Le Temple du Soleil

I confess to not having updated in a couple of weeks (oops).  Blame midterms, and spring break was definately a factor as well.  Spring break was fantastic, by the way–I went to visit Iris in Tempe and it was crazy warm.  Hooray for wearing shorts and sunglasses in early March!  It was a bit of a letdown coming home to the remnants of snow.  Actually though, it’s been beautiful here for three days now.  Sunday, I woke up and was gripped with the urge to fly a kite.  I don’t actually have a kite, so I walked into town to pick one up at Ben Franklin’s (only $1.99, amazingly) and promptly dispensed with an hour and a half on the lawn of Mac, one of the few places near my house that can accomodate a S-SE wind that doesn’t have power lines or an overabundance of trees.  I did almost get the thing stuck on the roof a few times, since my kite kept wanting to veer over the wall of Mac West and then nose dive.  Luckily, I succeeded in bringing it down on the lawn (albeit in the middle of a knot of football players).  It was a good day.  I remember trying to fly kites when I was younger, but since Woodside is, as the name would suggest, in the middle of a woods and an orchard, and the trees block the wind, I was never exactly successful.  But as it happens, I am now living in the wind energy capital of Ohio, which has certain compensations.

Hmmmm, what else is going on in my life?  School.  But school isn’t very entertaining to write about (or read about, I would imagine), which is why I haven’t been updating as frequently.   Still, it has come to my attention that people actually read my blog.  Not many, mind you.  But a few a day, usually, which warrants more frequent posts.  So, I’m going to wax eloquent about Tintin, a Belgian cartoon character from the early fifties.  For those of you who were never children in Belgium circa 1955, Tintin is a reporter in his mid-twenties who solves mysteries and catches assorted villians, with the help of his loyal dog (Milou in Belgium, Snowy in the English translations).

I wasn’t a child in Beligum in 1955, either, but our library for whatever reason had a few of the translations, and we (my brother and I) checked them out from time to time.  We were just about the only ones who did, which is why the library got rid of the books at some point, and I pretty much forgot about Tintin altogether.  Fast forward about eight years, and here I am in the French House, and two of my housemates present their cultural activity about bandes dessines (comics) in Belgium.  Imagine my surprise when a Tintin book appears–written in French!  And after that revelation, I found out that I already knew a fellow Tintin-ophile, who informed me that there is a Tintin musical!  Unfortunately, there were issues with the funding, so it had a very brief showing in Paris and that was about it.  But, they’re working on bringing it back, and in the meantime, there’s a soundtrack!  So that’s been my obsession for the last week and a half or so.  If you haven’t read Tintin before, I recommend looking around for the books, because they tend to pop up in unlikely places (a tiny public library in Wisconsin, for one.)  I actually found about a dozen at the university library as well.  So…yeah.  There’s my shameless plug for Tintin.  But it’s time for me to shamelessly do some homework now, so see you later.