And whither then? I cannot say

-Cousin, age 42, admitted to hospice after 2 year liver/pancreatic cancer battle. He’s probably not going to last the next 48 hours. He’ll be leaving behind a wife and 2 daughters no older than 10.

-Grandpa died three weeks ago. Celebration of life tomorrow, guests coming in. Lots of stress hosting/making sure everything is all squared away.

-Grandpa’s housekeeper/personal assistant has been causing drama. She may have been taking advantage of his generous nature if not outright stealing from him for the last few months of his life. We found out and have been dealing with all of that this last week.

-Mom dislocated her knee about an hour and a half ago.

-My dad, his Parkinson’s, and dealing with all of this as the only child of my late grandpa.

"You'll never have to kill a deadly shapeshifting creature posing as your beloved ex-girlfriend in order to suck salt out of human bodies," they said

Recently got into a debate at a church leadership meeting about Children's Church - ie when kids attend a separate 'service' from the adults on Sunday, either for part of the service (like prayer time and sermon) or the entire time

I'm super curious what thoughts others have in the following polls!

Sorry to keep banging on about this! I just have a few days left to meet the funding goal!

Let’s play the biggest game of kick the can on the internet.

let's see if this works. this contains randomised ingredients from various recipes, including: chocolate chip cookies, banana Nutella pancakes, lemonade, orange juice, carrot cake, homemade pizza, curry chicken, cornbread with bacon and cheese, and probably some other combinations possible in there

Movie Howl is a soulful and quiet. Book Howl is a drama queen and Causing Problems and has a long string of jilted exes and couldn't shut up if you paid him.

Sophie and Howl drive each other up the wall at the beginning and it's really funny. Sophie and Howl are (despite themselves) very much in love by the end and they still drive each other up the wall and it's even funnier.

In the movie, Howl has been ordered by the king to participate in The War, and Howl is avoiding it because he is a brave conscientious objector. In the book, Howl has been ordered by the king to rescue his lost brother from the Witch of the Wastes, and Howl is avoiding it by any means necessary because he is a cowardly weasel who wants to stay as far from the Witch as possible.

In the movie, the Witch cursed Sophie because she was jealous about Howl speaking to Sophie for five minutes. In the book, the Witch cursed Sophie because Sophie had been doing surprisingly powerful magic for years without knowing it and it was actually starting to cut into the Witch's plans. (Sophie does not discover any of this until nearly the end of the book, but the reader can start to pick it up much earlier and the way Sophie's magic works is pretty darn cool.)

In the movie, there's a rumor that Howl eats the hearts of maidens, but this is implied to be nothing but nasty fearmongering. In the book, there's a rumor that Howl eats the hearts of maidens because Howl started the rumor so people would stop asking him to do wizard junk all the time.

The book lightly parodies a couple of tropes from Western fairy tales. In particular Sophie has internalized that, as the eldest of three sisters, her "destiny" is to fail so that her younger sisters will look cooler when they succeed, which is why she's so resigned to the hat shop at the beginning. (Sidebar: Sophie's sisters come up much more in the book and they're great.) There's also a really funny bit where Sophie attempts to operate a pair of seven-league boots.

It’s unclear whether he finished his PhD or is still a grad student in the process of slithering out of his actual viva.

Here is Calcifer’s “silly saucepan song” that he sings to himself, which Howl sings when drunk (and Sophie doesn’t understand.) It’s a Welsh rugby song.