Hill and Bill and the heavies

Not a good weekend here at the old homestead. Woke up Saturday, and spent the next seven hours in an intestinal nightmare. Then I shivered and napped for another eight hours except for three calls from the Clinton campaign. Ate a baked potato. Slept another eight hours. Woke up Sunday with a calm stomach, but weak knees, sore abdomen, and pinchy twinges in my back, not to mention three more calls from the Clinton campaign. Ate another baked potato.

I believe strongly in the healing power of a baked potato for most of what ails me. Wish I believed as strongly in any candidate for public office. I was beginning to believe Hillary had called down a curse upon me after I cast my early ballot after the luncheon Friday afternoon. My brain was set on High Foggy all Saturday. Everything seemed like a bad community playhouse production of the Wizard of Oz. That Yellow Brick Road is just your intestine, Mama, and dang if those flying monkeys didn't get inside it!

Turned out six of the seven school staff members at our annual luncheon Friday had the same churning gut weekend. I'm not sure if they voted, but I bet Hillary and Bill kept their phone ringing. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. It's just Bill [and his little dog Toto]. And please pass the soothing pink Pepto Bismal.

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Merlin Goes Mod

Merlin, the wizard of Arthurian tales, has been portrayed as a time-traveler. My students discovered that Merlin had spent some time visiting the last half of the twentieth century, a time most mod, hip, and groovy, when they interior decorated their wizard towers last week. They also gave his tower a moderately mad scientist look with a telescope on the roof and a chemistry lab by the fireplace. The spells and potions books they made were quite similar to Texas roadkill recipes. I just wish we'd had enough time to make little Oster blenders so Merlin could make nutritious/delicious [eye of] newt smoothies.



History may look back on the past forty years of architecture and interior design with a critical newt eye. I've lived through flocked wallpaper, foil wallpaper, and flocked foil wallpaper. Do-it-yourselfers put crinkle veined mirror tiles on bathroom, living room, and allegedly elegant dining room walls. Both VWs and bathtubs got groovy daisies. The bathtub ones were non-slip, at least. Law students studied in eyeball chairs at the University of Nebraska. Student apartments were hung with black light posters. New construction homes and ancient mildewed basements both got very scary shag carpets in red, burnt orange, and avocado green.



Perhaps strangest of all were the early-1980s personalized custom travel vans with shag carpet on most surfaces. These family vacation get-away van exteriors were done up with airbrush paintings that were part NRA hunting billboards, part carnival midway caricatures, and part drunken truck driver tattoos. A Nascar vehicle looks sophisticated and understated by comparison. That may have been too much for Merlin, as the fad seemed to disappear from the face of the United States as if someone said, "Abracadabra, please and thank you very much!"

Peter Harlaub wrote in the 10/04/05 San Francisco Chronicle about this mysterious disappearance. His story is, "Once, custom vans ruled the road" is worth a read.



My students didn't have to travel through time to style their wizard towers. We received a goodly batch of gift wrap samples that took the place of foil, flock, and crinkle veins. It was a magical riot of cut and paste, plus glitter tempera paint! If only we'd had some shag rug samples--and a disco ball or two.

Low-end wizardry

My young students are having a magical time thinking about wizards and dragons this month. Most of them are just learning to read, so they are aware of Harry Potter through commercials and perhaps the movies, but not the printed word. I admit I enjoyed the first three Harry Potter books, but then it became too onerous a task to keep up with the series.

My brother, and later my oldest son, were Tolkien junkies, reading the whole Lord of the Rings cycle around and around for years. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis left me cold. I read Little Women every year during Christmas break, books about archaeology, and my favorite Laura Ingalls Wilder books many times. Given a good dugout roof over my head, a blizzard or two, and a plague of grasshoppers, I was a happy young reader.

So I was interested to overhear the kindergarten kids talking about the wizard headmaster, Double Door. Not the wise, powerful, and possibly deceased Dumbledore of Hogwarts Academy--I think Double Door presides over the Hogwash Academy of Wizardry housed in the aluminum double-wides down at Uncle Cam's Trailer Lot. Before he became headmaster, Double Door was the professor of bug zapping, and K-Mart blue light spells. When Hogwash Academy has a Sorting Hat ceremony, the hat still has a price tag hanging on it.

Bring on the grasshoppers.

Watch how you flick that wand

Wizard camp is in full gear. We were horsing around pretending to do trick shots with magic wands, shades of our Annie Oakley Wild West camp sneaking back in.

Don't try this at home! We were wand-zapping behind our backs. "You wouldn't want to accidently turn your mother into a frog," I said. A preschooler piped up, "Maybe you could turn her into a crab!"

Forget the magic wand! I'm sure every kid in this camp has the power to change Mom into a crab any day of the week.

Any afternoon we arrived home from Eastridge Elementary School and found my mother vacuuming or cleaning my brother's room, we knew she would have been magically turned into a crab. On such occasions, it is good to retreat into your wizard cave. Maybe practice those most excellent magic words--Please, Thank you, and I'm sorry!

Building the Raytheon Castle

I am a fortunate beneficiary of a corporate recycling initiative. Raytheon has organized giveaways of recycled materials for art teachers and other educators. The events are held in a Texas Instruments parking lot, and art teachers go wild scooping up boxes, tubes, packing materials, lids, and other goodies that aren't easy to describe. These events promote art teacher brainstorms, encourage employees to participate in the company recycling effort, and cut costs for art class materials. The quantities of materials are sometimes tricky to control. I will cart a Buick full of boxes back to my classroom, then spend weeks figuring out strange ways to use all the materials.And so, my preschoolers are building Raytheon castles. We are gluing together boxes for throne rooms, thrones, and windows, with dimpled sponge packing foam pieces for the "stone" walls. The kids are especially excited about the gray sponge foam block we are using for a stone. Not just any stone, but the stone for the popsicle stick sword. Whosoever pulleth forth this sword from the stone in crowned rightful King of England!Today we played Pass the Paint while we painted the castles. Tomorrow we will make clothespin people for the castle. Thursday we will add a magical dragon to the castle. The clay dragons have been fired, and are ready for painting!