Thoughts on Stevenson

I read “The Land of Counterpane” at my grandparents’ house in Media. At the top of the stairs was a windowseat that opened to reveal a whole bunch of children’s books. Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses lived there. Counterpane was the only poem that’s stuck with me all these years.

The illustration probably helped. Who wouldn’t want to spend sick days in bed with toy soldiers executing battle plans along the covers?

The artist is Jessie Wilcox Smith. I remember one other illustration from the book. Except for the width of and cushions on the windowset in the picture, that could be me in the drawing. And I now need to track down a print of the illustration to hang somewhere in my house.

Coincidentally, Smith did another favorite illustration of mine. It’s the Little Women illustration you can see here.

European Adventure Day 2 – Bienvenue A Paris

Missed Day 0 or Day 1? Follow the links.

Last night’s good dinner? Not so good. I was sick to my stomach for 5 hours. Yay. Now we’re on vacation.

I felt better this morning, and it’s off to Paris. We got to the train station early, but were on our way soon enough. The Eurostar was nice. Comfy seats, even if they didn’t recline. I was able to eat breakfast – yay for me – and spent the ride napping and looking out at the English and French countryside. Penny and I didn’t take pictures, but this guy did and wrote a good description of the journey.

In Paris, our hotel was a 15 minute ride on the RER B. It was only a couple of blocks from Notre Dame and just off Place Saint-Michel.

Place Saint-Michel

More Links

As mentioned in the previous post, I fell behind on posting interesting links. I’ve been collecting them, however, and storing them in my cheeks for the winter. No, it’s not winter yet, but here are some links to explore while you prepare for hibernation.

I hate the rampant abuse of quotation marks, and so do the people who run this site. Quotation marks do not indicate irony, and they certainly don’t belong in many places you see them. In my opinion (and 8 out of 10 grammarians agree), quotation marks should be used when you’re quoting someone, to set off titles or when you need to indicate you’re writing about a word as a word.

Long Overdue Links

Eek. Life and my innate laziness kept me away from the blog for far too long. The monthly posting of sites I find interesting hasn’t been updated in what seems like forever.

So, without further delay, here’s part 1 of what I’ve been doing online lately. Warning – no theme or rhyme/reason here.

NaNoWriMo is getting close. Essentially, it’s a challenge for yourself, a contest where the only prize is finishing. You write a novel in November. Start on 11/1 and finish on 11/30. Novel is defined as 50,000 words. I did this last year and won. Okay, I wrote over 60,000 words so I met the requirements for winning, but I didn’t finish the story and haven’t touched it since. Maybe one day. Not sure what I’m writing this year, but I’ll be blogging about it as a distraction from actually doing it. Why not join me?

Certain death

As I sit in a hotel waiting for my friends to wake up, I thought it’d be a great time to clean out my growing collection of links before it got too big for the inevitable May links post.

So, without further ado … things in cyberspace that caught me eye since the last links post.