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Tuesday, July 29, 2008

freaky.

So half our county is on fire again, except this time it really seems to actually almost be half the county. (Instead of, you know, a few hundred acres plus a sizable portion of hyperbole on my part.) I don't remember ever seeing a fire that grew this fast and did this much damage. People's houses have actually burned down, which almost never happens when we have a wildland fire. It sucks. I don't know what else to say about it other than that succinct little phrase. And it would be really lame of me to spend any time complaining about the smoke or the ash or the traffic or the fact that complications from the fire take up so much of my husband's would-be free time, when people are losing their homes and when this place will pretty much never look the same again. So I don't.

Fortunately for our family, at least, this particular fire is in the other half of the county, and we're in no immediate danger from it. It has put the fear of God in us, though, and we've spent several hours this week working on finishing up our own fire clearance. We're not done yet -- the "forest" that abuts our house still has just a couple of low branches, and I need to weed-eat again -- but we're a lot safer than we were on, say, Saturday morning. And that was a lot safer than we were when we moved in, because nobody had apparently ever worked on trimming the trees here -- well, except that when we moved in it was the middle of winter and we had like three snowstorms right on top of each other, but whatever.

Other news: I made blackberry jam just now, out of blackberries we picked this afternoon. Everything went swimmingly except for that one time when I thought I was standing on a tree branch under the blackberry vines and... I wasn't. Just FYI, it's really hard to get up when you're sitting among waist-deep thorny vines, surrounded by more of the same, and out of reach of both of your children who are under strict orders not to come closer lest they suffer the same fate. Also: blackberry thorns love to hide out in your jeans and then viciously attack you later when you least expect it. Just a warning. (The jam is so, so worth it.)

Saturday, July 26, 2008

tell me again *why* I pay for this thing?

I swear that I really really want to post more than once a week. I do. I feel terribly guilty for letting so much time go by between posts. Not because I am concerned that my thousands of loyal readers (SNORT) will be disappointed, but because this thing costs me money, by golly. Maybe I need to impose a post-a-day rule on myself again, strictly as an exercise. An exercise in rationalizing procrastination, that is.

ANyway. I did have a couple of listish kinds of snippets floating around in my head that were too long for Twitter*, and I have a few minutes to fill in (ever since I read The Phantom Tollbooth in the fourth grade, I have a hard time saying that I'm "killing time". Poor Tock!) while I upload some chapters to Librivox, so I'll grace the Internet with more of my madd blogging skillz.

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Snippet the First: THINGS I LOATHE. (ooh, goody! a list!)

• Use of the word "architecting". People, an architect (n.) does not architect (v.). There is no such (v.). He/She designs. So does anyone else whose activities you might be tempted to describe with that not-word. Please, for the sake of my sanity, stop. Just stop. There are other perfectly good verbs and gerunds you can use that won't cause me to go into spasms of uncontrollable twitching in the middle of a late-night transcribing session. Thank you. (PW: It wasn't you.)

• Cheetos.

• 95-degree days during which it RAINS. (OK, sprinkles.) This is California. I should not have to deal with this.

• Stupid expletive-deleted blossom-end rot. Every one of my full-sized tomatoes has this. It's all my fault, apparently -- I overwatered them when they were little baby tomato plants -- but that is no excuse. (Besides, the cherry tomatoes, which I also overwatered, are JUST FINE.)

• Automatic spell-checking in text fields. Yes, Firefox, "overwatered" is a word. So is Librivox. (You're right about "architecting", though, which makes me a wee bit less annoyed with you. I may let you live. For today, at least.)

• Library Elf's new email format. All of a sudden they only tell me what's due or what's on hold, without giving me a full list of everything I have checked out every time. Now how am I supposed to remember what I've read at the end of the month when I go to write a book post? Am I supposed to save actual paper library receipts? Surely I can't be expected to keep track of the books as I go? Sigh.

• Weeds. I turn my back for SIX DANG MINUTES (or, um. Cough. Six dang weeks. Cough.) and they take over every spare inch of my garden.

• The nightly chain reaction wherein one set of neighborhood dogs gets started barking and then others join in until it's this enormous cacophony of woofing and yipping and how-how-hooowwling that I think you can hear from space. How do the owners sleep through that when it's right outside their windows? (Scout, being indoors, just lifts her head for a brief growl and then goes back to sleep. Good dog.)

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Snippet the Second: THINGS I LOVE:

• Steamed yellow crookneck squash with just a dash of salt.

• Summer vacation.

• The fact that at 1:30 AM I just had to go wrestle a book out of my son's hands and force him to turn off his light and go to sleep.

• The little itty bitty tiny frogs that live in my garden.

• Sitting on the porch swing just before sunset in a tank top and capris and feeling completely comfortable. (Notice how I'm trying not to hate summer?)

• Letting the sun heat our water and dry our clothes, so that our utility bills in summer are slightly more than half what they are in winter. (See? Again.)

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And with that, the uploader is 15 seconds from finishing the last file, and I have less than five hours before I need to be up in the morning, and I still want to lie awake and read some Jane Austen for a while. I am SUCH a REBEL. Goodnight.

*if you actually are interested in the events of my life or simply miss my self-deprecating, sarcastic sense of humor -- what? you don't? -- when I'm not posting here, you can follow me on twitter. I do generally put up at least one or two little micro-posts each day. Followers are treated to snippets about how awesomely cool our family's DVD watching habits are, the occasional fascinating garden update, and of course complaints about the weather. Aren't you itching to go click "Follow" RIGHT NOW? You know you are.

Monday, July 21, 2008

weekend snippets

We fetched LT home from camp on Saturday. Originally we were not going to have to drive any boys other than our own, but then one of the other drivers had car trouble so we ended up making the trip in my parents' van and coming home with it stuffed full of sweaty, dirty boys -- some of whom were sweatier and dirtier than others, for example my son, who took the opportunity of a week away to avoid showering for six solid days. (Really, he just smelled like camping, as far as I could tell.) (Also, this was his first encounter with group showers -- "just-- showers in a room with no stalls, Mom" -- and his reaction to this encounter was a resounding I DON'T THINK SO.) Anyway, he had a good time, and the boys were perfectly friendly to him, and he branched out in some new ways (ghost stories! Wilderness survival merit badge! Archery!), and he's looking forward to next year when maybe his Dad can go.

It's really providential when you think about it that the van waited through that 240-mile drive before it died, completely and irreversibly, a quarter-mile (a downhill quarter-mile, no less!) from the chapel where the boys were to be collected by their parents. Sigh. My poor parents. I think that's the fourth or fifth time the fuel pump has gone belly-up in their (11-year-old, 180K-mile) van.

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Sunday we had the third meeting of our new fellowship in town, and I really liked it, even better than the first one. (I wasn't at the second; see above re: driving Scouts to camp.) Afterward we headed to my parents' place for the first time in a shamefully long amount of time, where the major excitement of the day was the search for my cousin's 7-year-old daughter. She and her dad are visiting from out of state, and she got lost while she was out for a walk. My dad and brother and cousin headed in one direction in trucks, while C and I and our dog and my parents' dog and my two nephews went the other direction on foot. My nephews had never met the little girl, and C had, which played into her sense of the dramatic nicely since she could fill them in: "She's SEVEN. She is ONE YEAR YOUNGER THAN ME. She is JUST A LITTLE GIRL and she DOESN'T KNOW HER WAY AROUND HERE VERY WELL. She may have been SNAKEBITTEN or KIDNAPPED. Mom, how can you be so CALM?" We found her, safe and sound and thirsty and footsore, after a passing motorist told us she'd seen a lost little girl wandering in the same direction we were but that the little girl (understandably) would not get into a car with a stranger.

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But my prolapsing mitral valve, which had not been happy all morning yesterday, protested loudly against all the jogging I did along the road during the Very Dramatic Search Effort, and I have been maddeningly annoyed by a symptom flare-up ever since.

This drives me bananas. I am SO not the invalid type. And I hate going to the cardiologist, which is why I haven't been to see one in a couple of years, and I don't want to start going again now so just GET BETTER ALREADY.

(I have a sneaking suspicion that the fact that my pants don't fit so well anymore and the fact that my stupid heart is grumpy with me may be mysteriously related to one another. Must investigate. But not too closely. Speaking of which, anyone have any chocolate?)

Monday, July 14, 2008

ok, so this is so pitiful.

Yesterday I drove a little over three hours each way in a borrowed van to drop off eight boys ages 12-16 at Scout camp. You know, I have to wonder: why don't they put Scout camps in nice, accessible places? I mean, come on, I live in the mountains and have for my whole life; I know that there are plenty of private, secluded places that aren't separated from civilization by twenty or thirty miles of harrowing, mostly-single-lane switchbacks going down cliffs into a ravine to a river and then back up the other side. It was funny, actually, because when my brother recruited me to do the driving -- out of desperation, mind you, since the person who was going to drive was ill and T had a prior commitment -- I made a rawther large stink about how I would prefer not to go via this one locally notorious bendy grade, but wanted to take the very slightly longer but much straighter (and more scenic, because the bendy grade is also very ugly, in a scrub-brush-and-bare-dirt kind of way) route through the valley. And then the last hour of the trip, unavoidable no matter what route we took, was like something you'd see in a cartoon involving a camp trailer and Daisy Duck, much more nerve-wracking and nausea-inducing (which turned out not to be an issue for any of the boys in my care, praise the Lord) than anything little old Bagby Grade could dish out. My brother was highly amused at the irony of the situation, I assure you.

Really, the drive was fun and interesting and the vanload of boys were pleasantly conversant in all kinds of topics ranging from film adaptations of books to the absence of transitional forms in the fossil record to the cyclical nature of global climate change. On the way back I was by myself, and I listened to three hours of Elizabeth Von Arnim's The Enchanted April (excellent Librivox recording here), which made the time go faster, but didn't alleviate the sadness of the fact that my boy is going to be gone for an entire week. I've been mentally preparing myself for this for months. I'm mostly past worrying that he'll be excluded by the other boys and have a terrible time (this is my own issues talking, mostly, and I realize that), and I'm OK with the fact that he'll probably get homesick at first because this is just something that people have to go through sometime, and I've never been really concerned that he'll get lost or anything frightening like that, because he's very cautious and deliberate by nature. Now I'm just faced with the reality of his absence for seven long days. This may sound silly (after all, hello, he's TWELVE; he's not exactly a needy little preschooler), but he's never been away from home for more than two nights, and we're all feeling it. He had better brace himself for a substantial onslaught of hugs when he gets home whether he wants them or not.

Tuesday, July 08, 2008

Two more books

I remembered today at the library that I'd read these, and they were really good so I wanted to mention them. Besides, what else am I going to blog about? "IT IS HOT. GARDEN IS GOOD. EATING OWN ZUCCHINI."

Oh, and "I CAN DRIVE STICK SHIFT." I haven't stalled the new car in ages. Or, OK, ten or twelve days.

Anyway. Shut up Rachel, on with the books.

The first one I saw sitting there on the New Books shelf looking all hurt because I'd forgotten to blog about it was Belong To Me by Marisa De Los Santos. (I actually think I wrote a twitter post mentioning this book, but that doesn't count, now does it.) This is a sequel to her first novel, Love Walked In, and I liked it very, very much. It picks up about five years after the previous book left off, as Cornelia and her husband (whose name I have, I'm ashamed to admit, forgotten) are moving to the suburbs. I was afraid at first that it was going to be yet another annoying "suburbs are eeeevil" novel, but it wasn't. It's a very busy novel, with a lot of things happening to a lot of people. I had a paragraph-long synopsis typed here, but I've just deleted it because the story is all the more delicious for being allowed to unfold a page at a time in front of you. I heartily recommend this book. Kat, thanks so much for pointing this author out to me.

Then I saw Run sitting there with the Ann Patchett books and realized that I hadn't blogged about it either. I think I may have even read that one before... Christmas? Can I have, possibly? I'm trying to picture myself reading it -- was it here, or at my parents'? Hmm. ANyway. Run was not as... shoot, how to describe it, as -- ethereal? beautifully unlikely? as the other Patchett books I've read. There's no deceased gay magician whose female assistant was in love with him; there's no opera diva taken hostage at a party. There's just a little girl who loves to run, and a pair of motherless college-aged brothers whose father is a Kennedy-ish politician, and a car accident in the snow, and a bit of a mystery as to how all these elements fit together. Patchett, as usual, writes a vivid and memorable story, and if it's not so brilliant a gem as Bel Canto, it's still very, very good and well worth the reading.

Wednesday, July 02, 2008

books for -- ah, heck, nevermind.

I am SO SO FAR BEHIND on books posts. I do feel bad about this. In April I actually reviewed two books right after I read them, and had the reviews (but only those two reviews) all ready to post in a "Books for April" post that never materialized, but since then I've just kind of given up and dealt with the guilt.

Maybe I'll try to do better for the second half of the year. But don't hold your breath. I'll rack my brain a bit, and dig around in my Library Elf emails, and pull out those two reviews from April, and overall just see if I can remember the more noteworthy books I've read in the past few months.

On vacation last week, I read The Book of Joe by Jonathan Tropper. Tropper is, like Nick Hornby, kind of a male Marian Keyes -- he writes about issues that are not-so-light, with a light touch and a lot of humor. On that score, The Book of Joe did not disappoint. It's about a man who has to go back to his New England hometown when his father has a stroke, which wouldn't be so bad except that the guy had, after shaking the small-town dust from his feet, written a bestselling novel that seriously trashed the people in it. They deserved it, mostly, but the author did a great job of having the reader and the character realize together that he could have handled the whole thing a leetle bit more maturely. Also, the story is structured carefully and well, with explanatory flashbacks getting closer and closer to the crux of the matter that caused the main character to feel so very bitter about the town where he grew up. However, this book did come VERY near to becoming a Very Special Episode about homosexuality and homophobia. Subject matter aside, Very Special Episodes bother me. A lot. Very well-written, and there's certainly a lot more to the story than that, so if you think you might like it anyway, dig in. (Also, that whole scene at the end? Was kind of freaky. You'll know which one I mean. Like a snowflake on his tongue? Eew.)

Sometime back in there I read The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, which was not at all what I expected it to be, but it was really readable and I liked it. It concerned a culture about which I knew almost nothing at all, so it was interesting from that perspective as well. I recommend it.

Oh, I also read Amsterdam by Ian McEwan. I actually don't remember a whole lot of detail about this novella, just that it was an enjoyable read with a moderately annoying (but not too surprising) dark twist at the end. I don't even remember what the source of the characters' conflict was. Oh, now that I make a serious effort it's beginning to come back, but still not completely. Whether that says more about my Swiss-cheese memory or about the quality of the story is anyone's guess. If you like McEwan, give this one a try.

Oh. I read a really strange -- but also memorable -- novel called His Illegal Self, which I picked up purely on the strength of the cover photograph and the title. It was set mostly in a commune in Australia. I liked the main character (a little boy, the son of permanently absent Communist revolutionary hippie types who is sort of accidentally abducted by another Communist revolutionary hippie type who he thinks is his mother) a lot, but I didn't like much else about the book, and the pretentiously unorthodox punctuation -- or, more specifically, the lack of it around quotations -- drove me bananas.

Hmm. Also in the Strange category -- Jenn, this is the book whose title I couldn't think of the other day, when we were talking about memoirs of people with crazy mothers or something like that -- was Her Last Death by Susannah Sonnenberg. Here's the review I put on Visual Bookshelf (which I no longer update, by the way) for that one: "Left me feeling dirty, somehow, and very glad for my ordinary humdrum wonderful relationship with my normal mother. Very well-written, but I still kind of wish I hadn't read it."

Aaaand back in April I read The Pajama Girls of Lambert Square, by Rosina Lippi. Lippi's writing and dialogue always crackle, and her characters are fresh and interesting as always. Maybe a little too fresh and interesting -- I found the agoraphobic, constantly pajama-clad female lead just that little bit too unrealistic for my suspension of disbelief to take (especially when someone so careful about her privacy hops into bed with the new guy in town practically the second she sees him. But then I guess in today's moral climate that's not unrealistic. Ahem.). Still, it's worth a read for the excellent writing, as Lippi's/Donati's books always are.

Here's the other of my April reviews -- I even formatted this one!

1. Conversations with the Fat Girl -- Liza Palmer -- 4
   
   • I liked this so much more than I thought I might. Maggie and Olivia have been best friends since they were the two designated Fat Girls in their class at school, but as the newly-thin Olivia's wedding approaches, the problems with their relationship are becoming increasingly apparent. Meanwhile, Maggie's been evicted and has a master's degree, a dead-end job, and a crush on a man she thinks is unapproachable. At first glance this seems like a typical fluffy best-friends-gone-wrong, girl-with-issues-meets-boy story, but there's a lot more to the book than that. For one thing, the writing is terrific, with believable dialogue, a steadily moving plot, and frequent sly little zingers of humor that catch you off-guard; even the chapter titles are clever. Also, in a rawther Marian-Keyesish fashion, there are some Deep Issues here, and they're deftly handled without the slightest bit of treacle or preaching or any tired clichés. The supporting cast, Maggie's mother and sister especially, crackle with life; Maggie herself is a woman who makes me root for her. The only way I could bring myself to put this down and stop reading long enough to get anything done for the past two days was to remind myself that I didn't really want to get to the end and have no more to look forward to. (So it's not perfect -- the best-friend's Bridezilla tendencies are a bit over-the-top at times. But it's still very, very good.)

OK. I know I read other stuff (besides all the reading I was doing for school up until mid-May) but that's all I'll torture you with. Now here's a meme. I keep seeing it around and hoping someone will tag me with it, but nobody has, so I'm just going to do it anyway. (Blog-tagging reminds me of waiting to be picked for teams in junior high.)

1. Do you remember how you developed a love of reading?
I just remember being really enthusiastic about the fact that letters made words and words made stories and stories made pictures in my head -- that, in short, all it took was the alphabet correctly arranged to create entire worlds out of nothing. (Although I wouldn't put it into those words until I was considerably older. I may have been an avid reader at three but I wasn't that precocious.) Also, my brother taught me to read, or at least I remember him teaching me the sounds the letters made -- I was stung by the injustice that while C could make a K sound, K couldn't make a C sound. And anything my big brother did had to be just wonderful.

2. What are some books you loved as a child?
The first ones I remember reading independently were the Frog and Toad books, and I still love those. Also, I was nuts about the Little House books, and Narnia, and the Oz books and Beverly Cleary and Doris Gates, and Trixie Belden and the Hardy Boys (not so much Nancy Drew although I read a lot of those books the way you eat a lot of gummy bears, without thinking much), and books of horse stories. As an older child I especially loved the Anne series. I enjoyed anything I could check out of the library and devour non-stop, really, but these were a few special favorites.

3. What is your favorite genre?
Overall, probably classic fiction. But it's hard to choose.

4. Do you have a favorite novel?
Talk about hard to choose! Maybe Persuasion. Maybe Jane Eyre. Maybe Anne of Green Gables. I love a lot of modern novels too (Never Let Me Go, A Thread of Grace, Into the Wilderness). Man, I hate this question. I could go on all day with answers. Moving on.

5. Where do you usually read?
These days, in bed. I read elsewhere too, but I always have so much else to do during the day -- school in season, working in the garden, house stuff, cooking, cleaning, hanging laundry -- that I just don't have the leisure to sit down without guilt as often as I used to, and when I do, I usually end up knitting because, I reason, I can read in bed at night, but knitting doesn't lend itself as well to that, and I have projects I actually want to finish before I die.

6. When do you usually read?
I think I just answered that pretty well.

7. Do you usually have more than one book you are reading at a time?
Yes. Usually I'll go through several lighter fiction books in the amount of time it takes me to finish a more serious classic (usually a reread), although sometimes I get so caught up in one book that I don't read anything else until that one is done.

8. Do you read nonfiction in a different way or place than you read fiction?
As much as I wish I were the type of person who read a lot of nonfiction -- seems so much steadier and more important than preferring novels -- I probably read maybe one or two nonfiction books per year outside of school requirements. I do like a good biography every now and then, and I'll check out nonfiction that sounds interesting when I hear about it, but I frequently turn those books in without reading them all the way through. Now you know my deep dark secret: I'm terribly shallow. I hope you can still be my friend.

9. Do you buy most of the books you read, or borrow them, or check them out of the library? Mostly I check them out of the library. Classics I'll buy.

10. Do you keep most of the books you buy?
Yes, the vast majority of them, because I almost never buy a book unless I know I want to own it for one reason or another. (One exception is library book sales, where I'll sometimes be less discriminate and end up with stuff I'll never read, which I then give away.)

11. If you have children, what are some of the favorite books you have shared with them?
Mostly, it's the list of books in question 2. But add a few: Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, the inevitable Goodnight Moon. My daughter is just now flying through the Little House books, and it gives me so much pleasure to discuss them with her. My son's rereading the Narnia series (actually, he'd only listened to those really good audiobooks of most of them before), so that's fun too. Both my kids loved Beverly Cleary and read just about everything she wrote for young children. One of the greatest joys of being a parent is sharing books with my kids.

12. What are you reading now?
I just finished North and South -- the Elizabeth Gaskell novel, not the one about the American Civil War. I'd listened to the Librivox version before -- back when I was doing the painting in our house, actually, so it was funny to be reading along and then suddenly flash to the mental vision of myself covered with yellow paint standing in what is now my living room painting cupboard doors. Now I'm slowly going through The Mill on the Floss -- is it just me, or is most Eliot not as accessible as Silas Marner? -- and also reading While I Was Gone by Sue Miller. Funny about this book: As I was reading along, parts of the story started sounding creepily familiar to me, but other parts were (and are) not familiar at all. I'm still not sure if I've read this book before, or if I read part of it, or if I read something else that bore a lot of similarity to parts of the story.

13. Do you keep a To Be Read list?
Not really.

14. What’s next?
I'm having a hankering to read some Gabaldon and Donati. Also some Dickens, and I'm going to try to make myself strike out and read something new of his, rather than falling back on David Copperfield. Again.

15. What books would you like to reread?
I reread so, so many books.

16. Who are your favorite authors?
YOU CAN'T MAKE ME CHOOSE. Seriously, if you've read this blog for five minutes you could probably come up with a pretty accurate list.

Whew! And that's all. Wow, that got long. Now I don't have to post for a long time, right?