Attack of the Uncle Bugs

Every night I lay down next to my eight-year-old daughter Miranda, and I read for a while. After that I turn out the light, and we talk for a few minutes before I leave her to fall asleep. One night we started talking about ants. In the Southern California accent we both share, the word ant sounds identical to aunt. One of us (it's hard now to say who; she's demonstrating an amazing ability to be quick and clever, which I find amazing in someone her age) then started referring to uncles...then uncle bugs. My daughter was then determined to come up with a story about uncle bugs.

In this endeavour, she enlisted her best friend April. They worked for a short while in a couple of sessions on her iMac before April moved to Okinawa. Then Miranda continued on the story for a while, occasionally turning on her computer and hacking away at it. She finally finished the story, but only just before the computer had to be packed up in preparation for our move to England.

Miranda's maternal grandmother finally managed to get the iMac up and copied the story to something with a network connection. She emailed the story to us, and I'm reposting it here:

Attack of the Uncle Bugs
By Miranda Arnush and April Oliveras

A long time ago there was a bug called uncle bug and once somebody found one and kept it in a warm shelter and the uncle bug liked it. But one day the owner forgot to feed the uncle bug and the uncle bug got very, very mad and called all of the other uncle bugs to fight all the humans in the world. So all of the uncle bugs came to fight and then the humans fought back. When the battle was over some of the humans died and some of the uncle bugs died. Suddenly all of the uncle bugs could talk! Then the uncle bugs went to North America to attack. Many of the uncle bugs died. Not many of the humans died.

Then they went to Mexico to attack. They went all around the world. They finally got to the last place on Earth! 5,00,16,221 people died and 9,0000,000,99 uncle bugs died! The rest of the people wanted uncle bugs. So the parents said, “You have to feed it every time it does not have any food in its food bowl” So the children promised that they would do that. There was one uncle bug per child. The children loved their uncle bugs “like father and son”. Then they lived happily ever after.

THE END

Grandma said that as she was retyping the story, she almost started correcting it (she's a retired school librarian, after all), but then wisely decided to just copy it verbatim.

I think I'm going to have to work harder on encouraging her to write more. Dare I say, "Pulitzer?"

Catching Up With the Blogs

Wow! Am I extremely bad at keeping up with this whole blogging thing, or what? I suppose I really should make more of an effort. A lot has happened since I last posted here. A lot of good blog-worthy stuff. I mean:

• accepting a job in England
• making a pre-visit to get the feel of the area and locate a rental house
  
• getting my San Diego house ready
• getting my San Diego house packed up
• packing enough stuff for my final trip
• making the trip just in time to encounter the worst snow storm to hit England in nearly two decades
• starting the job
• finding ways to make my house more comfortable while waiting for my furniture
• buying a used car
• acquiring my family when they arrived two weeks later
• ...the list goes on and on and on.
  

<sigh/>

I'll try to come up with better topics and discuss them more fully soon, even if they describe things that happened up to a few months ago.