Disneyworld: We Have Arrived

Hello all! We successfully made it to Florida. On Saturday night, we drove to Seattle to stay with my aunt and uncle, and then we left their house for the airport at about 3:30am Sunday. We flew out early, and had an hour layover in San Diego, but we made it to Orlando by about 5:30pm (Eastern Time). We made it to our hotel by about seven. Our hotel (a Disney resort) is HUGE. One one end is the main lobby, restaurants, and conference center (where my mom is spending a lot of her time). When you walk out the back doors of the lobby building, you find yourself on a path leading around a lake. All around the lake are smaller buildings with the actual rooms. Our room is on the exact opposite side of the place from the conference center, and it's about a ten minute walk to the main building (and food).

The pool. To the far right, you an see the end of the waterslide. To the left (off camera) is a bar and seatting area, as well as a children's play area. Behind me are the hot tub and volleyball court. This is about five minutes from our room, between it and the lobby.

Yesterday morning, we got up and went to play miniature golf. This is Disney of course, so it was Fantasia miniature golf. With our theme park tickets, we got to do this for free.

Isabelle playing minigolf.

Every part of the course was from the Fantasia movie. This is Mt. Olympus.

In the afternoon, Mom had the first session of her conference, and Isabelle and I hung out at the pool. In the evening, we took the bus to "Downtown Disney," a huge shopping and enertainment district, and ate dessert at an Irish Pub. They had a short Irish Dance program, which was fun to watch, since we were missing class that night. :)

This is outside the lego store. The entire thing behind us is made of Legos.

Here's a better view of the Lego sculpture thing (what do you call that?)

I didn't get any very good pictures of the dancing, but this guy was quite good.

Despite the very limited space, they did some soft shoe as well as hard.

They even tried to teach some little kids how to treble! 

This morning, mom is in a meeting, and we're hanging out in our room, but this afternoon, maybe around 3ish, we'll head over to the parks for the first time.

Survey

I posted this about a month ago, but for those of you who didn't see it, I wanted to ask you all again to complete this survey. Here is the original post:

I have recently realized what while you all know quite a bit about me, I don't know that much about you. I know that my readership has been growing steadily for months now, and I would like to know a little bit about you. My blog is mine, and, for the most part, I'm going to do what I want with it. At the same time, I think it is important for me to know what you think, and to know what kinds of posts and content you like. For example, if I find out that you all really like book reviews but don't care that much about homeschooling posts, I'll probably do more book reviews. I'm not going to stop posting about homeschooling, because that's a huge part of my life, but knowing what you like and don't like will help me decide what to post and how often.

Since the comments on here are notoriously unreliable, I've created a Google form with a few questions. I've tried to keep it pretty brief.

 I would very much appreciate it if you would take a minute to quickly answer the questions. Thank you so much!

Thank you so much to all of you who have already completed the survey. It is really helpful to see.

A Clash of Kings - George R. R. Martin

I finished reading A Clash of Kings (the second Song of Ice and Fire book, the sequel to A Game of Thrones) this morning, and I decided I'd do my review now, while I'm still thinking about it. This review will have spoilers for the first book, and some mild ones for this book, though I'll do my best to keep it to a minimum. Consider yourself warned.

Summary
In this thrilling sequel to A Game of Thrones, George R. R. Martin has created a work of unsurpassed vision, power, and imagination. A Clash of Kings transports us to a world of revelry and revenge, wizardry and warfare unlike any we have ever experienced.
 
A comet the color of blood and flame cuts across the sky. And from the ancient citadel of Dragonstone to the forbidding shores of Winterfell, chaos reigns. Six factions struggle for control of a divided land and the Iron Throne of the Seven Kingdoms, preparing to stake their claims through tempest, turmoil, and war. It is a tale in which brother plots against brother and the dead rise to walk in the night. Here a princess masquerades as an orphan boy; a knight of the mind prepares a poison for a treacherous sorceress; and wild men descend from the Mountains of the Moon to ravage the countryside. Against a backdrop of incest and fratricide, alchemy and murder, victory may go to the men and women possessed of the coldest steel . . . and the coldest hearts. For when kings clash, the whole land trembles.

My Review
Since I already reviewed the first book in this series, I'm not going to talk much about his writing style, or how exactly I liked the way he developed the characters or plot. Basically, I really love these books. If you want more, go read my review of the first book, in which I talk about these things a lot more.

My feelings about the various characters changed a LOT while reading this book.This is partly because you see different amounts of different characters, but also because the characters themselves have changed. Tyrion Lannister was a character I enjoyed, but didn't really like at the end of the first book, but is now one of my favorites. Sansa Stark I actually disliked in Book 1, but now I really like her. She narrated chapters in this book (did she in book 1? I can't remember), and she has a pretty terrible time of it. I felt a lot of empathy for her in addition to sympathy, which helped. She, at this point in the series, is the character I can best relate to (not that I can relate to everything she's dealt with, but certainly more that someone like Daenerys), and I always tend to like characters I can relate to. Some other characters like Theon Greyjoy, who I didn't have strong feelings about before, I now strongly dislike.

This book really ramped up the fantasy. There was actual magic happening, which definitely changed thing up. There are also dragons now, though they weren't much more than a trading commodity in this book. Some parts of the book, particularly anything involving Daenerys and Jon, seemed to really be setting up something else that never happened. I assume this will come to something in an upcoming book. The most confusing part of the book to me was Davos, the Onion Knight, who was narrating some chapters. I never really understood who he was (other than that he worked for Stannis Baratheon), or if he is actually important or not.

George R. R. Martin definitely has lived up to his reputation for killing characters, though some things happened at the end of this book that made me question a lot of the other things I had read. This book also really ended on some major cliffhangers. Almost every character's final chapter ended dramatically, and wasn't properly resolved. I can't wait to start A Storm of Swords!

Who Should Read This Book

I'm going to say basically what I said last time. If you read and enjoyed the first book in the series, read this one. These books are amazing works of fantasy, and I highly recommend them. However, these are certainly not kids or YA books, and have plenty of adult content in them that you should be aware of.

February Craziness

I usually think of February as the nice, quiet month in which I do nothing of importance or anything unordinary, this month has not been that way at all. There have been some quiet days, but on the whole, it's actually been quite busy.

I've had normal dance class, plus an extra hour of rehearsals, each week, volunteering at the library, and park day. There have also been various other normal events like Choir (in which we are singing Mozart), Current Events (in which we discussed a local issue about rebuilding the waterfront on Bellingham Bay), and World Lit (in which we discussed Tasting the Sky). In the past two weeks, I also went to a meeting of the local homeschool organization in which a panel of previously homeschooled adults answered questions, a party for a friend of my mom's from work who is living in China for the year but was home on winter break, and a play of The 39 Steps. I've also gone out to lunch twice and twice in the process.

Yeah, it hasn't been the quiet February we normally seem to have, unless I'm just making that up. In addition to all the stuff I've been doing, I have also been getting ready to go to Disneyworld. We leave really early Sunday morning from Seattle, and are actually going down the night before and staying with my aunt, so we'll really be leaving here on Saturday afternoon. We'll be in Orlando until the following Sunday, March 2nd, which is when we fly home.

Since a couple people have asked in real life, I thought I would mention that I'll probably be taking a lot of pictures on Instagram (@readerwriter512), so you can add me there if you want to see them. If I know you in real life, I'll be sharing them on facebook as well, so you can see them there. I will have several hours a day that I'll be in the hotel room while my mom's at a conference, so I might have time to do some blogging while I'm there. I'll try to post pictures here and talk about what we've been doing. If I don't have time to do that while we're there, I'll do it after we get back.

One Year Ago Today...

One year ago today, I started blogging here. It wasn't my first blog (more like my 6th), but it was the first one that I would call successful. I've kept with it for a whole year now, and I have posted regularly that whole time. My readership keeps growing at a steady rate, and I am getting more and more interaction with my reader. I love blogging, and I'm so glad you all seem to like me doing it too!

For my one year anniversary, I thought I would share with you some of my most popular posts this last year.

My number one post of all time is Comments!  I have no clue why this is so popular, since it's really just a standard life update from last month, but it is.

Coming in a very close second is this post from last year. It's a book review of Matched by Ally Condie. Nearly half of all my incoming search traffic goes to that post as well, which is interesting.

Next is the post Writing in Books from last March, in which I talk a little about how I rate books in my reviews.

Fourth is the post Some Thoughts for 2014, which, within 24 hours of posting, had nearly double the views that some of my posts from last spring have.

Fifth, and last for this list, is this link up I did at the beginning of the school year.

When you count the pages on my top of my blog as well as the post, my About Me page is the most viewed part of my blog. The Book Reviews, and Homeschool Friday pages are also way up there.

Weird is Good {Book List}

(This post contains affiliate links.)

Starting today, I'm going to be highlighting some of my favorite books, both those I read as a kid, and those I currently read and love. I'm going to be dividing them into categories, and we're going to start today with the category I don't have a name for. If you've read all the books on this list, you can probably figure out what I'm talking about.

I call these "weird books" for lack of a better term. They all have a fantasy aspect, and also a real life slant. They are probably my favorite books ever. They combine fantastic writing with unique characters and crazy worlds and plots. They are each unique in themselves, and that is really the main thing that ties them together.

1. The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster. This is probably my very favorite kids book of all time.



 2. The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart. While I loved the whole series, I'm thinking more about the first book here, and not the whole thing.



3. The Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket.



5. The Keys to the Kingdom series by Garth Nix



7. His Dark Materials trilogy by Phillip Pullman





These are some of my all time favorite books. As I look back on the list, I realize they are all kids books. There are some books by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett that probably belong on this list too (Good Omens, anyone?), since I really do love both of them, but I'm leaving them off for now.

So, looking at this list, what do you think the unifying themes are? What is it about these books that make me group them together? I'm honestly not completely sure myself, though I do see some themes of magic, fantasy, and dark themes. What do you think? Have you read these books? Do you like them?

Over the next month or two, I'm going to do a bunch more of these lists on different topics. Let me know if you have any I should cover. Some I'm planning on are:

History and Historical Fiction (this will be a long one!)
Classics
Sci-fi and Fantasy
Realistic Fiction

General Life Update

This isn't strictly a school update, but it's more of a school/life combo update. First of all, here is a brief summary of my school week:

I have been reading The Travels of Marco Polo. I'm only one chapter in, but it's already reminding me of a cross between The Boy's and Girl's Herodotus, and Gulliver's Travels, though it's way more like Herodotus. I've been doing well in Latin, studying 3rd conjugation -io verbs (does this mean anything to anyone else, or is it all just me blabbering?), and I'm doing graphing in math. In Rhetoric, I'm still doing analogies, and I'm barely squeaking along in science.

In other things, there's snow! It wasn't a lot, and, (outside the Starbucks I'm currently sitting in) it's almost all gone, but it was snowing when I got up. Also, I watched the Superbowl this year, for the first time in my life. Since the Seahawks won, it has been getting crazy around here. Everyone is really happy, and the general mood here in the Pacific Northwest is generally quite good.

I've had a pretty quiet week. I had dance, but other than that I've been laying low and trying to get work done. I also finished reading Tasting the Sky, which I plan on reviewing pretty soon. I'm still working on A Clash of Kings, which definitely gotten to the point of being exciting. I'm 600+ pages in, and people are dying and big stuff is happening. I wish I had more time to read it, but I'm also reading two other books, in addition to all my school stuff, so time is a bit limited.

I've been doing some editing in my spare time, which is fun. I really want the Chicago Manual of Style for my birthday now. It's the reference material that is considered the definitive text for most grammar or style related questions. I also want some Irish dance hard shoes. Both the shoes and the book tend to run in the $65 (the book) to $150 (the shoes) range, so I'm not sure how good my chances. I thought I should start asking early (my birthday's not for four months :) ) to get the word out.

In dance, we're preparing for our performance in March, which I think will be really good. In two weeks, we're going to Florida, which I am really looking forward to. It will be great to have some warm weather and Disneyworld will be awesome.

Next week, on Valentine's Day, we are going to see a play of 39 Steps with a bunch of friends. I know nothing about the play, so it should be a lot of fun.

That's all for this week. What have you been up to?