Hey there! It’s Granny Bunny aka Mary May. I’m sharing some of the magic I make for the children in my life. In this letter I’ll provide an update on the Cookie Contest with Ugly Bugly the Witch, give you a look into how we share our hobbies with the grandkids, discuss the fun of holding an Art Sale, give you a peek at our annual Les Coccinelles party, explain how to write Book Spine Poems, share our recent excursion to the Mineshaft to do a little gaming with da boys, tell you about my eavesdropping on a provocative discussion about virtual reality (VR), warn about a disaster in the Hogwarts Potions class, and share an old magic potion recipe. I’d love to hear about some of your adventures with the kids in your life. As always, hold on to your wand, cuz here comes some magic spells. — Granny Bunny

The never-ending competition for Best Baker continues in August as Ugly Bugly creates Lemony Snicket’s Lemon Bars with a surprise ingredient.

The letter is from Ugly Bugly, all right. You can always tell by her first grader penmanship. As usual she included a poem because she is a Witch Poet and competes with Granny on everything (she wants to be the Granny and marry Keith May). Below you can see the girls reading over the poem to decide if there are bat wings or vampire sweat in the ingredients. Hmmmm. Not too bad this time. But there was a lot of shocking news about divorces, a new boyfriend, and a potential marriage sometime soon.

UGLY BUGLY LOVES LEMONY SNICKET

I moved away without remorse  
Then gave dead* Rudy a divorce.
My new boyfriend is weird and sweet,
And so I made this special treat.

It’s made from lemons - very sour,
You have to bake them for an hour,
Then sprinkle them with special snow
(Which some call dandruff, as you know).

You hold your nose — then you pick it,
Just like lovely Lemony Snicket.
He’ll be my husband, wait and see,
Cuz I will make him adore me.

Cookies will do their magic soon,
Then I’ll take Lemony to the moon.
I’ll wear a Lemon wedding dress.
This plan will be a huge success.

He is lemon,
I am lime,
My forever
Valentine.

by Ugly Bugly the Witch Poet

*For those of you who might be sad to hear Rudy is dead, he was all ready dead when Ugly Bugly married him. She put a spell on him with her coven to reanimate his corpse.

Brave Lilly mustered her courage and nibbled on the edge of one of the bar cookies, despite being very worried about the dandruff and dried nasal mucous. She was relieved to discover it tasted magically scrumptious - but Presley was having none of it. She was too grossed out.

Like all parents and grandparents, over the decades, we’ve exposed our kids and grandkids to a variety of our hobbies and creative endeavors. One of the contagious ones has been Keith’s enduring love of the styling and engineering quality of great cars — past and present. This means our summer week-ends often feature Keith and a car show somewhere in Wisconsin. Luckily for us, we had two this year right in our hometown. On this day, we enjoyed the company of our granddaughter Kallie and her sweetheart Gio.

I caught this shot of Keith by his 55 Chevy at the “Cars on the Island” show. One of the requisite activities of any car show is the long stroll of admiration amid countless stunning vehicles. From the collection, we pick the ones we’d dream of adopting for our own garage. This show was a fundraiser for the local Boys & Girls Club. The food was superb, the beer was cold, but they ran out of Root Beer Floats, forcing us to make an aprés-show trip to the A&W to complete the full experience.

Events like this are about seeing old friends with similar interests — a chance to catch-up on their projects and share news about our own. It’s a chance to find parts, find help, and find friendship. We think it’s important to share the hobbies we love with kids. You never know what sparks are kindled. Whatever hobbies you share with the kids in your life, I think if you invent a little ritual like Root Beer Floats, it adds something magical to the memory.

P.S. I was struck by something when I was sifting through the day’s photos. Kallie and Gio are just 17 years old, the same age Keith and I were when we fell in love (it seems like yesterday). Who can tell what their tomorrow will bring? Whatever it is, we hope there’s ice cream and root beer.

Speaking of hobbies, if you know us at all, you know Keith was kissed by an art muse as a child. Consequently, we trial balloon all sorts of ideas to tickle those genetics in our progeny. One of those ideas (generally met with enthusiasm by the kids) is the opportunity to sell their art via periodic family auctions or by setting a “Sell Now” price. The latter is how Roland earned $25.00 for this fierce yet fragile ceremonial mask. We loved it so much, we couldn’t resist. We gifted it to Maggie so it will be carefully preserved and maybe someday it will be returned to the artist’s children.

Les Coccinelles means “The Ladybugs” in French. Les Coccinelles Poetry Day takes place for all the young lady poets each year on or around Bastille Day. It was established by the ladybugs of France who founded the Ladybugs Literary Society so many years ago. France is also the location of the Society’s castle where Miss Ladybug lives. Human members of the Ladybug Literary Society don their French berets, enjoy French patisserie, and write some poems. The Fond du Lac Chapter is led by Mary May, who joined the Society 62 years ago when she was 8 years old. (I am so far into this delusion, I sometimes forget I made it up).

The celebration is held at a chic outdoor cafe which closely resembles those found in Paris. Featured selections this year were éclair au chocolat (chocolate eclairs), tarte aux pommes (french apple pie), and our favorite grenouilles au chocolat (chocolate frogs).

When we finished our treats, we constructed Book Spine Poems. Miss Ladybug provided the worksheet above which guided us in our creative efforts. I brought library bags filled with a selection of both adult and childrens’ books with interesting titles so we could let our imaginations run wild.

Lilly’s first Book Spine Poem was deeply esoteric. It makes me wonder who Francis is and how hard his life must have been if he was willing to hang out with Uncle Wiggily and his friends just to hear more jokes and riddles. Didn’t he have other friends his own age? If he bargained to hear more jokes, what did he have to give Uncle Wiggily for his part of the bargain? I feel perhaps I should CCAP* Uncle Wiggily to assure little Francis is not in any peril. Yes, I find this Book Spine Poem very disturbing.

CCAP = Consolidated Court Automation Programs where you can see who has been arrested, charged, convicted, and for what.

Arcade games to video games to VR. Keith and I began our dating years with lots of ferocious competitions in front of the pinball machine at “The Bruns" (our local pool hall). We passed on our love of arcade games to our children. Then, with the advent and evolution of computer and video games, we played more than our share until Maggie and Mollie grew up. Since then we’ve largely become watchers instead of players as our grandchildren push the boundaries of gaming even further. The two fellows on the right are our grandsons Roland and Jaspir at a recent family outing at The Mineshaft in Oshkosh. It has great food and a phenomenal arcade which provided some nostalgic old school fun.

And not to leave our support of gaming in the 1990’s, we also gifted them with their game of choice for their VR (virtual reality) rig. I see great promise for this technology in psychiatric treatment of phobias. OMG! I am gobsmacked with the power and potential of VR - but also uneasy about its future.

Yuval Noah Harari is a scholarly futurist and I admire his thoughtful (and sometimes disconcerting) writings. His recent book, Homo Deus: a Brief History of Tomorrow, “is about what comes next for humanity — and the threat our own intelligence and creative capacity poses to our future.” In a recent interview with Ezra Klein I ran across a few days ago, I found some of Harari’s thoughts on VR. Here’s the exchange. Since the timing of finding this was a bit of serendipity, I decided to share it too.

Ezra Klein

The other side of the scenario you're laying out is a world in which what ends up happening is some kind of nonproductive, hyper-pleasure scenario. I honestly worry much more about the VR-dystopia than the AI-dystopia. 

In a world where people lose their economic utility, it’s easy to imagine them retreating into virtual reality, which is already pretty damn good, and will be amazing 20 years from now. Do you imagine a possible future where we are trying to manage the problem of economic irrelevance through a massive societal distraction machine?

Yuval Harari

Yes, I think the other problem with AI taking over is not the economic problem, but really the problem of meaning — if you don't have a job anymore and, say, the government provides you with universal basic income or something, the big problem is how do you find meaning in life? What do you do all day? 

Here, the best answers so far we've got is drugs and computer games. People will regulate more and more their moods with all kinds of biochemicals, and they will engage more and more with three-dimensional virtual realities.

This idea of humans finding meaning in virtual reality games is actually not a new idea. It's a very old idea. We have been finding meaning in virtual reality games for thousands of years. We've just called it religion until now… In the 21st century, we'll just have the technology to create far more persuasive virtual reality games than the ones we've been playing for the past thousands of years. We'll have the technology to actually create heavens and hells, not in our minds but using bits and using direct brain-computer interfaces.

Mary May

Yikes! This is not your Granny’s pinball game.

MAGIC CRYSTALS

My youngest grandkids are enrolled in my Hogwarts Online school for the summer and registered for a course in Potions. The “school” provided us with crystal growing materials which we could use to add crystal pillars to an underwater aquarium. Then we were to enchant them with specific magic spells. When we opened the box of supplies, the crystal growing seeds were gone!

We contacted the “school” and they arranged for an identical set to be provided in its place. According to Presley (pictured above), it appeared the crystal seeds were in with the materials, but it turns out they were fake. We waited days and days but no crystals grew. We reported this to Hogwarts also and they opened a formal investigation. It turns out… dark forces are stealing crystals!

“He Who Must Not Be Named” and his evil followers have been stealing crystals throughout the world. The Ministry of Magic is cautioning all magical humans to be on guard and to cooperate with their investigation. If you find any of your crystals or crystal growing seeds or stones are missing, please write to Headmistress Lisa Dee immediately. This conspiracy is believed to be related to a plot to take over the world with some type of crystal weapon.

Meanwhile, we are skipping to the next lesson: an archeological dig for gem stones. First, we must solve where they are buried.

MAGIC FINGER PAINT

Still on the topic of magic potions, my sister-in-law was looking forward to a week of babysitting with her 2-1/2 year old grandson named Henry. She asked if I had any ideas for fun and one of my dormant brain cells eventually fired off a recipe for edible finger paint. Here ya go!

1. Use Cool Whip or vanilla yogurt or vanilla pudding. Plunk a glob of your choice into each cup of a muffin tin.

2. Drop in food coloring but don’t mix. Try to cover it with a glob of pudding, yogurt, or Cool Whip.

3. Hold your hand on the magic wand with the child’s hand and wave it over the paint of one cup and say your magic word and color (e.g. Abracadabra Red) and stir it with your wand to ooooh’s and aaaah’s. Repeat the enchantment process until all the colors are mixed. Show the kiddle that it’s finger-lick’en good.

I love to use paper plates for paintings. I like that plates make their own frame, add some dimension, and help contain the “paint.

If you really want to make a memory, make a double batch, hop into an empty wading pool or go to a surface that can be hosed off — then paint each other’s arms and legs and face with colors. Next, hose each other off, and eat the leftovers, if you dare.