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Monday, October 31, 2005

Books for October

Ratings are out of a possible 5; bold titles are first-time reads.

1. A Breath of Snow and Ashes -- Diana Gabaldon -- 3
   • Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series was an obsession for me at one time. I devoured the first four books, waited impatiently for the fifth, traveled a few hundred miles twice to have it signed, tried to love it, and waited again with combined eagerness and trepidation (what if it's even worse than #5?) for this sixth volume in the series. I was not terribly disappointed. Breath was, in my opinion, miles better than The Fiery Cross, book #5 in the series, which opened with a 250- or 300-page (about a fourth of the book) breastfeeding/diaper-changing/menstruation/bullet-removing/doctoring intrigue-fest which covered one day at a Scottish Gathering in North Carolina. And at times it went downhill from there. Anyway, back to book #6. There's more action in this one, and less navel-gazing, and far fewer soiled diapers, and not quite so many references to that boring old Jacobite gold, but don't expect the spark that Outlander had. In some arenas, Gabaldon pulls no punches in this book; bad things happen to a lot of people -- some of whom her readers love very dearly. There's the by-now-obligatory legal trouble which involves the necessity of both Jamie and C outsmarting various authorities in order to survive and be reunited; there is guilt and suspicion and there are some terribly unresolved issues involving a r a p e. Brianna's no longer bratty, but she is also apparently a combination of Annie Oakley and Thomas Edison; Roger's more present and believable but his character takes a few unexpected and not-quite-natural-feeling twists as well. And of course you can expect blow-by-blows of several medical procedures (you either love these or hate them), and all that sort of experimentation that comes with being a time-traveling doctor on the American frontier. Oh, and there are i n c e s t and b i g a m y in this one too. (um, sorry, that was a spoiler).
     
     HOWEVER. I still think DG is heading back in the right direction with this book. Some people reviewing it are acting like this is the point at which DG finally lost their confidence and her ability to string two sentences together. Whereas I think that may have happened around the time Roger was sold to the Indians in Drums of Autumn, and somewhere between Fiery Cross and this book, the author picked herself up and dusted herself off and decided to start really trying again. I'm looking forward to the next book (which will supposedly be the last in the series, but then all of them from the first one on were supposed to be that at one point or another), if for no other reason than to see if she continues to improve.
2. Henry and the Clubhouse -- Beverly Cleary -- 4.5
   • Just keeping up with the kids' reading every now and then. LT is going through my Beverly Clearys like wildfire, and I do love Beverly Cleary. Reading her books always makes me want to re-read her memoirs.
3. At Home in Mitford -- Jan Karon -- 4.5
   • I love this series, which surrounds a diabetic Episcopalian priest named Timothy, his neighbor Cynthia, his, well, his sort-of-adopted-ward-sort-of-son Dooley, and the rest of the very-real-seeming people who inhabit Mitford, the small North Carolina mountain village in which they live. Light, calm, chaste reading -- just perfect after the behemoth of plot, sex, battle, and death that is Diana Gabaldon. I might not review each book individually; they really are best read as part of the series.
4. A Light in the Window -- Jan Karon -- 4
5. A Common Life : The Wedding Story -- Jan Karon -- 3.5
   • This is a little novella, written out of series order, to placate the people who wanted to witness the wedding of Father Tim and Cynthia.
6. These High, Green Hills -- Jan Karon -- 4
7. Out to Canaan -- Jan Karon -- 4
8. A New Song -- Jan Karon -- 4
   • I liked this volume, wherein Timothy and Cynthia spend a year or so "supplying" for a congregation on the island of Whitecap, better on re-reading than I did the first time. It does seem like perhaps the author just ran out of things to say with and about the original townspeople (who can blame her?) and so decided to move her characters elsewhere to meet some new people. But it works.
9. In This Mountain -- Jan Karon -- 4
   • The darkest of the Mitford novels -- and even as such, don't expect it to be terribly dark. Father Tim's diabetes finally catches up with him in a very painful way, and his experiences working through the aftermath of that (both physical and emotional) are quite moving.
10. Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith -- Anne Lamott -- 4.5
    • This book of essays is not for the faint-hearted Christian. Lamott's life and her faith are gritty, and very real, but -- different from the traditional idea of Christianity in many ways. Definitely a discussion-starter. There's a post with some of the thoughts I had after reading this book here.
11. In Her Shoes -- Jennifer Weiner -- 2.5
    • I got this from the library because some girlfriends and I were thinking of going to the movies, and the possibility existed that we would watch the recent film adaptation of this novel, and I do have my rules, you know. Frankly, I wasn't crazy about the book. It didn't seem to know whether it was supposed to be dark or funny; characters' personalities changed markedly without the reader being able to be in on much of the process. The writing seemed heavy-handed, and at times (especially in the opening pages, which was a big turnoff to me) quite vulgar, in a way that should have been more dark but was handled in an almost sprightly, humorous way. I'll admit that when the characters weren't having complete personality shifts for no discernable reason, they were quite believable, but they still didn't pull this above the level of a stereotypical nerdy-sister/hot-sister chick book.
12. Letters from Pemberley: The First Year -- Jane Dawkins -- 3.5
    • I've owned this book for nearly two years and have just now pulled it off the shelf and actually read it. I really did like it; it was quite enjoyable, and better-written than the other Austen sequels I've tried (which, granted, wasn't many). The author injects just about every character from the six major Austen novels, as neighbors or friends of the Darcys, but under different (also Austen-related) names, which makes this not only an oh-goody-more-about-Elizabeth-and-Mr.-Darcy sigh-fest, it's also basically one long set of clever puzzles, figuring out who's whom.
13. The Bluest Eye -- Toni Morrison -- 4
    • The prose in this book is lyrical, and the dialogue and narration are nearly pitch-perfect, capturing a time, place, and culture (poor blacks, America, early 20th-century) deftly, passionately, and thoughtfully. The story is compelling, and it made me see life (and self-image, and cultural identity, and a list of other concepts as well) in a way I never had before.

Friday, October 28, 2005

still life with sanity

(OK, so technically with the moving water it's not a still life. So sue me.)

For a more complete mental image of the scene, you should add the following ingredients:

• half a day in the city
  
• a daughter who is the poster child for overactive bladder syndrome (just in case you wondered, bathrooms at the dollar store are not the kind of place you want to visit twice in one trip unless you really have to)
  
• half an hour outside walking along the highway and through the tarweed in the dark, moonless night, looking for a cat who always comes running when you call but can't be found now, but who shows up, after you've envisioned yourself breaking the bad news to the kids, with a purposeful nonchalance that tells you how much she loved waiting until just the right moment to come out and show herself
  
• a three-layered (three-tiered?) cake to be baked and inexpertly decorated, by you
  
• a husband who's been sick enough to stay home from work the whole week, poor guy
  
• a quarter of a bottle of inexpensive shampoo for bubbles
  
• a specially-made 'bath music' cd playing on the stereo speakers wired into the bathroom by your ever-so-thoughtful husband -- said CD to contain plenty of Enya, Yanni, Austen-movie-adaptation soundtrack bits, Loreena McKennitt, and one heartbreakingly beautiful Puccini aria (hey, I'm not in school anymore; I don't have to restrict my musical tastes to whatever it is the cool kids are liking that year)
  
• and don't forget the FORTY-FIVE MINUTES OF BLISSFUL SOLITUDE.
  

Stir ingredients well and simmer until Mom is limp and relaxed as a sleeping baby.

Wednesday, October 26, 2005

the rattling contents of my cranium

These are a small sampling of the sorts of things that have been rattling around in my mind over the past 24 hours -- a mental snapshot, if you will.

(Speaking of snapshots -- I almost made a very Freudian typo there, and I'll let you figure out what it was -- I feel like I will never take another decent photograph as long as I live. I have the amateur photographer's version of writer's block. It's painful.)

*********

thing one: I realized today, when I was humming "One Special Boy" from Bye Bye Birdie, a show I haven't seen since I was in its pit combo in high school, that at that time (high school) I don't think I ever actually grasped that that song is pretty much a parody of teenaged girls and their obsession with Going Steady. I thought it was a serious song. That's because I was, as one classmate once informed me, book-smart but life-stupid. Also, I was a teenaged girl obsessed with Going Steady. Hey, at least I knew "How Lovely to Be A Woman" was a joke, right?

**********

thing two: T and I, like most people, have come up with several name-based descriptions for certain types of behaviors. We have a name for people who are whiny, attention-seeking hypochondriacs, for people who are very neurotic about food, for people who call in sick to work every Monday, for people who think work is more important than life itself, for people who tune you out while you're talking to them, and so on, all based on real people we have known for whom these activities were, well, characteristic, shall we say. And that got me thinking about what "pulling a Rachel" might be. I have no illusions about this. As much as I would like a Rachel to be, oh, I dunno, being a good and creative mother, or having a perfectly Biblical response to a stressful situation with my husband, or coming up with a brilliant rejoinder in a debate, or something of that laudatory sort, I know that this is not the case. No, a person has pulled a Rachel when he or she has done something utterly, ridiculously, embarrassingly absent-minded. Like putting his or her head in a rotating ceiling fan, or tripping over the coffee table, or saying "excuse me" to the dog and expecting the dog to get out of the way, or leaving her purse in a Kentucky Fried Chicken across the state and not realizing it until she goes to unlock the door at home, thus necessitating a six-hour drive in the pouring rain the next day with a screaming carsick infant. Not that I've ever necessarily done these things (ahem). But I am fully confident that there are people who have actually used my name in relation to this sort of bumbling inadequacy. Because that is how cool I am.

**************

thing three is a little story. Once there was a woman who took a pretty decent picture of Half Dome and its reflection in the Merced River, framed around Sentinel Bridge. She gave a print of this picture to her father-in-law, for his realty office, and a guy who published a travel magazine saw the picture and asked the father-in-law if he thought the photographer would let him run it in an article about Yosemite, with a photo credit. The father-in-law told him to call the woman and ask her, and the publisher did, and the woman said, "OK, but please send me a copy of the magazine in which you use it." The publisher didn't even say thank you after he got the picture, let alone send a magazine to the woman, so the woman figured he'd decided not to use it, except that he did. In an advertisement for which the woman later found out he was paid a four-figure sum. So after thinking about it for a while, and after much encouragement from several different people, the woman sent him a bill. Yesterday. The woman is not totally sure she didn't do something pretty pointless and maybe stupid, and yet the woman has also already mentally spent the imagined money.

Monday, October 24, 2005

the GUILT

Well, I can talk again. (Sorry, everyone.) The unfortunate thing is, though, that now I actually think I am, you know, SICK. With a cough, and this whole sinusy thing going, and stuff. And the REALLY unfortunate thing is that over the weekend, our friends brought their miracle baby for a visit.

Which would, of course, NOT be an unfortunate thing at all (isn't she adorable?), except that they arrived just as I went from sounding kind of cool and hoarse like Bonnie Raitt or Colleen Dewhurst, through having, I dunno, scalding coffee poured directly down my throat every time I tried to speak, and landed on "nothing comes out but whispers no matter how hard I try but at least it's not painful" (but they left well before this morning's arrival at "hit by a Mack truck"). So not only did I spend their entire visit whispering, scribbling notes, and attempting to croak out words... I also possibly gave them and their ten-month-old this miserable yuck (although I was careful not to touch the baby or their things and I never did get a fever and I washed my hands every time I moved and look at me trying to justify myself!).

Go ahead, you can despise me now, like the mom who drops off her green-snot-nosed child in the church nursery and swears it's "just allergies", like the parents who send their kids to school sick and contagious because they can't get the day off work, like everyone else who heedlessly infects innocent cherubs with vile illnesses. Your loathing for me will be nothing compared to mine, I assure you.

And with that I'm going to take my cough, my guilt, and a box of tissues back to bed for a while. I feel a "writing assignment, free reading and math worksheet" school day coming on.

Friday, October 21, 2005

oh, how I love that man

Here's a partial list of items I encountered (most of which I already knew about, of course, but you didn't) while I was tidying my husband's shelves in our bedroom today:

• A spotting scope and part of a periscope from a Sherman tank
  
• Two headlamps (one LED, one incandescent)
  
• More pairs of binoculars than any one person could probably use in a lifetime
  
• A two-inch stack (more or less) of astronomy-related catalogs, and a five-inch stack of Charger-renovation-related catalogs
  
• Several different editions of the Bible, and The Believer's Bible Commentary
  
• A printout from the Internet titled "WHAT TO DO IF A NUCLEAR DISASTER IS IMMINENT"
  
• A loaded camera bag the approximate size and weight of a Peterbilt truck
  
• A picture, made for him by our son, of a jungle scene, with a crayoned backdrop on which cute, jubilant jungle animal stickers cavort toward each other, titled "The War of the Jungle"
  
• A love letter from me, circa 1993
  

What's not to love? A veritable Renaissance man, no?

P.S. I have been hoarse for a couple of days. Tonight I reached the point where I have essentially completely lost my voice (actually, I can speak, but it hurts like fire). You have to understand, this is the approximate equivalent of a dam built across the top of Yosemite Falls in April. It feels so, so good to sit here and type, fast, communicating essentially without a barrier. I've been writing notes to my family. It feels like passing notes in class in junior high, only more frantic, and without the visceral thrill of disobedience.

Thursday, October 20, 2005

This entry really isn't about Anne Lamott

I recently finished reading Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamott. My initial impressions were all over the map; a short list would include: great writing, poignant, honest, dark, bleak, uplifting, raw, sweet, heartfelt, real. Theologically (Anne claims to be a Christian and may well be one) my thoughts showed similar conflict. When it comes right down to it, based solely on what I read in this book, I don't know, but I lean toward believing that Lamott does follow Jesus. Not that her personal salvation is for me to judge -- that's Jesus' job -- but that same Jesus tells us that we will know His followers by their fruits:

Matt 7:15-21 (Jesus is speaking)'

15 "Beware of the false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits. Grapes are not gathered from thorn {bushes,} nor figs from thistles, are they? Even so, every good tree bears good fruit; but the bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot produce bad fruit, nor can a bad tree produce good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. So then, you will know them by their fruits. Not everyone who says to Me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven; but he who does the will of My Father who is in heaven."

(NAS)

It behooves us to study the beliefs and actions of a person claiming Christianity before we look to them as someone we might follow or learn from. At the very least we must use discernment as we accept input, and separate the wheat from the chaff.

One thing I definitely took away from this book of essays is the difference between coming to Christ as a young person, when Biblical beliefs shape the foundation of who you are and will be, and coming to Him later in life, when your life's foundation is already fully formed. This is something I'd been thinking about a lot lately for other reasons as well. Yes, Christ is to come in and be a new foundation, but realistically that's easier said than done. Can a person truly follow Christ, and not have given over every area of thought to Him -- not see every issue the way Jesus would see it? I think so. There's a maturing process that has to go on, and that's one thing that I think happens much more readily to a person who becomes a Christian early on in life than one who's already lived what seem to be several lives, all of them rougher than mine by a long shot, before meeting Jesus and letting Him in. That said, I'll move on to a few specific issues that I did have with Lamott's essays, theologically speaking.

Lamott did have a life-changing "salvation experience." She knew about Jesus, knew who He is, resisted Him for a long time, and finally decided (in a rather non-conventional way ;) to let him into her heart and her life. Many, many of the things she says about her life from that point on are sound and Biblical -- in the aforementioned poignant, honest, dark, bleak, uplifting, raw, sweet, heartfelt, real way. That said, Lamott is a social liberal. She's ardently pro-abortion. Now, personally, that sets my teeth on edge, and makes me angry. Honestly, however, I have never related my anti-abortion stance to my Christian beliefs. Yes, there are verses in Scripture that indicate that God sees unborn people as just that -- people -- and that He made them and is concerned for their well-being (take Jeremiah 1:5 for example), but I have been anti-abortion since I was a child, long before I was a Christian, and hence I don't tend to connect the two nearly as often as other people (on both sides of the issue) do. It's an ordinary issue of morality for me; people in the womb are people, and killing people for the sake of your own convenience or even your own well-being is wrong. Anyway. I digress. So does Anne Lamott's position on abortion mean that I should not see her as a believer in Jesus? I am less inclined to think so than other Christians are, but the possibility definitely exists.

Lamott also describes (in a scene I loved, where two Christians of violently different temperaments, who annoy the hell out of each other, are able to find community simply in the fact that they love the same Jesus -- one of my favorite moments in the book) a well-known series of Christian novels as "homophobic", among other derogatory terms, some of which I definitely agree with. Now, it's entirely possible that Lamott was referring to something in the books (I personally remember nothing like this, but then I didn't find the books particularly memorable and will never re-read them) that treats homosexual people unkindly, and that she believes the Bible where it says that homosexuality itself is wrong (which doesn't mean that we are allowed to treat the people who practice it unkindly, any more than we are allowed to treat any other sinners -- that's everyone -- unkindly merely because they are in fact sinners). Or it could mean that she thinks those of us who believe that part of the Bible are intolerant, backward nutcases, which is generally the case when people are throwing the word "homophobic" around in the context of Christianity. If the latter is the case (and again, without knowing a lot more about Anne Lamott than I do, it's impossible for me to know) then this is where I have to ask myself: Where is the line? How much of Jesus' teaching and the message of the Bible can you disregard and still follow Jesus? Because the Bible is very clear about the practice of homosexuality as a sin. It would be really easy to say, "oh yes, I believe in Jesus and trust him as my savior," if you were then free to define 'Jesus' however you choose. So easy, in fact, that there are entire religious systems based around un-Biblical ideas of Jesus, and innumerable individuals who think of themselves as followers of Jesus, but who disclaim his claimed deity or otherwise don't follow His teachings (which goes back to the verse above: "Not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord..."). It's less easy to look at the Biblical Jesus and accept Him, knowing everything He teaches and claims to be.

In the end, that's what this entry is really about -- believing in the real Jesus, and what that means in the life of the believer. It's not about Anne Lamott. She was simply a catalyst, who got me thinking about this issue and has had me thinking about it for days. I do recommend her book for discerning readers, for that reason, even if I wouldn't recommend it for any other -- and I do.

Tuesday, October 18, 2005

just so you know I'm not perfect

...cause I know you all thought I was, right? tee hee.

Tonight T and I had a little argument. Not even an argument, really; just an incidence of Rachel Not Getting Her Way. The short version: I had (and have) a quite miserable headache, and wanted takeout for supper. T (who had a friend coming over, immediately after his own arrival home from work, to do some really manly stuff to a car they're going to sell) pointed out that I had just told him earlier today that money was tight, and that no, paying less to our credit card really shouldn't be an option, now should it, so I was going to have to go ahead and cook supper.

You should have seen how spiritually I handled this disappointment. I set an example for every Christian wife in Western civilization with my humble, submissive, Godly attitude. Here's how I did it.

I pouted.

Oh MAN did I pout. You were expecting me to say that I stood there virtuously cooking supper with a shining, sweet attitude about me, whilst mentally reciting a litany of reasons I love my husband, interspersed with really helpful Bible passages like Titus 2:3-5, weren't you? But I didn't. Nooo. I slammed doors, I clattered pans, I muttered under my breath like a surly fifteen-year-old, I manufactured a tight little I'm so ticked off at you, and you had better watch it, buddy smile for my husband every time I happened to see him. I did this for the first five minutes because it seemed good and righteous and necessary. For about the next half hour I kept it up because I felt very strongly that backing down would have been the sissy thing to do. Right at the end of this half-hour, dinner was ready, which fact I sent the kids out to announce to their father, just so he wouldn't think I'd relented and gone all warm-fuzzy-submissive-Christian-wife on him.

In other words, I was a total, total brat. I really was.

I'm better now. The dishes are done (well, the dishwasher's doing them; hallelujah for minor miracles), I've a diet cherry Coke on hand, and I carefully calculated that I could eat a peanut-butter Twix bar (bought after a quick post-dinner trip to the library to pick up a hold, with a dollar I'd found on the sidewalk, of all things -- I mean, God must have WANTED me to have a peanut-butter Twix bar, don't you think? to throw the dollar at me that way?) without losing all my "nothing tastes as good as thin feels" weight-loss momentum. And chocolate, especially chocolate combined with peanut butter and crispiness, always helps, doesn't it? Now I just have to (gulp) go outside and say something sweet to T so that he knows I'm better, and I can sit down with my book and my Coke and pretend I was never upset at all. Because I'm such a good wife that way.

Monday, October 17, 2005

ah, motherhood

LT is The Teacher at school today. He takes this job very seriously, critiquing his sister's work carefully ("This is a good paragraph about spending the night at your friend's house, but why don't you include a couple of sentences about what you did while you were there?") and delegating jobs ("Mommy, it's your turn to pray before school. C, would you like to lead the flag salute?"). Meanwhile, I think C didn't get enough sleep at the aforementioned friends' house last night, because she has gone beyond "drama queen" and into the realm of "emotional basket case". She (like her brother) gave up naps at around the age of 18 months, but today after school, she's taking one. For the sake of her sanity -- and mine.

Since the kids were gone overnight, I got up this morning and went for a walk. A brisk walk, in broad daylight, alone (well, alone with The Nikon). It was strange -- I kept feeling like people were going to give me the kind of accusing glances I occasionally get when the kids and I are out and about during school hours -- like I was doing something that others would find vaguely illicit. It was nice, though, to be able to walk fast enough to feel like I should have lost at least five pounds by the time I got home. Bummer that it doesn't actually work that way, eh?

Saturday, October 15, 2005

what I've spent far too much time doing this weekend

I've sort of re-vamped the photo blog. (yeah, about eleven hours' worth of 'sort of'.) This involved installing a program thingie on my host server (don't you love my technical terminology?), and then I had to change some permissions on my files and then I had to tear my hair because I had made a vile error which pretty much made my site completely inaccessible (my dad, who was there at the time, said, "Well, why don't you just make another one?" Ah, Dad. Life without Internet is so simple.). And then I had to customize it, of course, and hoo boy did THAT take a while. Don't you love that crick between your shoulder blades from too much typing? me too.

Anyway. Here's the link to the new photo blog. The old one is still there, but it won't be updated anymore, unless I decide I hate the new way (or the, what, ten people who looked at my photo blog with any regularity decide that they hate the new way) and go back to it. Explore a little (there's not much to explore, really) and tell me what you think. Please?

Thanks. Meanwhile I'm off to see how many miles I have to walk (and, incidentally, how many photos I have to take) before my back forgets all the hunching-over-the-keyboard it's done in the past two days.

Wednesday, October 12, 2005

What Rachel Needs

I shamelessly lifted this from Thicket Dweller. For once, here's a meme that I'm doing not because I feel like I need to write in my journal, but because it looked like so darn much fun. Like googlisms, before the googlism lists got full of duplicates from people blogging about their googlisms. Here's the drill: You google "[your name] needs", except of course that you replace [your name] with, well, your name. Then you look at the search results, and you laugh. (You might want to turn on the "Family filter" or whatever it is that Google calls that. Because there are apparently some people out there who think you need stuff that, uh, you don't need. Or at least, you probably don't want to read about needing it on the Internet.)

So. Without further ado, here's what Google thinks I need:

• Rachel needs your prayers!!!!!!! Well, maybe I do. But not with seven exclamation points. I don't need anything with seven exclamation points. It pains me even to copy and paste seven exclamation points. Ouch.
  
• Rachel needs help when she enters Manhattan's meat-packing district to help
  three t r a n s v e s t i t e h o o k e r s find out who murdered one of their friends. Oh my. Yeah, I guess I would need help with that.
  
• Rachel needs £5000. Who doesn't?
  
• During all stages of application development, Rachel needs to refer to Web sites, manuals, and a variety of documentation— Maybe that's why my application development never works out. Thanks, download.microsoft.com.
  
• Rachel needs guidance and normal supervision. A person that has a rapport with Rachel can easily redirect her. Relationships are very important to Rachel. I am so high-maintenance.
  
• Rachel needs help with a question on "Value Laddering"... I certainly would, if I had the slightest clue what that was.
  
• Rachel needs to have blush that is very bright and colorful. Ack, noooooo.
  
• Rachel needs $180.70 ($580.70 minus $400) to bring her income up to the OSIPM standard.
  
• I told Ellen that Rachel needs to be responsible for her own behavior. Good thinking.

  And last but not least:

• Rachel needs to stop being so loud. Got that one right, at least.
  

Sunday, October 09, 2005

ten secrets

Here's a meme I lifted from Jenn.

TEN NOT-SO DARK SECRETS ABOUT ME

ten not-so-dark secrets

1) You know how when you're driving down the highway and you forget to dim your lights for an oncoming car, the driver of said oncoming car will blink his lights at you to remind you? When that happens, I dim my lights, say "whoops, I'm sorry", and wave. They can neither see nor hear me, and every time I swear I'm not going to do that again, but every time, I do. It's like a reflex.

2) I am really easily amused. For example, I think it's really funny when I lift up the cash door on the ATM before it spits the money out, and the cash shoots across the little mini-counter and into my waiting hand. This is just one small example.

3) We have eaten Burger King food so many times that every time I clean out the kids' toybox (once or twice a year), I throw away a grocery sack full of kids' meal toys. (Rationalization: Burger King is the only quick, cheap food available in our town. If we need to pick up something on the way somewhere, or if for whatever reason I'm not cooking, Burger King is pretty much it. All you whole-foods people can call child-protective services now.)

4) I almost always use a mix to make brownies or gravy. Brownies because it's cheaper that way, and gravy because it makes way better gravy than scratch.

5) I make my bed maybe one day a week. For a while I did it regularly, but I got out of the habit.

6) I'm supposed to be on "computer restriction" right now. If the kids see me riffling the pages of my book as I read, I get a day of computer restriction (it's a deal we struck to make it a little less onerous for them to break some of their own bad habits.). I was caught fair and square earlier today. Yet here I sit. I think they've forgotten.

7) The only romantic dreams I have had in years about anyone other than my husband (don't you HATE when you have those; it feels so -- squicky) have been about Mr. Rochester (from Jane Eyre).

8) I have athlete's foot.

9) When I was fifteen and only had a learner's permit, I took my parents' car to town while they were gone so that my fourteen-year-old friend could buy cigarettes for my seventeen-year-old brother.

10) Since I tend to babble on in here so much about anything and everything, it's hard to come up with anything else that might be considered a "secret" that's not actually too private to share here. :)

Friday, October 07, 2005

this blogger's kids

this just happened.

C: [brings me a glass of lukewarm water from the bathroom, with a big -- and now in retrospect I realize, ominous -- smile on her face]
I: "Um, thank you, sweetie. I don't really need a drink of water right now, but thank you."
C: [still with the big smile] "Just drink it, Mommy? Please?"
I: [feeling that something is not... quite... right, I take a small sip and proceed with one of the thousands of little white maternal lies told by mothers around the world over the course of their children's lives.] "Um, thank you. It's -- really good."
C: [still with the conspiratorial smile] "Do you know where I got it?"
I: [carefully not throwing up, but quite possibly with panicked eyes] "Where?"
C: "From my sink well!"
[Things rapidly begin making sense... the lukewarm temperature, the vague flavor of soap and toothpaste, the moisture on the outside of the not-at-all-cold glass.]
I: "Oh. Oh, dear, no, honey, you don't give people water that you had sitting in the sink."
C [big-eyed as only C can be]: "Why not?"
I: "Because -- that's -- kind of gross, sweetie."
C: "Ah! OK." [takes the glass of water to the bathroom for disposal, a chipper, shrugging 'live and learn' echoing in every phrase of her body language.]
I: [between bouts of snorting laughter, take a large swig of Diet Coke and start pulling up this blog entry page; meanwhile:]
LT: "Mommy, you should blog about that."

Thursday, October 06, 2005

life is normal again

....too normal. Meaning, the house is messy again. (however, the piano, desk, and shelves remain organized and tidy. At least there's that.) It is SO DEPRESSING, sometimes literally, how quickly and effortlessly it can get this way. You'd think at least we'd have to have some kind of soulless revel in order to wind up with stuff all over the floor. No, apparently it just requires laziness, which is one thing we have in abundance.

I am even behind on laundry again. Sob. I'm going to fix that today, though.

And hey, I'm reading again (the Mitford series, because she's coming out with a new one this fall too). So all is not lost, right?

So, while I go start a load of laundry and get to folding (sigh) and while the kids clean up their innumerable scraps and sheets of paper from the floor, check this out. It's really interesting, and almost creepy.

Monday, October 03, 2005

mark it on the calendar

I just finished reading a 977-page book (the latest in the Outlander series; it's as good as the rest, I think, with some quite surprising parts. The reason I kept working to finish it soon, though, is that it's a seven-day book and I can't renew it; if I didn't finish it by the time it was due I'd have to wait who knows how long until I could get it again). I started it on Friday morning. This means that my head feels -- a little addled and worn-out right now, and I don't feel like reading, even though I have free time in which I could do so.

Did the world just tilt on its axis? I think maybe it did.

Books for September

I forgot to post these before I took off over the weekend.

1. Homecoming -- Cynthia Voigt -- 4
   • This was, I believe, the second novel Cynthia Voigt wrote, and the first she had published. But I could have those reversed. Especially for a first novel, it's an amazing accomplishment. You meet the Tillerman family, who will be with you in six other books, and for the rest of your life in other ways. Voigt's characters are so real that you expect to look up and see them sitting in the room with you when you put the book down -- which is frequently very hard to do, and as soon as you're done, you want to move on to the next one. This first novel in the Tillerman saga introduces you to four children, Dicey, James, Maybeth, and Sammy, who are abandoned by their (schizophrenic?) mother en route to their great-aunt's house. This happens in the first chapter; the rest of the novel follows their journey (mostly on foot) first to the aunt's house and then from Connecticut to Maryland, where they wind up with a very real, very spirited, very conflicted grandmother. Kid-lit like this is definitely not just for kids.
2. Dicey's Song -- Cynthia Voigt -- 4.5
   • This is a continuation of Homecoming; we see Dicey and her siblings adapting to life at their grandmother's and at school, watch them learn about being themselves and holding on and letting go and growing up. It sounds cheesy when I talk about it. It's not. See above rave review for my opinion of it.
3. A Solitary Blue -- Cynthia Voigt -- 3.75
   • One of my favorite things about the way Cynthia Voigt writes is that she will occasionally tell about the same events, in separate books, from different points of view. A Solitary Blue follows the life of Dicey's friend Jeff, through his early childhood well before he knows Dicey, as he deals with disillusionment and his parents' divorce and learns not to shut himself off from the world just because the world has the capability to hurt him.
4. Come A Stranger -- Cynthia Voigt -- 4.5
   • This book concerns another of Dicey's friends, Mina, and her struggles as a young black girl growing up. Really eye-opening to me, and riveting; also my favorite example of Voigt's multiple-POV technique.
5. The Runner -- Cynthia Voigt -- 4.5
   • This is a flashback book, telling the story of Dicey's uncle. The best thing about it is the view you get of Dicey's grandmother as a younger woman, and all the hints of what made her the way she is. Interesting treatment of a domineering father -- made me think of the way someone very dear to me grew up -- and also of mindless racism and what happens when people can put it aside. You probably want to read this one before "Come a Stranger", come to think of it. I did. It's in here out of order.
6. Silent to the Bone -- E.L. Konigsburg -- 4
   • This story succeeds on several levels. It first struck me as an anthem to friendship -- young male friendship, at that, which is not given as wide a treatment in literature, for children or adults, as its female counterpart. It developed into a good detective story (as an adult, the whodunit and the why became clear relatively early on, but I think the target audience might be in a bit more suspense than that), and touched on themes of psychology, family issues, sexual manipulation (!), and divorce as well. All in all, a strong, worthwhile read. Honestly, I'd never read any Konigsburg except for From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, which I have read numerous times since the age of eight or so; I was glad to see that over thirty years later, she's still writing very well indeed.
7. The Outcasts of 19 Schuyler Place -- E.L. Konigsburg -- 3
   • I found that this book started out really strong, and lost it a bit at the end. However, again, I'm out of the target audience, and I think a middle-school girl might feel differently about the ending than I do. If you care, I'm about to spoil the ending here, so on the off-chance that I'm not the only person in my little blogging circle who reads children's literature, and on the further off-chance that a fellow reader would mind having the ending spoiled... be warned. I thought the initial camp scenes were excellent. I bitterly hated the brats who tormented Margaret, I really did, and they all had faces drawn from my own elementary-school and junior high days. In the middle of the story, I pretty much forgot about them, and found myself (as a lifelong resident of a once-sleepy but still-small town) identifying heartily with the main character's frustration at uppity newcomers to her fictional hometown of Epiphany, New York, who want to raze her great-uncles' life work, an artistic trio of towers in their backyard, because of concerns about property values. So when the bratty camp girls came back into the story, I rubbed my hands a little, thinking that in some way or another they were about to Get Theirs. I wanted to see abject humiliation. I wanted to see, I dunno, maybe a little blood (me, bitter?). What I did not want was to see them become, essentially, heroes who help save the towers. No no no. Nooooo. This is not a terribly realistic reaction, because, well, isn't that what any mature, thinking, Christian person would love to see happen -- villains turning into "good guys"? And hey, real life villains, y'all have my permission to turn your lives around and save a local landmark near you, more power to you, really. It's not nearly so satisfying in fiction, though.
8. Sons from Afar -- Cynthia Voigt -- 3.5
   • We get to know Dicey's brothers better, as they take a journey (in more ways than one) to find their deadbeat father. Still good, but probably my least favorite of the set.
9. Seventeen Against the Dealer -- Cynthia Voigt -- 4
   • The last (waaah!) novel in the Tillerman cycle. Dicey's an adult, trying to run a business; James is at Yale and Sammy and Maybeth have various high-school struggles. This would not be a terribly remarkable book (although Dicey's business struggles are heart-rending) except for an INGENIOUS sub-plot so subtle that I would never ever have picked up on it if I hadn't been told about it. BRILLIANT. It changes an ordinary story into a -- wow, a brilliant one.
10. Voyager -- Diana Gabaldon -- 4
    • Much of the time this is my favorite from this series, even though there's a bit of smuggling intrigue sort of whodunit kind of stuff that I always want to skip, and there's a character who's quite obviously only there because the author needed someone in the book to perfomr a service he performs (and yes, the author admits in interviews etc. that this is the case). The emotion is really good in this one. Again, though, I'm not as enthralled with the series as I once was. I think Sara Donati kind of ruined me for Diana Gabaldon, truth be told. Better research, better writing, less like a 900-page Harlequin (not that DG's books ARE 900-page Harlequins, but they're closer than Donati's, especially on the fourth or fifth re-read).
11. The Blue Castle -- L.M. Montgomery -- 4.5
    • I LOVE THIS BOOK. It's so different from most of Montgomery's other books (not that I don't also love them, some of them even more than this one). It's one of her only two books that were written for adults -- and it's the only one where all of the main characters are adults. In fact I don't think there's a single child in the book, except for the narrator's descriptions of the characters' childhoods. This has been a life-changing book for several people I know; it has one of my favorite female characters in literature, and her interactions with her world are surprising and a joy to observe. The only reason this book doesn't get a 5 is that it contains some rather long-winded nature-description passages; in the story they're quotes from the main character's favorite author, but it's rather obvious (especially on rereads) that they're simply the author, finding an excuse to include Victorian-ish nature descriptions, which were abundant in her earliest books, in a book published in the mid-30's. I skip them. You don't miss any plot points in so doing.