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Sunday, December 31, 2006

oh my gosh it's New Year's Eve!

I completely, totally, one hundred percent did not connect the fact that tonight is the last night of 2006 with the fact that I have meant since September to start a brand-new yearlong photography project on the first day of 2007 (until just now, of course). Oh dear. I am SO UNPREPARED.

See, the thing is, do you remember the 28 photos in 28 days project I did back in the spring? The one where I had all those different subjects and types of photography and I had to do one each day? You, er, don't? Oh, OK. Well, um. Go here and then come back.

Are you back?

OK. Well, this is going to be a yearlong version of that. Yes, I'm a lunatic. I have 365 challenges in a list (OK, some are duplicates; it's probably more like 300 or so) and the theory is that this will challenge and inspire me and I will take at least one picture EVERY DAY during 2007. Not sure what I'll do for vacations yet -- if I'll let myself take them in advance so as not to let creepy Internet stalkers know I am away from the computer, or whether I will just take them while I'm gone, upload them when I get back, and make sure I use the deadbolt, or whether I will go into mucho credit card debt and buy a Wi-Fi-enabled laptop to take with me. (probably not that last one, but hey, a girl can dream).

So. This project is frantically being scrambled together under construction tonight, but it should be live by tomorrow, and it will be here.

Thursday, December 28, 2006

hee!

Sometimes funny things happen when you alphabetize your playlist. I swear this was not staged at all.

Maybe it's the kind of thing whose humor is more evident late at night.

Wednesday, December 27, 2006

Or maybe THIS is why people get married.

YES.
4gb iPod Nano: Best belated-thanks-to-eBay-dolt birthday present ever.

Serious advantages (ooh, goody! a list!):

• holds way way way more Librivox audiobooks than my car's 12-CD changer.
• oh, yeah, it holds all that music on there too.
• I hear stuff in music that I never noticed before, even with the blow-your-ears-off stereo we had in the Buick. Half the time it kind of freaks me out -- like, where is that COWBELL coming from? Who is banging on a COWBELL? until I remember that I have earphones in my ears and that is in fact Ringo himself on the cowbell. Oh yeah.
• Applying the above characteristic to Rachmaninov and Mozart (the only ones I've tried so far) = unbelievably awesomely oh my gosh wow. You can hear them turning the pages of their sheet music. You can hear them breathing. André Previn and the London Symphony Orchestra are in my head, y'all.
• I know you all know this because I am the last person in the western world to get an iPod. I was the last one to see Titanic and also the last one to get DSL or a cell phone. And my cell phone still doesn't have a camera in it, which is actually quite an accomplishment. I am so far from an early adopter they had to create a new category for me.
• It forced me to finally organize all those mp3s I had sitting around in folders duplicating each other and hiding totally inaccurate metadata.
• Remember the first time you listened to "Bohemian Rhapsody" with stereo headphones and you entered a whole new world? This is like that all over again only more awesome, except now I am 32 instead of 10 so my awe is perhaps less excusable.

All is not perfect, however.

• The aforementioned 12-disc changer is feeling a little inferior and left-out. Or it will be as soon as I get a car kit.
• There is enormous embarrassment potential here, folks. I mean, I am, er, extremely musically expressive, shall we say, and my car dancing is the source of much mirth for others, in my car or out of it. Add 'singing along to music only you can hear' to the mix and I may have to buy a hermitage or something.

Monday, December 25, 2006

you know you're a grown-up when...

...you're glad to see the end of Christmas Day.

It was nowhere near as bad as last year, when C was sick and T thought she was well enough to go to his immuno-compromised stepmother's house for dinner but she threw up there and wasn't THAT grand (really, this is one of the hardest kinds of little decisions to make. Do we wreck the holiday for everyone for what could be a case of 'I ate too much junk', or do you run the risk of finidng out too late that you should have?). Fortunately. It was just crazy. And there were only 13 people here! I mean, I've had more and it's gone more smoothly. This year the main problems were that a) I started dinner too late, because I swear time went straight from 8:30 AM to 10:50, I've no idea how or why but I swear it did, and b) the turkey was possessed by the devil. It just WOULD NOT COOK as fast as it usually does. And there was this whole comedy of errors wherein I checked it with the broken meat thermometer (why hadn't I already thrown this out if I knew it was broken? [kicks self]) and thought it was done so I turned the roaster oven off but then I remembered about that stupid meat thermometer and checked it with the real one and it still had twenty degrees to go. And then the roaster oven and the coffee maker conspired between them to throw the overload-protection switch on their joint power strip, which we didn't find out until I noticed that the turkey juices weren't hissing and sizzling anymore, and that it was remarkably stubborn about staying at 165 degrees. So we ended up just having the ham with all the sides for dinner, and I didn't even carve the turkey until just before we ate dessert. Yes, this means I now have the meat from an ENTIRE TURKEY in my refrigerator and WHEN are we ever going to eat that? sigh.

And I'm getting a kind of hoarse sore throat thingy so I DID NOT sleep well last night what with the congestion. Also, this morning after we finished opening presents, C had a little fit because she didn't get this one particular enormous stuffed duck that she wanted, so she had to get sent to her room until she could stop being so Veruca Salt-ish, at which point she shifted from crying because of greed into crying because of (a flair for the dramatic and) shame. So THAT made for a fun little interlude.

However. Everyone left with full tummies (we had seven pies. For thirteen people.), and the dishes are clean, thanks to my angelic and hard-working mom, and everything was good to eat and we remembered Jesus, so even if the day didn't feel birthdayish to me in the slightest, it's all good. Especially since the three days leading up to today have felt like three birthdays all in a row. I hope that doesn't mean I have to be 35 now.

P.S. I have been putting pictures up at Flickr lately. I am planning something different for the photo blog for next year, and Flickr has become the place where I upload the few pictures I take that I think are worth showing to anyone. There are a lot of older photos up there right now too. If you are someone I actually know, online or off, and you'd like access to our family album which is set to private, drop me a line and let me know and It Shall Be Done.

Saturday, December 23, 2006

THIS is why people get married

My bedtimes have been really awful lately. Last night I was up until 4:30, and it wasn't the first or the second time in the past three weeks that I'd done that. This Christmastime has wrecked my sleep patterns FOR EVER, I am sure (witness: it is 12:50 A.M. and not only am I not tired, I simply can't imagine going to bed right now unless it was to read -- oh bliss -- for a couple of hours). So this morning T let me sleep until 10:30ish, at which time he woke me with breakfast in bed -- eggs and toast and bacon all done perfectly -- on my very own breakfast-in-bed tray. Then at 2:30 he whisked the kids and me off to the city for dinner at the Olive Garden (mmm, Kristen and Jenn, the OLIVE GARDEN. It's even better than Panda Express!) and a walk down Christmas Tree Lane, complete with all the grumble-free photo-taking stops I wanted. We even stopped off at the biggest brightest most beautiful Joann Fabric and Crafts store ever. I didn't buy anything -- we actually stopped there because it was on the way out of town and we needed to make sure we didn't wind up in the middle of nowhere on the way home in the middle of the night in the forty-degree fog with someone who had to pee RIGHT NOW, C, I am looking at you -- but Debi and I will have to make a pilgrimage there soon, I am thinking. Just as soon as our checkbook recovers from Christmas. So maybe sometime in 2009.

Anyway, it was all just a pleasant, sweet day. T has declared that it was Day One in the Four Days of Ducky (you have to have been there on that nickname), culminating with Monday, which is my 32nd birthday, but which is also the day on which twelve or eighteen people will descend upon my cave of a house, which is currently in oh my gosh such a messy state, to eat a meal which I will have prepared for them. I can only fondly hope that the Four Days will include some serious help getting ready.

Wednesday, December 20, 2006

Anne of Green Gables is finished

Remember Librivox? I'm still spending plenty of time volunteering there (I feel like a cheat calling it 'volunteering', because it truly is so much fun for me; I keep thinking they're doing ME a favor letting me record books); I just stopped posting about it because I could feel the boredom coming from you all in waves. Anyway. A day or two ago I finished the Anne of Green Gables solo project that I started at the end of October. If you're so inclined, you can download it (chapter by chapter or all at once) here.

Thursday, December 14, 2006

Thursday Thirteen

Thirteen Things that Prove I Am The Grinch in Mom's Clothing

1. I never let my kids eat candy canes. (daughter with long hair + sticky candy specifically designed not to stay in mouth = way too many baths in one day.)

2. I had never listened to the Trans-Siberian Orchestra until yesterday.

3. I keep XM on the Classical Christmas station even though the rest of the family is tired of it. My car, my XM. You get your OWN car and your OWN XM, and we'll see if maybe I'll let you decide what to listen to on it then.

4. Fake Christmas tree. (This one has lasted us since 1995, which means we're down to $2.50 a year now. If we use it for all forty or fifty years of our marriage, it'll be way under a dollar a year. That's the goal.)

5. I hate all those stupid inflated yard decorations. I mock them out loud at Costco.

6. I mock Luciano Pavarotti and José Carrera singing Christmas music on XM too.

7. My kids have known from birth that Santa is just imaginary. They don't get presents from him either. (At least we tell them not to go around spilling the beans to your kids...)

8. I haven't wrapped anything yet.

9. The kids' presents (except the Big Ones, which are in the basement) are just sitting in a big green cinch-neck bag in my room. They're on their honor not to peek. If they want to ruin their own surprise, shrug. (My brother and I 'peeked' at our presents once when we were kids. It only took that one year to realize that most of the fun was the surprise. In our household we call that a 'self-punishing action'. Like when you're running in the house and you trip over the coffee table and careen into the wall. Not that my clone has ever done that.)

10. I just bought the first of my husband's Christmas presents yesterday*.

11. I never ever ever wear reindeer antlers. Although I used to wear a Santa hat occasionally, until it made it into the kids' costume cache and got wrecked.

12. I'm not-so-secretly hoping it starts raining just in time to cancel the caroling at Awana this evening**. Tramping around where there are no sidewalks or even good road shoulders, in the freezing cold, with thirty kids, half of whom forget to bring jackets, singing Christmas carols to which only the adults have ever learned the words, then coming back in and hyping everyone up on cocoa and cookies... ugh.

13. I have had a splitting sinus headache for two days and it's apparent that I must have let it suck away every inch of cheer in my body.

*He is very intimidating with his very specific lists.

**Really I love the idea of caroling and I used to try to get the community chorus to do it every year. Just not at Awana.

Tuesday, December 12, 2006

zoom.

Life feels just a wee bit crazy right now. This last weekend was packed full of a variety of things -- shopping and a flat tire* on Friday; a baby shower (for which Debi and I had to come up with games**, ugh), extended-family drama, and a visit to my in-laws' on Saturday; and a birthday party for one of LT's friends followed by T's birthday party here at our house on Sunday. Except it didn't feel like there were any commas involved, let alone any semicolons; it was more like shoppingtripflattirebabyshowerfamilydramainlawsbirthdaypartybirthdayparty. I'm still trying to recover; the nightly routine neither helps or is helped by this insanity. Meaning that I still stay up late but I'm too exhausted to do the things I'm supposed to do, so I putter around a bit, do one or two tasks, go to bed in the wee sma's, and get up at an obscene hour***, falling slowly behind on sewing projects, which means frantic nights of scrabbling to catch up are coming soon.

Meanwhile I went to the community chorus concert (ah, remember the days when I was in the chorus? I miss that so much) last night, and all of a sudden BOOM, it felt like Christmas. So that was nice. Except now that it feels like Christmas I know how very behind I am. Yikes.

*I changed this tire by myself. Granted, some passing strangers were helpful in telling me about the little slit doohickey in my bumper -- I had never changed a tire on my beloved Dart before -- where the jack went, and I had a little trouble figuring out how to convince the thing that I really did want it to go back down when I was done, but overall this was actually a kind of positive experience, because all the rest of the shopping trip I went around with the glow of a woman who has successfully changed her own tire, practically unaided.

**You know, every woman with whom I have spoken about baby shower games hates them (except the friend for whom we were having the shower, of course; she requested them). I don't like them much myself. Why do we continue to do this to ourselves? Anyone? Anyone? I went to a shower a couple of months ago where instead of games the organizers had set up tables where the guests sat, with scrapbooking supplies in little homemade kits, and at the end of the shower there was a 'baby's first year' album to give to the mom. It's the only scrapbooking I have ever done, and if it hadn't been for Debi, who was my partner, the poor baby's June page would have been a sad sight indeed. But it was a far better idea than a bunch of kids' party games for grown women, in my opinion.

***I won't tell you what time it was this morning, but it started with a 1. And it wasn't the first hour that starts with 1. I am so ashamed.

Saturday, December 02, 2006

Books for November

I'm a couple of days late with these. Oh, the craziness. Ratings are out of five, bold title indicates first-time read.

1. The Second Summer of the Sisterhood -- Ann Brashares -- 4
   • I actually cried reading this. Granted, it was 3 am and I'm always more liable to cry over a book at that hour, but still. The book focuses heavily on mother/daughter relationships, and some of the bits about girls growing away from their mothers and then back to them had me sniffling. The whole book is pretty good -- I especially liked to see Bridget finding herself a bit. Recommended for light-but-not-inane reading.

   
   

2. Ralph's Party -- Lisa Jewell -- 2.75
   
   • This was fluffy and sometimes a bit amateurish, and rather laden with vulgarity, and what is it with EVERYONE in adult novels smoking marijuana these days? Sheesh! The core story was interesting (six [?] strangers who live in one triplex in London, and their various interrelated trials and tribulations), and some of the characters (particularly Jem) are well-drawn. Still, it was kind of a fun read, although the ending of one of the threads was Not Satisfying to me. It sort of screams FIRST NOVEL at you, but not in the worst way I've ever seen. This is another addition to the "don't mind having read it but won't be re-reading it or passing it around to my friends" pile.

   
   

3. Water For Elephants -- Sara Gruen -- 4.5
   
   • I LOVED THIS BOOK. Sersly. It would have been a five if it hadn't been for the unnecessary vulgarity (again). I sound like a prim maiden aunt saying that word, but really, do I need the mental image of, say, a dwarf having what should be an extremely private moment, etched in my mind forever, in order to be able to enjoy this story? No, I don't. I hope, honestly, that they make a movie out of it and leave in everything except the nasty bits, because it's a brilliant story, very well-told. It's set both in the modern day (the narrator is either ninety or ninety-three; he doesn't know what year it is) and in the deeps of the Depression; in an assisted-living facility for the elderly and in a traveling circus. Both settings are pitch-perfect, truly; I can smell them, know what I mean? The ending is uplifting (possibly the most perfect book ending I've read in years -- original, interesting, almost gleefully happy, and unpredictable -- and it's rare to find a truly unpredictable ending without it being high-art-nobody's-allowed-to-be-happy melancholy for melancholy's sake). It's been weeks since I read it, and Gruen's expert treatment of everything from aging to acceptance of other's differences to spousal abuse to schizophrenia to the care and treatment of large exotic animals is still going around and around in my mind. READ THIS NOW THIS MEANS YOU. Even in spite of the nasty bits.

   
   

4. Happiness Sold Separately -- Lolly Winston -- 3
   
   • I liked this well enough while I was reading it, but in looking back I can't remember much about it other than a very sketchy outline. This is probably not a good thing. It's about divorce after infertility (almost a yawn nowadays), and infidelity, and... yawn. Sorry. Couldn't help it. Truly, it wasn't a bad book. I remember thinking it was quite well-written, and you do get into the characters' heads a good deal, and oh! the little boy! She did a very good job with the boy. I didn't like the ending, though.

   
   

5. Pat of Silver Bush -- L.M. Montgomery -- 4.5
   
   • I like (and, honestly, mildly dislike) different things about LMM's books pretty much every time I reread them. This time I confess I got a wee bit annoyed with Pat's unending devotion to a house, although I can kind of identify with it, especially if I manage to interpret it as undending devotion to the people in the house. Still, I think this is one of LMM's five best books; Pat is the character of hers with whom I can most closely identify, and Hilary is my favorite of her male characters -- in this book, at least, he's as well-defined as Dean Priest in the Emily books, without that is-he-creepy-or-is-he-not factor that makes Dean a bit harder to like.

   
   

6. Mistress Pat -- LMM -- 3.5
   
   • Jingle vanishes for the entire book until the last page (typical of LMM's males); LMM skims over eleven years in not very many pages, and Pat becomes a bit annoying. Which is pretty realistic. I really do like this book quite a lot, especially its portrayal of Pat's relationship with her sister, but it's not on a level with its predecessor.

   
   

7. Rise and Shine -- Anna Quindlen -- 3.5
   
   • I would have liked this a lot better if it hadn't been for Quindlen's too-frequent lapses into material that's better suited for her Newsweek column than for a novel. Her thoughtful passages about life in New York, or about the dog-eat-dog social structure among, well, socialites, or the little zingers about politics (especially those) were unwelcome intrusions in a novel that could quite well have been rather brilliant otherwise. I guess it doesn't help, either, that I'm really kind of OVER the whole "of course the only really interesting people live in major urban centers, preferably New York or London but LA will do in a pinch" theme in modern novels, about which I ranted very briefly in I think last month's books post. This is worth a read, though, because Quindlen is really quite a good writer -- she immerses you quite fully in her characters' lives, except for those columnist intrusions -- and because this novel's treatment of sisterly relationships is not exactly standard fare for chick books. I don't have a sister, so I can't say how on-the-money it is, but it was more interesting reading than the usual Ya-Ya (yes, I know they weren't sisters, quibble quibble) kind of simplistic view of things.