Friday, January 08, 2010

What I've been reading, by special request

Kat asked me to blog about what I've been reading while I've been out of school. Good idea! I might be inclined to put this off and do a "Books for ______" post like I used to do, but let's face it: if I wait until a more round-number time to do it -- the end of the month, say, or even the end of my semester break -- it'll never get done, so I'll do it now.

Honestly, I know I'm going to forget some stuff. I have come to accept this about myself, this Swiss-cheesy nature of my brain. If I later remember the ones I've forgotten, I'll add them.

• Certain Girls -- Jennifer Weiner -- 4
  • This was a fun, lightish read. If you've read her previous book about Cannie, which has the brown-paper-coverable title of Good In Bed but is really quite enjoyable and is much deeper than its title implies, you'll enjoy it more than if you haven't, I think. It's the story of a mom and her young teen daughter, which, OK, if you want to sell a book to me you should always start out with that premise, I guess, based on my reactions to some of the Traveling Pants series and this book and basically every other book that involves girls growing away from their mothers and maybe I don't want to think about what this says about me so I'll move on. Jennifer Weiner writes cracklingly funny prose interspersed with thought-provoking Issues and Sad Things in almost every book I've ever read of hers -- Goodnight Nobody, I am looking at you -- and this is not an exception. Highlight: I learned more about bar and bat mitzvahs than I ever knew before. I actually had to look them up on the Internet to see if there are parents who really go as overboard-crazy with them as they do in this book and, um, there are. It's a whole cultural phenomenon that I've never even heard of, and that always makes for an interesting read if it's handled right. And it is, here.
• Prairie Tale: A Memoir -- Melissa Gilbert -- 2
  • There were aspects of this autobiography that I found very interesting. Most of those aspects were over and done in the first third of the book, during the parts that talked about making the Little House series. But maybe I'm just not cut out for celebrity bios, because the entire rest of the book just seemed like too much information mixed with a heavy dose of name dropping and self-justification. Generally, I was left with the feeling that Melissa wants us to know that she's really very different from all the other cosmetically-altered drug-addled Lifetime-Channel-staple former child stars in The Industry. Whereas by the end of the book I just didn't care. I had lost interest, It's sad, really, because I am all in favor of realizing that everyone in the world is a unique individual and that tossing people into categories without getting to know them is foolish, wasteful, and hurtful, but by the end of the book, I couldn't get the shallow, airbrushed, surgically altered, air-so-rarified-they're-completely-disconnected-from-real-life Hollywood stereotype out of my head, because this book presented a woman who fit it so well. It was well-written, I suppose, but I wish I hadn't read it. Again, this probably means that celebrity memoir isn't my best genre.
• And There I Stood With My Piccolo
  Eggs I Have Laid
  "But He Doesn't Know the Territory!" -- Meredith Willson -- 5 each
  
  • What was that about celebrity memoir? ;-) But SERIOUSLY, you GUYS, these books are WONDERFUL. Very 1950's, very witty, very lively and interesting and just... WONDERFUL. Meredith Willson, who wrote a lot of music and lyrics and was quite well-known in mid-20th-century radio and television, but is most famous for his musicals The Music Man and The Unsinkable Molly Brown, also, it turns out, wrote wonderfully readable memoirs. I couldn't put this down. Maybe it's because juicy tell-all memoirs weren't the style then (you never hear, for example, about Willson's first wife whom he divorced, and the most drug-addled scenes involve the Willsons' joint efforts to... quit smoking [because it made them cough]), or maybe it's that small-town guys who happen to gradually make it big in music and radio and Broadway stay more down-to-earth than child-acting children of Hollywood personalities could ever think of being, or maybe it's that Willson was a writer by trade, but I loved these books even more than I loathed Melissa GIlbert's. If you like humor, the Midwest, show business, small towns, Americana, John Phillip Sousa, the New York Philharmonic, and/or charming, witty, clever, hilarious, nostalgic prose about any or all of the above, look for these.

• Slam -- Nick Hornby -- 3.5
  
  • I had no idea that Hornby had written a young-adult novel, so when it showed up WebCat I thought I'd give it a try. It turned out to be about teen pregnancy, from the boy/father's point of view, which is a bit of a stroke of genius. The protagonist is a 16-year old skater (skateboarder, except you never use that word, see), son of teenage parents himself, who lives in London and who has his life turned completely upside-down when he becomes sexually active and his girlfriend becomes pregnant. The story is quirky -- the boy (whose name I can't remember and the book's in the first person so it's hard to find it on a quick glance-through) is obsessed with Tony Hawk and his favorite form of therapy is to talk to the Tony Hawk poster that hangs in his room; Tony Hawk, through the poster, manages to mysteriously "whizz" the boy into the future a couple of times -- but accessible, and should be a cautionary tale to young men who would take it the right way and who would actually sit through reading it. (I do wonder how effective it would be, though, because teenagers tend to be notoriously unwilling to listen to cautionary tales.)

• How to be Good -- Nick Hornby -- 3.5
  
  • This book, about a couple whose marriage is already on the rocks when the husband undergoes a complete personality alteration and turns from a Cynical Angry Guy to an illogical do-gooder, had so much potential. At times while I was reading it, I thought it was just on the verge of being everything that it could be -- which is to say, wonderful. But it never quite makes it. It's a parable, and it does make you think about a lot of things, such as: What's the use of really caring about the world's problems if you don't do anything about them? Is it any less caring to not care and not do anything than it is to care and not do anything? And if you really do decide to do something, will that even work? But then these thoughts never really go anywhere. It's told from the point of view of the woman in the marriage, and frankly by the end of the book I loathed her, not only because of her choices and her reactions to her (granted, rather insufferable) husband, but because Hornby wrote her rather muddily; she would seem to be one kind of person and then do something out of character and before long she seemed to be an entirely different kind of person, until you lost any sense you had ever had of whatever personality the author may have intended to give her. Maybe this was intentional. Since Hornby is a genius, it probably was. But the whole novel came across, in the end, like some kind of bastard offspring of the kind of seriocomic writing at which Hornby usually excels, and the kind of literary-fiction novel that turns up its nose at those pointless books that have, you know, plots and characterization and bourgeois stuff like that. Still worth a read, even if only for the way it makes you think -- and, yeah, for more than that -- but it's not as dead-on as the name on the spine led me to expect it would be.

Friday, January 01, 2010

tweets, 1/1/09

I've come to accept the fact that this blog is the only thing that allows me to remember anything I've done, read, seen, or thought, so I may as well use it.

OK, I'm going to try to do a photo a day in 2010. Or, realistically, for the next six days until I get too lazy. http://tinyurl.com/yhcwczu 10:00 PM Jan 01, 2010 from web

This is part of my decision to try to remember to do things I love that don't involve school or social networking. For the fall semester last year, especially, I felt really off-balance, and I want there to be something in my life besides, well, school and social networking. So I'm going to try to remember to breathe deep and take walks and make music and knit, and play with my family, and spend time with my husband, and all manner of things that I used to do before school took over my life. (Item: I am in awe that people do this and work full-time too. Granted, homeschooling is quite a job, and I use that as an excuse for myself when I need it, but it feels hollow. I am increasingly certain that the real time-suck is Facebook -- not so much that I spend a long time at it each day, necessarily, just that it lures me in at all hours in passing and distracts me from other things.) We'll see how this plays out once college is, you know, actually in session.

I love how all the posts from my peers are about how nobody's staying up till 12. Like this one! Happy new year, and welcome to middle age. 11:40 PM Dec 31st, 2009 from web

As it turned out, I was awake at 12, reading in bed. I'm not sure if that's any more youthful or wild than just going to sleep. ;-) Our neighbors made enough noise for both our houses, not that I minded. At least these guys (they're new) didn't seem interested in shooting up in the air, which is a really common method of celebration in rural areas. (It's not true that the bullets come down as fast as they go up, but they do come down mighty fast. My brother once found one embedded in his roof, which is fortunately a much bigger target than, say, your child's scalp and skull.)

So. Maybe you'll see me here more often in 2010 than you have in a while. Or maybe not. Old broken habits are hard to unbreak. Or something.

Thursday, December 31, 2009

Goodbye, 2009.

1. What did you do in 2009 that you’d never done before?
I learned to use (and love, possibly in an obsessive and unhealthy manner) a pressure canner. I bought a college parking pass, which made me feel ridiculously pleased and it's now a family joke. I hand-loaded ammunition. I played Airsoft. (I... think that was this year?) I exercised voluntarily every day for seven weeks or so. Then I stopped. But I'm going to start again, I swear. I took someone's senior pictures. (Not well, I'm afraid.) I took my daughter roller-skating, which is SO MUCH FUN OH MY GOSH.

2. Did you keep your new year’s resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
I don't remember if I made any last year. This year, I'm resolving to update our checkbook and reconcile it with online banking every single night, and to relax a little bit during the school semester so that I don't neglect my marriage. (Or cut out social networking for those 18 weeks. Ha ha! Like that will happen.)

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?
Susan lives far from me but she is VERY close to my heart, and she had baby number six this summer. Go Supermom! (She really is amazing.) Also, a whole TON of my online friends had babies; sheesh, people! Also, there are several new babies in my circle of real-life acquaintance (most of whom I still only see over the innernets because I am a hermit).

4. Did anyone close to you die?
He wasn't close to me anymore, really. We were friends in high school. OK, he was my boyfriend in high school, or one of them, but long after that brief state of affairs came to an end, his family and my family were friends, and his sister was in my wedding. He killed himself in August. I think about his family every day.

5. What countries did you visit?
Um, I went to Arizona...

6. What would you like to have in 2010 that you lacked in 2009?
Time to read novels. Bifocals. Self-discipline (I say this every year).

7. What dates from 2009 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
I don't always remember to associate events with dates, but our trip to Arizona in March was immensely memorable and delightful.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
Hmm. Maybe the perfect score in College Algebra? (I wish I could lay that semester apologetically and yet triumphantly at the feet of my perennially disappointed high-school algebra/trig/precalculus teacher.) Or maybe a garden where more than 50% of the things I planted produced edible results? An uncanny number of Twitter posts that were EXACTLY 140 characters long?

9. What was your biggest failure?
I still haven't learned never to raise my voice when I'm upset with my kids, although I'm better than I was.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?
Nothing major. Nothing even very minor, actually.

11. What was the best thing you bought?
PRESSURE CANNER FTW. Also, this laptop is nice, but seriously, you should SEE this canner. Chickens! We love our chickens. And just this last week we bought a digital piano (used; we're not that flush) which has made me very, very happy all the way from my smile to deep down in my piano-missing soul.

12. Whose behavior merited celebration?
My husband's. He is... oh, he is just the most wonderful man, and don't take this wrong but he's been growing so much. He's so patient with me and the kids, and loving and affectionate and thoughtful and generous, and getting more so all the time. He's grown more mellow where he needed to and stayed solid and intense where it's fitting and I just can't get over how good he is to me and our family and his friends and strangers and... hey look! she can be REALLY SAPPY when she wants to!

13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?
Mine, more often than I wish it had. Also politicians'. And my friend's ex-husband's.

14. Where did most of your money go?
Mortgage, bills, Christmas, ugh.

15. What did you get really excited about?
Our trip to Arizona. My kids' birthdays. Algebra class. What.

16. What song will always remind you of 2009?
It's always hard to answer this question until the year's been over for a decade or so. Maybe that Taylor Swift one about how he belongs with her; Claire loves it. Or the Piano Lesson from *The Music Man*, which joined Claire's and my little repertoire of songs we like to sing in bathrooms. (Hey, don't knock it. You're all alone in there and the acoustics are fabulous! Go for it! You're never going to see those people in the adjoining office again anyway!) Ooh, and there was also Regina Spektor's new album, and Imogen Heap's "Glittering Clouds" which was pretty much my driving soundtrack for the spring semester.

17. Compared to this time last year, are you:?
thinner or fatter: MAYBE marginally thinner.
happier or sadder: Happier.
Richer or poorer: Slightly richer, thanks to refinancing and paying extra on our mortgage.

18. What do you wish you’d done more of?
Playing with my kids, hanging out with them doing stuff they like, going for drives, being spontaneous.

19. What do you wish you’d done less of?
Staring at this damn wonderful machine.

20. How did you spend Christmas?
The day itself we were at my parents'. The weather was beautiful and we went for a walk after dinner, which is generally my favorite part of Christmas when it happens, and the thing I remember most from the family gathering. We also had separate small celebrations with T's parents and with his sister's family. I have to confess that I kind of like spreading it out like this; not only does it make it last longer, but it's far more relaxing.

21. Did you fall in love in 2009?
I continued falling, as you can see above.

22. What was your favorite TV program?
Cash Cab! It will always remind me of the Arizona trip.

23. Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?
I don't think I hate anyone. Even people I really sincerely dislike -- and there are few -- I don't hate. That takes too much energy and does nobody any good.

24. What was the best book you read?
That's hard to say. Most of what I read were textbooks, and I have forgotten most of the few novels I had time for. Right now I am really loving Meredith Willson's memoirs. Oh wait! There was a children's book, about a girl with an autistic brother, called Rules, which I HIGHLY RECOMMEND. Whew. I feel better.

25. What was your greatest musical discovery?
Musically, this has been the year in which I discovered that I, um, kind of like techno. I'm not an aficionado, I just like what I like and some of what I like is synthesized and beat-driven and excellent for working out or dancing or cleaning the kitchen or raving, not that I rave. Mock me if you will. I can take it.

26. What did you want and get?
A laptop. A pressure canner. A digital piano. Chickens. A puppy. Tons and tons of love. I am one lucky lady.

27. What did you want and not get?
A waist.

28. What was your favorite film of this year?
I almost never watch movies in the year in which they are released. Maybe "Up."

29. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
There was kind of this whole birthday-week thing going on, really. It was amazing. (I TOLD you he was affectionate and generous! TOLD YOU!) We went for drives and we walked down Christmas Tree Lane. We ate dinner out, we played games in the evenings, we watched movies while I knitted; in short, I was pampered shamefully. (I turned 35.)

30. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
Well, come now, immeasurably? What if there's something that would have made it quantifiably more satisfying? Can I not share that?

31. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2009?
HA HA HA.

32. What kept you sane?
My family. The fact that my children now clean up after themselves (mostly).

33. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?
I don't get into this stuff, really. I am a boring old matronly biddy.

34. What political issue stirred you the most?
The massive, purposeless federal spending and what it will mean to us and our children and their children in terms of loss of liberty.

35. Whom did you miss?
I really wish I could see my friends who live far away more often. I have not laid eyes on Susan in person for over FIVE YEARS now, for example.

36. Who was the best new person you met?
Oh, hi, yes, that's a great way to make all the other new people I met feel just fabulous about themselves. (Um, did I meet any new people, actually? Oh yes, at school. My biology instructor was pretty awesome...) I reconnected with some wonderful people, though. yay!

37. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2009.
That keeping busy is good (much better than being lazy, which I used to really truly be), but there's such a thing as overdoing it, and also that I need better time management. I can't spare the time to spend a few minutes alone with my husband after the kids are in bed, but I can keep up with 300 people on Facebook? What does that SAY about me? Something needs to be rearranged here.

38. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year.
I am so not good at this song-lyric thing. First of all, things rarely fit that well -- maybe because songs about people who are happy and well-adjusted and who live quiet lives mostly at home with their families and their gardens and their schoolbooks and their farty dogs and their chickens don't get much airplay. Secondly, I tend to forget about songs that fit even if I do discover them. And thirdly, I forgot what I was going to say just now so I'll put a quote here and it is this:

"One for whom the pebble has value must be surrounded by treasures wherever he goes." -- Pär Lagerkvist

That quote doesn't just sum up my year, it pretty much sums up my life.

Thursday, December 03, 2009

closer

As a child, looking at an album of photos of my parents, I felt so removed from these wise older people -- by age, by time, by the grainy grayscale of the photos that made it hard to believe that objects came in colors in the long-ago time before I was born, by the simple knowledge that they were grown up, and that being grown up was a very, very distant thing.

As a teen, I felt removed from them by fashion and by anger. How can these people ever understand me? Look how different their lives were from mine! They have no idea what it's like to live now or to be me! They were young so long ago!

As a young adult, though, things began to change. There's the child that would become my father, with a dirty face remarkably like the one you'll see a few dozen pages and twenty years later -- in the section of pictures from my own infancy. Those are my parents, not even twenty, vowing before God to stay together for the rest of their lives. That's my mother, with my brother in her arms at nineteen years of age. Why, she's not old at all! How did I ever think she was old? She's my age! She's so much like me, holding my own son at the age of twenty-one! She must have felt... just like I do.

And now the past and the future are telescoping closer and closer together, years collapsing in on each other like the pages of a book. Fifteen years ago -- a breath, a lifetime -- I was nineteen, married, calling my mother to ask how to make gravy that didn't turn out as paste. Fifteen years before that, I was four and my mother was in her youthful mid-twenties, an age so far from my own that I thought surely I could never really reach it, not for reals. Fifteen years before that, my mother was a child herself, the age of my younger daughter, keeping a list in her beautiful schoolgirl penmanship of all the horses who lived along her route to school, their locations and their colors and their names if she knew them. I saw that yellowed, penciled list once, and my heart felt squeezed at the thought of that little girl, so like me, so like my own daughter. Then I looked up and saw her standing in front of me, a grandmother six times over. The same girl, no longer removed. Someday soon: me.

Now I look through that same album, looking for a photo of my parents together for a project that someone else is doing. I look at my father and mother, engaged to be married, eighteen years old. I see my brother's eyes looking back at me from Dad's face; I see my daughter's cheeks on his young bride-to-be. I realize with a visceral shock that of all the people in our family, the person closest in age to those young people in that photo is my own son. The infant, the squeaky-voiced round-cheeked boy grown suddenly tall and sonorous, now a carbon copy of the grandfather in the album who left home at sixteen to fight in a war, all long lean legs and unruly hair. Five years from now, he'll be a man. Five years, a breath, a nothing.

Thursday, September 25, 2008

dinner for the new great depression

Oh, now that's a really cheery thought. (My confidence in government bailouts is not so strong. I'm feeling very October-1929ish these days; how about you? Have been for months, actually. Hence the extra push toward self-sufficiency. Wacko survivalists, that's us.)

Seriously, though, last night I made potato soup for the first time in a long time and it was a huge hit. Considering that (in pre-crash dollars) it only cost about $3.50 to make enough for two meals for all four of us*, plus about 40c for saltines, I'm thinking this will be in our regular rotation from here on out. (Also, if we had a good garden and goats, we could make it almost entirely from things we grew ourselves. Next year!)

*except we were little piggies and overstuffed ourselves (especially me) so we ate it all at once. Bad us! That is not using it up, wearing it out, making it do, or doing without. But we could have been comfortably not-hungry and had enough leftover for tonight.

OK, without further ado, let me put my Betty Crocker hat on and type out the recipe.

Cut 1/2 pound of bacon into 1/2" to 1" slices; brown in a Dutch oven over medium-low heat.
When the bacon is almost cooked, add about half an onion, chopped. Cook together until the onion begins to brown.
Meanwhile, cut 6 potatoes (peeled if you prefer) into smallish cubes. Add to bacon and onion and cook for a few minutes. Then drain off some of the fat and add enough broth (your choice -- I use water and chicken bouillon cubes) to cover all the potatoes -- about 3 cups. Simmer for 15 minutes, until potatoes are soft.
Add 2 cups of milk along with plenty of salt and pepper, and bring nearly to a boil (actually, full disclosure, mine boiled, which I think goes against some deep and strong "Thou Shalt Not Boil Milk" cooking tradition, but it didn't harm my soup any). Then add 1 cup of milk thoroughly mixed with 1/3 cup of flour, and cook until hot and thickened.

This is easily expandable. Leaving the bacon the same, add more potatoes, more broth, and a little more milk, and you can make a batch that will feed six people twice, if nobody's greedy.

You can use cream or half and half if it makes you happier. I had 2% milk on hand this time, so that's what I used, but I usually use 1% or nonfat.

Also, you can add whatever vegetables you like to this. You could get in all three of your major vegetable requirements for the day if you added some carrot and broccoli, for example. (I've done the carrot, but never the broccoli... yet.) You can make it without the bacon -- just use a little oil to brown the onions and potatoes. Of course it loses some flavor, but it also loses some fat and is cheaper that way.

You can also add cheese if you want to. My husband thinks (silly man) that cheese and potatoes should never, no never ever, be placed in any kind of near proximity to one another, and also we were out of cheese, and furthermore we are all already fat enough, so I left it out. It's fine without, and cheaper.