I miss living in a climate with four distinct seasons. In North Texas it unfortunately goes from hot to cold with a very brief autumn (2-4 weeks at the most). Spring is a little longer, but it's so early it always takes me by surprise.

The lead up to Thanksgiving involves preparing to cook, and I need to clean my oven (though common sense says I should wait till after Thanksgiving to do that). I took apart the fan and the filters of the stove hood and those parts are running through the dishwasher after an initial scrub with dish soap. It had begun to thump when it started because the grease buildup had it off-balance.

Moonglow's Achille's tendon reattachment surgery was this morning, and I wanted to send her something to keep her entertained during the next week while she's off work. I found a book for my Theater Arts major child (costume design was her area of expertise, and she makes lots of costumes for friends now). I poked around Amazon and sent her a coffee-table book called Creating the Illusion: A Fashionable History of Hollywood Costume Designers (Turner Classic Movies). The blurb says it is "gloriously illustrated" and it comes in at just over 400 pages. We spoke this afternoon just before the book arrived (timed to arrive today) - and there was a bit of an excited squeal via text when she opened it. I'm tempted to get a copy myself - it sounds fascinating. Turner Classic Movies always likes to tell the story behind the story, and this apparently lives up to that.

When the kids were young I introduced them to good movies with some scholarly tricks learned in graduate school. "Passing one text over another" is the process of reading two or more books and looking for the similarities, and you can do it with all sorts of art forms. The first film I did this with intentionally with was one they had already enjoyed, the movie Chicken Run, a claymation Nick Parks film about chickens escaping from a chicken farm. A couple of weeks later I recorded Stalag 17 and one evening we sat down to watch it. They fussed about the black and white and the talking, though got sucked in by bad guy Peter Graves, and thoroughly enjoyed and understood it (I probably explained a few things about WWII along the way). Right immediately after that movie ended, I put Chicken Run in the DVD player and it started with the camera overhead, moving along the narrow buildings of the chicken farm and settling on building number 17. The kids both said "Oh!" and understood more about what this movie was portraying. And they enjoyed that kind of movie viewing after that. (I told their Dad about this, who the next weekend got them a copy of The Great Escape). Now that they're grown they're pretty good at taking a close look at any movie they're watching, and giving her a book that lets her know more about the costume designers just adds to the enjoyment (as well as the ideas for her own work.) End of a long story.

I need to start working on the reinforced cover for the dog beds I put out of Cookie's reach for the warm season. She tears these things apart, but the fabric from the retired dog-proof sofa cover can be made into a cover to encapsulate them. The dogs are all sleeping on pads at night, no longer interested in the cool tile floors. It's time.