It's been awhile since I blogged.  I went on vacation - a week at Lake Fremont with my family - and I had to work like a demon to get stuff done for AAR beforehand.  Then when I got home the message boards debuted in their new location, and it's been sort of one headache after another with databases crashing and search functions not working and ad scripts crapping out.  Let me just go on record here: I hate host transfers.  Transferring data from one site to another is always complicated, and there are always problems.  This transfer was necessary, but it was a lot of work before it transferred and a lot of work after too. 

Well, that's off my chest.  On to the good stuff.  Here's the garden at the end of June, specifically June 26th, 2009.

We had a heat wave the week we were gone, which was nice because we were at the lake and it was about 10 degrees cooler there.  When I came home, I found that my vegetables (and weeds) had exploded with growth.  The rain/heat combo made a dramatic difference.  My tomato plants had grown as much as a foot.  I ripped out some of my volunteer cilantro and froze the bottom leaves and picked some of the snap peas.  Tonight I had some lettuce from this garden.  The bunnies got at it and it took awhile to grow back, but I finally got a good head.  It was...a bit gritty.  But still good.  I'll have to do a better job washing it next time. 

My onions are almost ready to thin, which means scallions in the very near future.  The small row of carrots that survived look great, as do the potatoes.  The zucchini plants are thriving and have put out a couple of flowers as have some of the tomatoes.  Three pepper plants survived.  They look less robust, but I might get peppers off them still.  The beans and basil are coming back from pest attack too.  Over at garden #2, the one I'm doing with my dad, I've got a row and a half of carrots, more onions, lots of tomatoes, three good-looking pepper plants, and some great squash.  The beans and lettuce got eaten down.  You actually can't really tell there was lettuce, it's so badly depleted.   But, really, with my CSA bounty, I hardly need any more lettuce.  Overall, things are on target right now.

Here is my little container garden.  I've got 4 tomato plants (2 shown), a couple of cucumbers, some baby lettuce, and a cabbage.  These are all doing really well.  I had some trouble with chipmunks - I think - digging in the pots.  They destroyed my basil, so I'm now growing in indoors.  Once I mulched these veggies with horse manure, though, the critter damage has been minimal.  

See those weeds in my patio?  They are no longer.  You would not believe the weed growth from the water/sun double play.  I had so much nightshade growing back in the back of the flower garden.  Which would be handy if I wanted to kill someone with an old-fashioned, highly traceable poison.  However, since I don't, out it went along with some fake clover and a boatload of crabgrass.  

Speaking of invasive stuff, here is my mint patch.   This stuff grows like crazy.  I didn't plant it, but I have dug it out with a shovel each year of the past 10 years I've lived here.  And it always comes back bigger and better than ever.  Up until now I've just composted it, but this year I'm trying something different.  I'm drying it upside down in my garage as per these instructions.  (See photo here.)  This is so I can make mint tea this winter and use it for cooking with.  I ripped out a lot of it, but this is actually the after photo, so as you can see, I've got loads more.

Max and I picked mulberries off our neighbor's tree.  I froze them because berries are very time sensitive.  I asked Max if he liked blackberries or mulberries better, and he said blackberries.  Curious, I asked why.  "Because they taste stronger, Mommy," he said.  I thought that was pretty insightful and interesting considering he hasn't tasted a blackberry since last August.  But he's right.  Blackberries have a stronger flavor to them.  

Our first raspberries are also setting nicely.  I bought them off Craigslist for $2 a plant and dug them in only a couple of months ago.   They are pretty hardy.  The dogs have trampled them a bit, but they've stood the test so far.  I hope they grow and grow and grow.  I love raspberries, and that area of the yard doesn't have to look "sculpted" or anything.  Here is a picture of my fledgling fruitmaker.  There are also photos of my flowers on Flickr.  Almost everything I have this year I raised from seed I gathered free last fall.  Which is kind of cool.  I'm letting a lot of indigenous wildflowers live in the garden too as they are generally a lot more trample resistant than traditional flowers like lilies or roses.  It's kind of a more chaotic look, but I like it.  

We are back to cold and rain again for now.  I'm hoping that the warmer weather will kick back in because I need it and my garden needs it.  So don't pancake on us now, Mother N.  We need the sun! 

Well, they are coming in.  The vegetables are definitely coming in.  This week we got:

• Kohlrabi
• Spinach
• Loose lettuce greens
• Romaine lettuce
• Swiss chard
• Kale
• Parsley
• Radishes

And I actually still have some bok choy and parsley (it's so yummy, but very potent tasting) from last week.  I am going to the cottage this week for my annual vacation with my family and will take my greens, but I honestly can't see that we will eat this much, even as a group of 9, so I'm blanching my kale and chard and freezing it for the winter.

In my garden the lettuce is ready to be picked, as is the cilantro and the pea pods.  That's a lot of food, all at once, and we're not even in tomato season!  This week to use up my chard & kale, I put them in scrambled eggs and made a sweet & sour soup with the kale, and I ate a lot of salad.  Also, I did a stir fry with a sesame seed sauce that I whipped up.  I've really been cooking a lot, and often outside my comfort zone.  It's a learning process.

(Photo credit: Goebelski's family blog.  They got the same Trillium Haven Farm produce, so I figured it would be redundant to snap a photo of mine.  Plus, I'd already started cutting some of it up to blanch.)

Note: This is really a faux "Once More with Feeling" review since I wrote down these thoughts when I read the book nearly six years ago in October 2003. It's been in the back of my mind that they were making a movie out of this...eventually...but I just saw the trailer and it flashed me back.

Last night I stayed up terribly late reading this book and crying my heart out. I was very tired when I woke up this morning, but I couldn't get this story out of my head to go back to sleep.

I'll skip the explanation of the story since it's more or less inexplicable. Suffice it to say that Henry DeTamble has a disease that causes him to suddenly and unexpectedly go backwards and forwards in time. He arrives at his chronological destination naked, carrying nothing, and violently ill and must therefore scrounge for food, clothing, and shelter. This often leads to (frequently violent) confrontations with the law.

This, of course, costs him a great deal personally, and the one shining thing in his life is his relationship with Clare whom he meets when she's 20 and, due to some whonky time traveling, also when she's 6. By the time she enters his life for the first time in the proper chronology, he's fairly messed up - an alcoholic, a womanizer, stuck in an emotionally draining relationship, feeling trapped, hopeless, and utterly without choice (though, paradoxically, the philosophical mainstay of Niffenegger's time travel is, in fact, freedom of choice).

This is easily the most memorable book I've read this year. The characters were completely real to me. I know I will be thinking about them as actual people for quite some time. Niffenegger convinced me of the utter rightness of their relationship. This is a couple that was meant to be (though I confess I still can't quite comprehend the "chicken or the egg" nature of their meeting). Their love wasn't just emotion, it was energy, sex, feeling, and compassion. They were better when they were together, and bereft and unwhole when apart. And their bond was unchanged by age or health or beauty. Clare actually prefers the older Henry who has been "spindled and mutilated" by time and circumstance - because the older Henry's soul was the one who guided her throughout childhood and helped to form her as a person. Similarly, Henry is equally happy to see Clare at any age whether pre-adolescent or elderly. She is his Clare; she is his happiness. Her outside is packaging.

The time travel as fiction device is used by Niffenegger to wonderful effect. It is the ultimate "show, not tell" technique. The reader is not privy to information, and, therefore, the emotions underlying Clare and Henry's early meetings aren't immediately apparent. This is one book that could be read over and over again, and each time the reader will understand these characters and their relationship better.

Though the book's title is The Time Traveler's Wife, this is really Henry's story. His Chrono Displacement drives the course of the narrative and all of the characters' lives. Some of his adventures are comic and all of them are interesting, but most of them showcase his tragedy. He sees things, terrible things, over and over and can't change them. He knows his own fate well ahead of time and must keep it to himself. He knows what his condition does to Clare, yet he desperately needs her to keep waiting for him. Henry is beautiful, passionate, erudite, and frenetic. He is refined and poetic yet somehow intensely masculine. And though he must occasionally be brutish to survive, he's innately gentle. It's so touching to watch him interacting with Clare as a young girl and himself as a child. His suffering makes him patient and empathetic. And it makes him appreciate the here and now more than most people. He wrings the joy out of every moment.

Clare is very likable, but somehow not as fully fleshed. Her life was particularly interesting to me because she is exactly my age. Her experiences were, to some degree, my experiences. I remember the 1980's and the early 1990's just as she did, and I listened to many of the same bands. Reading her parts of the story was like going down Memory Lane for me.

One final praise: it's so rare to find a book where the sexual side of the relationship seems to be spiritual in essence. Henry is a very sexual being and so is Clare, and their interactions together are earthy but at the same time necessary and nourishing. The are inextricably tied to each other by fate and time, they have no choice in that, but in the sexual side of their relationship they affirm that commitment and it remains a joy.

All of the above impressed me greatly, but for me the book is "only" a B+. Somehow their story was almost to poignant and sad for me to take. It's not something that I could read over and over again, though I will likely purchase it. Clare and Henry have a true love, but, by the nature of Henry's condition, it's an obsessive love. They aren't whole without each other. And, unfortunately, that condition mandates that they spend a great deal of time apart. Their longing for each other during these times was so intense that at times it seemed that I couldn't keep on reading. It was too sad. Perhaps if other aspects of their lives had been touched on or had they other sources of equally stong love and support, their life together and apart wouldn't have been so tragic. But that was not the case. I ended the book in tears.

Still, if ever a book made me think "Carpe diem!" it was this one. When I closed it, I went off to tell my husband that I loved him and the little annoyances of my life didn't seem so very important to me suddenly. Joy is fleeting but precious, The Time Traveler's Wife illustrates, and that is a lesson most of us could relearn over and over.

 

Here's the film trailer:

 

This thing is going to be sad.  SAD.  I've been thinking for years that they should put "100 Years" by Five for Fighting on the soundtrack.  That song always makes me think of Henry (love that name, Henry!).  But I'm sure they didn't. I really like Rachel McAdams and am putting this on my calendar.

 

 

 

I have a new DIK review up at All About Romance for Bound by Your Touch by Meredith Higgins.  Check it out .

 

 

 

 

 

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Mr. and Mrs. Wrong Fay Robinson Harlequin Superromance #1012  9/2001 Rating: B+

 

"Lucky and Jack Cahill have been married for less than a year when Jack decides to move out. The two of them love each other very much, but they cannot get along. Lucky is impulsive and intuitive. Jack is protective and logical. Lucky loves her riverside cabin and the great outdoors. Jack thinks the cabin is a dump and spends his free time playing golf. The one thing they have in common and never argue about is their attraction to each other.

This attraction leads to a little snag in their separation. On one of his trips back to the cabin to "look for something," Jack manages to leave a little something behind: a baby. And since neither of them wants a divorce, they have to figure out just exactly how to make this marriage work.

In the middle of all of this emotional sorting out is a little mystery. Years ago a woman named Eileen Olenick was killed in Potock, their small town, and the murder was never solved. Many assumed that a local autistic boy killed her, and he was sent away to an institution. Now due to a change in laws about the disabled, that boy, now a man, comes back to live in Potock, and things begin to happen again. Things that make Lucky question if he did actually kill Eileen Olenick.

The mystery in this story was tightly plotted and kept me guessing. There were also little twists and turns in Lucky and Jack's relationship that I wasn't expecting. New things kept cropping up to interest me. I have to admit I'm a sucker for the old unsolved mystery plot, especially ones that involve old gossip and entangled relationships. This one was all of that and more.

The romantic plot was equally satisfying. Lucky and Jack have a frustrating but fun relationship, and they do enjoy each other's company when they aren't fighting. Reading these marriage-on-the-rocks romances can be an interesting change from the norm. In this case, what is sacrificed in sexual tension is more than made up for by the emotional depth these characters have for each other. Which is not to say there is no sexual tension here. The love scenes were fun, perhaps because Lucky and Jack were so comfortable with each other that they could "play" in bed.

The only problem I had with this book was that the resolution of the mystery was a little melodramatic, and that was followed by another, and somewhat silly separation between Jack and Lucky.

Mr. and Mrs. Wrong restores my faith in Fay Robinson. She's definitely a category author to watch. I will be looking for her future books, especially the next one, which is about Jack's sister Emma."

[Addendum: the sad thing is, I've had the sequel to this book in the TBR pile for years now, and I've never read it.  And, sadly, Robinson passed away some time ago, so there will be no more books to watch for.]

The original review is here. 

This book is available cheap at half.com or at Bookmooch .

 

I'm about to flip-flip on birth control: watch for it.

There it was.  Did you catch it?  I flopped.  Over.

I've been half-heartedly pondering this issue for quite some time.  Heartedly - because I'm Catholic and, since I converted to this religion, I've always meant to take its stands seriously.  Half - because, well, I'm infertile.  I've never had to nail down my opinions because it's never been an issue.  

I grew up Wesleyan.  Birth control was a non-issue for me then.  My mom talked to me about it, I got the standard public school sex education as a teen.  I never even questioned the advisability or efficacy of birth control until I was in my mid-twenties.  Then after a particularly grueling personal experience, I found myself sort of dating a really, really Catholic guy from a really, really Catholic family.  A really huge, really Catholic family.

Sometimes I wonder how exactly this happened.  I mean, he was cute.  He was a close approximation of my type - tall, dark, and stubbly handsome - but personality-wise, he was all off.  Kind of controlled and controlling, mildly disapproving and awkward. When I think back to that time, though, and psychoanalyze myself, it's clear that I was reeling from a complete and painful expansion of my worldview and I just needed someone to lay it out for me in black and white.  Which he helpfully did.  Helpfully in the short term, that is.  Because in the long term, undoing this damage has been a guilt-laden, chunk-by-chunk process.  

The thing is, regardless of how I felt about or needed him at that time, I really loved his family.  I got to know them over about six months and spent a lot of time at their house, and it was chaotic and lively, and there was always something to do or see, and his little brothers and sisters were always happy to see me and up for excitement.  Going over there was the perfect mixture of company - which I desperately needed, having lived most of the previous year in a sort of hermetic existence - and anonymity - because I was never the center of attention and no one really cared what I thought about anything because I wasn't Catholic and, thus, no authority on matters of import.  

The family wasn't perfect, no family is, but many of the things they did or valued were things I did or valued or wanted to do or value.  They had a little family farm and were actively involved in their own food process.  They lived, by necessity, very cheaply, and didn't really care about what other people thought about them.  They focused on their faith, and on reading and education and creativity instead.  They shunned the sort of mass media America that has evolved in the last 35 years, preferring to do things more slowly and on their own terms.  They had no TV.  Everyone wore hand-me-downs.  They put on their own plays.  They painted murals on their walls for decorative art.  They held and played with the baby pigs when they were born for fun.  They lived outdoors whenever possible.   They camped out in their yard on summer nights and picked corn from their own garden for dinner.   

That summer and fall was one big slow, tactile experience for me, and I sucked it in like a sponge, along with a boatload of Catholic doctrine. 

Now here's the deal.  The Catholic Church really does have a well-thought out doctrine on birth control which relates entirely to its doctrine on respect for human life and for the marital relationship.  If you have any interest in this, go here. 

I think the reason I considered any of this doctrine is because I respected so many of this family's life choices, and since they were so passionate on this one, I figured it must have merit.  I also genuinely still believe that erring on the side of caution is a good idea and that modern society rarely emphasizes any values that require self-sacrifice or discipline or humility or work.  We laugh at people for fun.  We demean them for our own enjoyment.  We objectify them, either sexually or otherwise.  And the Catholic doctrine on this issue commands we do the opposite - that we fully value people we can't even see, or who don't even exist in this realm in any aspect.  I can respect that.  

But having been a mother now for nearly five years, I think the story is a bit more complicated.  I have no deep theological arguments for my change of mind, only practical considerations.  Parenting is a great deal of work.  A great deal.  More than I ever expected or could have realistically imagined.  It is a relentless, largely thankless job, and if you do it poorly society as a whole will suffer the consequences.  Kids do not cut you any slack.  They don't care if you're having a bad day.  They cannot empathize with your exhaustion or your impatience or any other negative emotion.  They are hungry, and they need to be fed now.  Or they're tired and whiny.  Or they have dirty diapers and need to be changed, or homework that has to be checked, or a need to be entertained.   It's all about them.  They are cute and can be fun and funny and worth it, but they are still mostly work.

It occurs to me, then, that if you don't like children theoretically or practically, or if you don't want to or aren't good at putting your own needs aside, or if your life is chaos and doesn't look to be stabilizing any time soon, you really shouldn't have children.  And somehow I don't think telling people who aren't good at thinking longer term or acting completely selflessly in the first place (and who is?) that they just shouldn't have sex now or ever, is going to work.   I mean, some people shouldn't have children.  Really, they shouldn't.  But does that mean they shouldn't ever marry or have sex?  This is the position of the Catholic Church. 

That just doesn't work for me anymore.  So I am flopping on record.  Guiltily.

 

J. says I should blog about this because I was so stoked at my success in fixing my own ball joint faucet. 

Saturday, I was cleaning up after cooking lunch and I noticed that the hot water was no longer coming out.  At all.  Since I spend a goodly amount of time every day washing dishes, this was not good.  I went into the bathroom to see if the hot water heater was the problem, but the sink and tub both had it, so that meant the kitchen faucet was the culprit.  It had been sort of leaking for awhile if you put any pressure on the handle too.  

So, being cheap and not wanting to "Call a plumber," as J. suggested, I scoped out the fixture.  The handle was affixed with a sort of octagonal screw (the kind presumably manufacturers use so that you have to buy one of those screwdriver bit sets).  Fortunately, I have a screwdriver bit set, and with only a few wrong picks, located the right bit.  Once I had the screw out, I had to unscrew the cap and the whole thing came out in my hand.  

Since I had turned the water off, this was not a problem, but it was then that I began to wonder if I'd be able to get this thing back on.  Or if we'd be going the whole weekend without water because I wasn't going to call the plumber on weekend rates.  

So I started fiddling with the fixture itself, and lo and behold, found out that it had parts.  Moving parts.  Moving parts that sort of fit together and that presumably would make it easier to stick back onto the faucet base.   A quick internet search yielded the diagram to your right, and I realized that amongst the parts in my hand, there were no little spring thingees.  Huh.  I went back in the kitchen and rooted around in the sink where I found, amidst the dirty dishes, one spring and one tiny spring cap.  When I inserted this into the hot water circle in the spout and reassembled the whole thing, I found I had hot water again and cold, but the cold water wouldn't turn off.  So gambling that I'd diagnosed the problem, I went to the hardware store and bought a set of springs and spring caps, then came home, and inserted one into the cold side of the spout, reassembled again, and voila!  It worked like a charm.  I had hot water, cold water, and no leakage.

Yay, me!  

What made me happiest about accomplishing this was not the $100 it saved me calling the plumber, but the feeling I got that I could do this, that I could operate independently, that I didn't actually need to ask someone (someone who would charge an arm and a leg) for help.  I could do it myself.  With an internet diagram and a willingness to tinker around a bit.  I haven't felt this good since I installed my own wireless network a year ago.  There are times when I seriously think I should have taken more practical courses in high school like shop and home ec.   Knowing how to do stuff, or where to start the process of learning how to do stuff would be far more valuable to me than all that Calculus I've since forgotten.  

Well, after a month or more of double ditching (digging a ditch, piling the dirt to the side, adding layers of leaves and cow manure, then piling the dirt back in) a roughly 16 ft. by 12 ft. plot of land, I've got the garden almost all in.  What's there?

Peas, potatoes, onions, cucumbers, bush beans, pole beans, tomatoes, peppers, carrots (though most of these didn't germinate), Swiss chard, lettuce, zucchini, cilantro, oregano, dill, basil, and parsley.  Quite a lot of stuff for a not-so-large bit of dirt.  I hope it all comes up.

Already as you can see if you look closely, the potatoes are thriving.  The onions are tiny but growing.  The peas are nearly to the first line of string.  Lettuce and chard are coming up, and there's some volunteer cilantro up and at 'em.  I've got two rows of tomatoes, three different kinds, and a row of peppers.  They aren't large yet, but 8 hours of regular sun and copious waterings should get them moving.  

 

So far, the costs this year are as follows:

Money:

• $34.51 - seed order
• $8.42 - incubator 
• $5.46 - peat pots + 1 packet zucchini seeds (all 20% off)
• $1.50 seed potatoes (I'm going to try using small potatoes that have already sprouted in my basement and see if that works)
• $5.50 - gas for truck (2 24 mile round trips @ $2.00, averaging 19 miles to the gallon)
• $10 for wire caging
• $16.99 for fertilizer

Total: $82.38
Sweat:

• 1 hour choosing seeds (more browsing, but I'm counting that as entertainment)
• .5 hour planting flower seeds
• 5 hours picking up and spreading manure.
• 10 hours double ditching (at least)
• 2.5 hours planting
  

Total:  19 hours

Tomorrow I'm going to try and plant most of my second garden, the one I'm doing with my dad.  When I see exactly how much space I have, I'll better be able to decide what's going in there.  Beans and more tomatoes, for sure. 

 

 

Remember Me? Sophie Kinsella Chick Lit 2008 Rating: B

 

"Sophie Kinsella's newest book, Remember Me?, dangles from an interesting premise: What if you woke up tomorrow and everything that you didn't like about your life was transformed?

In 2004 Lexi Smart had a crap job, a crap boyfriend, crap teeth, and a crap future. She was a bit pudgy, more than a bit unfinished, and her father had just died. Running to catch a taxi on the night before his funeral, Lexi falls and hits her head. The next morning she wakes up in the hospital. But it's not the next morning. It's 2007.

Lexi can't remember anything from the intervening three years, but it's apparent to her that they've been eventful. She's lost significant weight. Her teeth have been fixed. Her hair is expensively done. And she has a husband. A perfect, super-rich, very handsome husband, Eric, who dotes over her and is so relieved she's okay. Lexi also learns that she's now the boss at her job, the manager of the carpet division of Deller Carpets. She's a high-powered executive now and makes a great income. Her employees – who include several of her good friends – fear her. Her nickname is "The Cobra."

All of this is more than a little unsettling. Lexi now has the perfect life. But how perfect is perfection, really?

There have been incidents throughout history – one of the most famous of them being Phineas Gage, a man who had his frontal lobe speared with a metal rod – in which people who suffer brain injuries have had radical personality changes. It appears that a similar thing happened to Lexi. From her fall emerged a more confident, ruthless, ambitious Lexi, the kind of woman who can make anything happen and does. Lexi who has always felt a bit out of control, has a hard time reconciling this new Lexi to her old self. She's hurt by the fact that her old friends despise her and appalled to learn she may have been having an affair with Jon, the sexy architect from her husband's firm. Just who was this interim Lexi and where did she come from?

Watching Lexi discover her fancy new self and her fancy new life is both fascinating and amusing. The author's humor is mild and predicated on embarrassment, but it's effectively funny. As is the case with most Kinsella heroines, Lexis both underestimates her abilities and frequently gets in over her head because she doesn't want to appear inept. Trying to fake a job and a relationship with no information about either, Lexi fails frequently – with style.

The book does have a rather sweet romantic subplot, but it's not immediately apparent how this will play out since Lexi has forgotten both of the men who claim to love her. Readers who have experience with the author will recognize the creatively brilliant, rich, down-to-earth and wry hero when he shows up, though, even if her alleged infidelity is troubling.

Kinsella's readers will also recognize these themes: perfection can be stifling, work is important but should not be everything, and "real" people are more about vulnerable substance than invulnerable surface.

With its fun premise Remember Me? is able to explore some interesting ideas with humor and insight. Lexi Smart is a likable heroine most readers will be rooting for even as the many sides to her overall character are exposed. This is solid, enjoyable Chick Lit."

The original review is here. 

This book is available cheap at half.com.

 

I've found the whole RPattz thing to be so interesting, from every angle - the crazy [really - lunatic] fans, the originally manufactured but now organically growing hype, the media coverage, even Robsten, which I am not too sold on as a fact but think is pretty romantic as a fiction.

It's been ages (if ever) since I've had a celebrity crush, but for some reason RP is the perfect storm for me, and I've tried to break down the appeal into isolated characteristics so as to better understand. Obviously, he is gorgeous - you could cook dinner over his photo - but his oft default scruffy look doesn't really appeal to me, so it's not that. At least not entirely.

The voice has to be given its own credit, though. Tenor and accent - Plus, plus.

I actually only wanted to see Twilight originally because of youtube videos I'd seen. For me Pattinson's interview persona is much more interesting than the perfect Edward, and I think a large part of that is the combination of his shyness/introversion and his seeming generosity with people. The Twilight craze is kind of ruining the moment for him, the fame is exhausting and each photo taken is kind of stolen goods, but he's not getting all Hugh Grant curmudgeonly about it. He rolls with the punches, smiles for the fans, and makes self-deprecating jokes about it, and for that you - I - feel rather protective about him. Back off, everyone, and let the man breathe. Enough, already.

I think lots of people with an online presence are introverted, but most of Hollywood is probably extroverted, so you may enjoy these people, but you can't relate to them, and many of them are a bit intimidating in their manner or bearing, or just arrogant. I, for instance, would never want to have a conversation with Brad Pitt because it would be so imbalanced, or at least I would feel like it is. He is the Big Man on Campus in every way, and I am the girl in the back of English class scribbling her notebook. What is the point in talking...there is nothing to say.

Rob is, however, so incredibly nonthreatening. He gives off a gentle, nonjudgmental air. He hasn't yet begin to believe his own hype. He seems real, unaffected and unwilling to change stuff he thinks is unnecessary. And because he doesn't care, he can get away with wearing the same 3 t-shirts and 2 pairs of jeans and carrying a Dadcase and everyone squees over his choices and thinks they are the coolest ever when, in fact, they are not. He is the coolest. Because he's decided what's important to him and he remains unwavering to those things.

I have no idea how much talent he has - I think that's yet to be revealed - but he is magnetic on the screen. You can't take your eyes off him, and you wouldn't want to if you could. That could take him far, if he decides after all this he still wants to go there.

Honestly, I think there's a real chance he could bail, esp. if the criticism gets too mean and personal. He's not in it for the fame or, seemingly, the money, and other stuff might be just as enjoyable and allow for less spotlight and scrutiny. I would love to see him work his screen mojo in some interesting projects and would be sad if Hollywood puts him through the mill and churns out pulp, but what concerns me most is the chance of all this High Profile crap turning him into a self-righteous, humorless, arrogant prick who just wants to bang supermodels and blather on about politics. Because that would ruin all of his appeal for me. The lack of all that in his public persona is what makes him seem like a good old fashioned movie star.

 

Addendum (6/9/09): Here's a rundown on why smart girls love Robert Pattinson .  Interesting summation.

Flagrant denial and stupidity are on display here.  Excuse the naiveté, but I've been trying, recently, to blame at least part of Americans' galactic economic mess on poor education and general ignorance about money.  This guy's actions cannot be blamed on either of those reasons.  Edmund Andrews was an economics reporter for the NY Times, and he warned others about many of the wheelin'-dealin' money schemes he fell into himself because he wanted to live comfortably and well beyond his means and he wanted to "pamper" his new woman. 

Even more interesting to me, however, were the comments following another writer's dissection of Andrews's situation.  This writer, Megan McArdle of the Atlantic, nearly gives Andrews's behavior a free pass, preferring to use him as an object lesson.  The comments left are brutal, though, and, in my opinion frequently misogynistic (see pic at right, which one commenter references as the real explanation for Andrews's problems).  Ironic, given that the writer of the piece is a woman.

J. saw this image and laughed, and I took frank exception.  Of the two of us, I'm far more frugal.  His finances were much worse off before he met me, although that can partially be blamed on his still-in-grad-school status.  Still, there seems to be this idea floating around out there in the male consciousness that marriage = financial doom because a woman will spend you into poverty and then leave you there.  

Am I alone in thinking that men can be equally stupid and disastrous with money, without a woman's help?

 

I know this comes as a surprise, but I actually have a lot of clothes.  A lot of clothes.  I never buy them (except at garage sales v. occasionally).  Everyone just gives them to me.  And plenty of them are really nice, particularly the stuff J.'s Aunt K. passes on. She has good taste in clothing and only buys very tasteful name brand stuff.

And, yet, I still wear the same 5 outfits all the time.  Or a variation thereof.  In the winter I've got maybe three pair of really comfy black fleece pants I wear with varying degrees of underclothing.  These I match with a red/burgundy top, preferably turtlenecked to make a sort of wintry uniform.  Now that it's spring, I've gotten out a couple of pair of jeans, and I work them in if the weather is warm enough.  Summertime is for V-necked shortsleeves and shorts (with sandals).  The quality of all of the above is negotiable.  I've acquired nearly everything I wear used since I quit my job - it's a momdrobe of stuff I can get dirty in and not feel guilty about.  

Frankly, I like old stuff.  If it's already distressed, I don't feel bad when I spill food on it or if Max spits koolaid on it or if the dogs jump up on me with their muddy paws.  Plus, it's already broken in in all the right places.  

Actually, here's the thing: I just don't care what I look like as long as I'm basically clean and presentable.  I only wear makeup if I'm going out, and only the bare minimum then.  I've given up entirely on mascara and wear my glasses instead of my contacts all the time now.  I try to curl my hair when I take Max to school, but I don't always work it in.  Half of my shoes are frankly a disgrace.  I just don't feel it's my goal in life to be decorative.  I want to be healthy.  I want to be decently attired.  It would be nice if I were model skinny or had great coloring and hair with tons of volume and natural highlights.  But since I don't and, since I'm meeting my real goal of being useful, it's all the same to me if I not winning any Best Dressed Mom contests.  I'd rather be comfortable.   My sell-by date has long since passed, and I've bagged my limit.   My energy is better spent elsewhere on something I actually care about.

Fifteen Beverly Cleary YA  1956 Rating: A

 

"There is something about adolescence, those teenage years, that marks you and leaves its brand for life. It's a time of an enormous breadth of feeling; breathless excitement, staggering humiliation, quivering expectancy. When you're in it, it absorbs you, and when you're past it, you never quite forget.

Beverly Cleary paints a vivid portrait of this in her book, Fifteen. First published in 1956, it's the story of first love and all of its painful thrills. Despite the lengthy time gap between then and now, all of the feelings, thoughts and actions still ring true. It's all there - the waiting by the telephone, the careful decisions of what to wear and say and do, as well as the wondering if maybe you could walk by his house and accidentally run into him without being completely obvious.

Jane Purdy is fifteen and desperately desirous of a boyfriend. She is in the midst of a crushing discovery. All of a sudden it is painfully clear that she, her parents, her friends, her house, and her clothes are all unbelievably lame. She is average; not a glamorous girl-woman like Marcy or an intellectual like Liz. Just ordinary. She babysits for extra money, and she has plenty of time to do it because she doesn't have a boyfriend or even date much. Unless you count baby parties that she goes to with George, a family friend who is shorter than she is and only interested in his rock collection.

Then one day she meets Stan, Stanley Crandall, the new boy in town. He's older - at least sixteen because he drives-and so handsome with gray-green eyes and a cute dip in his brown hair. She meets him in an awkward babysitting moment and fantasizes about him. Maybe he'll call. Maybe they'll go out. Maybe....

He does call, and they do go out. And he is polite and sweet and older, and all the other girls look at Jane with new awareness. But instead of being happier and having all of her problems work out, she is now in crisis all the time. Because every word she says - everything she does - now hovers on the brink of being a startling social gaffe. If she wears the wrong dress, will he think she's a baby? If she orders the wrong thing to eat, will that reveal how unsophisticated she still is? Will she ever know the right thing to do?

Fifteen is a wonderful book for anyone who remembers what it was like to be young and nervous and inexperienced and for anyone who remembers what it was like to not quite know yourself yet. The book is, of course, about Jane and Stan and their blooming relationship, but it's more about Jane and how she learns who she really is and what she really wants. She has to define herself before she can be happy with Stan. She has to figure out who Jane is.

A warning: the sweet factor is very high in this book, but that did not bother me at all. It's just a charmer. I found myself laughing and cringing at the things Jane does and how her parents react to her. And Stan Crandall is the nicest boy in the world, bar none. I only have one question. Where was he when I was in high school?"

The original review is here. 

This book is available cheap at half.com or at Bookmooch.

 

I have never really been very good at traveling.  The whole "It's out of my hands" is so not my thing.  I fret about my luggage getting scanned and then getting lost.  I worry that I will lose my carry-on or that someone will steal something of mine when I'm distracted (as I tend to be when traveling, since worrying about the plethora of smallish details takes so much of my focus).  I'm always certain I'll lose my tickets, or my passport, or I'll be bumped from a flight and this will cause problems for whoever is supposed to pick me up.  Basically, I'm a wreck until I reach my destination and then I need a little time to recover from it all.

I'm inclined to believe that this is really just my OCD aggravated by stress and, therefore, that I've always been like this, but my adventures in Eastern Europe in 1993-1994 did not help anything.  I had a series of really strange things happen to me in Russia, Poland, and Lithuania that certainly didn't help me feel in control while traveling.  I kept a "diary" of my daily goings on while I was abroad - really, it was copies of letters I wrote to this guy I was obsessed with.  I've been planning for awhile to transcribe some of that stuff here because it's the first-hand (and most accurate) account of that time, but, honestly, reading it is so excruciating, that I can't bring myself to do this.  I can't peruse more than a page or two before I want to die of embarrassment.  My 22-year-old self is so contrived, so manipulated, so presented, and so emotionally heightened, all for the benefit of this guy, that I wish I could go back in time and stuff her in a writing implement-free incubator until she is a bit more fully hatched. 

So since I can't read it - and I mean it, I CAN'T read it - I'll just sum up from memory.  

1st leg of trip - my luggage gets lost in Warsaw.  This wouldn't matter so much except that I packed exceedingly carefully because I could only take a few bags and I had to fit in everything I'd need for a year, including my teaching materials.  Fortunately, it was eventually found.  

2nd leg of trip - we cross the border, and the Russian guards paw through our stuff. (I am in a group of about 11 people.)  Anything and everything is subject to confiscation.  Imagine that whole crappy go-through-the-x-ray-machine-at-the-airport on steroids in Russian, and that's it.  Again, fortunately, I didn't lose anything.  

Arrival in Russia - my housing situation falls to pieces.  No one has any idea where I will teach or live for several weeks.  When the date of my practice homestay arrives, a rep from the school who had promised to employ me takes me instead to a little resort on the Baltic Spit.  In Soviet Russia this was sort of the place to stay, I'm told.  Unfortunately, the accommodations are not luxurious in the Western sense.  They drop me off in a room in a sort of bathroom-free shack, tell me that a teacher from the school should be along, and leave.   I spend the night locked in my room with all my belongings listening to the mother of all drunken binges going on around me and thinking about where I should pee.  Eventually, my escort returns with her teenage daughter as she realizes I know no one and don't even know where I am geographically (and have no way of contacting anyone since there is no telephone).  

1st big trip - Warsaw/Krakow.  This was actually a really cool trip, except that I was the only person in our little group who spoke adequate Russian and we were, in fact, in Poland (where they speak Polish).  I found that if I approached people speaking Russian, they would ignore me, but if I approached speaking English and then switching to Russian, they would talk to me (in Russian).  I have some good memories of this trip, including traveling by bus through the Polish countryside seeing the regular flash of a series of cemeteries, lit up with candles for All Souls'.  Krakow was beautiful, and Auschwitz made a permanent impression on me.  My biggest challenge?  Arriving in the Krakow station at midnight with no map, no Polish, and no idea where we would stay or how we would get there at that time of night.  Honestly, there are times when I can't believe I actually did these things.  They are so unlike me. I completely could have been raped or killed.

Complete Clusterf*ck (i.e., New Year's trip to Vilnius) - a friend of mine and I decided we would go to Gdansk since we had significant time off around the holidays (Russia shuts down everything for the first couple of weeks in January), but he had left his passport in the city we lived which was east, not west.  So we went to Vilnius, Lithuania, instead.  At the border, right around midnight on the 1st, the Russians confiscated my multi-entry visa which made it possible for me to enter and exit the country at will.  When they walked away with it, I thought they were going to check on something and bring it back, but then the train started again, and my little adventure with Russian travel bureaucracy began.  I had brought about $80 with me for this weekend trip, and suddenly I was stranded in Lithuania during the holiday shutdown with no assistance given whatsoever from my travel companion (who spoke only incomprehensible Russian and was irritated with me, I think, for not wanting to hook up) and little support from my program director.  The American embassy wouldn't help me.  I got shaken down for money by the bus patrol because I forgot to have my ticket stamped.  The photographer I went to for new passport photos suggested I pay in a non-monetary currency.  I had to throw the most embarrassingly bitchy hissy fit at the Russian embassy and physically refuse to leave the building to get them to look into the details of my visa confiscation.  It was like a surreal nightmare with a soundtrack in Lithuanian.  Eventually I got out of there, re-entered the country at the same check point - where they were waiting for me with my original visa, having realized they'd screwed up - got home, and went to bed for about 3 weeks where I cried and huddled in a fetal position.  It had occurred to me, as I rode this dismal journey back alone, my travel companion having abandoned me to go back to teach, that it would have been so easy for me to be pulled off the train by some official, killed, and dumped.  And it would have been weeks before anyone would even think to investigate my whereabouts because communication was so impossible.

That was the low point, I think.  I did go on some trips after that, to Gdansk, to St. Petersburg, to Tallinn (and some charmingly remote Baltic island offshore), to Kaunas.  But I made sure to travel with other people who spoke Russian too - girls who spoke Russian and were neither interested in me romantically nor passive-aggressive - and I had occasional problems with panic attacks, esp. when dealing with officials at borders.  And instead of staying on in Eastern Europe to travel after my term was up, I left early and just came home.  

Then I just avoided going anywhere which would require a visa or a passport.  I held out, in fact, for 10 years until the time when we went to pick up Max.  And that trip is its own little story.  

 

Last week I reviewed Twilight, so this week I thought I'd comment a bit on the extras, specifically, the commentary by the movie's director, Catherine Hardwicke, as well as its two leads, Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson.  I bought the 3-disc edition from Target and so got an extra dose of extras, many of which were actually of some interest, although I'd really have appreciated more outtakes and a blooper reel.  There have to have been tons of bloopers on this film, esp. given all the weather troubles they appear to have had. 

The commentary is on the first disc.  Robert's comments are by far the most entertaining.  For a good rundown of those, go here; not all of his quips get mentioned - Mandi Bierly leaves out a couple of the funniest ones - but the ones she misses come up in the comments left by others.   

What I think is most interesting is that, of the three, only Catherine Hardwicke seems to be a fan of Twilight, the book, and she is really, really a fan of its melo-love-drama in general and of Edward Cullen in particular.  To be specific, her comments lead one to the conclusion that she has spent many evenings imagining how she would shag Edward completely senseless.  But since Edward is, very unfortunately, a fictional character, she could make Rob work in a pinch.  Yes, she could make Rob work...and there would be pinching.

This left me with a bit of a bad taste in my mouth.  It's not the age difference, really.  Really.  It's that she was his boss, and she's more or less verbally leering at him throughout.  Otherwise, she offers little enlightenment on the making of the film, and in at least one instance, [at the point in the film where Bella exits the book shop] she completely drops the ball, failing to explain the perspective of a camera angle Rob asks about.  Did she or did she not film and cut this thing?

Kristen Stewart is by far the least talkative of the three.  My sense is that she may have some perspective to give, but nothing has inspired her to offer it.  She's there on sufferance.  Twihards who imagine a Robsten pairing would only have to listen to this commentary for that fantasy to be cleared up - her attitude toward her costar is familiar, friendly, and at least once [when Rob complains about his hands] utterly exasperated.  Bella as a character, in her everygirl ordinariness, doesn't seem to particularly interest her.  For that matter, neither does Edward.  Mostly she comments on the everyday problems of each shoot - bad weather, treacherous terrain, wire work.  She did seem really familiar with the audience reaction to the film, like she'd been to a number of showings and was interested to see how the work had been perceived/received.  

In contrast, this is obviously the first time Rob Pattinson has seen the whole of Twilight, and it's clear it makes him beyond uncomfortable to have to view his performance. To endure it he resorts the British fallback, self-deprecating humor and spends the almost hour and a half ripping on his face ("Sometimes I think I look like I've had facial reconstructive surgery, like after burns or something."), his hands ("I've got such effeminate hands. I could never be strong."), and his "sculpted" eyebrows (which seem to represent and bear the full brunt of the contempt he has for Edward).  

Charmingly enough, this strategy works for him, probably because he mostly concentrates on the thing that he has no control over but which has been universally well received - his looks - instead of thing he did have control over and was less well received - his performance.  This is a smart use of self-deprecation; however, it's my sense that it comes naturally to him and it's not simply manipulation.  And he is genuinely funny and quite entertaining putting on this one-man talent show, laughing, joking, and bursting into song for comic effect.

Yet all this can't hide the fact that he clearly views Edward as fairly ridiculous and the Edward worship as beyond explanation.  Twilight could in no one's estimation, be considered a recommended book for 22-year-old males (the few 22-year-old males who actually read books, that is).  It's a girl's book, a romance.  Many of Edward's characteristics - his Adonis looks, his sculpted body, his politeness and good manners, his prolonged abstinence - are not ones that recommend him to other men.  And, objectively, this is a guy who has spent the first 90 years of his immortality going to high school and not even taking advantage of his good looks to bag girls.  He can play the piano and read minds, but what has he accomplished? 

Additionally, you can tell that the way the movie people dolled Edward up rankled.  The many disparaging remarks on his sculpted eyebrows reveal that.  Then there are his comments on Edward's "bouffant," his lipstick, the dorky baseball costume he wears during the vampire baseball scene.  None of these things add up to a manly enough man for all of the attention Edward's gotten, at least to the actor who played him.  Catherine Hardwicke clearly thinks she nailed Edward [cough, cough] and he is as dreamy as they come, though.

So, in sum: really enjoyable and fascinating commentary - not for what is said, but for what isn't.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have a new DIK review up at All About Romance for Catch of the Day by Kristan Higgins.  Check it out .

 

 

 

 

 

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Montcalm County has finally, under much public pressure, voted to discontinue giving their animal shelter pets to R&R Research, Inc. , a company that either sells them or euthanizes them. 

This is definitely a victory for the domesticated animals of West Michigan, so hurray for that!

Today I blogged over at the All About Romance News & Commentary blog about my delicious experience watching the movie Twilight.  Check it out.

I have to say, having read the GQ interview with Robert Pattinson , that he doesn't sound like he's having a heck of a lot of fun at this point in his life.  The piece flashed me back to when I was 22, living in another country, supposedly having this great adventure but really just eking it out day after day, alone and miserable.

At that point in my life I was working in Kaliningrad, Russia, teaching a whole spectrum of different aged students English.  When I signed up for this gig, it was supposed to be this grand adventure that also proved how fantastically courageous and blithe I was.   I was very excited about it.  At one point another plan I'd made to go and teach in Moscow fell through, and I was devastated.  After four years of college studying Russian and Russia, I wanted to go there and breathe the Russian air and absorb the Russian culture in through my very skin.  I thought I was totally up for it.  I mean, I'd kicked a$$ in my program at the University of Michigan, finishing Summa Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa.  Nothing was beyond me, right?  The world was my oyster to be slurped up and digested with relish.

Only it didn't quite work out that way.

In reality, the whole thing was terribly overwhelming.  I could speak and understand and write Russian if I concentrated, but living in the midst of a foreign language is like hearing a buzzing all of the time.  In normal life, if the people behind you in line at the movies start talking politics, you can process and either eavesdrop, participate, or ignore.  In Russia, I had to isolate every conversation and concentrate in order to understand it.  A phenomenal amount of information was being funneled all around me, but I knew I was missing most of it, at least at first.  I felt embarrassed to talk because I had no confidence that I wouldn't make atrocious mistakes all of the time.  And, in fact, even though my Russian was pretty good, frequently people wouldn't understand it because they saw me, knew I was foreign from my clothes, the way I stood, or whatever, and would dismiss me as unintelligible before my mouth opened.  I'm not kidding.  I'd take Russian friends along when I went to stores and when this happened, ask them if I was messing up, and they would assure me that what I'd said was clear and correct.  It was the other person who wasn't hearing. 

Another kind of freaky thing was the knowledge that we were being monitored by the local KGB.  We were told they knew our whereabouts and our activities.  This was right after the fall of Communism in 1993, but much of the political apparatus was still in place.  I knew I didn't blend in, and sometimes I'd hear the word "American" before I stepped off the bus on  my way home in the dark cold and wonder if maybe those guys behind me were the ones talking on the bus.  And then I would think, "No, I'm being paranoid."  But the fact was that Kaliningrad was a closed city to foreigners until right before our group came in, so the vast majority of people hadn't seen anyone in their lives who wasn't a Soviet citizen.  It was just creepy.  

At this point, at 23, I really had only a small collection of life skills and making them work in another culture was challenging.  Purchasing food was tricky, and preparing it well was often beyond me.  I lived on deep fried potatoes and bread.  I lost significant weight and got down to 95 pounds.  I was alone all the time.  I made only one good friend, and, of course, she couldn't babysit me; she had her own life to lead.  I read all of the time because my music collection sucked, I didn't have a TV, and the radio was limited.  There was no internet then and about half of my mail didn't make it to me from home.  My students gave me a stray kitten for a pet, but I had such a strong allergic reaction to it, I had to give it back even though I was starving for company and really could have used some fur therapy.

I looked horrible the whole year.  I could only bring with me what luggage I could carry and that included toiletries, books, teaching supplies, anything I'd want for a whole year, so my wardrobe was limited.  Everything I wore, I hand washed when it got dirty, and I wasn't exactly adept at that, so I looked layered and rumpled and ugly all of the time.  Russian girls my age there made a real effort to look sexy even in the worst weather.  My goal was not to die of exposure, and to hell with the rest.  I had my mom send over contact lens solution (at great cost - thanks, Mom) so that I could ditch the glasses I'd intended to wear all year because I couldn't stand to look plain, rumpled, and bespectacled all the time, every day.  There were so many pretty girls there.  I felt like Nanny McFee.  

In the end, all these things added to some travel related visa problems made me a nervous wreck.  Despite having learned numerous new skills, I felt like a huge failure because I was only surviving, not thriving.  The constant isolation only increased my anxiety and paranoia.  I left early, came home, stayed with my parents for awhile and dialed it back to near zero.  Everyone wanted to hear about my exciting time abroad, and I could barely bring myself to talk about any of it, too shell-shocked and, at the same time, too proud to admit how I'd floundered.  The whole experience was humbling in the extreme.  

Looking back now, I wish I'd lived with a family instead of on my own.  I wanted privacy, but I think having a foster mother type would have helped tremendously, even if I'd had to sleep on someone's couch.  I needed a sounding board and more emotional support than I had available, and some decent food would have helped.  

I remembered all of that today when I read that interview and wished I could have somehow imparted the handful of wisdom I learned then, or at least been able to ship off a home cooked meal to Robert Pattinson (who would probably only laugh at me for my impertinence).  Poor lad, away from home and surrounded by complete lunatics and opportunists.  I will never understand fans who mob famous people and faint and scream.  I'm not sure I could actually bring myself to introduce myself to someone even semi-famous (such as a favorite author) whom I liked and respected.  What would I say?  Nothing impressive or of importance, I'm sure.  Better I stay at home where if I say something stupid, there's a limited audience for it.  

 

His Majesty's Dragon Naomi Novik Fantasy 2006 Rating: B

 

"His Majesty’s Dragon is straight fantasy, no romance whatsoever, but it does have, at its heart, a very lovely and emotionally rich relationship between a man and his newly hatched dragon.

Captain Will Laurence and his naval crew capture a French frigate in what Laurence assumes to be a routine skirmish. What’s hardly routine is the cargo the frigate is carrying: a dragon egg. Dragons are rare and powerful creatures, used by both the English and the French in the ongoing war, so a dragon egg is a prize indeed. Unfortunately, this egg is about to hatch, and no one on board knows much of anything about rearing a young dragon.

Shortly thereafter while the HMS Reliant is still at sea, the egg does hatch, and the dragon rejects the member of the crew selected by lot to put it in harness. Instead he decides he prefers Laurence. In that moment Laurence’s whole life changes as he transitions from career navy captain to member of the Aerial Corps/dragon handler, for once a dragon allows itself to be harnessed by a human, a bond is forged forever, and all other considerations and the comforts of a normal life fly out the window. Laurence accepts all of this with resignation as he places the harness on the dragon he names Temeraire. What he doesn’t realize is how important Temeraire will come to be to him.

While dragons are fantastical creatures, Novik’s introduction of them as fighting weapons in the Napoleonic Wars never feels artificial or unbelievable. Perhaps this is because the rest of her historical backdrop is so well done. Laurence is in every way a man of his time and a man of his career. His outlook, his decisions, and his prejudices all stem from being a man of good family and good upbringing. Temeraire, of course, takes him by surprise, mostly because he didn’t know how intelligent and social dragons can be. He is stunned to find out they can talk, and even more astonished to watch Temeraire outpace him intellectually. But the biggest surprise is how soon he becomes emotionally attached to his winged, scaled protégé.

The best parts of His Majesty’s Dragon are the quiet scenes between Laurence and Temeraire. Laurence has never been anti-social, but his position as navy captain prevented him from having very close friendships with his shipmates. His relationship with his own father is tepid at best, so when he is thrust into a mentoring role, he doesn’t quite know how best to go about it. But his kind and gentle nature comes to the fore, and he finds that caring for Temeraire is rewarding in and of itself.

Temeraire, for his part, becomes fiercely devoted to Laurence, far more devoted, in fact, than he is to his given mission: defending England. While he is able to talk and understand things upon hatching, Temeraire is childlike. As the book progresses, he goes through more adolescent stages, and it is interesting and often touching to watch him with Laurence. He is a fearsome creature, but emotionally vulnerable to this one man. It is fortunate for him that Laurence is so honorable. Some dragons in this parallel universe do not have it so good.

The book’s first two thirds involve Laurence and Temeraire getting to know each other and then learning to operate within the Aerial Corps. I found both of these to be very enjoyable. The last third was their introduction to warfare, and my interest waned here. Novik does a good job narrating her battle scenes and using them to reveal things about her lead characters, but action scenes, and particularly battle scenes, just aren’t my thing. I was tempted to skim in places and probably would have if I hadn’t been reading this book for review.

Strangely enough, while reading this, I kept comparing His Majesty’s Dragon to Wen Spencer's Ukiah Oregon series. While on the surface they are little alike, this series being historical and concerning dragons and the other being contemporary and concerning aliens, the relationship between Laurence and Temeraire is as warm and supportive as the one between Ukiah and his mentor, Max. And both Novik and Spencer do a wonderful job with world-building and suspenseful action scenes.

His Majesty’s Dragon is the first book in a series.  Several of its sequels have already been released to good reviews. So new fans of Laurence and Temeraire will be able to immerse themselves in this new and very exciting parallel universe right away. That’s good news!"

The original review is here. 

This book is available cheap at amazon.com.

 

What's in: 

• 2 short rows of peas
• 1 short row of Buttercrunch lettuce
• 1 short row of Swiss chard

(I will, perhaps, be adding rows of lettuce to spread this harvest out a bit.)

• 1 long row of carrots
• 1 long row of onions
• 1 long row of potatoes

(Check out this really cool link on growing 100 pounds of potatoes in 4 square feet.  I might have to try this.)

Also, tomatoes, peppers, and asparagus are planted in their little seedling trays.  Nothing has come up yet, but they are being encouraged to grow.

I've put in about 7 more hours of sweat labor, mostly double ditching the garden to dig manure and leaves into the soil and loosen things up for planting. And I bought a bag of potting soil ($2.75) to plant the peppers and tomato seeds in since the instructions specified "sterile soil."  

Also, I've discovered that Milo remembers well how to climb the fence and get out, so now when I'm gardening, I've got him on a chain in the yard.  :(

The weather is getting pretty decent here, with temps getting into the fifties during the day.  The porch has all of those big picture windows, and if the sun is shining it gets warm enough for seedlings to be set out by mid-morning.  Some of our crocus are still out, but we've also seen tulips, hyacinths and daffodils.  A few of our bushes are budding.  I am grateful for spring.

Have you seen the youtube video of the crowd in the Antwerp train station bursting into dance when the Do-Re-Mi dance is piped out of the central speakers?  So fun.

I've watched it like 5 times already.  It makes me smile and smile.  I LOVED The Sound of Music when I was little.  Loved it.  Waited for it to come on TV once a year (this was when we had 3 channels and PBS and you watched what they gave you when they gave it to you and were grateful) and ate it up.  We had the record set and my sister and I would listen to it on our huge HI-FI stereo (the cover was so heavy that if you weren't careful and it slipped, it could decapitate you - or at least I always worried it could) and sing and dance around the room.   Oh, we loved that movie.  I have it.  I'll have to get it out and watch it with Max.  Julie Andrews had the loveliest, clearest soprano - so joyful to listen to.  

It's funny how watching groups of people dancing can so invigorate you.  I remember feeling the same way when I saw Les Miserables at the Civic in college.  All those people singing and moving so passionately all together - it made you want to hunt down a French aristocrat and cut him down right there.  The feelings it inspired!

Laws of the Blood: Companions Susan Sizemore Vampire Fiction 2001 Rating: B

 

"I am always up for a good vampire story, and if a little romance is thrown into the mix, so much the better. Until now I was unaware that Susan Sizemore wrote a vampire series. Laws of the Blood: Companions is the third book in the series, and, though I have not read the first two, I enjoyed it very much.

The story takes place somewhere in the second half of the twentieth century. Istvan is our vampire "hero," and he is over five hundred years old. He's a dhamphir vampire, the son of a vampire and a Roma (gypsy) woman. He had strong psychic powers before he was turned into a vampire, and now he's top dog. Istvan's job is to be an Enforcer of Vampiric Law. He gets rid of law breaking vampires and protects the vampire community as a whole from human scrutiny.

Selena Crawford is a Chicago homicide detective who comes from a family of "white" witches. She has strong extrasensory abilities as well. Because of this she was picked to be Istvan's companion several years ago. They were both set up by an interfering vampire, and the result is that they have a blood bond that connects them. Neither of them wanted this relationship, but because the relationship exists, they crave each other and need the sexual and emotional connection even as this desire goes against personal inclination.

What throws Istvan and Selena together again in this book is a vampire murder that occurs in Chicago. As a homicide cop, Selena is called in to view the grisly remains of a mutilated and decapitated vampire. She immediately recognizes him as a vampire, but is somewhat at a loss for what to do. After all, vampires have their own leaders and laws. Unbeknownst to her, Istvan is also aware of the murder and involved in the investigation. There's one small barrier to their working together on this, though. Selena is Istvan's primary suspect.

This book was quite entertaining. The story moved along quickly, and there were a number of amusing moments. This is not a romance per se, it's more of a mystery adventure, but there was enough of a romance between Selena and Istvan to be satisfying. The fact that their relationship is a coerced and permanent one makes it a variant of an arranged marriage, which is one of my favorite scenarios.

There are some similarities to the Anita Blake books. Selena is rather kick-ass, Istvan is a vampire leader, and they are bonded together in a mystical type of union. But this series seems to be somewhat lighter fare. The Anita Blake books are so...everything. Violent, sexually graphic, complicated, angsty, intense. Companions is violent and sexy, but not in a graphic way, and the rules of the universe seem more constant and clear. And, unlike the Anita books, this series is told in the third person, so Istvan's feelings are explored too. It's not so heroine-centered.

The one thing that would have made this book better would have been the addition of a glossary/codification of vampire law. It was confusing to try and figure out how an Enforcer was different from a strigoi and what exactly a dhamphir was. Half the fun of a vampire book is figuring out how that particular vampire universe operates. Since Companions is the third book in a series. I kept wondering if all this had been spelled out in the preceding books, or if the reader was just expected to puzzle it all out. Also, most of Selena and Istvan's personal history was summed up in clunky flashback form. One can only assume that it had been covered in real time format in a previous book.

Laws of the Blood: Companions was a solid read. It was straightforward, interesting, fun, and not too angsty or melodramatic. I think I'll go see what the first two books in this series are all about. If they're anything like this one, they'll be plenty enjoyable."

The original review is here. 

This book is available cheap at amazon.com .

 

This year I thought it would be interesting to keep track of input output of my garden(s).  I'm going to have two: the one I worked on together with my neighbor, Amber,  last year, and one I'm going to do with my father on his church's land.   The second one I ethically couldn't do, if there was a scramble for land to garden on, but despite the stories I've read about how more people are gardening to save money, half of these church plots are still untaken.   Maybe more than half.  So there is room for me.  Anyway, I thought my dad could teach me some things about gardening and it would be a fun thing to do with him.

 

 

I'm also going to be getting fresh, organic produce from a local CSA, Trillium Haven Farms.  I'm hoping between these three sources I will have enough tomatoes to do lots of canning for next winter and I will have lots of root veggies to take me through at least late fall.  

So, what have I done so far?  Well, back in February, I put my seed order together, and those seeds have arrived.  I bought one seed starter kit and my mother-in-law bought me another one plus some organic seeds. I used the first one to plant flower seeds I harvested last fall: sunflowers, cosmos, marigolds, hollyhocks, and this funky pod plant I've sort of coveted on my many walks around the neighborhood.  

 

The sunflowers, so gorgeous in their self-situated beauty (in my neighbor's yard), have not germinated well at all.  I had two come up, and one is already toast.  Of all the seeds, the gaillardia packaged seeds have done the best so far - that's the one in the front, second from the left.  I'm probably going to plant more sunflowers this week and hope I get a few more plants.  

 

This week I went and got a selection of small peat pots from Meijer because I wanted my tomatoes to do as well as they could, including on the transition from pot to garden.  Some of the seeds will have to be sown directly, including the peas and potatoes which I will be putting shortly, but some of them need a bit of extra TLC and a bit longer growing season.

 

I also found someone on Craigslist who was giving away horse manure, so we took the truck and got two loads.  It was surprisingly un-gross, I assume since it's just partly digested grass.  I spread that all over my small garden plot, grateful for the volume, the price, and the lack of plastic bags to throw away after.  I started to dig it in on Thursday, and discovered a bunch of rocks which will have to be sifted out of the soil before I can turn over the manure and add more.

 

So far, the costs this year are as follows:

Money:

• $34.51 - seed order
• $8.42 - incubator 
• $5.46 - peat pots + 1 packet zucchini seeds (all 20% off)
• $1.50 seed potatoes (I'm going to try using small potatoes that have already sprouted in my basement and see if that works)
• $5.50 - gas for truck (2 24 mile round trips @ $2.00, averaging 19 miles to the gallon)

Total: $55.39

Sweat:

• 1 hour choosing seeds (more browsing, but I'm counting that as entertainment)
• .5 hour planting flower seeds
• 5 hours picking up and spreading manure.

Total:  6.5 hours

 

 

I Am Not Esther Fleur Beale Young Adult Fiction 1998 Rating: B

 

"I find the topic of religion to be fascinating, so I’m always up for a book that includes religion as part of the plot. I Am Not Esther is a rather chilling book about a cult that allows no individual thought.

Kirby Greenland has always had a chaotic life with her flaky mom. She’s used to taking care of her and the household responsibilities. One day her mother receives an upsetting letter and soon afterward announces that she’s quit her job at the hospital and will be going to Africa to work. Kirby will be staying with her Uncle Caleb and his family until she returns.

Kirby, however, has never met any of her relatives before, and she soon finds out why her mother had no contact with them. Her uncle, Caleb Pilgrim, belongs to a fundamentalist religious cult, the Children of the Faith. Their religion is very rigid. Women stay at home and have children. Children respect their elders and don’t ask questions. All members follow the Rule, a set of restrictions that keep them out of the reach of the world and focused on God. Once in Caleb and his wife Naomi’s care, Kirby is immediately renamed Esther. All members of the faith must have Biblical names. They must also not dress in worldly clothing and avoid TV and radio. Kirby learns that if she stays in Caleb’s care, she will likely be expected to marry a boy of her uncle’s choice soon, since most girls from the cult marry at sixteen. When Kirby rebels against the restrictions, the entire family is punished: Caleb, Naomi and their children spend hours on their knees praying and waiting for Kirby to repent. Kirby finds this to be terribly unfair but also terribly effective as punishment. How can she watch her tiny cousin suffer for what she does? It’s impossible; better to abide by the Rule. Nod and smile.

Of course, not everyone is completely satisfied with the way things are. The Pilgrims had a daughter, Miriam, who disappeared from the family only weeks before Kirby arrived. No one will talk about what happened to her. Kirby’s cousin Daniel secretly harbors the desire to be a doctor, even though he knows his religion frowns on higher education. Some of the girls Kirby associates with slyly break the Rule while at school. The longer Kirby stays with the Pilgrims, the more she wonders if she or anyone can leave. If social coercion alone can’t hold her, her feelings might. She doesn’t know if she can leave her cousins when she loves them and they need her.

I Am Not Esther has a horrific premise and will be appealing to teens. The idea that, at any moment, you could find yourself completely powerless and dependent on the whims of your elders is something that won’t feel too impossible to young people who already must play by adult rules. And though the Children of the Faith is a fictional religion, it bears great resemblance to many faiths with fundamentalist leanings.

The story moved along quickly. Kirby was an interesting character whose anger, belligerence, and occasional obedience were easy to understand. She see-sawed between hatred and love for her missing mother, and that was understandable. The resolutions of the two problems, how to cope within the cult’s strong grip and how to deal with her mother’s betrayal, were both well done and touching.

The book’s one flaw is its one-dimensional portrayal of religious people. Beale makes all the deeply religious characters cold, hard, unemotional and controlling, and all the doubters compassionate, brave, and wise. The cult itself was fairly interesting, and the obvious questions arise. Why do these people believe the way they do? How do they deal with doubt and disagreement within the religion? Do they find peace and happiness in practicing their faith? Beale never answers these questions. Making Kirby so ignorant about what the Children of the Faith are about is an effective device. It makes the story more frightening. But a more even-handed characterization might have made the tension between feeling and religious belief even more poignant.

Fleur Beale is a New Zealand author, and I Am Not Esther was originally published in 1998. I believe this is her first title published in the United States. Though the book had a few flaws in characterization, it was a riveting, emotional read, and I will be looking for future titles by Beale."

The original review is here. 

This book is available cheap at half.com or, alternatively, at Bookmooch.

 

Truly Madly Yours Rachel Gibson Romance Novel 1999   $6.99 Rating: A

According to my database, I've read Truly Madly Yours at least three times.  Personally, I think it's closer to five.  I read it this month as a comfort read.  Why I find it comforting I'm not exactly sure, but I can tell you that, for sheer sexual tension, this ones got few competitors in the romance genre.  

The book's plot rests on a very unlikely scenario.  Delaney Shaw's adoptive father Henry dies having arranged his will in a very manipulative way.  The document states that Delaney will inherit half of his considerable estate if she stays in Truly, Idaho for one complete year.  His illegitimate son, Nick Allegrezza, stands to inherit two valuable properties if he does not have sex with Delaney.  The will, on its surface, seems to want Nick and Delaney to stay away from each other, but Henry had something more complicated in mind.  He knew these two had a past, and he knew that they both hated Henry telling them what to do.  So it remains to be seen whether the two will succeed in meeting the will's stipulations or whether they will act as entirely inappropriately as they have in the past, risking humiliation and loss because the spark between them is too tempting not to touch...

Honestly, what makes this book for me is Nick Allegrezza.  He is a smoking hot alpha jerk, and I loved everything about him.  I loved him when he was coarse and blunt.  I loved him when he was calling Delaney on the carpet.  I loved him when he was pulling Delaney to the carpet...Whew!  Fan me off!  Nick is a combination of outsider/bad boy and biggest catch in town.  As Henry's unacknowledged bastard, he lived his life beyond the pale until he reached adulthood.  Since then, he's made himself a financial success.   He's also gorgeous and able, decisive and strong.  And yet, he's hung up on Delaney - always has been and always will be.  She is forbidden, and he smoulders for her, often pushing her away then pulling her back as his emotions seesaw between desire and fear of rejection.  He's a bit more psychologically complex than I'd expect from an Avon contemporary.  Definitely not tortured, but he's not entirely in control of himself either.  Delaney makes him vulnerable in ways he hates and rails against. 

Delicious. 

Delaney is so much fun as a female protagonist.  She's down to earth and yet quirky and fun.  She dresses in some rather shocking ensembles for Truly and craves independence from the town, Henry, and her overly constrained mother.  Delaney isn't beautiful, but she isn't afraid to work what she has and she isn't afraid of working for a living.  She's a hair stylist by training, and her job provides the context for her ambitions and outlook.  She schemes to take down her old rival, Helen's, salon and judges people by their split ends.  Her feelings for Nick are also complex, and, while she can't quite keep away from him, she also wants to take him on her terms and her terms alone.  She's not his doormat or his disposable date.  

The sexual tension between the two of them is really strong throughout the book.  They enjoy playing games with each other and like pitting their wits too, and, though Delaney rarely triumphs in their verbal sparring, she often enjoys the process and the loss of control.  The will provides another great source of conflict.  The reader wants them to get together and yet wants Delaney to have her inheritance too.  This is not a plot driven book, but the terms of the will - that year required of Delaney - do provide a natural structure and pacing.

Rachel Gibson's sense of humor is on exhibit here throughout their many exchanges.  I loved their verbal barrages and Delaney's mental monologues.  I also liked how Nick's Basque heritage was incorporated in the book.  

Great conflict, great hero, great heroine, and smoldering tension throughout - what's not to love?  I think I always worry that this next re-read is going to be the disappointing one, that I'll have gotten everything I can out of Truly Madly Yours.  But five re-reads and counting, and I'm still highly entertained and sometimes even touched by the antics of these two crazy kids.

 

 

Please go here and tell me what you think of this woman's story and POV.  There are days when I think I'm getting too judgmental, but is it unreasonable to think that if you can't afford to live on your own, you can't afford to have another baby by yourself or travel to the Continent? 

Can You Keep a Secret? Sophie Kinsella Chick Lit 2004 Rating: B

 

"I didn't know exactly what to expect from Can You Keep a Secret?. Becky Bloomwood, the heroine of Kinsella's previous books, the Shopaholic trilogy, struck me as an irresponsible twit, but Kinsella's writing was enjoyable. So this time I was hoping for a better protagonist. And, lucky me, I got one.

Emma Corrigan isn't a twit, but she does have a tendency to fall into awkward situations, mostly because her insecurities rule her personal roost. Emma is a marketing assistant - mostly a glorified secretary. She yearns for a promotion to marketing exec so that she can show her family and especially her overachiever cousin Kerry that she is so a success. When no one is available to nail down a done deal in Glasgow, Emma's company, Panther Corporation, sends her up there as the fill-in body. But when she gets there she realizes that the deal has gone sour. Her attempts to shore things up fail miserably, and she makes her way to the airport lounge to drown her sorrows.

Midway through the rocky flight home, a tipsy and frightened Emma winds up spilling her life's secrets to her seatmate, a young American guy who is an astonishingly good listener. Emma tells him all all about her too small g- string and where and with whom she lost her virginity. She vents about her family and Kerry and about her job and her coworkers. She talks about her unsatisfying relationship with her boyfriend Connor. By the time the plane lands, she's sobered up and he knows everything there is to know about her. Awash with embarrassment, Emma scurries from the plane, glad beyond measure that she will never see him again. But Monday morning at work, she gets an awful shock. Jack Harper, the head of Panther Corporation drops in the London office for a look-see - and to Emma's extreme humiliation, she realizes Jack is the guy from the plane. What is she going to do now?

Okay, this book pivots on a premise that is pretty shaky - the coincidental unknowing meeting between boss and employee - and the fairly unbelievable supposition that anyone would actually pay any attention to the drunken ramblings of their obnoxious seatmate. But if you can get beyond those two things, this is a fun story. Emma is a bit clueless, but she's conscious of the fact that her desire to appear more together than she is can be dangerous, and when mini-disasters happen (as they frequently do), she takes it on the chin. She and Mia Thermopolis have that in common.

It is really quite amusing to watch Emma deal with all the things she told Jack on the plane. She is no longer able to use all the small social lies she would normally tell to smoothe things over or make a good impression on him, and he knows it - and rather enjoys twitting her about them. The two of them have a nice, subtle chemistry together. Another welcome touch is that Emma's boyfriend isn't a complete rotter like so many of boyfriends in Chick Lit. He's just wrong for her, and she has to figure out what to do about that.

Jack, on the other hand, is more than right for her and more than willing to make her life better and more enjoyable. Many of the things that make Emma feel helpless are the same everyday things that would grind anyone down. Her coworkers shaft her. Her family underrates her. Her roommate is a witch. And rather than make a big fuss over it, Emma is a good sport. But every slight undercuts her self-esteem. Jack, knowing her secrets and being the boss, is in an excellent position to call attention to these slights, and he does. Because Emma is so likable a character, his putting things to rights for her is a big fat warm fuzzy for the reader.

Unfortunately, because this book is written in the first person, Jack remains enigmatic throughout, and so just what this super-successful multi- millionaire sees in Emma remains a bit of a mystery, as do certain other things about his character. The other secondary characters aren't very dimensional either, but as they are there for mostly comedic purposes, they don't detract from the story.

Can You Keep a Secret? was a fun book that lifted my spirits and made me smile repeatedly. In some very pleasant ways this book reminded me of Meg Cabot's Princess Diaries series. Both have heroines who want to be cooler and more sophisticated, but are more lovable the way they actually are. If you're looking for a light, happy, feel-good read I recommended picking this one up."

The original review is here. 

This book is available cheap at half.com or, alternatively, at Bookmooch.

 

 

After hearing a rumor that 60% of Americans are struggling to put food on the table, I happened to see this video on CNN.  The correspondant, Sean Callebs was challenged to live on the food stamp allowance for a month, which for a single person is $176 a month.  What I found most interesting was not the segment itself, but the comments on Callebs's blog which could serve as a text book example of the term "polarized."  Some people insisted it was impossible to live on this amount and others said they could live practically in luxury on $176.  The difference in perspective is amazing and amusing to me.  

From the perspective of a longtime Tightwad Gazette devotee, it does seem more than doable to live on this amount.  But - and this is a big BUT - you have to be organized and plan ahead.  And you have to have storage room, preferably in a freezer.  

Shameful confession here - I don't really have a food budget.  I hate tracking expenses and I don't coupon.  I've been lucky in that we have had [knock wood] consistent employment, and I've been frugal enough in other areas that I haven't had to scrutinize my grocery bills.  However, I do:

• bulk buy when things are on sale
• purchase my bread at the discount (read: day old) bakery
• buy house brand instead of name brand whenever possible
• price per ounce in the grocery store
• eschew pre-packaged or pre-made dinners or snacks
• shop at ALDI/Dollar General/ethnic supermarkets
• use produce from my (or someone else's) garden
  

Since I am now cooking more and wasting less, I'm getting more bang for my buck because I know what's in my fridge and I try to use it up efficiently.  The leftovers are all being eaten, even if sometimes by the dogs.  I've never been an entirely from scratch person - I have a weakness for Cool Ranch Doritos, Classic Coke, and Double Stuff Oreos - but I'm noticing that the more I cook, the less junk I'm eating.  I guess because I know there's something decent in the fridge and I just eat that instead. 

In any case, while I've never had a fixed grocery budget, what I've spent there has never been astronomical, and it's never been with an eye for just what I'd been eating this week.  I've always been a pantry shopper.  Here's a quick tour of my "pantry" - i.e., various places in my basement where I store food for future use.  

Main Pantry		Here the top shelf consists of cleaning products, TP, light bulbs, etc.  The stuff you don't really want to run out of, but don't want your young child to get into.  The second shelf is sort of a miscellaneous - peanut butter, raisins, condiments, spices, teas, spaghetti sauce.  Third shelf is canned items - veggies, fruits, beans, canned meats, mushrooms.  There used to be a lot more soup there, but I can make so much more soup for so much less money, I've really stopped buying that.   This third shelf is really the core of the pantry - I started it because I never wanted to not have ready food in the house in case of emergency, and it evolved from there. The bottom tier is water bottles, full of city water with a few drops of bleach in them to kill bacteria.  They are there in case of emergency as well.
Dry goods		Here is one of the secondary tiers of the pantry, with a longer term goal.  Most of this is dried stuff - dry milk, dry potatoes, Bisquick, oatmeal, stuffing.  I also have jams - bought or homemade - more peanut butter, oils and syrup.  There is also soap and toothpaste, shampoo, and things like that because J. and I share some apocalyptic anxiety of the Y2K variety.
Dry ingredients for baking or cooking		Here are more dry goods - flour, sugar, and ramen, with a large container full of different kinds of dried beans below.
Misc.		Here we have noodles, mac 'n' cheese, crackers, rice mixes, nuts, condiments, molasses and honey.  I've pretty much stopped buying rice mixes because plain rice is more economical and just as easy.  I've also gone to buying corn meal flour in 5 lb. bag quantities (or larger).
Frozen foods		Finally, here is my chest freezer.  Visible are only the top items.  This thing is packed with homemade rolls, bread, meats, cheeses, margarine, you-pick blueberries and cherries, tomatoes from the garden, and salsa.

 

As you can see, we are in no danger of going hungry for some time.  And this storage is only my basement storage.  It doesn't count what's upstairs in my cupboards or in my fridge/top freezer, or my root vegetables.  I have a huge trash container for dog food, and a 20 lb. bag of rice sitting around too.  I figure we could eat off of this for a couple of months at least should anything go horribly wrong [knock wood].  

All of the above is my basic food strategy for saving money at the grocery market and guaranteeing that the basics of cooking are always on hand. My goal for this next year is to replace most of this boxed/canned stuff for locally grown, grass finished products with less of a carbon footprint.  That will be easier for some of this stuff than for others.

 

I have a feeling this is going to be the season for garage sale deals.   With the economy tanking, people are going to want to buy and sell stuff to make and save money.  I'm planning on holding one to get rid of all the baby stuff in my basement and miscellaneous other crap I don't see a future need for. 

I'm also going to power yard sale, in hopes of reducing my Christmas/Birthday costs for the next year.   I can't make a list for those things, mainly I just have to keep my eyes open for stuff I know my nearest and dearest would appreciate.  My list includes things like:

• Boys' navy cotton dress pants sizes 6/7, 7/8 (Max has to wear a uniform next year)
• White/light blue dress shirts or polos, sizes 6/7, 7/8
• Canning jars
• Pressure cooker
• Cookie sheets
• Wooden spoons
• Bread bowl (Dad gave me one!)
• Fabric
  
• Other sewing odd 'n' ends
• Boots (Boys' sizes 1 or 2, women's size 5 waterproof)
• Small glass plastic bowls (I have a set that is slightly smaller than the average  soup bowl that I use a lot.  Max has broken too many of them in the last couple of years; I'm down to 6 or so and dropping.)
• Axe
• Tomato cages any/or garden trellising
• Large flower pots for container gardening
• Metal bike basket
• Snow brush with scraper (2 of mine broke this winter.  I'm now using the cheap looking scraper J. got as a gift from work along with what remains of the brush after the scraper end broke.  This is passive frugality at its finest.)
• Dog toys
• Dog leashes
  

It is also my intention to get a much larger freezer, approximately 20 cubic feet, to use to store my CSA abundance for next winter.  This I estimate will cost roughly $600, but I haven't gone to physically price them yet to see if there are better deals, on scratch and dent, say.  I'm waiting for my tax refund to come before I do that.   I have been debating purchasing a wood stove, mostly to alleviate anxiety about my complete dependence on the gas companies for my heating, but I think installing one might be too complicated, given our lack of a chimney.  Since I'm not really intending on using it, except in a heating emergency, it's probably not an essential purchase.

It's haunting to see these kinds of images of places that look war torn - without having been through a war.  Detroit is a massive sh*thole and, IMHO, beyond redemption.  They should just wall it off, send in periodic supplies, and let it implode in a huge Lord of the Flies-type experiment.  That the rest of Michigan finances this city with infusions of cash from its now meager resources is a crime.  

I lived a year and a half in inner-city Detroit (1996-1998) getting my Master's degree, and then you couldn't walk a block without stepping on glass from broken booze bottles.  The once beautiful neighborhoods were literally disintegrating, the gorgeous Catholic churches echoing the drips from the water that seeped in through the holes in the rooves.  Once I walked down the road to St. Albertus parish church and school and spent an hour or more walking through the wreckage of what only a few decades before had been a vibrantly proud Polish center.  The school was lovely, the kind of place I'd wished I'd gone to with its high ceilings, huge windows, wall length blackboards, and old fashioned two-story auditorium/stage with balcony.  I imagined the kids' voices and footsteps echoing in the stairwells.  It was not hard to envision hundreds of little Catholic children in uniforms, running, jumping, giggling, being shushed by nuns. 

The church was gorgeous - hand painted, with numerous carvings and statues.  A small group of parishioners was keeping it running for special masses only.  No priest was stationed there, and any congregation commuted in from the suburbs.  The church was run down, not in ruins like the school, but needing enormous infusions of cash to keep it from going that route.  The whole area was unsafe to linger in, even in broad daylight. 

While I lived in Detroit, the city imploded the Hudson's Building downtown.   So I heard and read dozens of stories of how that building had once been part of so many of the citizens' lives, in memorable ways, especially at Christmastime.  Now there is an empty space.  

If I think about what has become of this once lovely, interesting city, I get really depressed, angry, and bitter.  So I try not to.   Numerous people are at fault for its downfall, white and black, but what's remains of the population - poor, uneducated people, aging, physically compromised, violent, shortsighted, and deeply racist - frankly, they do not have it in them to revitalize anything, let alone this once great city.

Miranda Blue Calling Michelle Curry Wright Chick Lit 2004 Rating: B

 

"A friend of mine recommended Miranda Blue Calling to me, comparing it to Tim Farrington's The Monk Downstairs . Since I enjoyed that book so much I was eager to try Michelle Curry Wright. Her writing voice isn't at all the same as Farrington's, and this book doesn't contain any religious themes, but that same quiet melding of two broken but thoughtful characters is there. This is another touching story of new beginnings.

After souring on men following a number of bad experiences with losers, takers, and users, Miranda Blue moves from New York City to Aspen, Colorado, but her luck and her proclivity for bad boys follows her there and culminates in an abusive situation. So she decides to take a sabbatical, not just from men, but from all of humanity and goes to the most remote location possible she can find - in Otnip ("pinto" backwards), Colorado. She starts up a home business calling elderly shut-ins, keeping them company over the phone and assigning them interesting and inspirational reading so that her clients can occupy and challenge themselves.

Miranda couldn't imagine anyone bothering her in Otnip, but she didn't reckon on her neighbor, William Wordsworth Steadman. Billy is a hydroponic farmer who grows world class tomatoes and other herbs and vegetables for restaurants and other vendors. He himself escaped to Otnip after his young wife died of leukemia eight years ago and has been content with the solitude. But Miranda reawakens his curiosity about life, and he sets himself the Herculean task of bringing her out of her shell - or at least out of her house. But Miranda doesn't trust Billy, and, more importantly, doesn't trust her own judgment anymore. His continuous efforts to charm her are hard to resist, though. Will she be able to hold out against Billy and the world at large?

First of all, a big thank you to Michelle Curry Wright for giving the reading world Billy Steadman. What a nice guy he is. Kind, helpful, creative, thoughtful, and delightfully quirkly. I wanted to pinch him on both sets of cheeks. That Miranda can stand to rebuff him for as long as she does is a testament to human will and mule stubbornness. While it is true that she is operating under the mistaken impression that he dabbles in growing marijuana on the side (an impression that Billy has fostered just for the sheer perversity of it), it's hard to understand how she can think Billy, the guy who gives her deerskin work gloves and putters around putting her house to rights, is in the same league with the hard-drinking, Harley-riding guys who came before him. Oh, to be pursued by a guy like Billy.

Miranda is occasionally obtuse in other areas. She seems oblivious to the effect she has on Billy and on men in general, and she underestimates her importance to her clients. Determined to prove her professionalism, she fails to realize that her collection of homebound clients care a great deal for her and can sense her loneliness. The parts of the book that focus on her conversations with them are charming. Miranda leads them in readings from the bible, Walt Whitman, Victor Hugo, the kabbalah. She encourages 92-year-old Evalina to do I Ching. But she doesn't really understand why they might care more about what's going on with the neighbor across the street than Leaves of Grass. And when Miranda lets her guard down on the phone about the police visiting Billy, her phone community gets more involved than she could have ever imagined.

Wright has an offbeat writing style in both description and dialogue. She clearly likes to play with words and their numerous meanings, and that manifests itself particularly strongly in Miranda and Billy's conversations. They banter; they remember previous conversations and play with those words again. They use song lyrics and quotations to communicate with each other. Some of their dialogue might seem a bit inauthentic until you realize that these are two quick-witted people who have more than enough time on their hands to come up with clever things to say.

Miranda Blue Calling is a very hard book to categorize. If you scroll up to the top of this review, you'll see that I labeled it Chick Lit. I did so primarily because of the imprint - Avon Trade. But this book isn't written in first person point of view, and Billy does get to have his say. It's also not set in a city, and the heroine isn't a "career girl" in the usual sense of the word, although her work is very important to her. Really, this is just an old-fashioned love story, written in pretty pose, about nice characters who have been hurt before and are learning to love again. Exactly my kind of story."

Click here for the original review. 

This book is available cheap at half.com or, alternatively, at bookmooch.com.

 

I've been reading a ton of economic news lately.  Surprised, huh?  I'm sure we all are. 

Much of it leaves me feeling irritated.  For example, this piece on motel rooms becoming "homes" for the new homeless.  Reading it, I want to ask what the Garzas' and Hayworths' lives were like 2 or 3 years ago, more specifically what were their actual (not false fronted) financial pictures like then?  I'm guessing they were families that the news described then as being "one or two paychecks away from homelessness."  In other words, no savings, still charging Christmas, not stopping to think that perhaps a fourth child might be not such a great economic choice.  

What irritates me most about this huge economic mess we're in is that it was obviously coming, and, yet, everyone is so damned surprised that it's here.   Oh, and that it's being politicized so heavily.  Yes, the Bush Administration overspent, got us into a war we couldn't afford, and did nothing about the trade deficit, but this problem is far, far older than the Bush Administration in its making.  This is the result of 30 years of buying things we couldn't afford on credit.  For years I've been reading about how the average family had $10,000 of credit card debt and were mortgaged to the hilt and had two car payments and student loans. This did not stop people from spending lavishly at Christmastime or from getting yet another new car with a loan or eating at restaurants three, four, or five times a week (or more).  Way back in high school our Gen X generation was told there were serious problems with Social Security - i.e., the Boomer generation was too big and no one was putting any money aside so that meant we'd have to finance their retirement on our backs.  Yet no one in Congress dealt with our unsustainable spending in any sort of tangible way.  They preferred to leave it to the future when, doubtless, things would be brighter and problems would take care of themselves.  General Motors has known for eons that it couldn't afford the UAW retirement it promised and be able to stay competitive, but did that stop them from rolling over for the unions and leaving this reckoning for some unpleasant point later in the future?  Uh, no.

I mean, this was coming.  It was coming with every McMansion built and bought with no downpayment.  It was coming with every purchase people bought on plastic that they knew, knew they couldn't pay for.  And the fact is, you can't have both high wages with full benefits and a plethora of super cheap goods.

What pisses me off is that it was all so unnecessary.  We have had years of full employment, peace at home, and booming economies, yet only a minority bought modest houses they could afford today, on one income.  Or drove old cars until they fell apart.  Or just lived within their means.  People like me have felt cheap or outclassed for doing just that.   And now we have outraged pieces about the "victims" of the recession.  The fact is, there are very few true victims here.  We have all been willing participants in our own downfall, living it up then, and paying, paying, paying for it now.  

Knock it off with the surprise and outrage,  New York Times.  It's sickening.