Life Update {Dancing, Diagraming, Editing, and Reading}

It's been a little while since I just talked about what is going on in my life. I have been, in some ways, incredibly busy, and in other ways, not busy at all. What I mean by this is that I'm spending a lot less time running around to activities outside the house, but that I have a ton of things that I need to do at home.

I'm performing on March 15 and 16 with my Irish Dance group. This is a bit exciting because it's definitely the biggest show this class has done together. If you live in the Bellingham area and are interested in seeing us dance, we are dancing on March 16th at the Firehouse Performing Arts Center in Fairhaven. Click here for more details. Our Irish section of the show is about 30 min. long. There are also two or other shorts by other dance groups who are affiliated with Northwest Ballet, including the title program "Into the Night." On the 15th, we are performing our section of the show three or four times at various locations (probably nursing homes and similar places) throughout the day.

A few days ago, a friend posted this sentence on facebook, accompanied with the challenge "Is there a grammar nerd out there superb enough to correctly diagram this sentence?":

In after-years [Piglet] liked to think that he had been in Very Great Danger during the Terrible Flood, but the only danger he had really been in was in the last half-hour of his imprisonment, when Owl, who had just flown up, sat on a branch of his tree to comfort him, and told him a very long story about an aunt who had once laid a seagull’s egg by mistake, and the story went on and on, rather like this sentence, until Piglet who was listening out of his window without much hope, went to sleep quietly and naturally, slipping slowly out of the window towards the water until he was only hanging on by his toes, at which moment luckily, a sudden loud squawk from Owl, which was really part of the story, being what his aunt said, woke Piglet up and just gave him time to jerk himself back into safety and say, “How interesting, and did she?” when—well, you can imagine his joy when at last he saw the good ship, The Brain of Pooh (Captain, C. Robin; 1st Mate, P. Bear) coming over the sea to rescue him.

While I haven't had time to really do much but stare at it yet, this is definitely something I plan on attempting soon.  From 3rd to 8th grades, I diagramed on a nearly daily basis (not quite, but nearly), but I've done almost none since then. I'm thinking I'm going to give this a shot tomorrow afternoon (though I'm sure it will take me a lot more than one afternoon!), and I'll let you know how it's going in a couple of days.

I'll do a full school update post tomorrow, but for now I just wanted to say that a LOT of my time this week, (or at least yesterday and today), have been spent completely updating and organizing my Latin and Spanish flashcards. This is a much bigger job than you might think, especially considering that I have nearly 600 Latin cards and about 200 Spanish ones.

I've taken a break from editing recently, while the author did some writing, but just this week he sent me three chapters of a new book to work on.

Also, I have recently started using goodreads (as you can see from the widget in the sidebar), and I am finding that my TBR list is growing at an alarming rate now. My to read shelf on goodreads is nearly 200 titles long!

For a long time (especially since I started reading FYA, which has a love/hate relationship with her work), I've heard about V. C. Andrews, her books, her writing, and her legacy. This week, after Lifetime released their new tv movie of Flowers in the Attic, I was reading more about the books (actually, I was reading a hilarious but extremely spoilery plot analysis of Flowers in the Attic on FYA), I think I may have to read them sometime. I've always passed this off as another iconic but poorly written series from the 1980's that I had no need to experience. But after seeing the battle raging on social media after the movie aired (that book is extremely polarizing. There are as many people who want to burn every copy ever written as there are who say it was the best book of their childhood), I think I may have to actually experience it for myself.

Since I really don't have time right now, I've decided that The Dollanganger series will be set aside for my summer reading project.

All right, this post is now a lot longer than it needed to be. :) Does anyone want to take on the diagramming challenge with me? What are your thoughts on Flowers in the Attic? If you can (ack!), let me know in the comments. If you know what might be causing my commenting problem, please email me at readingwritinghighschool@gmail.com.