Here is the birthday girl rocking a madly fashionable zebra print ensemble. Fabulous!
Grandpa Carson's two little girls.
Maddy needed a little encouragement to dig in to her cake.
Rockin' in her new chair from Cathy and Grandpa Carson.
Opening Presents with Mom!
Delia and I decided this year to forgo the crepe paper streamers and instead make some decorations for her birthday that could be reused. These banners are the result of our first night's work. The big one is made from triangles we measured and cut out of a length of felt. Each is 5 inches wide at the top. They are machine stitched along with a piece of black ric-rac. Super simple, mega cute. I wanted to cut the felt triangles with pinking shears so they would have zig-zaggy edges to kind of echo the ric-rac, but alas, my Grandma's pinkers are plenty old and not as sharp as they used to be (much like me). They wouldn't cut the felt, so the edges of these pennants are just straight. 
These little guys are made from scraps I had left over. They came out pretty awesome, for being all kinds of random. I did sort the triangles generally by size, and then stacked them so the littlest ones would be closest to the ends. Just overlap the triangles a little bit as you feed them through the machine and they come out strung together. I made little loop hangers for the ends out of pieces of felt, and stitched them onto the end triangles.It's the birthday of Philip Pullman, (books by this author) born in Norwich, England (1946). His father died in the air force when Philip was seven, and was awarded a medal after his death, and Philip grew up believing his father had been shot down. He learned much later that his father died in a plane crash, and that he had been dropping bombs on the Mau Maus in Kenya, who had no weapons sophisticated enough to shoot down a plane.
His favorite stories as a kid were the cowboy and gangster shows on the radio, ghost stories, and also comics, especially Superman and Batman. He said, "I was sure that I was going to write stories myself when I grew up. It's important to put it like that: not 'I am a writer,' but rather 'I write stories.' If you put the emphasis on yourself rather than your work, you're in danger of thinking that you're the most important thing. But you're not. The story is what matters, and you're only the servant, and your job is to get it out on time and in good order."
He went to Oxford, but he earned the lowest class of degree. He said, "I thought I was doing quite well until I came out with my third class degree and then I realized that I wasn't — it was the year they stopped giving fourth class degrees otherwise I'd have got one of those." He got a job teaching English to middle schoolers, and he published a novel called The Haunted Storm (1972). He usually acts as if The Haunted Storm doesn't exist when he discusses the books he has written, although it did win an award for young writers — he was only 25 at the time it was published.
Pullman was a popular teacher, and he got his start with children's literature by writing plays for his middle school students to perform. Out of those plays came the books that launched his career as a respected and popular writer, books like Count Karlstein (1982) and The Ruby in the Smoke (1986), the first in his series starring the spirited Victorian heroine Sally Lockhart.
But the books that really made him famous are a trilogy called His Dark Materials, named for a passage in Milton's Paradise Lost:
"Into this wilde Abyss,
The Womb of nature and perhaps her Grave,
Of neither Sea, nor Shore, nor Air, nor Fire,
But all these in their pregnant causes mixt
Confus'dly, and which thus must ever fight,
Unless th' Almighty Maker them ordain
His dark materials to create more Worlds."
The first book was published as Northern Lights (1995) in Britain, but in the United States they called it The Golden Compass. The books tell the story of two children, Lyra and Will, who journey through shifting worlds, learning about a mysterious particle called Dust that the Church believes is the physical embodiment of Original Sin. They eventually take down the Kingdom of Heaven. The books are full of armored bears, witches, gypsies, people with animal companions who represent their souls, and portals between parallel universes. Despite this, Pullman said, "I've always resisted calling it a fantasy, just to be perverse, and tried to maintain that it's a story of stark realism."
His most recent book is The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ (2010), a retelling of the story of Jesus, which divides him into two separate figures: Jesus, a loving and radical preacher, and Christ, his smart and manipulative twin who twists his brother's message and establishes a power structure in order to ensure that Christianity survives. Philip Pullman said: "I have always written what I wanted to write. I have never considered the audience for one second. Ever. It's none of their business what I write! Before publication, I am a despot."
When he writes a book, he writes down scenes on Post-It notes, and then he puts them all on a giant piece of paper and rearranges them. He said that he believes in exercise and healthful eating, but that he himself doesn't practice either of those things, and that the most exercise he usually gets in a day is unscrewing the whiskey bottle.
lifted from The Writer's Almanac
It's the birthday of the novelist and essayist George Orwell, (books by this author) born Eric Arthur Blair in Bengal, India (1903). He grew up in England in what he described as the "lower-upper-middle class," in a family that acted as if it were from the upper class but didn't really have much money. He was sent off to private boarding schools, which he hated. After graduation, he wanted to get as far away from England as possible, so he joined the British Imperial Police in Burma, which he hated just as much. He saw that the system was unjust, and he was forced to act as one of the oppressors. So he went back to England, and he said, "I felt that I had got to escape not merely from imperialism but from every form of man's dominion over man. I wanted to submerge myself, to get right down among the oppressed, to be one of them and on their side against the tyrants." He worked for a while as a dishwasher, then a teacher, and then he decided to try writing. He used his experiences of being poor and unemployed, and he wrote Down and Out in Paris and London (1933).
He worked as a journalist, and he was sent to cover the Spanish Civil War. In Barcelona, he observed a communist utopia, and he said, "Many of the normal motives of civilized life — snobbishness, money-grubbing, fear of the boss, etc. — had simply ceased to exist. … I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for." But then he watched communism and fascism turn into extremist ideologies, and he decided that idealism was always dangerous in the extreme. He continued as a journalist, but he said, "Only the mentally dead are capable of sitting down and writing novels while this nightmare is on."
But then one day he saw a boy leading a horse down the road, and he wondered what would happen if domesticated animals banded together to stage a revolution, and he wrote one of his most famous novels, Animal Farm (1945), modeled on the Bolshevik Revolution. Over the next few years, while he was suffering from tuberculosis, he wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). He died a few months after it was published, and today it is considered one of the best dystopian novels ever written, and even people who have never read Nineteen Eighty-Four probably use the phrase "Big Brother is watching you."
He said, "Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers."
It's the birthday of poet Jennifer Michael Hecht, (books by this author) born in Glen Cove, New York (1965). She's the author of The Next Ancient World (2001) and Funny (2005).
Her poem "Blind Love" begins:
Lady says, Doc, I think I need glasses.
Teller says, You sure do, Lady, this is a bank.
In the poem "History," she describes Eve in the Garden of Eden as "the only soul in all of time / to never have to wait for love," who "wished to trade-in all of Eden / to have but been a child."
She's also a scholar of intellectual history; she has a Ph.D. from Columbia — in the History of Science. She's the author of Doubt: A History (2003), The End of the Soul: Scientific Modernity, Atheism and Anthropology (2003), and The Happiness Myth: Why What We Think Is Right Is Wrong (2007).
Each day goes down in history, wets its feet,
bathes in the clear or murky stream, drinks deep,
comes out to join past days on the other bank.
We go in with the bathing day, every morning,
brace the shiver on our skin, taste the slaking
of thirst, find footing on mossy rock. Climb out
with sleep. Waking, we're back on the first bank,
wading with a new day into the kaleidoscopic
water. Days far from either bank are barely seen
and seem unseeing. There is no recording of them
that knows the cold and quenching of their moment
in the water. Yet I cannot let them go, nor bear
the strong suggestion formed by their fading figures
that they have let us go and that those coming cannot
be foretold anything actual of water, flesh, or stone.
Publisher holds out a large envelope says, Sorry.
We can't publish your autobiography.
Man sighs, says, Story of my life.
All these words, then, are only for the stream?
The stream is everything? The stream is not enough?
The specters on the banks are deaf but listening?
The book of his which I have read is Invisible Cities, and it is indeed magical and weird.
