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Wednesday, December 31, 2008

It was a good year.

I liked 2008 -- economical issues notwithstanding. But then I'm an annoying Pollyannaish type who -- if you listen to some people -- goes around with her head buried in the sand like an ostrich. But hey, I'm a happy and sane ostrich, and life is too short to freak out about stuff before its time. (Prepare: good. Freak out: bad.)

I feel a list coming on. Here... it... comes.

Good Things About This Year (A Year That Apparently Actually Sucked In Real Life, But What Do I Know)

1. We spent it living in our own new home.
   
2. We had a really great time with our garden.
   
3. We even ate some food from our garden.
   
4. We got a dog.
   
5. Or, um, maybe, um, two. But not really. Not yet.
   
6. Good grades! even in the classes I disliked.
   
7. Gas prices! (At the end of the year, not the beginning.)
   
8. We all enjoyed good overall health.
   
9. Nobody broke any bones or required any surgeries.
   
10. We developed a few really lovely traditions, at least one of which involves mass quantities of deliciously unhealthy food.
    
11. My sister-in-law and two of her kids moved to town.
    
12. We had two bathrooms for the first time in our family's history.
    
13. We discovered I Spy.
    
14. I do not know where the rest of this entry went. It vanished into the ether.

    
    

Thursday, December 25, 2008

A Very Picture-y Christmas

Oh, it was a very nice Christmas. Best in a long time, I think, overall.

The kids' first presents after their stockings were an homage to Weird Al, because that's just how we roll with the humor around here. Have you seen UHF, the movie Weird Al made in the late 80's? We hadn't until lately, either. This present will make NO SENSE AT ALL TO YOU if you have not seen this segment, so feel free to go watch it and come back. (I'm too uncool to embed.)

Are you back? OK.

Nothing says "I love you" like a spatula.

Close-up of one of the tags, made in Microsoft Word at some late hour on Christmas Eve.

While we're looking at pictures of the tree:

This is T's hemi engine ornament. He has big plans involving this ornament, my camera, his online Mopar friends, and the engine compartment of his car, once he has the engine compartment painted.

Also today:
My house was veryvery full of people again -- for probably the last time for a while. It's hectic but nice. Dinner went off without a hitch, largely thanks to the invaluable assistance of my mom. Seriously, I couldn't pay someone to be as big a help as she is.

Mom loved her shawl, by the way. I did blog about finishing the shawl, right? I didn't? OK, MORE PICTURES. I just realized that I forgot to get a picture of Mom wearing it. Maybe on Saturday, when we go to her house for my birthday party. Because oh yeah, today was also my 34th birthday, which is possibly the most boring number change ever. OK, shut up, Rachel. Shawl pictures:

I have to include a wide-enough picture to show the shape of the shawl, but I fully acknowledge that this is a terrible photo, photographically speaking. Hello, ugly white sheet that usually alternates being used for dressup or as a light tent, but has now been used to transform my bumpy bed into a blocking surface after the nice portable mat I was going to use turned out to be too small! Hello, shadowy dusty corners of my bedroom! Hello, pincushion! The Jane Austen book is there for scale, by the way. EVERYONE has Penguin Classics for comparison, right? This shawl turned out enormous -- more than six feet along its longest side. I LOVED MAKING IT. The pattern is linked here. I used Patons Classic Wool in New Denim. My ravelry page for this project is here. Knit this now. This means you.

Also, I met the young man who will be my nephew once my sister-in-law marries his father, an event which should be happening relatively soon, and I really liked him. He's so awesome with the kids, and the adults, and the dogs, and just everyone. He's 22. Welcome to the funny farm, Andrew! (I don't have a picture of him. Sorry.)

But wait! There's more! I saved the most interesting part of the day for last. (Even more interesting than the fact that we fed seventeen people without any major disasters.) First I have to start with backstory. Before we even moved into this house, we made the acquaintance of an enormous hound puppy named Festus, who belonged to our neighbors but who would show up here at least weekly, dragging his chain or having slipped his collar. FRIENDLIEST. DOG. EVER. Then, because his owners got tired of trying to keep him tied, they gave him away about six months ago. Fast-forward to this morning, when my parents called to ask if we needed them to bring anything else to help with dinner (besides Mom the Kitchen Miracle Worker, that is), and asked if we knew anyone who wanted a dog because this very friendly, enormous hound dog had been hanging around their area for a couple of weeks and they'd finally taken him in but couldn't keep him because of his enormous size. I said they could bring him over for the day, since they didn't know where they'd leave him while they were gone, and I said, funny, that dog sounds like Festus, with the "big" and the "friendly" and the "hound", AND IT WAS.

(Claire is wearing a rag/dress over her clothes because she had used it as her Mary costume in the Christmas pageant she put on with her cousins. "But of course her dress would be ragged and dirty. She had just been on a donkey for all those miles." Can't argue with that.)

Anybody know what kind of hound he is? He's about 25" or 28" tall at the shoulder, about six feet tall standing on his hind legs with his paws on your shoulders.

Anyway, we walked over to the house where Festus used to live and talked to his former owners. They don't want him back, and they didn't know the phone number of the people who ended up with him before, so we're going to post a Found Dog notice at the local market*, and if nobody responds we may put him up for adoption (his owners told us a long time ago he was a purebred something, but I don't remember purebred what) or we may keep him because did I mention FRIENDLY? and DOES NOT BARK AT MY HUSBAND? Even Scout is more mellow and less prone to freakouts when Festus is here.

*even though he was Found about fifteen miles away and we have a hunch he was dumped, since that happens rather a lot out there; people take their dogs "out to the country" and let them go figuring someone will take them in or they'll learn to fend for themselves, or at any rate they won't have to worry about them anymore and oh by the way it's possible that they're soulless and irresponsible jerks.

So that was our holiday. I hope yours was as nice.

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Book review and it's not even the end of the month.

Let's face it; I've not exactly been Miss Johnny On The Spot with my monthly book review posts this year. I wanted to review this one while it was still fresh and post it now in case I forget later. Plus this is actual content, which is hard to come by nowadays. And it's also a little long to be thrown in with all my other reviews. OK, shut up, Rachel, and get on with it. (Yes ma'am.)

The Hour I First Believed -- Wally Lamb -- 2.25
I loved (and still love) She's Come Undone, and liked I Know This Much Is True well enough, so when I saw that Wally Lamb had come out with a new book I got it from the library to give it a try. Sadly, it doesn't measure up to either of his previous books. The first 400-ish pages (that is to say, the first half) are a compelling and disturbing, if somewhat overly-drawn-out, retelling of the Columbine shootings and their effect on Wally's fictional protagonist, Caelum Quirk, a teacher at Columbine, and his equally fictional wife, Maureen, a school nurse there. Caelum was a highly unlikeable character: he's emotionally wooden (an issue that I was sure would come up at some point, but it didn't), rather obtuse, and also unevenly written. Lamb tends toward overdoing it in his extremely detailed chapters about the school and the shootings, but who can blame him, really? In spite of its flaws, this first half of the book holds up well enough.

In the second half I got bored, though, and when you've written a nearly-800-page novel, you really don't want to start boring people. As part of the fallout from the shootings in Columbine, Caelum and his wife (who is battling an addiction to tranquilizers) have moved back to his family's farm in Connecticut, willed to Caelum by his aunt. Just as Maureen is starting to get better, sort of, things really go haywire, very badly, and while Maureen is serving time in prison, Caelum and a tenant he's installed in the farmhouse -- a women's studies major from Tulane who wound up in Connecticut with her husband after Katrina -- begin unearthing Caelum's family history, and needless to say, All Is Not As It Seemed. This is spread out over four hundred pages, consisting largely of made-up century-old letters, articles, and diary entries -- and let's not forget the tenant's doctoral thesis, all sixty pages of it. There are a couple of twists as the end gets closer (one of which, I have to say, was a bit shocking, which at this point was a good thing, but since it was part of the very predictable Family Mysteries theme, it lacked the punch it might have had coming out of a clear blue sky). In those same last 100 pages or so, there's also an increasingly heated subtext that's basically a diatribe against Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, the Iraq war, and anyone who ever voted Republican ever (you know, I'd say I hated this regardless of the author's politics, because I would, but you never see it happening from the other side, at least not in novels that are intended for the mainstream market). Then the diatribe gives up on the whole "subtext" thing in the afterword, and then the novel's finally over.

Also, OK, look, male writers (or, hey, female ones too; this is an equal-opportunity complaint). I have to say it. Please, please stop writing detailed accounts of your characters' masturbation sessions. I am begging here. Nobody needs to see that. OK? Thank you.

All right, so it's not ALL terrible. There's some good symbolism, although I got tired of being whacked over the head with it (I get it: praying mantises = triumph over adversity, thank you very much). The first chapter, wherein Caelum encounters Dylan and Eric at the pizza parlor where they worked and has a normal conversation with them, with no clue what's coming in just a few days, is really very good. The character of Velvet is a bright spot in the book, someone I felt I could know and maybe do know. Maureen wasn't so bad once I got to know her. Lamb's a good writer, although I think he needs a new editing team; he seems to fall victim to the same foible that has sunk Diana Gabaldon so low. He knows (or imagines, in the latter half) so much about his subjects, and it's all such interesting stuff, and much of it throws light on some very important topics (small sample of the many Issues in this novel: the treatment of women in prison, school bullying, PTSD, war, Hurricane Katrina, teenage prostitution, drug addiction, alcoholism, homosexuality, child molestation, incest), and he just can't bear to leave any of it out -- and his editor didn't make him leave it out. (If I'd had the editing of this novel, I'd have wanted to cut it probably in half. Or make it a really punchy novella that grabbed you and wouldn't let go. Or I would have left the first chapter alone as a short story and thrown out the rest. But that's just me, and I'm neither a writer nor an editor, a fact for which I'm sure Mr. Lamb, the publishing industry, and the rest of Western civilization can be grateful.)

Overall, I think the guy just tried to do too much. He admits something in the author's notes that I had pretty much suspected from the beginning, given the ten years since the release of his last novel and the forced feel of much of the text: he had a deadline, a contract, and waiting readers, and nothing to give them. He follows his admission with the story of how the novel was inspired, but the bottom line is that this novel felt like work. Work for him to write, work for me to trudge through waiting for the good parts that kept getting fewer and farther between. The effort he put into it is so evident that I feel really bad not liking it, and I kind of hope that other people do like it, because tenderhearted me can't stand the thought of even Wally Lamb (who I'm pretty sure would hate me to my core if he knew me, based on that afterword) sitting with his head in his hands, washing down Tums with vodka, and looking back on ten years' wasted work writing a book that ended up tanking. Good luck, Mr. Lamb, and here's hoping for your sake that my opinion is the minority view.

Monday, December 15, 2008

Things I would have been posting about if I posted here anymore

I'm beginning to live my life in 140-character snippets. It's really bad of me. And I've just been very very busy -- too busy to blog, obviously, but not too busy to stare at Facebook for half an hour at a stretch. So I resolved that this time, instead of dorkily clicking around the Internet like a channel surfer on a Sunday afternoon, I would write something memorable that would succinctly yet cohesively update my loyal friends about what I've been doing and thinking.

Or, you know, maybe just post in my blog about a bunch of junk no one cares about.

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So, um. It snowed here. It was such a laugh, really. The National Weather Service (query: why oh why do I rely so heavily on their weather forecasts when they have repeatedly proven themselves to be untrustworthy? Is it the official-sounding name? You have to trust THE national weather SERVICE, right?) had been telling us for days and days about this cold storm that was coming in. And we did get a cold storm, but at one point the NWS was predicting TWENTY-ONE INCHES of snow out of it in 36 hours, and that simply did not happen. There are a lot of people who got more than we did, because we're not that high in elevation, but we only got two inches and then the rain we had all day today pretty much obliterated it. But the kids got in some fun sliding this morning before the rain got too bad. We were right; that hill is great for sledding.

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We took family pictures on Friday. I had prepared the family for this all week, but I still didn't want to take up too much of everyone's time (the kids especially are rather weary of having THE NIKON pointed at their faces, although they're good sports about it) so I only used three different locations around our yard and kept it under 100 shots. WHAT.

I really liked this pose (the kids are sitting on a low branch of their Fort Tree in the "forest"), but when I looked at the images on the computer, I discovered that the fill flash didn't do enough to overcome the tree shadows. We'll try this one another time at a different time of day, maybe with all four of us sitting on the branch just for fun.

This is the one that we got printed.

This one was LT's favorite. Have you noticed that LT is not so L anymore? (Those of you who didn't know what LT stands for probably just had a light bulb moment...). I liked the idea but it just ended up looking a little awkward. (Notably, at first glance it looks like I have one REALLY LONG leg.)

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Wednesday, we had a Bible study potluck/Christmas party here, complete with gift exchange. I was surprisingly sane about the whole thing. I have just learned to expect and accept that the first fifteen minutes after everyone arrives will be a little crazy and hectic, but that I don't need to ruin a whole day worrying about how things will go, because things will generally go fine. (As long as my mom is here, that is. MOMMY!) We completely rearranged our living room for the season (T's birthday party, the Bible study party, and Christmas all here, with 20 people at each) to allow for tables to be set up down the length of our "great room", and I really like it. It makes me want to host more things. OK, someone please shoot me now because obviously I've gone completely around the bend.

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I finally finished this semester's classes. GOOD RIDDANCE. Well, OK, they ended up not being as bad as they were at the beginning, and I found some things to like in both classes, but I can't deny that I'm still looking forward to Monday night algebra classes next semester as if they were chocolate factory tours with free samples. In Europe. All expenses paid. Plus incidentals. Seriously, though: no research papers, no navel-gazing, no "I language", no psychological developmental theories, just hours and hours of sweet precise equations with answers that are either right or wrong. B-L-I-S-S.

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Thank you everyone for the book recommendations. I have placed many, many holds at the library. Meanwhile I'm reading Elizabeth Berg short stories, which are just amazingly good. And I don't even have to take notes! Awesome.

Wednesday, December 03, 2008

Books for November

School books. That's what I've read. Fat wordy textbooks. Thousands and thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of words. Notebooks full of notes. The thing is, it doesn't make very good review copy, does it? "Kail's style is not as dry as you'd find in most psychology textbooks, and his insights into the psychological impact of aging are spot-on, but his characterization needs work." Hmm.

I do try to sneak in a few minutes (usually literally) of "free reading" at bedtime. In November, I managed to get all the way through The Blue Castle (and enjoyed it hugely, by the way). Which is, what, a hundred and thirty pages, maybe?

The thing is, COLLEGE IS SWALLOWING ME WHOLE. And I'm only taking six units, may I remind you. Any more than that and I would have no life at ALL. I would have to give up... TWITTER. And FACEBOOK. And then everyone would just assume I had died.

I will have about a month's worth of break between semesters, and I am putting out a reading recommendation request as if I were going on vacation. Everyone tell me: what have you read lately that you think I would like? Something not too light and not too heavy -- something in which I can completely lose myself, please, and preferably something without the phrase "disconfirming speech", or any paragraphs full of facts about the changing nature of sexual drive in middle-aged men*.

So, if there's anyone still out there who hasn't completely given up on the idea of my ever posting anything worth reading ever again and gone away, please do me this kind favor. Thank you very much. Now I'm off to take notes about the nature of communication in committed romantic relationships. Don't you wish YOU were.

*Honestly, Human Development is kind of fascinating, but it's not exactly pleasure reading.