Animal Wise: How We Know Animals Think and Feel by Virginia Morell

The author of Animal Wise, Virginia Morell, compiles in this book many recent studies done on animals demonstrating that they are not purely driven by the need to eat and procreate. There is a level of cognition in these animals proving that they indeed think and feel.

Although not all of the studies are complete and some have not yet been peer reviewed, they show what anyone who has spent time with animals already knows. From ants to elephants, there is a level of intelligence. What we sometimes thought was anthropomorphization was actually a hint at what lies in the animal mind.

Written in a way that makes the studies easy to understand while also entertaining, I recommend Animal Wise if you have ever wondered what animals are thinking.

P.S. I made a Pinterest board of my favorite facts from each chapter here.

Happy 88th Birthday Sir Attenborough!

Happy Earth Day!

Reduce, reuse, recycle!

long weekends

We got a lot of yard work done on our long weekend. It's looking good back there. Final project is a mini grass patch for the spoiled mini pack!

P.S. Cha Cha Chia Chihuahua is by Mike Holzer.

The Taste of Apple Seeds by Katharina Hagena

The Taste of Apple Seeds takes place in Germany and has been translated from German.

A 20-something girl named Iris is shocked to learn she has inherited her grandmother's house. After her grandmother's funeral, she decides to stay in the house for a week to see if she should stay there or go back to being a librarian in another town.

As she explores the house she relives memories and unearths some family secrets. Iris didn't know she was going to inherit the house and winds up wearing her aunts' and grandmother's old gowns because she didn't bring a change of clothes. She then rides her grandfather's bike around town and continues to run into her friend's little brother, now grown up into a hottie, whenever she leaves the property.

This was a cute story, but forgettable. Marketed as magical realism, I would classify it as romance.

P.S. This book counts as my Published in 2014 book for the Eclectic Reader Challenge, and my Book That Has a Connection with the Number "14" for the Take It or Leave It Challenge.

Hooray it's Opening Day!

Too bad the Dbacks lost though. :(

But yay! I get to watch baseball again!

Everything I Need To Know I Learned From a Little Golden Book by Diane E. Muldrow

Everything I Need To Know I Learned From a Little Golden Book by Diane E. Muldrow is a little montage of Little Golden Book illustrations through the years paired with words of wisdom.

Although I had a lot of hand me down books from my sisters, most of the illustrations were from stories older than the ones I had. It still put a smile on my face. You will really like it too if you enjoy cute vintage illustrations like these:

This would make a good gift and would also be a good coffee table book.

P.S. This counts as my Book That I Discovered on an LT Thread in 2013 for the Take It or Leave It Challenge.

Darwin: Portrait of a Genius by Paul Johnson

I read Charles & Emma in 2011, and although I learned some of Mr. Darwin's life, a lot of the focus was on his family and their reactions or connections to his work. This year I read Darwin: Portrait of a Genius for Darwin Week to learn a little more about his scientific life.

I really liked how the information about Darwin's life was laid out in this book. It wasn't too dry and it seemed to hit all the high points and spaces between concisely. One interesting fact was that he was a wealthy man, and if he had paid someone to read and gather other scientific papers from the time, Darwin would have had the crucial missing piece of his theory of evolution. "Darwin showed the what of evolution and the why, natural selection. Now Mendel had produced the how, genetics." The irony is that Mendel was a priest! Yes, a priest completed Darwin's theory of evolution by trying to grow the best peas for the other priests in his monastery. Mendel's Laws, that rang a bell.

The other big aha for me in this book was the chapter about Social Darwinism. I had heard that term before but never put too much thought into it. Darwin loved using the term "struggle" when referring to how living things adapt to survive. ("Survival of the fittest" is actually Herbert Spencer's term, which Darwin liked and added in his fifth edition of On the Origin of Species.) As time went on, people chose to misinterpret and misuse his scientific work and apply it incorrectly to the economy or sociology. Hitler's a good example of using Darwin's theory of evolution in a terrible way. Mein Kampf...My Struggle. Yikes. Or others who believe poor people deserve to be poor because they are obviously not fit enough to survive like rich people. Poor Darwin. If he knew how people misused his work he probably would have been horrified, although the author suggests that he was somewhat culpable by, "...always [carefully steering] clear of politics as such."

Reading about the true genius of Charles Darwin was fascinating. I recommend this biography if you love science or are in a creative rut. The man is an inspiration, and born on the exact day as another great thinker of the time, Abraham Lincoln.

P.S. This counts as my Book You Received as a Present for the Take It or Leave It Challenge. (I got it for Christmas from my nephew Kyle.)

quote of the week

Even though I'm on Spring Break this week I still got my first grader fix when my friend, Tanya, brought her daughter, Maddie, to lunch. Maddie loves sci fi just like me so I think we'll be BFFs.

Maddie talked about how she likes to dress up like Princess Leia so her mom asked, What's your favorite scene in Star Wars?

Maddie thought for a moment and said, "When Princess Leia met the mini-Chewbaccas...the Ewoks!"

I love it! The force is strong with that one.

P.S. Ewok Star Wars Poster was made by Glenn.

Happy 1st Day of Spring!

Today I'm reading Full Dark, No Stars by Stephen King. The stories are pretty horrific so far, quite in contrast to this photo.

What are you reading?

P.S. Wild Flowers is by Su Blackwell.

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

I celebrated by day drinking with my friend Erin and watching Leprechaun's Revenge. Good times!

P.S. Grumpy St. Patricks Day came from Grumpy Cat.

Snowy Owl Classroom Fun

Tuesday on my way to school I heard a cool story on NPR about how all these snowy owls are suddenly showing up in the USA, which is uncommon. Why? the biologists wondered. Climate change? No. Crazy weather? No. The answer is a plethora of delicious lemmings.

I was excited to share the story with my class. We were reading a fiction story about a bird learning to fly this week, The Story of a Blue Bird.

I sat my students down at the rug and started summarizing what I had heard, our luck in having snowy owls visit our country. I was just about to tell them the reason why they are here and stopped myself. Instead I asked, Can you figure out why they're here all of a sudden? Think about what you know about living things. (In first grade we learn that living things need food, water, air, and shelter.)

My little sassy girl raised her hand and said, "Maybe they're here because there's a lot of food, like, I don't know, a bunch of mice or something?"

Take that biologists! I have a future candidate for you!

P.S. 1920s GIRL SCIENTIST Looking into a MICROSCOPE came from sandshoevintageprint.

Project Life May 2013 continued

I really like how this week turned out. It includes Corey meeting Grumpy Cat, a pack walk, buying flowers for 2 of my favorite people, 2 students watering our class garden, Mad Men, Star Trek Into Darkness, a funny hat bike ride, and The Preakness Stakes.

A closer look...The Born in the USA thing came from the packaging Corey's flowers came in. I also wanted to note that Corey meets celebrities constantly at his job and rarely takes pictures of them for himself, but he couldn't resist when Grumpy Cat came to the station.

Another post card saved from advertising days used for finishing season 2 of Mad Men, mounted on a junk mail card:

Vellum and patterned paper:

Star Trek pic printed off the internet, and Liberty Market sign pic taken by me:

The sign pic goes with a bike ride my friend Stephanie organized with her bf. I added a sticker to the pics on the left and used part of their invitation for a caption on the pic on the right:

Here's the whole page, mostly about the bike ride but I fit the Preakness from the previous day in too:

Again I used the invitation as my background here. Saved me from journaling the who, what, when, where...

Coincidentally the canal we rode along was constructed exactly 100 years before. It says, "WATER FROM THE SALT RIVER RUNS THROUGH THE CITY":

This pic from the Preakness is from the newspaper. I just added journaling and a sticker:

Again, you can be creative with the materials you find around you to scrapbook with. The only traditional supplies I used were 3 stickers, 4 scraps of patterned paper, a post-it note, and a vellum die cut.

The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer

The Interestings is the very first book selection in the A Beautiful Mess Book Club and since I'm obsessed with Elsie and by default her sister I thought it would be fun to join in. At the time this book was only available in hardcover and I almost always wait until books come out in paperback but I had a gift card from my nephew so I lived large and got it.

The story is about a group of kids who become friends at a summer art camp and dub themselves "The Interestings." OMG I love coming of age stories and these are artistic kids too! I was pumped. After we meet them they grow up and...don't do very many interesting things. The story dragged on and on but I have a pretty strict finish-it-if-I-start-it policy because I'm an optimist and always think the story can come around at the end. Not the case here. In addition, one of my favorite characters didn't even get a wrap-up at the end. Boo.

But one part made me laugh. Jules, one of the main characters, was about to have sex in a bunk bed with her boyfriend and didn't want to climb up the ladder first because she was self-conscious about him watching her from behind. So she goes:

"After you, kind sir," she said--oh God, had she really said that? And why? Was she pretending to be a Victorian prostitute?--sweeping out her arm.

LOL! It just seems like a dorky move I would make.

Here's another quote I liked:

"There was this Grimms' fairy tale that our mother used to read us," she said. "A brother and sister run off into the woods to get away from their evil stepmother. It's always a stepmother, never a stepfather; even fairy tales are sexist."

I wanted so badly to like this book but I just didn't.

P.S. This book counts as my Work of Fiction from the New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2013 book for the Take It or Leave It Challenge. Is there something I'm not getting here?

Project Life May 2013

It's been awhile since I shared my pages but I'm still doing Project Life and loving it. I'm almost done with November.

This week documents a card for Teacher Appreciation Day, watching Dbacks baseball, Survivor, and Mad Men, rereading The Great Gatsby, having a clean-a-thon in the bedroom, and Captain enjoying the backyard.

Angi remembers me on Teacher Appreciation Day every year with a card mailed to the school. So thoughtful. Glad I have this Project as a place to display this super cool card and remind me of one of the many special things she does for me.

The Dbacks logo on the base is from some junk mail, and the Survivor sticker came with a Buff we bought. Reduce, reuse, recycle!

I have a postcard book featuring women in advertising through the years. I tore out this ad from 1962 which is when this season of Mad Men took place. I'm more likely to look at it in here than in the postcard book.

I saved the Chipotle bag, cut out the talk bubble, filled it with brown cardstock, and filled in my own journaling from the night (a run-on sentence but really this is for me right?). More waste saved from the recycle bin!

Spoiler alert from 2 Survivor seasons ago! Cochran wins, and Corey and I were very happy about it. I printed this pic off the internet.

Captain Skippyjon Jones loves relaxing in the "creepy crawly" and it makes for a nice photo op, don't you think? I just added a little scrapbook paper at the bottom.

Just a reminder for people who say scrapbooking is too expensive...on this entire page I only used 3 scraps of scrapbook paper, a post it note, and some letter stickers. The rest of the materials are things I had on hand or scavenged from my life that week, + photographs. You can do it too!