauseum. She is pleased and thoroughly praised and feted.
Now all we need to do is get Alice happy about going to school.
On Friday Aerin and I stopped at the Peabody Essex Museum, nowhere near on the way home but closer then that at any other moment of the summer. It used to be Peabody Marine Museum and have lots and lots of good boat stuff in it, now it is mostly art that was plundered brought back from various exotic locales during the time Salem was a world trading power. I wanted to see the Joseph Cornell exhibit, because he seems to be a Very Important Person in the development of collage and assemblage.
Like Mimi, I found it hard to get into. I thought it might be Aerin’s increasing impatience with the place, or the (astonishing, to me) crowding, but it occurs to me in retrospect that if it had been more interesting it would have been difficult to drag her away. It was dim, to save the art. The organization was not clear to me, although there did seem to be some kind of thematic underpinnings relating the various kinds of work to times and places in his life.
I didn’t find much of the work I saw terribly compelling. I can see how he is an important source to people working in collage and assemblage. He drew from many varied sources and did rather paste everything together. I usually play the game "Which one would you steal buy?" and I was surprised that I didn’t find any particular piece that I really lusted after. I liked a couple collages, two made me smile, two more made me stop and look harder, but on the whole, I was underwhelmed.
On the other hand, down two floors and over one gallery, I was itching to touch, borrow and steal one out of every three pieces I saw in the Origami exhibit. So many really interesting and compelling images and shapes and such a great deal of cleverness wedged together in one place made me a little dizzy. There was a Pangolin in particular, that I wanted for my very own. It was folded from a single sheet of 6 foot square paper, and had all the lovely scales along its back and the sweet pointy nose and lightly bronzed edges on all the scales… stop here and imagine, for a moment, a piece of paper 2 meters on a
side. Now imagine folding it precisely, to make a creature that is
roughly 45 cm long, extravagantly detailed, and blackly/charcoally
gorgeous. Makes my head spin. Clearly it really spoke to me.
In family things, Alice seems to have had a fine time at Pony Farm, and is even now recreating it for three dolls and four stuffed horses all over the kitchen floor. The girls have fed the ponies, cleaned stalls, and are now being run through their riding lesson, later they have been promised swimming with the ponies. There is a steady monologue of songs and encouragement for dollies and ponies. I feel I am watching Alice’s past week unfold, possibly with editing to make it funner.
Aug 12
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.
shhhhh (looking over shoulder)
There are no children in this house.
That hasn’t happened for more than one night at a time for a very very very long time. I’m thinking they are hiding, even though I know I left one with my mum, and the other today at pony camp.
Alice looked like this: 
as we left. She has been assigned a smallish gray pony for the week, name of Stitch in Time called Stitchy for general use. We found the pony, found the donkey, found the chickens and the goats and the miniature horse and her foal, and left her reading and cheerful. Her friend Sophie is in the next bunk over. The counselors look like a very kind and compassionate lot. The cook promised not to poison her. We have high hopes for the week.
Al and I left and had an extremely grownup dinner on the way home. It was lovely.
Lee Thomson 