Feeling like the Grinch

Since I feel cranky and rather Grinch-like, here's some things that make me happy about the coming holidays

1.  Lights on houses, trees, fences and all other stationary objects
2.  Pecan tarts, Yummy Carmel Bars, Sugar Cookies, and Lemon Bars - the familiar holiday cookies.
3.  The first Christmas song after Thanksgiving (all the early ones don't count)
4.  Decorating the tree and the house
5.  Vacation days - use it or lose it - I end up with a few extra days at the end of the year

Where has the time gone?

It's been a busy few months - with many happy thoughts to keep me going...

• Spain - good food, long walks, and beautiful gardens, cathedrals and palaces - and art, wonderful art - enough for art overload.
• Birthdays - we've celebrated 7 in the last few weeks - lots of parties, cake and ice cream
• Parties - friends, food and dancing
• Friends - those near and far, old and new
• Books - not reading as many as I would like, but enjoying the ones I do read
  

Great (wee) White Shark

A few weekends ago, I took a day trip to Monterey and back to see a great white shark. The Monterey Bay Aquarium has a young male one. Before I thought sharks looked like they were smiling. Not anymore..

I heart Portland

A long weekend in Portland gave me a long list of things that make me happy...

• Friends - ones wonderful enough to fly across the country to spend a long weekend, ones fabulous enough to provide a ride to and from an delicious home cooked meal that could feed an army, and ones who hang out after work - sipping wine and sharing Thai

• Walking tours - those provided in books by Laura O. Foster and those provided by Portland Walking Tours, hill walks, a panoply of architectures, neighborhood walks, bridge walks, waterfront walks, fast walks, ambling walks

• Cupcakes - delicious from Cupcake Jones and amusing because we kept finding ourselves on the corner where the are located

• Waking up on my own schedule - sure it was too early, but after I woke up I could go back to sleep or doze, or get up - all based on what I wanted to do
  

• "Croquet" with bowling balls and sledgehammer, complete with period safari clothing

• Pouring beer for hours - it turns out I can enjoy a beer fest, I just have to pour the beer and be on the other side from the drunken hordes

I'd highly recommend walking tour books by Laura Foster,

• Portland Hill Walks: Twenty Explorations in Parks and Neighborhoods
• Portland City Walks: Twenty Explorations In and Around Town

15 books in 15 mins

The object is to name 15 books that affected you - or the first 15 books that come to mind. So, starting now, at almost 9p on a Monday...

1. Tale of Two Cities - the first classic I read twice
2. The Jungle - I renewed my vegetarianism
3. The Octopus - evils of corporations
4. Little Women - so well read it fell apart
5. Go Dog Go - I cried so much about when I lost it, my parents had to buy another one
6. Nancy Drew - don't know which one, but started my love of the mystery
7. Whatever the first Mercedes Lackey I read was - the start of reading fantasy/sci-fi
8. L.E. Modesitt - first book in the series - I recommend it way too much
9. Magicians Assistant - no idea why this came to mind
10. Bel Canto - probably related to Magician's Assistant in my head
11. Great Expectations - don't try to read this when you have mono
12. Dean Koontz comes to mind - Watchers, Lightning
13. When Rabbit Howls - why I try to donate to foster kids
14. Sister of my Heart - I think that is the title...
15. Moby Dick - never have finished it and not planning to try again

This was really hard to do without looking at the walls of books that surround me

The Buffalo Soldier - Chris Bohjalian

I liked the first Bohjalian book I read - Midwives very much. It took a difficult topic and presented it with a narrative and a variety of voices. The Buffalo Soldier is similar. As I was reading this book, I kept wondering why I hadn't read more of Bohjalian after I finished Midwives. The story moves along slowly, exploring the story from several viewpoints. Each chapter is written from a different point of view, and normally that is something that I hate. Normally, I have trouble remembering which character is in the lead at the moment. But in this book, Bohjalian brings out the character in more than what is in their head or the events they lead. The chapters have a different feel based on which character is in the lead. But the entire book feels like flowing down a stream - moving along toward the final moments - but not urgently, just drifting.

I'll be picking up more of Bohjalian either at the library or the bookstore.

Poem in your pocket day

Today is Poem in Your Pocket day - a NYC event. There have been many poems I've admired and thought about over the years. In fact, I still have a notebook a high school friend created with poems and lyrics she thought I would like. But there is one poem by e.e. cummings that has always stayed with me.

****
From 95 Poems (1958)


l(a

le
af
fa

ll

s)
one
l

iness

*****

I am not sure if it is the sentiment - loneliness - or the very visual way it shows the leaf falling, but this is the one poem I would carry in my pocket.

Tulips

I love Spring. One of my favorite things about Spring is the presence of tulips at the florist - which means I'll be bringing them home. Tulips are one of my favorite flowers - a flower you only see in Spring. Maybe it is the fleeting presence - miss those few weeks and they're gone until next year. Or maybe it's the bright colors in contrast to the gray cloudy days. When you first get them, the flowers open and close each day.

The other thing I love about tulips is the way they die like little sculptures. The flowers lean toward the light. The petals shrivel instead of just dropping. They stay interesting and on my mantle until the petals drop.

When you see those bright bulbs, you know that winter is almost over. So for as long as they are available, I'll be a filling my vases with them. And I'll smile when I see their bright colors.

(And maybe this year is the one I plant some. My old tulips ended up in the lawn when we reconfigured the yard. They are casualties of the lawn mower...)

Traveling around Facebook is a list of books that supposedly the BBC thinks you will have only read 6 of. I kept my count at the end of the line. I was doing good with 6 out of 7 to start.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (1)
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (2)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (3)
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (4)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (5)
6 The Bible - the whole thing and not just parts. (I tried and gave up, several times)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (6)
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell (7)
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (8)
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (9)
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott (10)
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller (11)
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (12)
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (13)
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger (14)
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell (15)
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (16)
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (17)
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck (18)
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (19)
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame (20)
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens (21)
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis (22)
34 Emma - Jane Austen (23)
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen (24)
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (25)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini (26)
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden (27)
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne (28)
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell (29)
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (30)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (I tried several times - 2)
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving (31)
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery (32)
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood (33)
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding (34)
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan (35)
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel (36)
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons (37)
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen (38)
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon (39)
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens (40)
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley (41)
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon (42)
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (I tried - 3)
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck (43)
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt (44)
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold (45)
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas (46)
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding (47)
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville (I tried multiple times - 4)
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens (48)
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker (49)
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett (50)
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson (51)
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno - Dante (52)
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray (53)
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens (54)
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker (55)
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro (56)
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White (57)
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom (58)
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (59)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams (60)
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare (61)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl (62)
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (63)


So out of the 100, I read 63 and 4 of them I tried to read and decided they weren't worth it.

25 things that make me happy

This is for the 3 people in the last week who "tagged" me with the 25 things post on facebook.
1. Higgy
2. Big boy O - he won't let me call him baby anymore
3. Baby L - she'll always be the baby
4. Reading a really good book
5. Recommending a book to some one and finding out they really enjoyed it
6. My comfy bed - feather bed, soft sheets and down comforter
7. thick fuzzy socks - my favorites are pink and purple stripes and they have a face with ears that stick out on the ankles
8. Getting letters in the mail, e-mail - whatever, I like to hear from people
9. the smell of fresh baked bread
10. Hot chocolate with whipped cream, although marshmallows work too
11. Hot fudge sundae with whipped cream, nuts and a cherry
12. sleeping children - bonus for 2 kids taking naps at the same time
13. laughing children
14. Quiet - with rain on the roof
15. Watching silly teen romance movies in the dark in my comfy bed
16. Skipping
17. Eating dinner in a restaurant by myself - especially eating just dessert and appetizers
18. Being able to touch my toes the first time I try
19. Having bicep muscles that I can actually see
20. Friends who travel to a different city for a girl's weekend and the friends who just wish they could make it
21. Making a fancy recipe and having it actually come out the first time
22. Photos or paintings of a single tree and either the sun or the moon
23. A warm bath with smelly bath salts (Hurray for the arrival of Lush in Sacramento)
24. A cat curled on my lap who doesn't bite when I move (unfortunately, the one in my house bites..., I miss my Waldo cat)
25. Christmas cookies - Yummy Carmel Bars, Pecan tarts, lemon bars, crisp decorated sugar cookies - why are the only for Christmas?

Tournament of Books

Every year The Morning News conducts a Tournament of Books ala March Madness.

According to a friend, they have some great authors as judges and the commentary on the books is often both insightful and funny. She looks forward to it every year and often adds several titles to her "want to read" list of books.

I'm going to try and follow along this year, maybe you want to as well????

Iodine - Haven Kimmel

This was just a strange book, a puzzling book. I still enjoyed the style, but I had to really pay attention to follow along. It follows a girl who is coming close to graduating from college when she becomes involved with a professor - that is the easy part. But the rest of the story is the flashback to how she got there; her relationship with her family and her past. It is these flashbacks and remembrances that are the bulk of the book - and where the confusion comes in. Trace/Ianthe, the main character, is trying to reinvent herself but her past keeps coming back in. It makes it painful to read, painful to think about living like she does.

It is the kind of book that I am still thinking about a few weeks later. But it is not a book I am likely to read again.

25 things minus 16 things = 9 things

Tagged again for 25 random things, but since I just did 16 things, you are only going to get 9 more. "random things, facts, habits, or goals"
1. I am trying to get back to the same weight I was when I was married by the time of our 5 year wedding anniversary in October.

2. There is only one thing I miss about working in the office - the clean desk policy. Since I didn't have an "assigned" desk, just logged into a desk every day, my desk at the office was always cleared at the beginning and end of every day. Now, I work in a pile of household files, children's drawings and random boxes and books. And the ever increasing pile of cooking magazines.

3. I think I still know all the words to the movie "Grease" and I haven't seen it in at least 4 years.

4. I spend almost as much on food each month as I do on my mortgage, it is out of control.

5. I cry when I think about Greg's death , even though I didn't know him well at all. I wish I could do more for Greg's wife.

6. I am avoiding going to bed because if I stay up late enough, I'll be awake when Higgy gets home around midnight.

7. I missing traveling for work - not the every work day of every week that I had for most of 1996 - 2000, but the once a month travel schedule I had in 2001.

8. I hate setting up a new laptop, I don't like it when I go to use something and realize I need to install it first. And, it won't stay on the network - I keep dropping the connection. I hope the router isn't failing.

9. Tomorrow we're going to have a full house - 2 working at home parents, 2 kids under 3 and a baby sitter for the kids. It should be interesting.

by Haven Kimmel

• The Solace of Leaving Early by Haven Kimmel
• She Got Up Off the Couch: And Other Heroic Acts from Mooreland, Indiana by Haven Kimmel
• Something Rising (Light and Swift): A Novel by Haven Kimmel

These are the books by Haven Kimmel I have read in the last month. She is one of the few authors I read all the way to then end and then read the acknowledgements. Love her! If you haven't read her you should. A Girl Named Zippy and She Got Up Off the Couch are memiors, but she also have 4 novels (I've only read two so far). She has a wonderful sense of humor - wry, dry, with sarcasm (of course).