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Tuesday, October 31, 2006
Books for October
Only five this month, and two of them were for Librivox. I got a big stack of books from the library early in the month, and just couldn't get into most of them.
Bold titles indicate first-time reads, ratings are out of five.
- Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler -- 4.5
- I've never made a secret out of the fact that I pretty much am Maggie Moran, the protagonist in this wonderful book. Not that Maggie is wonderful; she's amazingly flawed in some very real, humdrum kinds of ways, but the book is wonderful. It covers one day in the life of a long-married but still-affectionate couple consisting of solid, patient Ira and scatterbrained Maggie (that'd be me). I will, however, add a threefold disclaimer to this oft-repeated statement, after this most recent reread. One: I am not a nag. Maggie is a bit of a nag. Two: I am not an airhead. There's a line between scatterbrained-but-intelligent and airheaded, and Maggie crosses it a few times. Three: I don't make up things about people in my attempt to make them do what I want them to. I might have done this when I was thirteen, but not since. However. If you want to know how I see myself, read that caveat and then this book, and you will know. Not to mention that you'll have a great time reading a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.
- Baby Proof by Emily Giffin -- 3.5
- Not what I expected it to be, honestly, which can be a very good thing. For a chicklit romance with a twist, it managed to keep me guessing about the ending rather well, pretty much right up until the ending. The writing was pretty good and the characters were believable, but for some reason this fell just flat enough for me to keep it from being in the 4 range. Note: What is it with modern novels and suburbia? This is [counts on fingers, makes 'thinking' face] at least the third and maybe the fourth book I've read in like two months that had these subtle-or-otherwise slams at the idea of living anywhere but in an urban center, preferably New York. What gives with that? I guess people who still cling to their Mom jeans* (yes, I plan on mentioning those in every post for quite some time, in case you were wondering) just can't understand such things. Give me peace and quiet any day even if it does mean I have to drive a while to get to highly cultured places like Target and Panda Express.
- The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants by Ann Brashares -- 4
- I liked this. It was fresh and funny and very different. I could tell I was quite a few trips around the sun away from the target audience but who cares. (One spoilery note: I truly liked how the book handled the one girl's loss of her virginity. Much more realistic -- and tastefully done -- to my mind, than all the starry-eyed treatments this topic got in the books I read as a teen. I hope girls who read it can see the truth in it.)
- Five Little Peppers and How They Grew by Margaret Sidney -- 3.5
- This is a story of a widowed mother raising her five children on a shoestring, to put it briefly. Paula was definitely right when she commented that this book is syrupy but readable. Maybe if I hadn't been reading it aloud, necessarily taking a couple of months to get through it, I would have enjoyed it more, but when you're reading a book aloud you notice things you mightn't otherwise. For instance, in I think every single chapter in this novel, someone 'screams' a bit of dialogue. Sidney's writing doesn't have the timeless, ageless quality that L.M. Montgomery and Louisa May Alcott mastered so thoroughly. It's a good book for what it is -- children's literature from the late nineteenth century -- and I liked it well enough, but I don't love it. You can listen to me read it (ack) here.
- Silas Marner by George Eliot -- 4.5
- This has long been one of my favorite books -- a simple story of a social outcast and the way his life and the lives of his neighbors were changed by a little girl who was "sent" to him. you can listen to me me read it (ack again) here.
While we're talking about good books: if you like Sara Donati's Wilderness series (and you should), today is the US release date for the most recent novel in that series, Queen of Swords, the ARC of which I reviewed here.
*I am a mom, by the way. Who better to wear them?
Friday, October 27, 2006
what I did today
before (blurry. I am so awesome at self-portraits. way to move out of the focus area, Rachel.)
and
after. (yay for the single little strand of hair going across my forehead. It was windy.)
Note: Whenever possible, get your hair cut by someone whose first language is not English. Yes, there's a bit of difficulty explaining exactly what you want, but my goodness does it cut down on the uncomfortable need for small talk. My stylist today (I say that as if it has been less than eight years since a stylist touched my hair) was Natalya from Uzbekistan, and aside from telling me helpfully that "wite-amins" would help my poor thin hair to thicken up a bit, she was really nice about the not-talking. (Seriously, she was very nice, and conversed quite well -- far, far, FAR better than I would if I moved to Uzbekistan to start cutting hair, that's for absolutely sure.)
Also, I bought jeans. It was actually a little bit of an anticlimax, because I was all prepared to Lose the Mom Jeans and Go Below the Waist and all that, and it turned out that at least two of the pairs of jeans I already wear qualify as below-the-waist and therefore probably aren't Mom Jeans at all. So I'm not as unhip as I thought I was. Except I couldn't bring myself to buy stretch denim jeans because, let's face it, one awesome thing about denim is that it's kind of corsety, and it sort of shapes you, even without being super tight. It's magic. Not so much with the stretch denim; I haven't seen my thighs look that fat, like, ever. Also, there seemed to be very few options in the gap between Mom Jeans and jeans with 70's-designer-style decorations on the back pockets. I just am not ready to go there yet. However, I did buy a pair of boot-cut below-the-waist jeans, and one pair of straight-leg below-the-waist ones. Kristin, you should be proud of me.
AND I found a nice soft red boucle sweater that I really like. I'm going to hate pulling it out of the washer, with that shuddery wet-acrylic feeling, but I like it.
Also, speaking of boucle, I bought a big skein of boucle yarn. This stuff is from the devil, as it turns out. Not only is it almost impossible to work with (I think there's a stitch... there [tentative poke]. repeat), but also, I could not find the pulling end no matter how hard I tried, so I had to take the paper off and unwind the yarn from the outside, and the skein has... it has grown. It is fully round and every time I look at it it's bigger. I'm afraid to go to sleep tonight because I think I might come out front and find it absorbing stuff, Blob-style, filling my living room. It's pretty colors, though.
And I bought a knitting book that I'm going to take back because it turns out to not be very helpful. I would scan a sample so that you could see the unhelpfulness of it, but that would bend the book up and I so want that $11.95 back. I could buy yarn with that money.
AND I went to Panda Express. Mmm, yum. I wish I could go back right now. Take that, haters of the bliss that is fast Chinese-esque food combined with a buffet.
And I went to Costco but forgot to buy cat food even though it was on my list and we were already totally out and had been feeding the cats leftovers from our fridge since this morning, so when I got home I went next door and asked our tenants if we could borrow a cup of cat food. Because I am all together and with-it like that. Further evidence of my extreme tiredness near the end of my shopping trip: I was on the phone with T as I was driving home and he swears that I said I felt "much more safer" driving my parents' van while my beautiful Dart is awaiting a rebuilt brake cylinder booster (read: while my beautiful Dart doesn't want to stop once it's moving unless you ask it really forcefully and well in advance). I deny this. How could I not? But he insists.
Thursday, October 26, 2006
oh, my brain! the hurting!
Don't say I didn't warn you. (creative googling will find you the solution but that's no fun.)
Tuesday, October 24, 2006
things that are happening around here
Thing One:
My seven-year-old daughter has a temporary tattoo:
I think it's kind of cute and glittery and girly and pretty (although I just noticed that the fairy's posture looks just the slightest bit suggestive in a Bare Naked Ladies anime-babes-that-make-me-think-the-wrong-thing kind of way), and since my problem with the idea of a tattoo is the permanence of it, I thought it was fine when C wanted to spend her two quarters on a fairy tattoo from the machine at the grocery store. Heck, I think I might spend two quarters on a fairy tattoo from the machine at the grocery store next time I'm there. After all, it's not like she'll have some bleached-out green version of it on her wrinkled 80-year-old neck. Her dad, however, was not so comfortable with the idea, and he kind of failed to see the cute girly glitteriness and went straight to "that'll come off in her bath, right?"
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Thing Two:
I KNITTED.
A WHOLE DISHCLOTH. Do you SEE the knitty goodness?
I have always been under the impression that I could not knit. This dates back to a dreadful experience in Girl Scouts, when we were all supposed to make little knitted bells as ornaments for the library Christmas tree, and I just couldn't do it. The two memories I took away from the attempt are:
- the shameful feeling of coming to the leader for, like, the eighth time, and having her rip my bell apart AGAIN and tell me to start over because I was doing it wrong, and
- the realization that the world didn't fall in if I failed to complete an assignment. As my high-school grades will attest, this was a Very Bad Lesson to have learnt at such an impressionable age.
So you can see why I was scarred.
Anyway. I learned to crochet instead, and periodically I would try knitting and fail again and put away my one lone set of needles until the next time. This time it worked, thanks in part to Kat's cheerleading and advice, and also thanks to about.com's knitting area, which is totally awesome. I made a dishcloth because I could learn as I went without having to care if the result was ugly because who cares what a dishcloth looks like?
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Thing three:
I have a little bit of money, and aside from the two pairs I bought at Goodwill a month or so ago, pretty much all my jeans are getting ratty. So I need to replace them. I MIGHT happen to buy jeans that are not Mom Jeans, but LET IT BE KNOWN BY THESE PRESENTS that it is not because I feel like I have to. It is certainly not because of any dictates by the fashion police or clothing manufacturers who think it's really important that everyone throw out all their clothes every few years so that a) they can look ridiculous to their kids fifteen years later and b) the aforementioned clothing manufacturers can make more money. If I buy jeans that are mid-rise, it will be because, well, I need jeans, and they are available, comfortable, appropriate, and nice-looking on me, and that is all. I would like to remind the fashion-conscious youth of America that they are not the first generation to think that their mom's clothes were dorky and that obviously THEIR clothes are the only ones worth wearing. Nor will they be the last. I can't WAIT till there's a whole generation of 40-year-old women clinging to mid-rise jeans while their young daughters mock them in Internet videos.
Saturday, October 21, 2006
Silas Marner is done
...and catalogued here.
Wednesday, October 18, 2006
rather interesting and totally awesome
(separately)
Here's the 'rather interesting':
(oops, the Ctrl-C didn't take. I just pasted an entire chapter of Villette here. Trying again.)
There we go, that's better. Thanks Kat, who is as always ever so helpful in pointing out interesting Internet things to me. (warning: Turn OFF your speakers for this one. There's a really annoying sound-embedded ad.)
And for the totally awesome, everyone-must-see-this part of today's post:
(Turn your speakers back on.)
Go watch this now. This means you. Especially if you are a girl or a woman or ever looked at a girl or a woman or at a magazine ad or a movie star or any print or video media portrayal of female beauty. Please?
Sunday, October 15, 2006
many random things
I have a spot on the side of my nose that I can see in my peripheral vision, which drives me batty. I have said it before, but I find it patently unfair of God to decree that I should have spots and wrinkles at the same time. Further, I far prefer the nice British-ish term "spot" to "zit". "Zit" sounds like the name of a dog in a 1950's sci-fi book, and yet paradoxically it always brings to mind a skinny fifteen-year-old with buck teeth, a prominent Adam's apple, and a loud way of guffawing at un-funny things.
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I have recently discovered that the style of jeans I wear are called "Mom jeans" by the youth of America. In spite of a) my persistent belief that the waist of pants should sit at the waist of the woman, and that any other place looks kind of ridiculous, and b) my insistence that, not being in high school, I don't have to care what other people think of my clothes as long as they are clean and in good repair, this disturbs me a bit. Are "mom jeans" the embarrassment equivalent of the candy-apple-red, white-polka-dotted sheeny rayon pantsuit with the frilly cravat that my mother used to wear, until Jenn mercifully (but totally accidentally) put it out of its misery by dropping it into a serendipitously-placed pan of used motor oil in the laundry/utility shed when she lived with us during high school? If so, perhaps I should maybe go try on something that's mid-rise and straight-legged. Because that would be actually pretty bad.
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While we're discussing my lack of hipness, perhaps I should share that as I'm typing this, I'm listening to a Yanni song. Whoops, it just went to Loreena McKennitt. I don't think that brought me much higher on the hipness scale, but what do I know, in a world where jeans that show all your belly fat are preferable to ones that don't.
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I have stopped updating the librivox chapters in the blog. Not that anybody noticed. They're always available at the "my librivox recordings" link over on the right, if anyone's interested. I'm well over halfway done with both solo projects now and am planning to do Anne of Green Gables next.
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Oops, now it's Enya. This is far from the only kind of music I have on my computer. It's just what I felt like listening to while doing a negative-scanning job.
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This feels like the kind of note I would write when I was thirteen (on peach-colored binder paper, with big circles for dots on the i's), wherein I would announce at intervals what song was playing on the radio and how I felt about it. And yet... my friends still liked me. Crazy.
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OK, I have a bit of a literary question for all you brilliant English major types out there. Why, in "The Highwayman" (Loreena McKennitt's musical version of which I may or may not be listening to right now, at quite a loud volume for 11 PM), do the soldiers tie the musket to Bess, other than as a necessary plot device? How would that further serve their purpose than to simply gag and bind her? I do not understand. Not that I don't totally love that poem, in the same way that I love the impassioned music of the Romantic era. I'm just... wondering. Randomly.
Saturday, October 14, 2006
can we keep him, Mom? can we?
Yesterday the kids looked outside and saw a stray cat (or rather a half-grown kitten) on the porch. They went outside thinking they'd try to pet him, and to their surprise he actually let them. Enthusiastically. They noticed that he was attempting to eat little black fragments of -- well, of whatever it is that comes off the barbecue grill when you clean it -- from the porch, so they brought him a bowl of food, which he scarfed, and a bowl of milk, which he did likewise. He came in the house without blinking an eye, and they presented him to me.
OK, I must be completely honest with you, my vast blogging public. That last sentence? Happened in the opposite order. Ahem.
Anyway. He was starving, matted with stickers, hosting a couple of ticks, and uncannily like our cat Henry, who died a little over a year ago. We cleaned him up, treated him for fleas, and put a collar on him. Meet Darcy:
(ordinarily I do not attempt studio-style photos of pets, but I had constructed a light tent for some ebay photography -- see the photo blog -- so while I had it already set up I stuck him in there. He didn't much want to sit still; I was lucky that he sat down to wash himself and I could snap a shot as he lifted his head.)
Anyway. At least I call him Darcy, because he fights with Elizabeth. C calls him Smoky, and LT calls him Oscar, because (having apparently been on his own and scrounging for quite some time) he has a strong feline passion for the garbage, which he is constantly trying to overturn in hopes of a snack, even though he might already have eaten a small plate of leftover spaghetti sauce, a huge portion of cat food, and probably a cup or so of milk. During the night he succeeded in his quest, and T thought the position of the FOUND flyer to be humorous enough to risk using THE NIKON while I was sleeping to take a picture of it:
(note the blurring to protect me from crazed Internet stalkers. I'm not just going to hand it to you guys.)
I did put several of those up around town but we secretly hope that nobody calls. If we haven't heard from anyone by the end of the weekend, I'll call the vet on Monday and see about getting Darcy/Smoky/Oscar his shots and his testicles removed and all that sort of fun feline stuff. And then I guess maybe we'll have to all actually agree on a name. :)
Monday, October 09, 2006
can you feel the love?
Jennifer (who gets the dubious honor of being the subject of two posts in a row) tagged me for a meme. I'm supposed to do some sort of word association with four words of her choosing. Fun times. :)
OK, here goes.
encumbered: Oh, great, already this word has done that thing where it becomes the weirdest possible collection of sounds and letters ever, know what I mean? And I'm going to have to type it again. Honestly, the first phrase to come to mind is "self-loathing". As in, I have gone through my life encumbered by self-loathing. Not today, though. I'm pretty chipper today. And, well, pretty much every day. My whole life.
lofty: What my ceilings are not. Neither are my ambitions. Or my plans. Wow.
exaggerate: When I was a kid I used to exaggerate regularly, like it was an addiction. I would tell a story and then embellish it. Frequently this meant that (because I was only a kid, and while I was book-smart, I was life-stupid, thank you Edewaa Foster for that completely apt description of me; bet you didn't know I'd still be using it twenty years down the road) at some point someone would look at me, all nuh uh, that is totally impossible, and I would be stuck choosing whether to stick it out or backtrack. By my teens I had learned that the exaggeration just plain wasn't worth it. Although I still have a few of these stories come bite me in the butt from time to time, and I get to admit that I was being an idiot and I made that up.
Now you all don't like me anymore and you won't come around. Fine.
And, because Jennifer loves me SO MUCH*, I get the word bowel. Thank you. Um. It's been better, thanks for asking. (begin glowing, flame-hot blush.... now.)
*Speaking (again) of Jennifer, I have been contemplating the friendships in my life and thinking about making a blog post about them, but like most of the blog posts I think about, it hasn't happened. I'm having a super busy week (baby shower present to crochet, zoo date with Debi tomorrow, far far behind on librivox stuff, just got a transcribing job, plus all that school/dishes/laundry stuff that keeps repeating itself) so it's not going to be happening anytime too soon, either. But I'm thinking about it all the same.
Edited to add: I completely forgot to tag anybody.
Um, Michael, Debi, Valerie, and Susan (in my comments since you deprive the world of so much of your wonderfulness by not having a blog, even though with only four kids I know you have all kinds of free time), you are IT. And your words (I'll be nice, unlike SOME PEOPLE I KNOW) are:
desperation
clever
fractions
flirt
Wednesday, October 04, 2006
way awesome
Jenn is participating in Lauren's Bloggy Tour of Testimonies with thirty days of posts. I am SO LOOKING FORWARD to this whole series, and I thought I would give Jenn (and the grace of God) a bit of a plug here. Do make sure to check her out over the course of the next month. I love Jenn very much, and this story she's about to tell is one that I have a feeling will make me cry more than once.
Tuesday, October 03, 2006
Silas Marner and Five Little Peppers updates
Chapters 10 and 11 of Silas Marner:
And chapters 10 through 12 of Five Little Peppers and How They Grew:
