A Girl With a Sword

corn and gorillas: this is Nebraska to me

I saw lots of corn. We drove back from Nebraska yesterday, all in one day. That was a lot of corn for one day. I don't think I'm all here now, but I felt the need to post again before I got lazy. Anyway, Masters of Education (I like that name, it's kind of like Masters of the Universe, can't you just see it "I am Daphne Haddad, Master of Education." so cool.) is here now, so I can get into the nice Mills computer labs.

I spent three full days visiting my family and two of those days I spent at the zoo. I love the Omaha zoo. My mom got us a pass and I plan to visit it more at Christmastime. I wonder what zoos are like in the winter. Anyway, they just built a whole new gorilla complex (which my brother refers to as "The Valley of the Apes"). It's very strange to watch the gorillas come up and stare through the glass at me and realize that their gestures remind me a lot of my grandpa. I think my favorite part of the zoo is the giraffes. They look like something from a strange fantastic story, nothing about them looks natural. We watched the giraffe keeping herding the giraffes into their building at the end of the day and he came only halfway up their legs. Speaking of tall things, there is a huge cornfield directly behind our house and I went wandering around back there one evening. The corn must be about nine feet tall and the leaves are so big it's hard to walk. It's like a jungle when you get in there. You can't see more than a few feet in any direction.

I've ditched that Charles Williams book I was reading and have taken up Robin McKinley's Spindle's End. I love McKinley's retellings of fairy tales. In fact, any retelling of a fairy tale is pretty interesting to me, just to see what the author choses to elaborate on. This particular story is a retelling of Sleeping Beauty. Like in most modern retellings the handsome prince is almost nonexistant and the strength of ordinary people is emphasized. I like McKinley, though, because unlike a lot of authors these days she leaves in the magic. It's so disheartening for me, who grew up with all the fairy tales, to read a retelling where the magic is entirely discounted.