For Christmas Lucy had asked for an American Girl Doll, but I told her that would be over my dead body, which she agreed to, but I had second thoughts... Anyway, after a long search for an alternative, she chose a doll from Hello Honey Honey, on Etsy. Émile is a huge fan of this doll.
I love the idea of factoring composite numbers into their component monsters. I'm not sure if children will agree about its intuitiveness, but I am thinking of getting You Can Count On Monsters for Lucy, after hearing about it on NPR.
I really have enjoyed listening to The King Is Dead, by the Decemberists, brought to me by NPR. I loved Shankhill Butchers off of the 2006 album, Crane Wife, with its nursery rhyme malevolence. This new album is much lighter, but very good. I have the tunes humming round my head all day. Especially January Hymn.
I have started reading The Dancing Wu Li Masters, by Gary Zukov. I have two categories of books I enjoy reading these days: inconsequential fantasy, or dry. Dry anything, but I particularly love reading about mind bending physics, and quantum mechanics fits the bill. I like it that I can try to understand it, but I will fail. Like Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, comprehension isn't the point. It leaves my thinking mind with the same newly washed feeling that meditation gives my emotional and aware mind.
I have a fantasy life where I am a mathematician. When I was little, the dream was that I was a physicist, but then I realized that math was more fun actually to do. In my pursuit of understanding, I read Einstein's Relativity: The Special and the General Theory. I so desperately wanted to be smart enough to understand it, but, well.
Maybe I will follow up The Dancing Wu Li Masters with a Dan Brown book. Then I'll feel smart. For now. Until I try to write something like that...