Got a kitten, kitten, kitten, kitten in my hair

[sovay]

It is the seventh anniversary of Kittening Day, when the children of golden-eyed Hera left their fosterage with the family of a_reasonable_man and came to live with us. We celebrate them constantly.



Hestia, presiding over the remains of her scratch box. One of her cult titles is Death to Cardboard.



Autolycus, sacked out on my shoulder. A few nights ago he chased a plastic bottlecap through the apartment at exactly the hour we wanted to be asleep.

I learned tonight that in 1930, John Steinbeck wrote, shelved, but did not destroy an unpublished werewolf novel called Murder at Full Moon. "Its characters include . . . an eccentric amateur sleuth who sets out to solve the crime using techniques based on his obsession with pulp detective fiction." Take my money, please.

Comments

[jreynoldsward]

I pre-taught about the trauma pretty aggressively by talking about foreshadowing. We read the book aloud together--the imagery works really well for that age because Steinbeck can convey a lot of image with concrete language. But again, these were rural kids so they knew what it was like to go to the woods to experience life. They'd also lost pets (a hazard of mountain rural life) so the experience wasn't new. And as a horse person, I talked about strangles (especially since it had cropped up in my barn) and what the issue with it was.

I'm meh about the My Side of the Mountain movie. I saw it first, in junior high, and I didn't like it as well as the book.