Finish This Book: Attention Skills

This page has delayed my Finish This Book blog posts by so many months. I actually started work on it way back in August last year, then it sort of sat unfinished until just this week. In fact, it wasn't unfinished, it wasn't even properly started.

The directions for this page instruct you to 'develop you attention skills'. You're told to walk around your neighbourhood, looking at the ground:

Take notes on how many different colors, shapes, and objects you see.

There's then some space to write at the bottom of the page and on the facing page are twenty boxes for you to draw in the things that you saw.

I'll admit, I cheated on this one slightly. It was never going to be practical taking a book the size of this one out for a walk, so I took my shiny new camera instead and took a whole bunch of photos of the things that I saw on the ground. Then they sat on my computer waiting for me to draw them into the book.

So I got to work copying them into my Finish This Book. I'm not the world's greatest artist, but hopefully they're recognisable:

I laid out the pictures in the collage above so you could see what I was drawing. Some of them are quite recognisable in my drawn version.

It's not often that I find an excuse to draw things but I quite enjoyed copying these photos into my book. There's obviously more space for more pictures but I just copied in the sixteen because they were the best things that I found. I had lots of random photos of leaves so once I'd drawn a couple of the interesting ones I didn't see the point of adding in more.

The other bit the book asked me to do was to make some notes on what I'd seen. I made notes when we went for the walk back in August, so it made it easy to add those to the page:

It was an autumn day so there were a lot of reds, oranges & yellows. As it was early autumn there were still quite a lot of green plants as well. There were odd bits of rubbish, half hidden in soil or grass; these stood out because of their colours (blue or red). I was interested to see the floss stick since it seemed really out of place in the countryside, more than the bits of rubbish from food or packaging.

I can't believe that I put off working on this page for so long, but I'm glad I've got it out the way. I'm now free to carry on with the rest of the book and I've nearly reached the end of my 'Secret Intelligence Training'. I can't wait to see what comes next!

Wordless Wednesday: Entrance

Chapter-by-Chapter: The Grim Grotto, Chapter 7

The last chapter of The Grim Grotto ended on a bit of a cliffhanger, with the Baudelaires and Fiona finding themselves surrounded by Medusoid Mycelium. This chapter should show us how they deal with it. I suspect not very well.

What Happens?

The children kill time while they wait for the mushrooms to wane and so they search for the sugar bowl, without much luck. They do however find some interesting items which they look over while Sunny prepares something to eat. They learn a little about the plans that Gregor Anwhistle had for the mushrooms in the grotto. Violet also makes a discovery that worries her but refuses to share this information with her siblings, and worse, someone has a Mycelium spore in their diving helmet.

Thoughts as I read:

This chapter opens with an image of what appears to be a fish bowl full of spaghetti. I hope it’s spaghetti. I like spaghetti. I’d quite happily just eat that for a meal on its own, never mind about any sauces or anything. I’m hoping that this means that the children will make it back to the submarine in time for tea and not that they’re going to have to come up with something to eat with what has been washed up in the cave.

The word “lousy,” like the word “volunteer,” the word “fire,” the word “department,” and many other words found in dictionaries and other important documents, has a number of different definitions depending on the exact circumstances in which it is used.

We then get about three pages explaining the numerous different definitions of ‘lousy’ as they can be applied to the Baudelaires, culminating this this impressive sentence:

And their lives were lousy with lousiness, from terrible people to horrible meals, from terrifying locations to horrifying circumstances, and from dreadful inconvenienced to inconvenient dreads, so that it seemed that their lives would always be lousy, lousy with lousy days and lousy with lousy nights, even if all of the lousy things with which their lives were lousy became less lousy, and less lousy with lousiness, over the lousy course of each lousy-with-lousiness moment, and with each new lousy mushroom, making the cave lousier and lousier with lousiness, it was almost too much for the Baudelaire orphans to bear.

There’s really nothing I can say to that.

Fiona’s confident that they’ll be safe from the mushroom spores as long as they don’t get too close. The mushrooms are still popping up all over the place but they’re not getting any closer so Fiona seems to be right. All the same, they still need to be able to figure out how to go back because one spore could be the end of them. Sunny asks about an ‘Antidote?’ but Fiona’s not too sure about that.

Luckily they’ve got Violet with them and she’s already tying her hair up with a ribbon. Sunny’s keen to be of help and says ‘Tingamebob’ which means ‘There’s plenty of materials here in the sand’ though Violet is more concerned about what she’s going to invent and how well it will hold up if it’s used to get all of them out of there. If it fails whoever is using it will probably not survive either the fall or the mushrooms.

Fiona pipes up to let them know that the mushrooms will wax and wane and so right now they’re waxing but soon enough they’ll start disappearing. In that case they don’t need to invent anything, they just need to walk past them. Unfortunately they don’t know how long that will take and it could be a while.

This leads to a discussion of the term ‘Hobson’s choice’ and how Mrs Baudelaire used to give the children a Hobson’s choice when they had to do something they didn’t care to do. In turn, this helps to take everyone’s minds off of the scary things going on in the cave, and initiates a discussion about times when Mrs Baudelaire and Fiona’s mum got really mad at their children. This is somewhat awkward for the Baudelaire children because they haven’t really thought about times when their parents were less than perfect since they died. Fiona interrupts this musing by explaining that Widdershins and her stepfather used to have rows as well, despite Widdershins telling the children how charming Fiona’s brother was.

Which leads them back onto the topic of the sugar bowl and reminds them that they should really be looking for it. It’s interesting to see what they find instead of the sugar bowl; things like ‘an odd, square stone with messages carved in three languages’, ‘a ring made of dull metal’ and ‘a fancy wine glass filled with holes’. Eventually Sunny says ‘Snack!’ meaning ‘Why don’t we stop for a bite to eat?’

The snack turns out to be crackers and peanut butter which they have found in the cave, which I’m not sure I’d want to eat considering you don’t really know where it’s come from. The only person who hasn’t found the search to be a complete waste of time is Klaus who has found a poetry book with the title ‘Versed Furtive Disclosure’ and he has a theory that V.F.D. has used the cave to hide things.

This seems to be likely as Fiona produces an envelope that she found and Sunny picked up a page from a newspaper with ‘V.F.D.’ circled. Violet suggests that they take a chance to investigate these things. Sunny might be able to cook whole meals, but she’s not so hot on the reading yet, so Klaus suggests that she make them something to eat. And what does she make? Well, it’s noodles, not spaghetti, but close enough and it is in a fishbowl. When asked exactly what it is she says ‘Pesto lo mein’ which Klaus translates as ‘soft Chinese noodles, which she tossed with an Italian basil sauce she got out of a jar.’ I love that when Fiona comments on the international basis for this meal, Sunny comments with ‘Hobson’ which means ‘I didn’t have much choice, given our surroundings’. She also offers them some wasabi which they decide not to eat just now.

And then it’s time to discuss what they have learned from their research. Klaus has discovered something called ‘Verse Fluctuating Declaration’ (I bet by this point Daniel Handler was regretting his choice of the initials ‘V.F.D’ and was wishing he’d gone for something a little easier to play with). This technique involved swapping words in poems to create a secret code. We get a bit of an example of how this might work before the children move on to talking about making up their own secret code and Sunny suggests they use ‘food’ words as the code.

Fiona’s envelope contained a letter to Gregor Anwhistle from Kit Snicket about the schism, it’s not entirely clear though because it’s also written in code and mentions something called ‘Volatile Fungus Deportation’. That would be moving the highly poisonous mushrooms out of the cave. Just for the record, if something is highly poisonous and very quick to reproduce, I’d recommend not taking it anywhere! This was basically what Kit was warning Gregor, because using them against their enemies would be a villainous thing to do.

Sunny then points out that mushrooms are beginning to wane which then leads Fiona to mention the fact her brother always kept a deck of cards for boring moments like this. They used to play a game called Fernald’s Folly; Fernald being Fiona’s brother’s name. Violet finds this interesting but won’t say why. Hmm, wonder what it is that she’s found then, claiming that there wasn’t anything useful in the newspaper.

Now it’s time to start getting ready to go and Fiona helps Sunny into her helmet. Sunny responds to this with ‘Shivalrush’ which means ‘That’s very kind of you’. The two younger Baudelaires don’t know what Violet knows though and she isn’t sure that they won’t end up having a schism of their own with Fiona.

The sinister information in the newspaper clipping was like a tiny spore, blossoming in the small, enclosed space of Violet’s pocket – like a spore of deadly Medusoid Mycelium, which at that very moment was blossoming in the small enclosed space of a diving helmet worn by one of the Baudelaire orphans.

Not looking good for the Baudelaires right now.

Book 40 of 2014: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling

I love rereading the Harry Potter books. I had them set up on my ‘children’s bookcase’ for so long that after rearranging it the other week I still keep looking at it wondering where they have all gone (answer: in the cupboard in Tara’s bedroom). Although I’ve replaced the books on that shelf with another three sets of books, it still looks kind of bare because they’re not at brightly coloured as the Harry Potter books they’ve replaced.

I used to reread them each time a new book came out and then got into the habit of trying to reread them each year. Now I’ve slipped back to once every couple of years and I take longer between each book to make the series reread last that little bit longer. Having finished my last reread last year I’m taking a year off rereading them this year and that makes me feel kind of sad (I realise I could just read the books if I felt like it, but there are so many other books to read and so little time).

This book is the one where Harry suspects that Draco is up to something in Hogwarts and no one really believes him, except he is. Harry also gets some special lessons with Dumbledore to help get inside Voldemort’s head as we learn about the creation of Horcruxes. Then Dumbledore dies at the hand of Snape and everything is very sad.

This edition of the book happened to be the American hardback version which a friend gave to me. It’s a massive book and not at all practical to take out of the house so I carried on taking the British edition to work with me. It’s still a pretty hefty book but just slightly more portable.

I have to say, the American editions look a lot fancier than the British ones. There were some nice little touches, like Hagrid’s letter being in a different font and with actual tear stains on it. I would like to get American editions of the rest of the series so that I can compare all of them.

I pictures were also a nice touch, though some of them did kind of give away bits in the story if you were reading it for the first time. They also helped to add to the bulk of the book as well, but like I said above, it’s such a pretty edition that I can’t complain at all. I just had to keep it by my bed to read because taking it out in my bag gave me backache!

It was good fun trying to spot all the differences between the UK and US editions. Most of the time I forgot to look until some appeared that was glaringly obvious to me (like whiskey, Sorcerer's Stone and pants). I suspect that were I to get Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone I might be driven slightly crazy by the Philosopher’s Stone being referred to by its Americanised name throughout the book, but I’d still like to get my hands on a copy to give it a go.

I realise that I’ve mainly talked about the book in this review, rather than the actual story, but I’ve read it so many times now that there’s really more to be said for reading a different edition. It’s still one of my favourites of the series and I can’t help but remember reading it for the first time. The bit where Dumbledore dies makes me think of bagpipes because that was what was playing outside as I read it, quite fitting for the great wizard.

I look forward to reading it again in the future is seeing what I pick up from it next time.

Chapter-by-Chapter: The Grim Grotto, Chapter 6

Another week and another run of chapters from The Grim Grotto, we’ll be heading past the halfway mark this week. In the last chapter we saw the Queequeg arrive at the cave where Widdershins dropped the bombshell that the only way they would be able to get the sugar bowl is to send a child in to get it.

This won’t end well.

What Happens?

Widdershins waves off the three Baudelaires and his stepdaughter as they head out into open water in search of the sugar bowl. The current takes over and they drift into an underwater cave which gives them the opportunity to take off their diving helmets. The ground is littered with detritus and so they all set to work looking for the sugar bowl. Too late they discover that they have wandered into a patch of Medusoid Mycelium.

Thoughts as I read:

This chapter image is of some descending through the water. We can just see the top of their diving helmet with a string of bubbles heading up towards where the water is lighter. I’m going to guess that whoever is in that diving suit is probably not going alone. I do like the way the water is shown with sort of wavy pencil lines, getting heavier and heavier the further down the page they get.

Sure enough, all of the Baudelaires are in their diving suits, or rather Violet and Klaus are in their diving suits, Sunny is having to curl up in a spare helmet and be carried by her siblings. None of them are particularly comfortable. We also learn how the suits work, considering they aren’t attached to oxygen tanks; the helmets have an oxygen system in them which will give them enough to breathe for a short time.

Poor Sunny can barely be heard in her helmet. She says ‘Hewenkella’ which I’m going to guess is a clever play on ‘Helen Keller’ and which is translated as being her questions how they will see. But there are no waterproof flashlights, luckily the tide will push them towards the same place as the sugar bowl so they won’t need to swim there (on the way back it’s going to be another question though).

There’s a bit of debate about whether all three Baudelaires need to go or if they won’t be better just picking one of them to go. But the Baudelaires prefer not to be separated as their special skills may be necessary. Sunny adds ‘Ulp’ meaning ‘I don’t like the idea of drifting by myself in a diving helmet.’ Thankfully they’re not going entirely alone, Fiona is going to come with them.
Widdershins is promising all of them that they will receive citations for bravery which isn’t much of a consolation for any of them considering the dangers they are facing:

Anyone can write up a citation for bravery, and I have even been known to write up one for myself from time to time, in order to keep my spirits up in the middle of a treacherous journey.

I think I’ll have to try this next time the ferry is really rocky, that will definitely help me on those treacherous journeys!

As the children head out they try, once again, to find out why the sugar bowl is so important. Once again Widdershins refuses to tell them, apart from the fact that it’s just about what’s in it, not the actual bowl itself. There are things too terrible for children to know about, but it’s not too terrible to send them out into uncharted waters with a short term oxygen supply into an area full of deadly mushrooms. Love your rationality, Widdershins!

Snicket goes on to give us a recap of the water cycle, which we all probably studied half a dozen times at school so already know about but it’s intended to send us to sleep so we don’t have to read what happens next. I have to admit, this is a good technic for a book; tell people it’s boring and that they really shouldn’t read it, then actually talk about the boring stuff to prove how boring it is.

Suffice to say, exiting the submarine is very frightening for the children as they all disappear into the gloom. Apparently there are things in the grotto that the children can’t see, like a mosaic and equipment to prevent the cave from flooding which has evidently stopped working considering the fact that the children are floating through the cave right now.

Eventually the children reach the surface of the water and come out onto a beach in the cave. This confuses the children and Violet, despite being a mechanical genius actually asks if they are in a submarine. They then spot a trio of floorlamps which have the letters V.F.D. on them. Alongside those are a bunch of random bits and pieces like books, a roller skate, bottles and lots of other things that must have drifted here from elsewhere. Hopefully this means that somewhere nearby there will be a sugar bowl.

They wonder aloud where they might actually be and Sunny voices a very relevant question ‘Oxo?’ meaning ‘Does that mean we can breathe without our helmets?’ Once they’ve decided that yes, they can. They also establish that all this stuff has washed up here then they must be in the right spot to start looking for a certain sugar bowl. Sunny says ‘Mission’ which means ‘Once we find the sugar bowl, our work here is done’ so Klaus has to point out that they will still have to get back to the Queequeg, in the dark and against the tide. Finding the sugar bowl will be the easy bit of the mission!

So they set to work hunting for the elusive sugar bowl but without much luck, instead they find all manner of random detritus like a doorknob, a knife, a poetry book and in Sunny’s case ‘Three can soup… jar peanut butter, box crackers, pesto, wasabi, lo mein. But nadasuchre.’ Oh and Fiona finds something that none of them wanted to see, Mycelium.

Meanwhile the story is interrupted by a full page picture (yay, that means we’re halfway through the book!) which shows little Sunny holding a jar of peanut butter which is almost as big as she is. There’s a jar and bottle beside her but more worryingly, there’s also a little patch of mushrooms. Definitely not a good sign. Also, how cute is Sunny now she’s standing on her own two feet. Aww.

We learn that the children have wandered into the midst of a mushroom patch and the longer they look, the more they see. And the children are pretty much surrounded.

Which means that not only do they have to find the sugar bowl, they need to not die of mushrooms as well!

Things are getting dramatic.

Get rid of the smell of burning vacuums (and other odors) with Air Wick Life Scents Plug In

You may have noticed that we’ve been on a bit of a spring cleaning kick over here at Chez Click. It started in the spare bedroom when I decided to excavate the bed and put away all the Christmas stuff and clothes that had been hanging out there for way too long. I even dusted the spare vacuum cleaner in there which we’re planning on getting rid of soon.

The following week I decided to tackle my bookcases and reorganised all of those. We’ve been doing some general sorting and organising and tidying around the house. I suppose it’s the season. The snowdrops are blooming and the weather is starting to get warmer, it’s the time of year when you want to make everything fresh and new.

When I received the Air Wick Life Scents pack from Bzz Agent I couldn't help but think that it's not the sort of thing we would really use that much, after all, we moved into our house nearly four years ago and have had the same plug in air fresheners since then and haven't needed to replace them in all that time. I don't like to think that we're a particularly smelly household.

And then I cleaned out our pet rats (who were not particularly smelly, I hasten to add) and tried to vacuum up their paper litter. This was a mistake and I almost set the vacuum cleaner on fire. There's nothing quite like the smell of burning rubber.

That coupled with the dog deciding to throw up this morning meant that I really had the perfect excuse to try out the Air Wick Life Scents plug in.

And I was impressed. I could smell the scent as soon as I opened the box and I'll admit that I was a little worried it would be overpowering. The air freshener we've been using has a tendency to make me sneeze because it is very strong smelling.

I needn't have worried. The plug in has a dial so you can adjust it from full strength right down to a more subtle release. I imagine I'd use the latter to give the house a nice smell if we had someone coming round, whereas the 'full blast' setting is perfect for getting rid of more immediate odors.

It was fairly easy to set up; there are straightforward steps to follow on the back of the plug in part though it's fairly self-explanatory, although I will admit that I needed a little bit of help from Mr Click to get the caps off the scent bottles. That's more about me being a weakling than about the effectiveness of the product and at least I can be safe in the knowledge that the caps are unlikely to come off and leak before I can use them in the plug in.

It might just be mine but the left hand scent bottle seems a little bit looser than the right. It seemed to wobble around a little more than I think it should but it's secure enough if I don't touch it.

The scents, as I said above, aren't too overpowering. I'm not entirely sure how it works but there is a nice mix of scents. With our old plug ins we noticed that they changed every ten or fifteen minutes so you noticed when they changed. With the Life Scents you don't notice the change, one minute you're smelling melon, the next vanilla, and then there's the other scent which is obviously white flower. I have to admit that the melon could be a problem, every time I smell it I crave the fruit!

I'm really pleased with this plug in and I foresee us replacing the elderly one in the bedroom at some point with one of these. They seem nice and durable and as the old Air Wick plug ins we use have lasted so many years, I suspect that these will last just as long.

It definitely gets the vote of approval in our house, losing just one star for the slightly wobbly connection on one of the plug in bottles. It's not such a problem in our house, but it might be if we had little people who might fiddle with it. As it is we just have a labrador and although she was interested in it, I don't see it being a huge problem. I like the refreshing scent and I can see it being quite handy in our house, I'm just going to try not to burn out any more vacuum cleaners, even if I do have a way to clear away the smell!


I received this item free of charge through Bzz Agent in exchange for an honest review. I was not compensated in any way, other than receiving this free item.

Weekly Rundown: Alphabet, Books & Charity

For the last few months I’ve been considering the A to Z Challenge and trying to convince myself that I wouldn’t do it. There was no point, I told myself, after all, I’ve got other blog posts planned for April. I’m writing roughly eleven blog posts a week at the moment and I’d not want to drop out any of those posts during April, that would mean writing another six posts per week for a month. That’s a lot of blogging.

Besides, what would I write about? I did an infertility theme for my first one and went with the easier option and did favourite songs last year. Whenever I considered it I took the fact I couldn’t come up with a theme as a sign that I shouldn’t join in this year. Perhaps I should sit this one out?

Until my blogging buddies started talking about signing up for the A to Z Challenge. Well that changed things a little. I’m kind of competitive and if other people are doing something challenging I like to prove that I can do it too. So I signed up.

I’m not entirely without a plan. I’ve added an extra month to my blog planning spreadsheet (well, technically I overwrote the month of April and had to go back and rewrite the whole month because I’m a dork) and I’ve started coming up with some ideas for what I’ll write about each day of the month. That’s right, I’ve got a theme.

I’m not telling you what it is yet though. The blog reveal isn’t until the 23rd of March. I’ve got it on my calendar. I’m hoping that by then I’ll have ironed out some of the kinks and gotten some of my posts written ready for the month ahead. Plus that gives me nearly a whole month to change my mind about my theme and go with something simpler (you’ll never know)!

Other than making big blogging decisions, this week has seen me getting a haircut. Woo hoo! slightly shorter than last time. My cousin is actually getting her hair shaved off for Red Nose Day on Friday the 13th (something which I’ve wanted to do myself for years). I can’t wait to see how she looks afterwards (since she’s able to rock pretty much every hairstyle she’s ever gone for) and it’s watching her hair getting shorter and shorter that prompted me to get mine short.

If you're feeling particularly flush right now, why not hop over to my cousin Claire's fundraising page and donate whatever you're able to for Red Nose Day. It's a great cause and I'd love to see her raise plenty of pennies.

I also got a treat in the form of more reading material, courtesy of my husband who treated me to eleven new books.

And it didn’t break the bank since these eleven books were from the 80th Anniversary Penguin Classics set, so they were just 80p each. I would love to get the whole set but for now I’ve just picked eleven of the ones which stood out to me (mainly authors I’ve read and liked before but also a couple which link into my Reading Challenge, hello book with a colour in the title and single word title).

They’re lovely cute little pocket-sized books which I should be able to read fairly quickly (hello book I can finish in a day!) and I can’t wait to start them, though at the moment I’m still working on my ‘book by a female author’ and it’s a bit of a drag. I probably won’t get to crack open one of these until at least this time next week.

As always I picked these up from my local bookshop, Print Point, which wasn’t open by the time I needed to head to work so I gave Mr Click a list and he got all of them. I told him that if they didn’t have any on the list he could pick for me which obviously wasn’t necessary but if they keep a stock of them for a while I might just nip in and spend the odd two or three pounds on some randomly selected books just to dip into in the future.

I'll close this post by returning to the topic of the A to Z Challenge, since that's what's floating around at the back of my mind right now. Are you joining in on the A to Z Challenge this year? Have you chosen a theme or will you be winging it?