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Saturday, February 28, 2009

A few little updates

I'm about to do a books post, but I wanted to get some updates out of the way first because I know you all are on the edges of your seats wondering what I've been up to. Right? Hee.

Festus is still gone, presumably fitting in fine with his new family because they were going to call if he didn't. I am still sad. Not like that first day when I actually cried... a lot... but still sad. Good news in that department, though: Mary is back around and in the house, looking sleek and lovely again and coming right out in the open instead of skulking around like she had been before she finally fled to the under-house crawlspace. So that's good anyway.

I am typing this on a brand-new laptop. We had some money coming in and I've been wanting a laptop for various purposes for a long time, so now I have one. It'll be good for school, and for doing things like transcribing and Librivoxing (if I ever get back in the swing of that) in the front room where they won't bother my sleeping husband.

Speaking of my sleeping husband, he's really sick right now. We'd all had various ailments this past week -- T had a pretty bad cough and some chest congestion, and the kids and I all took turns with a 24-hour stomach virus that knocked us flat. But poor T -- today his chest got way, way worse, and he spiked a fever, and on top of that he seems to have finally caught the stomach thing too. Needless to say we're not going anywhere in the morning.

OK, enough boring life stuff. Books! Next!

Wednesday, February 25, 2009

grieving.

OK, so 20 hours later I'm no longer wallowing in certainty that I made the wrong decision and will always be sorry; I've moved on to merely (painfully) missing the sight of his darling face and the feel of his silky ears and the way he arched his back when I would pet him really firmly. This is progress.

Also: we are a plague house. We need a yellow sign for the front door. You may have infected yourself simply by reading this. I'm sorry.

Tuesday, February 24, 2009

AGGGHH.

OK, so here's the deal. Festus the former foster dog terrorizes our cat Mary, right? Mary went missing a couple of weeks ago, and then it turned out she was living under our house to keep out of Festus' way. I hope she's still there because she's not been seen in a few days again. Anyway. So we put Festus the Terror to Cats up for adoption, around the same time Mary went missing the first time. Someone called yesterday and wants him. And here I am in the FREAKING VALLEY OF INDECISION again.

Rationally, I know this is a great home the people are offering him, as an only pet and hiking companion to a family where the dad works from home so he'll always have his people around him. But when he looks at me like that, it's hard to be rational. We're his people!

But Mary!

(But he's cocking his head at me! Mary lives under the house now! He never attacks Smokey!)

But the inconvenience! the having to stash him someplace when people come over! the running off!

(But when we'd put him in the garden - which we won't be able to do in, say, two months - because we had a lot of people over and he got scared by the launching of a substantial battery of model rockets, where did he run when he broke out and could have gone anywhere? Under our porch! This is his home!)

So you can see how it is inside my head. I think T, who looks at this in a matter-of-fact "yes we'll miss him but it's for the best" kind of way but who has left Festus' fate up to me, is wondering who this waffling emotional mess is and what she did with his real wife. I probably will end up calling the guy back today and setting up a time to take Festus to his place, because Mary Was Here First and all. But it's HARD. HELP.

(But he's putting his head on my knee!)

Sunday, February 15, 2009

blew it. oops.

And I was doing SO WELL.

It's just been very, very crazy. My niece is still in the hospital, and we have her brother staying with us, and there have been trips to the valley and droppings off and pickings up at school and much homework and snowstorms (yes, MORE snowstorms -- 6 inches of powder in two hours on Friday morning, all gone now) and afternoons at my parents' and it's just been generally very nutty. And I haven't even really wanted to post, let alone had time and energy to do so.

But look! I just have.

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

OK, that was a REALLY long day.

So a few hours after I sat here and complained about my day yesterday while pretending NOT to complain about my day, my SIL called: her daughter was really, really sick, something the matter with her pancreas, the local ER had said*, and she was being ambulanced to the children's hospital in Fresno. My SIL didn't know how to get there or what to do. So, seeing as how 12:40 AM is the Rachel equivalent of, say, 8 PM, I had no problem offering to drive her down there, impending snowstorm or no impending snowstorm. We got about eight miles along the shorter but more mountainous route (about 12 miles shorter, no crossing the city on surface streets once you get there or having to take the long freeway loop around, but 55mph or less all the way instead of half the route being on the freeway, so it ALMOST evens out time-wise) when it became obvious that we were going to get stuck putting on chains in the pelting snow if we kept going that way, so we turned around and took the low road.

I am typing this on a non-ergonomic keyboard and it's driving me CRAZY. I just had to share.

We narrowly missing someone's cattle who had strayed onto the highway on our way out of the mountains, but the rest of the trip was uneventful. At 3 AM when it's raining I can almost tolerate Fresno: no traffic, much less smelly, no heat, no fog. We got to the hospital, found my niece**, got an update on her condition (acute pancreatitis, which I have to say seems like NO FUN AT ALL), and ate in the awesome cafeteria before I headed for home with my nephew to get some sleep while my niece got admitted and her mom found a place to sleep in her room.

You know, that thing they tell you to do where you pull over to the side of the road and take a nap if you're driving drowsy REALLY HELPS. I slept for 25 minutes at the halfway point just after full daylight and was good to go for the rest of the drive home, whereas I had actually, um, NOT BEEN for about fifteen miles before that. I got home at 8:00, made a couple of phone calls, and then slept from 8:30 to noon. That, by the way, is feeling like NOT ENOUGH, and I am secretly*** hoping for a serious snowstorm that causes us to cancel Bible study tonight so I can sleep some more this afternoon instead of OH MY GOSH cleaning my house. Please?

*Our local ER is sometimes infuriating. The doctor who saw my niece kept telling my SIL that my niece was obviously "doing this" (having a 40+minute episode of unrelenting vomiting with a side of severe upper abdominal pain) "to get attention". In front of my niece, no less, who was nearly unconscious from weakness at that point. When the blood results showed something actually wrong, he smoothly changed his tune. Unfortunately, this kind of treatment seems to be the rule rather than the exception there, in our experience. SUCH a difference from the quality of care at the children's hospital. Too bad their ER is an hour and some away.

**My niece is really brave. I kept thinking about how my children would handle it if they had to go all that way in an ambulance full of strangers without their mom. I think they'd have to be sedated, no joke, because of the freaking out.

***or not so secretly anymore, I guess.

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

urggh. I mean ahhh. Of course. Ahhh.

I don't EVEN want to write about today. It was long and frustrating in several ways and that's all I'll say about it. Better tomorrow, right? Meanwhile, here is a picture of a serene and lonely place where you never give yourself a crick in your neck trying to set up a backup computer, or get into arguments with internet service providers about whether you bought or rented a modem, or have to clean up your floor after your dogs find their way into the compost bucket, or anything yucky like that.

Monday, February 09, 2009

just like pioneer folks!

In the spirit of full disclosure I must admit that I am backdating this post by three minutes so as to have it dated Monday. I am allowing myself this small cheat because:

I am still up from Monday, and hence Monday is still mentally "today" instead of "yesterday".

I just got home less than half an hour ago from school

AND

We have been without DSL all day, and still are. I know, it is remarkable that we have survived. I have only logged on to the Internet twice today, both times via dial-up. Didn't Ma and Pa use dial-up? I think they did. See, we had this GINORMOUS lightning storm last night. It was really, really loud and sudden and hail-y (to continue with the Little House theme, it's the kind of storm they'd have had hit them just as Pa was making a list of all the wonderful needful things he planned to buy with the bumper crop of wheat he had standing in the field), and at one point there was a strike that seemed like it was right on top of us, and not only did the thunder sound like an eighteen-wheeler being dropped on our roof, not only did the lightning light up the entire interior of our house JUST as all the lights blinked out and then came back on, but I think our modem got completely fried. But I wasn't quite SURE, because when I called our ISP to ask if I could buy a new modem in our small town or if I had to drive to the not-so-near and not-so-small town to get one, they had a recording on that said that their DSL service to our area had been partly knocked out by the storm. So I've been waiting all day to see if it was their problem or mine. Short answer: It's mine. Dang. This is our second modem in a year. Time to buy a surge protector for the phone line.

You know what's cool about older kids? Instead of freaking out during lightning storms, they're right there with you shouting about how awesome it is. Now I just have to convince them -- or at least one of them -- that roller coasters and really high, fast waterslides are nothing to be freaked out about and maybe I'll have someone I can take with me to theme- and water-parks. Worth a try, anyway.

In other news:

Both my classes have tests in two weeks. YES. I love tests. Except: ACK. In the algebra class, your test scores ARE your grade. No pressure there.

I just tried to upload a few pictures to Flickr via dial-up. HAR HAR HAW I have such a sense of humor. (OK, trying again after resizing them to 800px and it looks like it MIGHT finish before it's time for me to get up in the morning.)

FINALLY. OH. my. GOSH. It HURTS.

Standing on my front stoop, looking slightly to the left, this morning when I (finally; it was a late night) got out of bed. (Don't ask me why I didn't take pictures looking straight ahead or to the right. Sun on the lens maybe? Just wasn't thinking. This is the best view anyway.) That little shack-looking thing is an Airsoft bunker. It's supposed to be temporary -- if by "temporary" you mean "it's there until the kids move out and if we don't act quickly at that point we'll end up leaving it up for the grandkids". I love that the boys have fun playing Airsoft with their friends. I'm not so overjoyed about the fact that (one of) their bunker(s) is smack in the middle of my favorite view, but you can't have everything.

Claire, tobogganing down our sledding hill. It is an enviable hill for sledding. Steep enough to get up some speed but not so steep you're going to get a concussion; no rocks; no trees; no fences; no roads. Come on over next time it snows. BYOI. (That's Bring Your Own Innertube, of course.)

LT, who can actually steer his disc and keep it pointing straight ahead all the way to the bottom, a skill I certainly never mastered.

This is a mountain that's across our little valley from us; I can see it really well from my kitchen window. Anytime the weather is the least bit interesting, it's likely that I'll look across at it and see that it is having different weather than we are. When we're in the sun, it's often under dark clouds. It can be raining on us, and lovely and sunny there. Cloud shadows look divine skidding along it. I don't know why this tickles me so, but it does.

They look SO unthrilled to be out sliding on a beautiful sunny snowy morning when most of their peers are stuck in classrooms. Really, though, they were just unthrilled to have to stop to pose for a picture with the sun in their eyes. I am such a mean mom.

Sunday, February 08, 2009

Query

So I just sat and laughed and cried through La Vita è Bella for the first time. Hey, I'm only about, what, eleven or twelve years behind the times, right? It is, no pun intended, an absolutely beautiful movie and if you're like me and you routinely watch well-known movies for the first time over a decade after they come out, by all means quit waiting on this one. Just make sure you have a box of kleenex handy. I've never seen such a brilliant use of comedy in a tragic film. Or... such a touching depiction of tragic events in a comic film. Or... such romance in a... oh, man, let's just move on, OK?

(By the way, HOW is it that 1997 is over a decade ago? DOES NOT COMPUTE. Well, OK, really it does, but... nevermind.)

Here's what I knew about this movie before I watched it:

• It was about an Italian guy who used humor to help his family through the Holocaust.
• That actor/director guy who won an Academy Award for it went absolutely bananas when they called his name at the awards ceremony.

Yeah, that was pretty much it. Notably, I had somehow missed that the movie was in Italian, even though I knew it was made in Italy by an Italian director with Italian actors, until the opening credits started. I am not a person who dislikes foreign-language movies with subtitles; in fact I like them just fine, as they kind of make me feel smarter and more cultured than I really am. I'm certainly not complaining at all. The whole point of sitting down here to blog was to ask this question:

When you're watching a movie with subtitles, do you forget that you're watching a movie with subtitles? Meaning do you just absorb the words and later on have to actually remind yourself that you read them on a screen instead of understanding them as they were spoken? This always happens to me. The subtitles become like the black bars when I'm watching a widescreen movie (definitely my preferred format); I just stop noticing them. I suppose I would like to know if this is normal, or if it is something that goes along with my previously discussed mental issues involving seeing words in my head as people speak them. (Because for years -- decades -- I thought that was normal. In fact, in my heart of hearts, I still think so, and that you all [except Kat] are pulling my leg.)

Saturday, February 07, 2009

Girls' weekend in.

C and I are on our own tonight, as the boys have taken a Scout trip* to the San Francisco Bay area and no I'm not jealous IN THE SLIGHTEST even though they're camping and hiking in places from which I have wanted to photograph the city for at least THREE YEARS. No, not jealous at all. (Oh well. LT says it's foggy anyway.) So far in their absence, C and I have:

• had a nap (not very successful; neither of us woke in the best mood, and C was unbelievably grouchy)
• eaten junky food (deep-fried Tina's Burritos. I'm sure there's something junkier but you'd have to look pretty hard to find it.)
• watched a costume drama (BBC's adaptation of Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South, LOVE)
• had hot cocoa (from a mix, but with real hand-whipped cream on top so that has to count for something, right?)

  and, so that we can feel less slothful:

• folded three baskets of laundry.

Overall I'd say it's been a Good Day.

*Girls' nights in have become more common around here since the Scout troop resolved to do at least one overnight trip PER MONTH until the end of time. So roughly one in four weekends, it's just the two of us. Good thing we have an excellent supply of film adaptations of classic British novels.

Friday, February 06, 2009

well, at least it's not a meme.

Only six days into my attempt to post every day for a month and I am already out of things to write. Hey, I know! I'll post the recipe for the supper I just made!

It was very nice of you to roll your eyes where I couldn't see you just now. Thank you.

The kids earned a massive reward a couple of weeks ago when they did about a million tons of laundry for me. I promised them that for one of our Twilight Zone nights they could have whatever they wanted for supper, and they decided on a Chinese-themed night. C wanted beef with broccoli (which I make with some regularity, and it's OK, but not fabulous), and LT wanted orange chicken, which is a rarer treat. (When we go to Panda Express, he gets a two-entree plate with double orange chicken. I don't think he's ever eaten anything BUT orange chicken at Panda Express.) Making the two things at the same time is a huge amount of work and creates a ginormous mess, but they certainly earned it.

Without further ado (even though excessive ado is pretty much my trademark):

Rachel's Attempt at Orange Chicken
(also known as: It's Not PAN-DA!, But It's Not $8 A Plate Either)

Start oil heating to 375º-400º in the deep fryer. (What? You don't have a deep fryer? Buy one that doubles as a steamer; you'll feel much better about yourself. $25 at Wal-Mart. You might even use it as a steamer occasionally.)

Whisk together in a large bowl:
1 egg
a blort of oil -- 2T maybe? 1/4 c? (Not olive oil because it has to be able to handle really high heat.)
about a teaspoon of black pepper
about 2t of salt
a good sprinkling of cayenne

Add to the above and mix well:
2lb boneless chicken breasts, cut into bite-sized pieces

Then add:
1/2 c cornstarch
1/4 c flour
and mix well again. Mix it even better.

Deep-fry chicken pieces in 3 or 4 batches for 3-4 minutes per batch. Drain on paper towels.

Make a sauce with:
juice of two oranges (I reduced the orange juice this time, just as if I were a Real Chef, but then I added water to the sauce. Oops. Don't bother with the reducing, I'm thinking.)

Add about equal parts vinegar, sugar, and soy sauce -- you want about a cup of sauce total. Maybe less sugar than the other things. I didn't measure this.

Set aside a small amount of sauce to be used as a thickener with:
2t cornstarch

Stir-fry over high heat in a wok or large skillet, until fragrant:
2-3 cloves garlic, minced
1 t fresh ginger, minced (I didn't have any tonight so I used a tiny sprinkling of ground ginger instead)

Add sauce and bring to a rapid boil; then add chicken and toss until coated. Combine reserved sauce with cornstarch (you want it runny, not pasty); stir well and then add thickener to pan. Toss until the sauce is thick and everything is nice and glossy and OH MY GOSH so tasty. Serve over hot, cooked rice. Serves four if you're moderately hungry but not going to gorge yourselves.

(P.S. That same deep-fried chicken recipe is really delicious with buffalo sauce -- I make mine with a partial cube of butter melted into maybe 3/4 c of Frank's Red Hot. Usually when I'm making that I slice the chicken into strips instead of bite-sized pieces, and I dip the besauced strips in ranch dressing, and I go around bloated to twice my usual size for a couple of days because do you have any idea how much sodium is in Frank's Red Hot? TONS of sodium, that's how much. Not to mention all the salt in the batter/breading/goop that goes on the chicken.)

See? There. Not only have I powered through to keep up with my blogging promise, but I've done my part to contribute to obesity and hypertension among my vast blogging public. My work here is done.

Thursday, February 05, 2009

So this is how the other 97.8% lives.

I had two extra children from Sunday until today; my niece and nephew were staying with us while their parents were away. We've had them stay with us before, but not for so extended a time when school was in session. OH MY GOSH. How do you people do it all the time? One thing I hear pretty often as a homeschooler from non-homeschooling moms is that they just don't think they could do it -- homeschooling, that is. I'm here to tell you that it's about five bazillion times easier to teach my children the three Rs plus extras than it is to get up at zero dark thirty every day and get two kids onto a school bus. It was kind of an adventure, really, but I must admit that the thought of sleeping past 6:30 in the morning has me a little giddy with joy right now. This must be what weekends are like for normal people with, you know, day jobs.

It was really a lot of fun to have them here, though. I'm not going to deny that. My kids always have a great time with their cousins. They love my cooking. And I got to have that strange combination of shuddery horror and bittersweet nostalgia when I dropped my niece off at the junior high -- excuse me, middle school -- one morning. Speaking of feeling fourteen.

By the way, my nephew says that he told his teacher that I did his homework for him, which is absolutely not true, but I wonder if she believed him. If so, she must think I am a pretty awesome haiku artist -- not to mention my madd skillz at spelling. My handwriting needs work, though.

Wednesday, February 04, 2009

How To Feel Fourteen Again

Not, of course, that you'd want to. Sixteen? I can see wanting to feel sixteen, although you couldn't induce me personally to go back and actually be sixteen for any amount of money. Ten? Ditto. But fourteen, that's right there along with twelve and thirteen in the Miserably Awkward and Uncomfortable range. No thank you.

But if by any chance you ever did want to feel fourteen, there's a simple remedy that only costs $60 plus materials: take an algebra class. The algebra itself isn't what does it. Algebra is pristine and pure and beautiful; algebra is order from chaos and music without sound; algebra, in short, is ageless. Successfully working a page of algebra problems makes me feel like I've just helped to create a fresh, clean universe where it's always springtime. No, it's that sentence:

"I have to do my algebra homework."*

Ding! I feel in my soul that my bangs are soaring three inches above the top of my head, and that if I look down I'll find I'm wearing too-tight rolled-up cutoffs and white canvas (knockoff) Keds without socks or shoelaces. Not to mention the painful crush on the bespectacled, skinny, soft-spoken boy with an era-appropriate mullet and braces who barely knows I'm alive.

Oh, please, make it stop. I'm going to have to come up with alternate terminology; there's no way around it.

*(Not that I actually uttered this phrase very often at that age, unless it was approximately twenty minutes before the start of my 6th-period algebra class.)

In all seriousness, I am as glad about studying algebra this semester as I thought I'd be. You may remember from last semester, when I was up to my eyes in psychobabble, that I held an algebra class out before myself as a reward for surviving the term without needing to be institutionalized. It worked; you'll note the conspicuous absence of a straitjacket, in spite of the number of papers I had to write for that Godforsaken communications class. So now I traipse off down to the valley every Monday night to sit for three hours in a surprisingly diverse class taught by a youthful blonde high-school algebra teacher who looks startlingly like one of my bridesmaids and who speaks with an Eastern European accent that I'm sure her young male students find extremely alluring. It's a very happy time.

I'm also taking a class in California history that I don't need, but it's taught up here by an instructor I enjoy on a night when everyone else was busy anyway so I signed up. Last week we were asked to tell what topics we were thinking of for the papers we'll turn in later in the semester, and fully half the class is apparently planning to write seven to ten pages about the Gold Rush. I pity the instructor. I personally am going to add spice to the mix by writing about the Hetch Hetchy water system. I KNOW. You can't WAIT to read that one, and I'll bet the poor beleaguered teacher can't either. (I had it narrowed down to that or the life of James Lick, but in the end I decided against doing a biographical paper, even though the research trips would have been AWESOME.)

Tuesday, February 03, 2009

Festus

Oh, I think you all knew we would end up keeping him.

His original owners didn't want him back (as mentioned previously), and the guy who owned him after his original owners owned him never returned our calls. T especially was still inclined to find him another home, when one magically appeared. Festus took off, something he did a lot in the first couple of weeks we had him, and we got a call on our answering machine from a nearby family he'd gone to visit. Did we have to take him back? They would love to keep him....

OH, THE INDECISION.

I had always pretty much hoped Festus would stay with us. T's position had been that if nobody else would give him a suitable home, we would keep him; now that said suitable home had presented itself he was all for letting the family have him (not that he didn't like Festus, it's just that he's very practical). At that point we were still waiting for the aforementioned guy-who-didn't-return-calls to return our calls, though, so we took Festus home and told the family to wait a few days and we'd get back to them. During those few days we had a Bible study meeting here (an every-week occurrence now thanks to a change in T's work schedule, long boring story, moving on) where Festus proved to be such an annoying, unceasing (, adorable) distraction that even I was all in favor of calling the neighbor family and asking them to collect Festus immediately, in spite of his endearing ways of sleeping upside-down, and cocking his head beseechingly when he wanted to be let outside or given a treat.

Except I just couldn't. You know what did it? I was thinking about an L.M. Montgomery character (everything in life can be tied to an L.M. Montgomery character if you look carefully enough; someday we'll have to play Six Degrees of LMM Characters in order to set out to prove this empirically) who was fearfully indecisive, and what finally cured her was when her fiancé told her that whenever she couldn't decide what to do, she should do what she'd been gladdest of when she would be eighty. Boom! I realized that I would be a happier eighty-year-old if we kept Festus than if we gave him away, and the fence-sitter in the Festus debates became an outright lobbyist for the kids' long-held position that Festus belonged with us. Practical-but-affectionate T hardly stood a chance. (We did address the practicalities. We're to install a redundant gate to help reduce escapes -- hounds do LOVE to go exploring -- and to give him a place to stay during Bible study so that he's neither climbing into everyone's laps nor bounding up and down outside the half-glass door, whining, like a crazy, lonely puppet-dog. Also, we've asked T's sister to stay here with her family -- paid, of course -- during our week-long trip to Arizona in March. We bought him a special collar, which looks like a medieval torture device, but doesn't actually hurt him, so that we can take him for our daily walks without having our arms pulled off or his trachea seriously injured.)

So that's our happy Festus ending. He's not without faults: he loves to chase the gophers in our lawn, which would be fine if they weren't, um, under the lawn. He thinks he's treed the cats if they're on top of the refrigerator or under the couches, which gets very noisy, but he's learning. He's also learning to stick around... mostly. I think he's less prone to running off than he ever has been in his entire history. (I don't think his previous owners let him inside, and he LOVES being inside, and maybe that makes him happier to be here.) When we're arriving home, especially, he no longer tries to get out through the gate, but cavorts around hallooing at us instead, overcome with doggish joy, wagging his whole hindquarters because his tail just isn't enough. We think he likes us.

Monday, February 02, 2009

Books for December and January

(I know I read a couple books that aren't mentioned here, but I can't remember what they were -- other than The Hour I First Believed, which I already reviewed at length -- so I ended up making this post a sort of homage to one of my very favorite authors.)

Years ago, when we took a trip to the art museum in Fresno, my husband and I encountered a painting that we just couldn't stop staring at. It was a nude (shut up; it's culture) on an enormous canvas, this larger-than-life depiction of a round-limbed, well-padded woman in a meadow. The thing about this picture that kept us standing in front of it staring for I don't know how long was the fact that the more we looked, the more we saw that simply blew us away. Looking from across the room, we saw a well-done painting of a lovely girl in an idyllic scene. Standing closer, we noticed more detail and precision; as we kept looking it began to seem as if the woman was going to step out of the frame and into the museum -- the artist had done so careful and exquisite a job with shading and contrast and I don't know what all else magic that artists do with their brushes because frankly I can't even draw a stick figure with any skill.

Reading an Elizabeth Berg short story is kind of like that. Her plots viewed from afar are engaging and original. Her skillful prose makes you want to read slowly to savor it. Viewed extremely closely, her stories not only reveal details about her very knowable characters, but they reveal things about you, the reader, that you may never have actually known about yourself. Her writing, as I've always said, is thick with phrases that make me realize that really I've always thought what she just said; I'd just never thought to think it in those (absolutely perfect) words before. There have been times reading her novels late at night that I have actually cried a little bit at her sheer undeniable rightness.

I read three Elizabeth Bergs in December and January. One is a novella retelling the Nativity called The Handmaid and the Carpenter. If you've only ever thought about the Nativity in Luke's timeless words, or if you can't get the thought of childhood Christmas pageants (your own or the Herdmans') out of your head, you really need to read this lovely little story, which fleshes out the story beautifully, if a little imaginatively at times. 4.25 out of 5.

I also read a collection of Berg's short stories, The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted: and Other Small Acts of Liberation. This was my favorite read in a long time: an absolutely delectable collection of stories that are by turns hilarious, poignant, thought-provoking, and downright tear-inducing. Ideally, if you like Berg, you'll buy this, so that you can spread the stories out so as not to run out of them all at once. Many (but not all) of the stories center around a girl or woman who is struggling with weight or eating (or who has decided not to struggle with weight or eating) or dealing a major and painful life change. Some stories are whimsical; some make you feel like you've been punched in the stomach; all are lovely and worth every minute you'll spend reading them. I have spent a lot of time over the years pondering our culture's perception of beauty and thinness and where real women and girls fit into that, but with this collection, Elizabeth Berg made me think about the issue in ways I never had before. I am trying not to make this sound like a set of didactic morality tales or Very Special Episodes, but in case I've failed, they aren't that at all. 5 out of 5.

Early in January, I read her latest novel, We Are All Welcome Here. If I hadn't already said that The Day Ate Whatever I Wanted was my favorite read in a long time, I'd say it about We Are All Welcome Here. In fact, what the heck, I will say it. We Are All Welcome Here is an utterly unique story, set in the 1960's, about Diana, a 13-year-old girl, and her mother Paige, who is paralyzed as a result of a bout with polio suffered during her pregnancy (in fact, Paige gave birth to Diana in an iron lung). Somehow Berg manages to infuse this slightly bizarre-sounding, heartbreaking, based-on-a-true-story tale with beautiful magic. Paige, Diana, and their live-in helper Peacie are brilliantly and realistically drawn. There's not a self-pitying moment in the entire novel; the story is vivid and even upbeat. The main drama is split into several subplots, whose topics include but are not limited to: the Freedom Rider movement, single-mother sexuality, teenage drinking, sweepstaking, absentee fathers, well-intentioned-but-by-the-book social workers, and Elvis Presley (who contributes considerably to the aforementioned magic). Please do yourself the favor of sitting down for a few hours to devour this lovely story. 5 out of 5.

Sunday, February 01, 2009

So, um, hi.

In case you were wondering (you probably weren't, you probably hadn't even really noticed my absence, but I'm allowed to have a few fantasies here, right?), I actually was planning on abandoning my blog for good, but then I changed my mind. (This is the part where you pretend to sigh in relief, instead of dismay, to make me feel better. Thank you.) The reasons I changed my mind were (ooh goody! a list!):

1. I like reviewing the books I read, so as to have a record for myself, but I won't do it unless I have a place where other people might see the reviews. I'm narcissistic that way, I guess.

2. Also, to whom would I brag about my garden this spring, if not to my loyal blogging public? (P.S. I HAVE SEEDS! A whole bag of seeds! Spring can't stay away forever!)

3. Also also, I missed everyone. Yes, I know "everyone" is something on the order of ten people, but I missed communicating with you (yes, you!) for the almost-month that I was no longer a blogger. Even the commentless posts felt like conversations. And that's as soppy as I'm going to get about the whole thing, so you don't need to run away in fear of more goopy sentiment.

4. Further also, Facebook just isn't the same, and Twitter's not quite enough. Not that I won't post stuff there too, but I was wrong when I thought I would be just as happy without a blog since I had those two outlets.

5. Further further also, I guess #1 can be expanded to include life in general. I'm amazed how often I look back on my old blog posts and have a wonderful time reading and remembering about stuff I had completely forgotten, and which never would have written down if it were only for myself to read. So basically, I have to allow myself the illusion that someone else might find my thoughts interesting before I record them, even if I'm really recording them for myself. Is there a name for this particular psychological disorder?
   

The thing is, I'm so out of the habit of using this thing on a regular basis, and I have a whole lot more going on on a day-to-day basis than I did when I used to post every day. (Sometimes, early on, more than once a day. Really! People do that! Remember when it was once a day and twice on Sunday? Where'd that kind of spark go? What? I'm talking about blogging!) I have actual stuff that I have to write for actual grades, and I have an actual garden (well, seasonally - although I am so putting in cold frames for lettuce and broccoli. What's the use of living in California if you can't take advantage of the relatively mild winters?), and actual children who don't generally like being blog fodder, and I do try to keep my house from looking as if a thrift shop had exploded in the front room, which was, I must admit, not always the case. But I'm going to try to make time to post with some semblance of regularity. In fact, for the month of February, I'm going to try to post every day. Hey, it's a short month; you never know; I might actually make it. I won't make any drastic no-memes promises, though. I may need to cheat now and then.

So. Today is a boring metapost, but tomorrow I'll try to write about my books for December and January -- the ones I can remember, anyway. And surely I'll have come up with something else by Tuesday. I hope?