Reading: The Ground Beneath Her Feet. Shut up.

Moving: lots of hoeing and pitchforking

House and Garden: sifted some compost loam, hoed the vegetable garden, raked the south garden out, turned the compost

Yule: an adorable lavender hippopatamus puppet who I hope will help put Emlet to bed.

11 November 2002: What I've Recently Discovered

• There is at least one mouse living in my compost bin. There is a hole of a squirrely diameter chewed into its face, but I figure mice could live quite comfortably in there until I as Mr. Fitzgibbon get in there with a pitchfork and turn it. Happily, I didn't turn over any baby mouselings yesterday, though I did rouse two as I attacked the pile.
• Jordan Catalano is like Jen Wade and John Scalzi, in that he must be referred to by his whole name. Also, if he's so illiterate that he doesn't easily recognize his own name in the salutation of a letter, how would he recognize Angela's name or handwriting enough to return a lost letter to her?
• The Westing Game does not make for good reading aloud the way we read aloud. It's important to be able to visualize the clues, and it's hard to recognize textual clues in the will just from hearing them, and it's hard to keep track of so many heirs when you listen to only a few pages at a time, a few times a week, over many weeks.
• Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH should work out better. Fewer characters, longer narratives. The Westing Game is great but not even Turtle is as compelling as Nicodemus and Justin and Mr. Ages.
• I remembered Mr. Fitzgibbon's name on my own, though I did fetch the book to check it and also for the reading-aloud. Yea me.
• My new song "Asparagus Pee" can be sung to the tune of They Might Be Giants' "Particle Man" with just a little elision. Guess what I had for dinner.
• Ted Turner remains a jackass [I'm listening to CNN. Sorry for the non sequitur].
• Speaking of jackasses, I also really craved the donkey. It took me a little longer to think of Brighty's name, and I did get it, but he's a burro. I'm not sure I read that one, though. It might have struck me as sad and the nightmare-inducing illustration in King of the Wind was bad enough. The only other non-Eeyore donkey I can think of is Rabadash. I double-checked that one too, but I should have more confidence in myself in this one area. And Rabadash is not so admirable a character I want to name an animal after him. I think Emlet is not yet old enough for animals who can't easily be washed. Plus the animals I sent upon her birth did not yet have personalities that I could see. I would have a harder time shoving that donkey into a box to shunt him across the pond.
• I still want the okapi (but I can't find its picture).

I had a specific errand in Kazoo & Company: Tinker-Toys. But seriously, how could I do a quick errand in there? It's a great toy store. Naturally I had to visit the animals before I left. Luckily the badger wasn't there, luckily because it would be freaky to see a Pantalaimon who wasn't Pantalaimon. Almost like seeing a severed d--no, I can't even type it. Plus I should remember that Emlet needs books and toys and she should not be a surrogate for my frustrated desire for more animals. It's bad enough for me to own children's books, including rare and OOP ones, who will have no other reader until I die (whoa, check the anthropomorphizing pronoun. It stands). It would be downright immoral for me to accumulate animals I don't get to know well. I had all this figured out years before I read The Velveteen Rabbit.

Maybe this is why I never liked dolls. My mother sewed some Barbie clothes for CLH's Barbie, but otherwise every other Barbie looks alike. Every animal wears differently from its clone at the store as its character develops, but a vinyl doll just gets grubby. Especially character dolls like Barbie rather than anonymous dolls who can be whoever they want to be--the difference between Woody, who was loved enough to forget Woody's Round-Up, and Buzz, who needed to be loved before he could differentiate himself from every other Buzz.

At the counter I saw a flyer about a book donation program. Denver Social Services contributed names and ages of children in its care, children who probably have never owned a book of their own. The idea sends a chill down my spine. I might not have owned many, but I had stacks and stacks from the school and town libraries. Children. No books. Shunted among foster families. Attending different schools and the state of school libraries. How easy it is to lose a library card. I took a star off the tree: Marina, age 10.

Kazoo is a toy, not a book store, and its book selection is limited, especially with the Tattered Cover around the corner. I decided against Sharon Creech as maybe too old or too sad for a child whose life is already sad, and anyway my two favorites are about girls her age who miss their mothers or parents, Walk Two Moons and The Wanderer. No Narnia, partly because What If a grown-up stole the book for witchcraft and partly because of the heretical re-numbering.

Charlotte's Web, a full-color edition. Friendship and steadfastness and a Right if Bittersweet ending and Wilbur learning in-de-pendence. I have no idea how good a reader a ten-year-old ward of the state might be--I suspect that the great Gilly Hopkins is an anomaly among foster children--so I hope Charlotte isn't out of Marina's reach. Next time I might take the star out of the store, around the corner to the Tattered Cover. I'll be there Wednesday for Isabel Allende and either once or twice next week, definitely for Donna Tartt and maybe for Ann Clausen.