We've vaguely known for awhile that there was park land behind the York Central Hospital, which is about a 25 minute walk from our house, as I discovered last summer when I spent eight days walking back and forth each day to visit John in the hospital. We decided to walk out after school yesterday to see what the park lands were like. As you can see from the photo they are very pretty! It's nice to have another rather rustic walking spot so close to home!

( Woods and Wildlife. )

We took the two Gr. 4 classes to Medieval Times in Toronto on Friday. It's become pretty much a rite of passage at our school- when you hit Gr. 4 you get to go to Medieval Times. The kids talk about it all year long- how they get to eat with their hands, how they get to see horses, how they get to see jousting. Most of them have been told all about it by older siblings or friends in older grades. I had one girl tell me her older sister had instructed her to try to catch a "rose" (actually a carnation) from her knight champion, as the sister had caught one the year she had gone. And the sister this year did manage to catch one, too :).

I find after having gone seven or eight times myself I get a little jaded, but if I keep looking at Medieval Times through the eyes of a nine-year-old I will always know it's one of the most magical, awesome, amazing places imaginable :).

( Photos beyond )

The newest member of the family clan :). Reilly is my Dad and sisters', Sheilagh and Anne's, new kitten! So very cute!

( Reilly! )

A couple of months ago I was studying the Adventure genre with my students and it seemed the best movie I could show them was "The Princess Bride", which most of them had never seen before and is one of my favorite movies ever and has about the best definition of an adventure book/movie that I could imagine:

The Grandson: A book?
Grandpa: That's right. When I was your age, television was called books. And this is a special book. It was the book my father used to read to me when I was sick, and I used to read it to your father. And today I'm gonna read it to you.
The Grandson: Has it got any sports in it?
Grandpa: Are you kidding? Fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, miracles...
The Grandson: Doesn't sound too bad. I'll try to stay awake.
Grandpa: Oh, well, thank you very much, very nice of you. Your vote of confidence is overwhelming.

The kids really loved the movie and I was glad and I will show it again next year.

So today I showed them the first two episodes of the BBC series "Robin of Sherwood", because we're studying Medieval England and we've just finished a novel of Robin Hood adventures and it's still my favorite screen version of the Robin Hood legend. And the kids loved it, too, and they really got into it and they are very excited about writing and performing their own Robin Hood plays.

But I didn't quite realize how much of an influence these movies were having on them until the very last scene of "Robin of Sherwood", where Robin and Marian are being married by Herne the Hunter and I heard a boy across the room saying under his breath- "Mawwiage. It's what bwings us togevah today.".

:)

As a teacher sometimes you really do create a monster... in a good way.

Heaven help me, I actually decided to play around with my Pinterest page a bit. It can get kind of addicting once you get started. Anyway, you can find my page here (hope it can be seen without registering!). Not sure how to friend people over there, but feel free to friend me, if you like.

Thanks to those of you who have left such nice comments about these con reports! What with my cyber life straddling LiveJournal and Facebook (though I prefer living at LJ), I’m never quite sure who is seeing these reports :). Nice to know some people are reading!

My thanks to Phil Mills for letting me borrow his photos. All credited photos are his, the rest are mine. You can find his whole set of photos here.

Let’s finish this up.

( Filk Hall of Fame Concert )

Somewhere in the late afternoon during the concerts Walter showed up, so we went to get ready for the banquet and then headed down together. I ended up sitting beside Ellen Kranzer, where the two of us laughed about actually being able to relax and eat at the banquet this year :)(we were both inducted into the Filk Hall of Fame last year). But it did make me more aware there were a handful of other people in the room sweating out those last few minutes before going up to become the newest inductees!

( Filk Hall of Fame )

Headed down to breakfast Saturday morning where we were joined by FKO Toast Waif Paul Estin and his fiancé Kate. We hadn’t caught up with Paul in quite a long time, so that was really nice. Took a spin
through the Dealer’s Room and got tempted by many things- CDs, instruments, music books, paperbacks, FKO memorabilia- but saved my money for a later spin through the Dealer’s Room later in the weekend, when I would find even more and different stuff!

(Aside: Thanks again to Phil for letting me borrow his FKO photos. Any credited photos are his and the rest are mine. You can find Phil's full FKO set here.)

( Saturday Afternoon Concerts )

A most excellent FilKONtario- I had a great time! It was a bit sad for Jodi and me at first, as it is the only FKO that we’ve ever been at without Debbie, but scheduling conflicts are in the hands of the fates and we can only keep our fingers crossed that FKO and the game boarding con Deb attended this weekend won’t overlap too often. Deb will be at FKO next year as Urban Tapestry celebrates our 20th Anniversary (holy cow).

(Aside: For reasons I can't figure out, Flickr is no longer allowing me to embed a photo into the top of a LJ post. Can't sort out why, so all photos are going under the cut in these con reports.)

My thanks to Phil Mills for letting me borrow his FKO photos for these posts. Any credited photos are his. You can find his entire set of FKO photos here

( Friday Night at FKO )

I liked this new cross-stitch pattern by Ink Circles. Modern technology and Celtic knots are cool. Sadly, it worked up so fast that I'm scrambling to find something new to stitch for the concerts at FilKONtario this weekend. I've found some nifty "Game of Thrones" bookmark patterns that might do the trick.

( Ear Buds )