Misheard Poetry

So Celeste and I are reading A Room With a Zoo before she goes to bed. Tonight we got to a chapter break and I notice the next chapter is 19 pages long.

I suggest that it might be too long of a chapter to read right now (we'd already read about 10 pages ... and she likes to interrupt, ask questions, start reading at a different point on the page than where I'm reading, et cetera).

Celeste asks, "Is it as long as a hound's bark?", which I thought was a pretty neat simile. It turns out she'd actually said "hound's back," which is nice, but not as poetic of a phrase.

"In the unlikely event of a water landing"

On the last few flights Celeste has taken, she has spent a goodly portion of the time in the air reading over the aircraft safety card. Back in March, when we flew to Louisiana for a wedding, she kept wanting Evelin to turn the pictures of people sliding out of the plane and putting on lifejackets into stories. On our pre-Christmas visit in December, Celeste just pored over the card for at least half the flight.

Evelin and I were talking about U.S. Airways Flight 1549 and Celeste started asking questions. "Were those people wearing their lifejackets?" Evelin said that most of them were, but she saw some people on TV who didn't wear them. "Oh, did they use their seats?"

I'm impressed she remembered that you can use your seat cushion as a flotation device …