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Friday, August 29, 2008

County fair! Whee!

I KNOW, two posts in one day. I ought to save it for tomorrow just to spread things out a bit, but oh well.

We're back from an insanely expensive evening at the fair. I don't even want to break it down to the per-hour rate, but we were only there for three hours, we ate dinner there, and we had to pay (THREE ADULT TICKETS! Who told that boy he could turn twelve?) to get in. We had a good time, though. The kids did nicely on their entries, and I just KNOW you all are on the edges of your seats wondering how I did, right? right? OK, you twisted my arm. I'll tell you.

Baked goods: Four blue ribbons, three red, one white, two nothings. I don't think I beat my grandmother at anything except maybe dinner rolls.

For photography, I didn't want to spend a ton of money on prints, and I hadn't done a whole lot lately that really excited me, so I just looked at the folder of pictures I want to print for the house anyway and selected eight that were from within the last eighteen months, which is the fair's limit for photography entries. So. WIthout further ado:

I won three blue ribbons:



in the "digitally manipulated" category






in the 5x7-and-under Animals category





and

in the greater-than-5x7 Animals category, which is HUGE with a whole wall of entries, so that was a nice surprise. (There's a sponsored award for first place in that category, so that's nice. I think that's also maybe why so many people enter it. Last time I won it, it was $50.)





Also one red ribbon:



(5x7)





And two white ribbons (3rd place):



(seascape, enlargements)





and

(this one was also in the very large Animals category, so I was glad about how it did.)





Two didn't place, one of poppies and one of the infamous baby possum. That one is probably my favorite of all the pictures I've ever taken, and I was a little surprised that it didn't do better, but I mainly wanted the print to hang on my wall anyway, so oh well.

Anyway, we all had a good time and now I really must go to bed because we have to get up early to get good seats for the parade tomorrow. Grandma's one of the grand marshals and that's just not something that happens every day. Besides, there might be candy.

Oh happy day!

As if the opening of the county fair didn't make it festive enough, now I get a gun-toting, pro-life, BS-cutting 42-year-old mother of five (including one son who enlisted in the military on 9/11/07 and a newborn with Down Syndrome whom she describes as "perfection") for a vice-presidential nominee? Is this my birthday or something?

I haven't been this excited about something political in a long, long time. Since... probably 1994. You'll excuse my gushing, won't you? I promise it won't happen... too often.

Back later with the news I know you're all waiting for with bated breath: How did the baked goods place? P.S. Jenn, watch your mail.

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

little things part deux

Apparently all I can post these days is these little randomy snippetish posts. Ah well. Better than nothing? Maybe. Wait, don't answer that.

• Tonight I had an in-class session for my Interpersonal Communications class. While the textbook looks as though it's going to annoy me beyond measure (it's full of touchy-feely stuff AND meaningless pretentious words for stuff that could be described much more simply by using straightforward terms like "body language" and "talking" and the like), the class tonight was actually... kind of fun. Kind of Quest-ish (OK, so people who didn't go to my high school may or may not know what Quest was, but I'm too lazy to explain. Was it a broadly-used curriculum, or just something we did in our schools, I wonder?), but not too bad. However. HOW-EVER. We did this one exercise where we each wrote something on an index card that people wouldn't know by looking at us, and then the cards were redistributed and we had to guess who went with which fact. One person's fact was "I have been married for 23 years", and some barely-post-pubescent little college student with no crow's feet and a 7-inch waist guessed that I HAD SAID THAT. No, I am sorry, we do not live in Saudi Arabia; people in the United States generally don't get married when they are TEN YEARS OLD which is where I KNOW you made your mistake, little person, right? Because obviously you couldn't have estimated that I was at least ten years older than I am. Because if you thought that I might have to go, I dunno, buy some Oil of Olay or something. Or obsess over how hag-ish I must look. One of the two.

• Speaking of school, it's time for me to get down to business and start planning our homeschool year. I am freaking out (not in an "I can't do this" way, but in a "holy bejeebers, where on earth did the time go" way) about the fact that I have a seventh grader this year. Seventh grade is... old. For a child, I mean. He's doing beginning algebra this year, which I'm actually kind of looking forward to teaching. I love algebra.

• I drove through Raymond today. To many local people, Raymond is this near-mythical place because you are always coming upon signs that point to it, but most people have never been there. Raymond makes my town look like a bustling metropolis on a major thoroughfare. Raymond is still charming and quiet and the general store there is trapped in several different time warps: the inside hasn't changed since I used to go there with my grandpa on the way to the feed store in Madera when I was small; the solitary gas pump outside is frozen in time at $1.89 a gallon; most of the building still looks pretty much exactly like it did when it was built in the nineteenth century. Raymond feels like my own personal little secret even though I know it's really not. I hadn't been there in years, but I had to go to Madera today to pick up some Charger parts for T, so I took the scenic route. There was an old couple sitting in the little café inside the store who reminded me very much of my grandparents the way they were when I was a child, and it actually caused this wave of something between intense nostalgia and vertiginous déjà vu to sweep over me: for a split second I stood there looking at them and thinking: Am I thirty-three? Is thirty-three a dream and I'm really ten? (I think I've been watching too many Twilight Zone episodes.)

• One of the blogs I read a lot has a cats vs. dogs debate going on -- you know, the old "dogs are loyal and cats are useless" vs. "you don't understand cats because you don't love cats like I do" thing. Personally? I prefer cats. Yes, dogs are more useful. Yes, cats act like their owners are their personal slaves. But none of my cats has ever dragged anyone's dirty underwear into the front room and chewed it affectionately and energetically to shreds, and that clinches it for me right there. It's not that I can't like a dog; I'm pretty fond of Scout, and when I was a kid I had several different dogs at different times that I loved a lot. But dogs in general are not something I'm ever excited about. (Really, the best description of dogs I have ever read is in Watership Down, chapter 41. Read This Now; This Means You. When the kids were plaguing me to get a dog, I agreed to do it only if we could name him Rowsby Woof. Or the Fairy Wogdog. Or (her) Queen Dripslobber. It was a narrow escape for Scout, and I still call her Postwiddle or Sniffbottom when she annoys me.)

• Lastly, a few things you already know if you follow me on twitter (or, um, facebook, I guess): We still don't have our car back. I'm in the community chorus again (for this semester, at least). Fair baking proceeds apace. And most importantly of all: Chick-Fil-A, which, as far as I knew, only existed in places far, far away from California, has expanded to a city that is a mere 75-minute drive from my house. Oh, my, am I going to get fat. (Actually, it kind of balances out, because as far as I can tell they're moving into the building that used to house the Krispy Kreme until it shut down.)

And thatisall. Dang, look at the TIME. I'd forgotten how much school nights throw off my internal clock, what with the getting-home-after-ten thing. I still have transcribing to do. This will require extra Diet Coke, for sure.

Thursday, August 14, 2008

little things

I've been feeling snippety for DAYS but I don't know how many of them I'll remember.

• Chinese Olympic gymnasts: No way (in my opinion) are some of those girls sixteen years of age. JUST NO WAY. I can't watch the Olympics from home, so I haven't seen them in action (bummer, because that's my favorite part of the summer Olympics) but just looking at pictures, um. No. (Still, if they're that talented -- is it easier to do gymnastics like that when you're prepubescent? Cause unless it's an unfair advantage, or bad for their little bodies, or something, I guess it would be reasonable to open the games to anyone who can compete. Maybe I just totally sounded stupid right then, too, though, because people, I have no idea what I'm talking about. "Ooh, flipping! Oooh, flipping around the BARS! That is impressive. The end." That is the extent of my knowledge about gymnastics, other than that I completely suck at it and not just because I'm closer to the Amazon than the petite department when it comes to my luuurvely feminine physique.)

  
  

• Yesterday I took my kids to the valley because I had to do a lot of shopping and I like to torment them like that, and we had the BEST. TIME. EVER. You know what's really awesome, is when your kids grow up and have these very individualized senses of humor, and my goodness, they are so FUNNY. I laughed till I cried at some of the jokes we made in the car (not, by the way, the safest possible thing to do when you're driving). Highlight: Scanning through Sirius radio stations (the rental is absolutely loaded, and yes we're still in the rental, more on that later) and appending "Dead Clowns" to the end of whatever part of the song title showed in the display. "32 Acres of Dead Clowns" was our favorite. WE ARE A RIOT OF LAUGHS I TELL YOU.

  
  

• The garden is slowing down and becoming persnickety. It seems to need a lot of water, and yet when I give it enough water it seems to develop symptoms of overwatering. The corn is worrying me (but then the corn always worries me, and usually it turns out fine). The tomatoes, on the bright side, are doing OK, after a worrying episode when every single ripe tomato had bad blossom-end rot. The cherry tomatoes are also doing fine. The pepperoncini -- well, I blogged about that particular issue already. The yellow squash and zucchini are as dependable as ever, but the melons are ... not growing. They all achieved a certain size and then stopped. A lot of the fun has gone out of the enterprise, is what I'm saying here. But I'm still glad I did it (um, am still doing it) and Next Year Will Be Better.

  
  

• I baked five million (or, OK, fifteen dozen) cookies today, because I am starting The Fair Baking. I froze a half-dozen cookies' worth of pre-shaped dough from each of the four variety of cookies I made today to put in the fair (and half a dozen baked cookies as back-up in case this never-before-tried experiment goes badly awry), and baked the rest, and now we are up to our ears in cookies. And I still have ten other entries to do in the next two weeks.

  
  

• It is hot. Really, really hot.

  
  

• The car dealership was supposed to have our car done last week. Then it was supposed to be done yesterday. Now it might, if things go extraordinarily well, be done tomorrow. All this annoyance to replace (or I guess now rebuild) the transmission in a car with under 2200 miles on it. This should not have to happen.

  
  

• Did you notice that there's not one adjective in the above paragraph? That's because I don't use those words and no others would do. (At least they pay for the rental.)

  
  

• The sweater from the last post is coming along fine. It has been an enormous learning experience and I feel all designerish now. I even discovered why knitting charts (which I still don't know if I'll ever be able to read) are considered useful things. People, I kind of designed my own cable-y thing. This is a big milestone. Big. Huge. I have to go shopping now. (Sorry, inadvertent 1991 flashback. Oh, how I loved the clothes in that movie. Well, some of them.)

I know I wanted to ramble on and on about more things but I can't remember what they were. I know, I know, the hardship. I'm sorry. Maybe I'll do better next time.

Sunday, August 10, 2008

knittery help, please?

(To non-knitters, this post will be in a foreign language. Paraphased into English, it reads, "Rachel is in over her head again and has no clue what she's doing. As if that were anything new?" There, now you don't need to try to struggle through it.)

I bought some pretty heathery purple yarn to make a sweater for C. I am pretty much designing this sweater myself (which could be disastrous, but everyone has to try it once and I can always frog it and make something else, right?), and I would like to incorporate this celtic braid (just one repeat of it) down the middle. HOWEVER, I can't make it simple on myself; I want the rest of the sweater to be in stockinette stitch rather than in reverse stockinette. Any ideas as to how I can make this look nice? I'm about six rows in, and what I've done so far is to do reverse stockinette for two stitches on either side of the cable (moving the two stitches so that they stay right close to the cable, if you know what I mean), and it does allow the braid to show nicely, but it also looks a little jaggy. I'm thinking about a few different solutions:

1) add a simpler cable pattern in straight rows down either side of the complicated braid, and do a reverse stockinette background just between the outside cables.

2) increase the number of stitches of reverse stockinette on either side of the braid without adding more cables.

3) leave it as it is for another half-dozen rows or so and see how it looks before I decide.

The thing is, I don't want a curling/bulging edge between the reverse stockinette and the stockinette, and I know from experience that this can happen.

So. Any ideas? please pretty please? Thank you.

Wednesday, August 06, 2008

ugggh

I've had one of those days that seems tailor-made to make me feel like a complete failure. You know the type: the kids bickered at each other all day and disrespected their mom (um, that's me) and I couldn't muster the creative energy to do anything about it besides send them to their rooms and restrict their privileges AGAIN. My first attempt at pickling peppers, involving our entire crop of pepperoncini (came out to 12 quarts or so) ended up being a fiasco wherein it took FAR TOO LONG for the water in the canner to boil, and the peppers are floating in the jars all wrong because I didn't do a hot pack, and I didn't do a hot pack because I didn't want the peppers to be mushy, and then they came out mushy anyway, and mushy pickled pepperoncini are just blech. So I wound up with fourteen jars of blech and a wasted afternoon. The service department at the dealership where the new car is getting new innards (i will not swear i will not swear i will not swear) was supposed to call me today with an update (well, they were supposed to call Monday too, and when I called them on Tuesday they said they'd call me today) and they didn't and I forgot to call them which of course meant that T was ticked off at me on top of everything else. I missed Bible study because the stupid canning was taking too much stupid time so I'm here with just the dog and the cats and my grumpy bad obnoxious frowny self.

And now I'm going to take the dog and go check the mailbox to see if anyone sent me anything fun, like a million dollars or maybe a new attitude. The way today's gone, I'll probably get an unexpected tax bill or a federal jury summons or something extra awesome like that.

EDITED TO ADD:

There was nothing in the mailbox at all, but even so I feel much better. T and the kids came home full of hugs and kisses; apologies were offered and accepted all round; T opined valiantly (and untruthfully) that pepperoncini are always mushy and that mine are just fine. Plus I'm staying up late having just a weeeeeny teeny bit of ice cream while I wait for an upload and a load of laundry to finish. Ice cream always helps; I don't know why I didn't think of that before.

Tuesday, August 05, 2008

in which I get all Betty Crockerish and give you a recipe

I tried a new recipe today, out of desperation, mainly, because I had a crisper and a garden full of squash and a girl can only eat so many pounds of steamed vegetables a day before she starts to sprout.

The big, funny-looking squash are a YUMMY heirloom variety called Zucchino Rampicante; I heartily recommend them to gardeners. One of those provided nearly eight cups of slices. (This is not one day's haul, but it's only part of what has been building up in the fridge over the past few days.)

So I began a quest for a good squash casserole recipe; I did *not* want the somewhat traditional one that's so full of butter you can barely taste the squash, but I ended up with something only marginally less unhealthy. I copied it almost entirely from cookinglight.com, except that those virtuous and healthy souls use ingredients like low-fat cheese and fat-free sour cream (which, frankly, ought to be outlawed out of respect), which I don't stock because Costco doesn't stock them and, well, because I like being fat. Apparently. So my re-fatted version of the recipe they so carefully de-fatted is as follows:

Simmer 8-10 cups of squash (sliced) along with one large onion (chopped) in a half cup to a cup of chicken broth (yes, that's 1/2 cup; it sounds like it's not enough but it works) in a covered Dutch oven.
Meanwhile, cook enough rice to yield about 2 cups. (I just did 2 c water and 1 c rice and didn't measure the result.)

When those two things are done, combine them, after you kind of mash up the squash and onion a tiny bit with a potato masher. Sounds moderately OK so far, right? Especially if you use brown rice... which I didn't this time, but I'm going to try it.

But now the fun part starts. Add a cup of sour cream, a cup of shredded cheddar cheese, a couple tablespoons of grated Parmesan, and a quarter- to half-cup of Italian-seasoned bread crumbs, along with a teaspoon or so of salt and some pepper. (The original recipe added two beaten eggs at this point, but I left them out because T has a strange allergy to them. It was fine without them but it might be even better with them.) Stir everything together and then spread it out in a prepared (sprayed with nonstick spray) 9"x13" pan. Sprinkle a few more bread crumbs, some more parmesan, and a tiny amount of cheese on top, and bake the whole shebang at 350º for about half an hour, until it's all bubbly.

I warn you that this is the kind of casserole that leaves you feeling far fuller half an hour after you eat it than you do at the moment when you finally persuade yourself to put down your fork. Some dishes, especially those laden with starch and dairy, are evilly magical that way.

The thing that pleased me most about this recipe, other than the fact that it has squash in it and my children and husband were actively enthusiastic about it, is that it didn't involve canned cream-of-anything soup. I was not in a cream-of-anything soup mood today, perhaps because it's August and we're having a rare spell of humidity along with our usual blistering August temperatures, or perhaps just because I have this uneasy feeling that canned cream-of-anything soup is kind of creepy and just wrong. (Ask me if that stops me from using it under ordinary circumstances.)

The recipes I referenced in my last post were both bread recipes (whole wheat bread -- I added cooked wheat berries -- and braided French bread) which I basically got straight from Pillsbury, so I won't copy them out here because I am so tired I can barely type because that would be a shameless violation of copyright.

Because this entry wasn't already full enough of boring kitcheny details, I'll go ahead and add that this is the week when we have to turn in our entry blanks for the county fair, and I have made a solemn vow that I will do my part to help resurrect the baked-goods room. Some of the exhibit divisions are thriving -- photography and knitting are really big right now, for example -- while some rooms (baked goods, preserved foods, and flowers) just get more and more empty every year. I'm terrible with flowers and I've only just started canning, but I can certainly make people fat with baked goods, and I decided last year at the fair to do my part to bring back the glory that was Building D in former days. As it is right now, there are about three elderlyish ladies (one of whom is my grandmother) who turn in the vast majority of the entries, and they usually only have enough stuff to put on three or four tables, and that is just sad. So I'm entering about five kinds of cookies, brownies, three kinds of bread, some rolls, biscuits, and even a jar of blackberry jam if I can get another batch made in time (in smaller jars this time). It'll barely make a dent but at least I'll see if I can beat my grandmother at anything. (Probably not.)

Sunday, August 03, 2008

I deleted this post because it was very whiny.

I decided to make a Mary Sunshine/Pollyanna type post instead. So without further ado, in no particular order, here are some happy, non-whiny things about my life (ooh goody! a list!):

• The giant fire is pretty much out.

• I have so much produce coming in from my garden right now, and so many berries sitting in my fridge that the kids and I picked FOR FREE, that I just now was stupid enough to spend considerable time whining about how I was going to deal with it all. Yeah, that's right, I have too much free healthy yummy food. I swear, what kind of life is this.

• Everyone in my house is healthy.

• We have enough money to live normally if we don't do anything stupid.

• Three people asked me for recipes for things I brought to a potluck today. As far as ego-stroking goes, this is the midlife-mom version of having a modeling agent give you his card. If you want to score points with a woman who cooks, start by asking her for a recipe.

• Our new car is (of course) under warranty, so the fact that I have to drop it off tomorrow to get a new transmission installed (!!!) is a minor inconvenience and not an insurmountable expense. We even have coverage for a rental while they work on it. Plus I get to eat at PANDA! for lunch, that is if I walk two miles first, skip breakfast, and eat only vegetables for dinner to help make up for the onslaught of calories and sodium.

• Smokey, our favorite cat (they're not children; we're allowed to have favorites), is not lost. (He hadn't come home by his usual bedtime so I drove down the driveway looking to see if maybe he hadn't come home from an earlier excursion -- we went to the market for ice cream and as usual he stopped at the end of the driveway rather than going out on the road with us -- and there he was. I'm embarrassed at how squee-fully relieved I was.)

• Did you see that? We walked to the market to get ice cream. AWESOME.

• I took a nap today. WITH MY SPOUSE. I heart Sunday afternoons.

See? Much better.

Saturday, August 02, 2008

books for July

Look! A books post! TWO IN A ROW! And actually somewhere near the beginning of the month!

1. Westmark -- Lloyd Alexander -- 3.5
   • I've had this book for ages, and I read in someone's blog -- maybe Toddled Dredge? -- about how this was one of somebody's favorite YA books, so I thought I'd give it a try. I must preface this review by saying that I'm not exactly a diehard fan of the breed of book that involves imaginary countries that are stuck somewhere in the Middle Ages, technology-wise. (Oh, except that whole Narnia thing. Maybe I can enjoy Narnia for the same reason I can enjoy Outlander in spite of the fact that most romance novels that feature 18th-century Scots make me want to remove my eyeballs with my thumbs: because of the addition of modern real-world characters. Hmmm.) That said, this was an above-tolerable story, especially at the beginning. The middle dragged just a wee bit (good overall, though, and I liked the characters more as I went along, especially the ones who appear in the latter two-thirds), and the ending annoyed me. Not that the end was badly done, just that -- OK, spoiler coming -- the characters spend the second half of the book discussing whether a monarchy is a fair form of government, and you kind of get the idea that none of the good people realize it's the ideal, and then the neatly-tied ending has one of the main characters finding out that, wowee! She's a princess! It was just a bit of a letdown for me.
2. Over Sea, Under Stone -- Susan Cooper -- 4
   
   • This was another one that I've owned for a while and never read (I collect Newbery books). It concerns a family of British children who vacation in an old house in Wales, where they become engrossed in a mystery having to do with an Arthurian legend, involving some really evil bad guys and some quite decent good guys and oh yeah, a holyish kind of grail sort of thing. I had a bit of a hard time putting the book down long enough to do my chores, because I really did want to find out what happened to the characters, who, OK, aren't the Pevensies, but they were interesting and clever and plucky British children. Low point: Finding out that a Major Character is actually supposed to be Merlin. (BUZZKILL.) High point: The holiday parade near the end of the book. I could see it, hear it, smell it, feel the children's confusion and worry.
     

(herein begins the embarrassing part.)

3. Girls in Pants -- Ann Brashares -- 4 and


4. Forever in Blue -- Ann Brashares -- 4
   
   • 
     Hello, my name is Rachel and I like the Traveling Pants books.

     (Hi, Rachel.)

     Seriously, I don't know if it's because I remember being a teenaged girl or because I am the mom of a girl who will become one before I know it (PLEASE CAN WE MASTER THAT TIME-PAUSE THING NOW), but these books have resonated with me since I read the first one a few years ago. Not that my teenagerhood was much like that of the four girls in the books: I was neither beautiful nor athletic nor charismatic nor whimsically artistic; both my parents were (are) living and still married to each other; I did not have scalp-tingling relationships with wildly attractive slightly-older guys or geeky-but-sweet video-game champions (oh wait); I did not have a magic pair of pants and if they'd been flare-leg low-rise ones I probably wouldn't have worn them anyway. Also, is it just me or is this group of four friends totally unlike any actual group of four friends in that age bracket, what with the utter lack of jealousy, infighting, favoritism, and drama? Or maybe my friends and I were the weird ones. And yet I really like this series. I cry when I'm reading sometimes. Maybe it's because the author hits the nail right on the head when it comes to things like growing away from your mother (SOB) and then growing back (SNIFF) and looking at yourself and realizing that you've lost the person that is you at some point (CHOKE). Whatever the reason, I am willing to stand up and admit that I'm in my mid-thirties (note: HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?) and yet I truly enjoy this popular, light, young-adult girls' series. I think Ms. Brashares made a wise decision to end the series while we all wanted more, but I'm kind of bummed all the same.
     




5. Tara Road -- Maeve Binchy -- 3.5
   
   • This was the first Maeve Binchy book I read. It's an engaging story which tells (of course, because it's Binchy) of the havoc that is wreaked in one Irish family when it's destroyed by infidelity. The second half of the story takes place both in Connecticut and in Dublin, as the scorned ex-wife swaps houses on a whim with a woman who has some pretty serious troubles of her own. You know what I've just realized about Binchy's books? I always love her children. The kids of this broken marriage are endearing, and seem very real what with their childish hopes and misconceptions. Binchy's dialogue is also, as always, natural and very well-done.
     
6. Scarlet Feather -- Maeve Binchy -- 4.5
   
   • My favorite Binchy; it's richer than most of hers and the unavoidable marital infidelity (I really sometimes wonder how happy that woman's marriage can possibly be, dedications to her husband at the front of every novel notwithstanding, when she knows so much about unfaithful spouses) does not take center stage. This was a reread, but it had been long enough since I blew through it the first time that I found that I'd forgotten exactly how it ended, and I was pulling for the characters as they followed their mutual dream to start a catering company. (Also, the nine-year-old twins in one of the sub-plots are even better drawn than the children in Tara Road, described above.) This sounds clunky and just weird when I sit here and write about it, but trust me, this is the kind of book in which you live during the time it takes to read it. If you like Binchy at all, please do yourself the favor of trying this book.
     
7. While I Was Gone -- Sue Miller -- 3.5
   
   • Intriguing story about the frightening way in which your past can come back to haunt you (at least, it can if you live in a Sue Miller novel). This was a well-done story overall. Miller does an excellent job of drawing you in, with a placid enough opening followed by increasingly intense reminiscences by the main character, all of which revolve around a house shared by a group of hippies in the late 1960's, until what started out as just another literaryish chick book becomes quite a whodunit. And then, well, you find OUT whodunit, in a kind of surreal way. If Maeve Binchy and Scott Turow had a love child who then was raised by Ann Patchett, that child might grow up to write a book like this one. It's an OK book, maybe a tiny bit scattered at times, but worth reading once.
     
8. The Collected Short Stories of Dorothy Parker -- Dorothy Parker -- 4.5
   
   • (The high rating above is for the stories themselves. It wasn't Ms. Parker's fault that I read them all in a row and got a wee bit tired of her by the time I was done. I recommend spreading them out a bit if you can.)

     Dorothy Parker certainly didn't get her reputation for genius out of a crackerjack box. The woman knew her way around relationships and the human psyche, and her felicitous skill with words (if you've read her poems, you know what I'm talking about; the woman was brilliant) makes each story in this collection a gem. Parker, if your brain can handle having both women in it at one time without exploding, was the twentieth century's answer to Jane Austen, in my opinion: wry, scalding wit used to expose the ludicrous and simply silly, taking particular aim at the lives and habits of those in high society. If you were forced to read Parker as a teenager and didn't like her, please give her another try. If you like her poetry, you'll probably love her stories. If you've never heard of her, give yourself forty lashes with a wet reticule and get thee to the library pronto.
     

9. Me and Mr. Darcy -- I can't remember -- urgggh
   
   • Seven-word review: An interesting premise done very, very badly. I made a list on the back of my library-receipt-turned-bookmark of the things that annoyed me as I read this book, but I don't have the energy to inflict the list on you. A bare bones summary (of the part I read, because I couldn't make myself keep going after a while and I skipped to the end to see if what I thought would happen happened, and it did): Foul-mouthed Darcy-obsessed woman who runs bookstore takes Jane Austen-related vacation in Britain, meets pompous jerk who OH SO COINCIDENTALLY behaves in a Darcy-ish manner to her just as she happens to be reading the pertinent parts of P&P (example: woman overhears jerk bad-mouthing her to a friend JUST as she's reading the public-ball scene when Darcy calls Elizabeth 'tolerable'. WOW, THAT'S SUBTLE. I wonder if they're going to get together at the end. YA THINK? Answer: they do.) The characters are wooden, the clichés are thick on the page (the paragraphs about the main character's first few minutes in London were especially painful), there's a bizarre time-travelish element, and the male love interest is utterly unlikeable. You know, I can see the compulsion to write a book like this; it must be fun to set classic works in the modern era (and it worked really well for Clueless and Bridget Jones, right?), and you've got a guaranteed audience. But this book fails in so, so many ways. The author (whose name I'm glad I can't remember because I don't want her to Google herself and find this review, because I'm not being very nice and after all she did give it the old college try) simply doesn't trust us to be intelligent enough to pick up subtle clues, and she treats readers like imbeciles, not to mention the fact that she continually has her characters reference Mr. Darcy-related scenes that were created for FILMS (Colin Firth may have stridden [I hate this word] across a meadow wearing a wet shirt, but Fitzwilliam Darcy did not). AND her characters love the Keira Knightley adaptation, which shows how much she knows.
     

Friday, August 01, 2008

thank you notes

Apparently the reason that I am not frantically gathering irreplaceable items and loading them and my family into our cars this morning is that a man who lives a few miles from here, when his house caught fire around 2 AM, ran out in his unmentionables, got on his tractor, and cut a firebreak so that the inferno wouldn't spread to his neighbors. The sirens, and the neighborhood dogs' reactions to the sirens (you never really know how many dogs are in your area until there's an emergency response in the middle of the night), woke me as I was juuust about to go to sleep, and I went outside to reassure myself that there wasn't a fire, only to see with my own two eyes that actually there was. Thank you, homeowner, for your presence of mind and probable sacrifice of your belongings, since you could have been grabbing them and fleeing instead of preventing another week of heartache and disaster in our area.

While I'm on the subject, the nearby city's paper ran a story about our fire that made me cry a little. There's a guy who lived in the immediate area of the beginning of the fire. When he and his neighbors got the order to evacuate, he got a frantic call from a neighbor whose husband was out of town and who had no way of getting her four horses to safety. Rather than save anything of his own, the guy got on his horse and led his neighbor's horses (and one other neighbor's donkey) out to safety. He lost everything -- except the eternal friendship and hero-worship of every animal lover in the state.

Most of the fire crews have been loading up and heading out -- some to go home, and some to head to the northern part of the county to fight the much-reduced remnant of the fire (which, it turns out, at 34,000 total acres burned, is still way less than one-twentieth of our county. Who knew?). I am not given to emotional flights of fancy -- my tearful reaction to the above story, to be brutally honest, was more because the guy self-sacrificially put his neighbors' needs over his own, and lost all his unique rawhide-braiding tools and equipment to save some horses that could probably have made it to safety on their own, than because animals are some kind of holy creatures that should be rescued at all costs, and you can all hate me now -- and I know that they're getting paid (probably plentiful overtime) for their work and it's their job to go where they're told and put out fires. But even so I got a little lump in my throat every time a truckload of them would drive by, because job or not, they've been here for a week risking their safety to save my town instead of being at home kissing their wives hello after work and playing Lego with their kids. (Or, you know, hanging out with their roommates playing Nintendo. Whatever. Most of them are awfully young.)

And with that, it's past time for me to be outside watering my garden and hanging clothes, with especial thanks to God and my neighbors and some 4,000 assorted strangers that I still have a garden to water and clothes to hang. Book post tomorrow... I hope.