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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  
  

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

  
  

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

  
  

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

  
  

• It is hot. Really, really hot.

  
  

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

  
  

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

  
  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EDITED TO ADD:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• The giant fire is pretty much out.

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

• Everyone in my house is healthy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

See? Much better.

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

(herein begins the embarrassing part.)

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


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

     (Hi, Rachel.)

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




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

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

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

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

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

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

Fortunately for our family, at least, this particular fire is in the other half of the county, and we're in no immediate danger from it. It has put the fear of God in us, though, and we've spent several hours this week working on finishing up our own fire clearance. We're not done yet -- the "forest" that abuts our house still has just a couple of low branches, and I need to weed-eat again -- but we're a lot safer than we were on, say, Saturday morning. And that was a lot safer than we were when we moved in, because nobody had apparently ever worked on trimming the trees here -- well, except that when we moved in it was the middle of winter and we had like three snowstorms right on top of each other, but whatever.

Other news: I made blackberry jam just now, out of blackberries we picked this afternoon. Everything went swimmingly except for that one time when I thought I was standing on a tree branch under the blackberry vines and... I wasn't. Just FYI, it's really hard to get up when you're sitting among waist-deep thorny vines, surrounded by more of the same, and out of reach of both of your children who are under strict orders not to come closer lest they suffer the same fate. Also: blackberry thorns love to hide out in your jeans and then viciously attack you later when you least expect it. Just a warning. (The jam is so, so worth it.)

ANyway. I did have a couple of listish kinds of snippets floating around in my head that were too long for Twitter*, and I have a few minutes to fill in (ever since I read The Phantom Tollbooth in the fourth grade, I have a hard time saying that I'm "killing time". Poor Tock!) while I upload some chapters to Librivox, so I'll grace the Internet with more of my madd blogging skillz.

-----------------------------------------

Snippet the First: THINGS I LOATHE. (ooh, goody! a list!)

• Use of the word "architecting". People, an architect (n.) does not architect (v.). There is no such (v.). He/She designs. So does anyone else whose activities you might be tempted to describe with that not-word. Please, for the sake of my sanity, stop. Just stop. There are other perfectly good verbs and gerunds you can use that won't cause me to go into spasms of uncontrollable twitching in the middle of a late-night transcribing session. Thank you. (PW: It wasn't you.)

• Cheetos.

• 95-degree days during which it RAINS. (OK, sprinkles.) This is California. I should not have to deal with this.

• Stupid expletive-deleted blossom-end rot. Every one of my full-sized tomatoes has this. It's all my fault, apparently -- I overwatered them when they were little baby tomato plants -- but that is no excuse. (Besides, the cherry tomatoes, which I also overwatered, are JUST FINE.)

• Automatic spell-checking in text fields. Yes, Firefox, "overwatered" is a word. So is Librivox. (You're right about "architecting", though, which makes me a wee bit less annoyed with you. I may let you live. For today, at least.)

• Library Elf's new email format. All of a sudden they only tell me what's due or what's on hold, without giving me a full list of everything I have checked out every time. Now how am I supposed to remember what I've read at the end of the month when I go to write a book post? Am I supposed to save actual paper library receipts? Surely I can't be expected to keep track of the books as I go? Sigh.

• Weeds. I turn my back for SIX DANG MINUTES (or, um. Cough. Six dang weeks. Cough.) and they take over every spare inch of my garden.

• The nightly chain reaction wherein one set of neighborhood dogs gets started barking and then others join in until it's this enormous cacophony of woofing and yipping and how-how-hooowwling that I think you can hear from space. How do the owners sleep through that when it's right outside their windows? (Scout, being indoors, just lifts her head for a brief growl and then goes back to sleep. Good dog.)

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Snippet the Second: THINGS I LOVE:

• Steamed yellow crookneck squash with just a dash of salt.

• Summer vacation.

• The fact that at 1:30 AM I just had to go wrestle a book out of my son's hands and force him to turn off his light and go to sleep.

• The little itty bitty tiny frogs that live in my garden.

• Sitting on the porch swing just before sunset in a tank top and capris and feeling completely comfortable. (Notice how I'm trying not to hate summer?)

• Letting the sun heat our water and dry our clothes, so that our utility bills in summer are slightly more than half what they are in winter. (See? Again.)

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And with that, the uploader is 15 seconds from finishing the last file, and I have less than five hours before I need to be up in the morning, and I still want to lie awake and read some Jane Austen for a while. I am SUCH a REBEL. Goodnight.

*if you actually are interested in the events of my life or simply miss my self-deprecating, sarcastic sense of humor -- what? you don't? -- when I'm not posting here, you can follow me on twitter. I do generally put up at least one or two little micro-posts each day. Followers are treated to snippets about how awesomely cool our family's DVD watching habits are, the occasional fascinating garden update, and of course complaints about the weather. Aren't you itching to go click "Follow" RIGHT NOW? You know you are.

It's really providential when you think about it that the van waited through that 240-mile drive before it died, completely and irreversibly, a quarter-mile (a downhill quarter-mile, no less!) from the chapel where the boys were to be collected by their parents. Sigh. My poor parents. I think that's the fourth or fifth time the fuel pump has gone belly-up in their (11-year-old, 180K-mile) van.

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Sunday we had the third meeting of our new fellowship in town, and I really liked it, even better than the first one. (I wasn't at the second; see above re: driving Scouts to camp.) Afterward we headed to my parents' place for the first time in a shamefully long amount of time, where the major excitement of the day was the search for my cousin's 7-year-old daughter. She and her dad are visiting from out of state, and she got lost while she was out for a walk. My dad and brother and cousin headed in one direction in trucks, while C and I and our dog and my parents' dog and my two nephews went the other direction on foot. My nephews had never met the little girl, and C had, which played into her sense of the dramatic nicely since she could fill them in: "She's SEVEN. She is ONE YEAR YOUNGER THAN ME. She is JUST A LITTLE GIRL and she DOESN'T KNOW HER WAY AROUND HERE VERY WELL. She may have been SNAKEBITTEN or KIDNAPPED. Mom, how can you be so CALM?" We found her, safe and sound and thirsty and footsore, after a passing motorist told us she'd seen a lost little girl wandering in the same direction we were but that the little girl (understandably) would not get into a car with a stranger.

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But my prolapsing mitral valve, which had not been happy all morning yesterday, protested loudly against all the jogging I did along the road during the Very Dramatic Search Effort, and I have been maddeningly annoyed by a symptom flare-up ever since.

This drives me bananas. I am SO not the invalid type. And I hate going to the cardiologist, which is why I haven't been to see one in a couple of years, and I don't want to start going again now so just GET BETTER ALREADY.

(I have a sneaking suspicion that the fact that my pants don't fit so well anymore and the fact that my stupid heart is grumpy with me may be mysteriously related to one another. Must investigate. But not too closely. Speaking of which, anyone have any chocolate?)

Really, the drive was fun and interesting and the vanload of boys were pleasantly conversant in all kinds of topics ranging from film adaptations of books to the absence of transitional forms in the fossil record to the cyclical nature of global climate change. On the way back I was by myself, and I listened to three hours of Elizabeth Von Arnim's The Enchanted April (excellent Librivox recording here), which made the time go faster, but didn't alleviate the sadness of the fact that my boy is going to be gone for an entire week. I've been mentally preparing myself for this for months. I'm mostly past worrying that he'll be excluded by the other boys and have a terrible time (this is my own issues talking, mostly, and I realize that), and I'm OK with the fact that he'll probably get homesick at first because this is just something that people have to go through sometime, and I've never been really concerned that he'll get lost or anything frightening like that, because he's very cautious and deliberate by nature. Now I'm just faced with the reality of his absence for seven long days. This may sound silly (after all, hello, he's TWELVE; he's not exactly a needy little preschooler), but he's never been away from home for more than two nights, and we're all feeling it. He had better brace himself for a substantial onslaught of hugs when he gets home whether he wants them or not.

Oh, and "I CAN DRIVE STICK SHIFT." I haven't stalled the new car in ages. Or, OK, ten or twelve days.

Anyway. Shut up Rachel, on with the books.

The first one I saw sitting there on the New Books shelf looking all hurt because I'd forgotten to blog about it was Belong To Me by Marisa De Los Santos. (I actually think I wrote a twitter post mentioning this book, but that doesn't count, now does it.) This is a sequel to her first novel, Love Walked In, and I liked it very, very much. It picks up about five years after the previous book left off, as Cornelia and her husband (whose name I have, I'm ashamed to admit, forgotten) are moving to the suburbs. I was afraid at first that it was going to be yet another annoying "suburbs are eeeevil" novel, but it wasn't. It's a very busy novel, with a lot of things happening to a lot of people. I had a paragraph-long synopsis typed here, but I've just deleted it because the story is all the more delicious for being allowed to unfold a page at a time in front of you. I heartily recommend this book. Kat, thanks so much for pointing this author out to me.

Then I saw Run sitting there with the Ann Patchett books and realized that I hadn't blogged about it either. I think I may have even read that one before... Christmas? Can I have, possibly? I'm trying to picture myself reading it -- was it here, or at my parents'? Hmm. ANyway. Run was not as... shoot, how to describe it, as -- ethereal? beautifully unlikely? as the other Patchett books I've read. There's no deceased gay magician whose female assistant was in love with him; there's no opera diva taken hostage at a party. There's just a little girl who loves to run, and a pair of motherless college-aged brothers whose father is a Kennedy-ish politician, and a car accident in the snow, and a bit of a mystery as to how all these elements fit together. Patchett, as usual, writes a vivid and memorable story, and if it's not so brilliant a gem as Bel Canto, it's still very, very good and well worth the reading.

Maybe I'll try to do better for the second half of the year. But don't hold your breath. I'll rack my brain a bit, and dig around in my Library Elf emails, and pull out those two reviews from April, and overall just see if I can remember the more noteworthy books I've read in the past few months.

On vacation last week, I read The Book of Joe by Jonathan Tropper. Tropper is, like Nick Hornby, kind of a male Marian Keyes -- he writes about issues that are not-so-light, with a light touch and a lot of humor. On that score, The Book of Joe did not disappoint. It's about a man who has to go back to his New England hometown when his father has a stroke, which wouldn't be so bad except that the guy had, after shaking the small-town dust from his feet, written a bestselling novel that seriously trashed the people in it. They deserved it, mostly, but the author did a great job of having the reader and the character realize together that he could have handled the whole thing a leetle bit more maturely. Also, the story is structured carefully and well, with explanatory flashbacks getting closer and closer to the crux of the matter that caused the main character to feel so very bitter about the town where he grew up. However, this book did come VERY near to becoming a Very Special Episode about homosexuality and homophobia. Subject matter aside, Very Special Episodes bother me. A lot. Very well-written, and there's certainly a lot more to the story than that, so if you think you might like it anyway, dig in. (Also, that whole scene at the end? Was kind of freaky. You'll know which one I mean. Like a snowflake on his tongue? Eew.)

Sometime back in there I read The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, which was not at all what I expected it to be, but it was really readable and I liked it. It concerned a culture about which I knew almost nothing at all, so it was interesting from that perspective as well. I recommend it.

Oh, I also read Amsterdam by Ian McEwan. I actually don't remember a whole lot of detail about this novella, just that it was an enjoyable read with a moderately annoying (but not too surprising) dark twist at the end. I don't even remember what the source of the characters' conflict was. Oh, now that I make a serious effort it's beginning to come back, but still not completely. Whether that says more about my Swiss-cheese memory or about the quality of the story is anyone's guess. If you like McEwan, give this one a try.

Oh. I read a really strange -- but also memorable -- novel called His Illegal Self, which I picked up purely on the strength of the cover photograph and the title. It was set mostly in a commune in Australia. I liked the main character (a little boy, the son of permanently absent Communist revolutionary hippie types who is sort of accidentally abducted by another Communist revolutionary hippie type who he thinks is his mother) a lot, but I didn't like much else about the book, and the pretentiously unorthodox punctuation -- or, more specifically, the lack of it around quotations -- drove me bananas.

Hmm. Also in the Strange category -- Jenn, this is the book whose title I couldn't think of the other day, when we were talking about memoirs of people with crazy mothers or something like that -- was Her Last Death by Susannah Sonnenberg. Here's the review I put on Visual Bookshelf (which I no longer update, by the way) for that one: "Left me feeling dirty, somehow, and very glad for my ordinary humdrum wonderful relationship with my normal mother. Very well-written, but I still kind of wish I hadn't read it."

Aaaand back in April I read The Pajama Girls of Lambert Square, by Rosina Lippi. Lippi's writing and dialogue always crackle, and her characters are fresh and interesting as always. Maybe a little too fresh and interesting -- I found the agoraphobic, constantly pajama-clad female lead just that little bit too unrealistic for my suspension of disbelief to take (especially when someone so careful about her privacy hops into bed with the new guy in town practically the second she sees him. But then I guess in today's moral climate that's not unrealistic. Ahem.). Still, it's worth a read for the excellent writing, as Lippi's/Donati's books always are.

Here's the other of my April reviews -- I even formatted this one!

1. Conversations with the Fat Girl -- Liza Palmer -- 4
   
   • I liked this so much more than I thought I might. Maggie and Olivia have been best friends since they were the two designated Fat Girls in their class at school, but as the newly-thin Olivia's wedding approaches, the problems with their relationship are becoming increasingly apparent. Meanwhile, Maggie's been evicted and has a master's degree, a dead-end job, and a crush on a man she thinks is unapproachable. At first glance this seems like a typical fluffy best-friends-gone-wrong, girl-with-issues-meets-boy story, but there's a lot more to the book than that. For one thing, the writing is terrific, with believable dialogue, a steadily moving plot, and frequent sly little zingers of humor that catch you off-guard; even the chapter titles are clever. Also, in a rawther Marian-Keyesish fashion, there are some Deep Issues here, and they're deftly handled without the slightest bit of treacle or preaching or any tired clichés. The supporting cast, Maggie's mother and sister especially, crackle with life; Maggie herself is a woman who makes me root for her. The only way I could bring myself to put this down and stop reading long enough to get anything done for the past two days was to remind myself that I didn't really want to get to the end and have no more to look forward to. (So it's not perfect -- the best-friend's Bridezilla tendencies are a bit over-the-top at times. But it's still very, very good.)

OK. I know I read other stuff (besides all the reading I was doing for school up until mid-May) but that's all I'll torture you with. Now here's a meme. I keep seeing it around and hoping someone will tag me with it, but nobody has, so I'm just going to do it anyway. (Blog-tagging reminds me of waiting to be picked for teams in junior high.)

1. Do you remember how you developed a love of reading?
I just remember being really enthusiastic about the fact that letters made words and words made stories and stories made pictures in my head -- that, in short, all it took was the alphabet correctly arranged to create entire worlds out of nothing. (Although I wouldn't put it into those words until I was considerably older. I may have been an avid reader at three but I wasn't that precocious.) Also, my brother taught me to read, or at least I remember him teaching me the sounds the letters made -- I was stung by the injustice that while C could make a K sound, K couldn't make a C sound. And anything my big brother did had to be just wonderful.

2. What are some books you loved as a child?
The first ones I remember reading independently were the Frog and Toad books, and I still love those. Also, I was nuts about the Little House books, and Narnia, and the Oz books and Beverly Cleary and Doris Gates, and Trixie Belden and the Hardy Boys (not so much Nancy Drew although I read a lot of those books the way you eat a lot of gummy bears, without thinking much), and books of horse stories. As an older child I especially loved the Anne series. I enjoyed anything I could check out of the library and devour non-stop, really, but these were a few special favorites.

3. What is your favorite genre?
Overall, probably classic fiction. But it's hard to choose.

4. Do you have a favorite novel?
Talk about hard to choose! Maybe Persuasion. Maybe Jane Eyre. Maybe Anne of Green Gables. I love a lot of modern novels too (Never Let Me Go, A Thread of Grace, Into the Wilderness). Man, I hate this question. I could go on all day with answers. Moving on.

5. Where do you usually read?
These days, in bed. I read elsewhere too, but I always have so much else to do during the day -- school in season, working in the garden, house stuff, cooking, cleaning, hanging laundry -- that I just don't have the leisure to sit down without guilt as often as I used to, and when I do, I usually end up knitting because, I reason, I can read in bed at night, but knitting doesn't lend itself as well to that, and I have projects I actually want to finish before I die.

6. When do you usually read?
I think I just answered that pretty well.

7. Do you usually have more than one book you are reading at a time?
Yes. Usually I'll go through several lighter fiction books in the amount of time it takes me to finish a more serious classic (usually a reread), although sometimes I get so caught up in one book that I don't read anything else until that one is done.

8. Do you read nonfiction in a different way or place than you read fiction?
As much as I wish I were the type of person who read a lot of nonfiction -- seems so much steadier and more important than preferring novels -- I probably read maybe one or two nonfiction books per year outside of school requirements. I do like a good biography every now and then, and I'll check out nonfiction that sounds interesting when I hear about it, but I frequently turn those books in without reading them all the way through. Now you know my deep dark secret: I'm terribly shallow. I hope you can still be my friend.

9. Do you buy most of the books you read, or borrow them, or check them out of the library? Mostly I check them out of the library. Classics I'll buy.

10. Do you keep most of the books you buy?
Yes, the vast majority of them, because I almost never buy a book unless I know I want to own it for one reason or another. (One exception is library book sales, where I'll sometimes be less discriminate and end up with stuff I'll never read, which I then give away.)

11. If you have children, what are some of the favorite books you have shared with them?
Mostly, it's the list of books in question 2. But add a few: Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, the inevitable Goodnight Moon. My daughter is just now flying through the Little House books, and it gives me so much pleasure to discuss them with her. My son's rereading the Narnia series (actually, he'd only listened to those really good audiobooks of most of them before), so that's fun too. Both my kids loved Beverly Cleary and read just about everything she wrote for young children. One of the greatest joys of being a parent is sharing books with my kids.

12. What are you reading now?
I just finished North and South -- the Elizabeth Gaskell novel, not the one about the American Civil War. I'd listened to the Librivox version before -- back when I was doing the painting in our house, actually, so it was funny to be reading along and then suddenly flash to the mental vision of myself covered with yellow paint standing in what is now my living room painting cupboard doors. Now I'm slowly going through The Mill on the Floss -- is it just me, or is most Eliot not as accessible as Silas Marner? -- and also reading While I Was Gone by Sue Miller. Funny about this book: As I was reading along, parts of the story started sounding creepily familiar to me, but other parts were (and are) not familiar at all. I'm still not sure if I've read this book before, or if I read part of it, or if I read something else that bore a lot of similarity to parts of the story.

13. Do you keep a To Be Read list?
Not really.

14. What’s next?
I'm having a hankering to read some Gabaldon and Donati. Also some Dickens, and I'm going to try to make myself strike out and read something new of his, rather than falling back on David Copperfield. Again.

15. What books would you like to reread?
I reread so, so many books.

16. Who are your favorite authors?
YOU CAN'T MAKE ME CHOOSE. Seriously, if you've read this blog for five minutes you could probably come up with a pretty accurate list.

Whew! And that's all. Wow, that got long. Now I don't have to post for a long time, right?

lifted from Breda.

It's that meme thing where you -- well, here are the instructions.

How it's done:

* Answer each of the questions below.
* Surf over to Flickr (set up an account if you don’t have one — it's quick and easy) and type your answers (one at a time) into the search bar.
* From the choice of pictures shown only on the front page, click on the one that moves you.
* Once the page with your picture opens, copy the URL.
* Surf over to the Mosaic Maker, set up your mosaic, and paste your URLs.
* Click “Create!”

Here are the questions:

1. What is your first name?
2. What is your favorite food?
3. What high school did you attend?
4. What is your favorite color?
5. Who is your celebrity crush?
6. What is your favorite drink?
7. Where would you go on your dream vacation?
8. What is your favorite dessert?
9. What do you want to be when you grow up?
10. What do you love most in life?
11. Choose one word to describe you.
12. Your Flickr name?

Photo credits:
1. Rachel and the Lake, 2. fruit salad, 3. Respirators, 4. Gizmo, 5. Buying a Nikon doesn't make you a photographer. It makes you a Nikon owner., 6. ...As Long As You Water Them, 7. Borrowdale, Lake District, 8. Chocolate Ice Cream, 9. nurse 1, 10. Raccoon Family, 11. Tee-hee, 12. mrs rachel lynde is surprised