was that you or me?

It's a good thing I like tea, because I'm living off of it. (Well, that and the cheese danish I just got at Grand Central and the sandwich and the oatmeal...) I think I've had four cups today. I just put the kettle on again. I guess that's not too many, but when I have a cup it's because oh my God, I need a cup of tea. I haven't quite reached the 'I wish I had a teabag in my throat'* stage, but I do frequently feel like I just might die if I don't get something hot and warm in my throat NOW.

*Once uttered during a particularly wretched sore throat phase. The funny thing is that I can't remember if I said it or if someone else said it...at one point I had three very similar remarks about tea on little scraps of paper taped to my tea cupboard. It might have been Lis, Bee, or me, but it really doesn't matter because I feel like I experienced it.

Self Portrait Tuesday

 
Me and Lu. I just love this picture. I'm about six and she's probably two. This was the front yard of our first house when we moved from Indiana, before we rented the house across the street, where my brother was born, and before we bought the house down the street, where my parents still live. That tree behind us is gone now, and Lucy is taller than me. 

dance party

 
 

The True and Terrifying Story

I've been reading An American Plague: The True and Terrifying Story of the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1793. And coughing. A lot. The two seem tied together somehow.

But besides making me sick, it's a great book. GREAT. I'm serious. I'm learning all sorts of interesting things about 18th century medicine, culture, the early days of American government...I love how books like this tie all those things together.

And lest you think my life is all dull and coughing and nonfiction, we had a dance party last night! Um, yeah. If you happened to be walking past our apartment last night and gazed through our open blinds, I hope you laughed. Really hard. There was some talk of blackmail to try and get us to not put pictures on our blogs. Frankly, I'm just feeling too lazy to download pictures, but might if provoked.

Speaking of blackmail, we've decided that the only reason our incredibly awkward landlord allows our crazy neighbor (the one that smokes in a non-smoking apartment, goes on ten quick car trips around the block an hour, and threatens to kill other neighbors) to continue to live here is that Crazy Neighbor (CN) is blackmailing Awkward Landlord (AL). They were, so the rumor goes, college roommates...and CN knows what AL did and is blackmailing him to get an apartment. It's the only logical conclusion, right? Right?

plans

I've noticed that I like to make elaborate schedules for things. If I have a lot to do the next day, I might decide that I'll get up at 8, give myself an hour to shower & eat, run X, Y, and Z errands by ten, do an hour of letter writing, go for a walk, etc. Have it all mapped out. Then of course I get up at 9 and around 12 I start thinking about running errands.

I just found myself thinking, "maybe I should create a schedule for the type of books I read...one new children's book, one nonfiction, one adult novel, one older children's book..." Yeah right. I can't keep to schedules like that. But, I did just finish an adult novel, a nonfiction, an older children's book (well, two of them), and a new children's book this week...Maybe I could, more or less, keep to a schedule like that. Oh, plus a book on tape at all times.

I finished Criss Cross this morning, while I skip church in favor of hacking up my lungs in the privacy of my own home. I am still going to work, where neither incense nor singing doth prevail. I snapped this picture yesterday - this is my "spot." A more accurate picture would have one of those carts piled high with books and videos. This is where I sit and sort through things and chat with whoever is sitting at the desk.


There's also a work table to the right where I cover books and such. In the back corner is a lovely little cubby that I squeeze into when I work on the computer. You have to pull the chair out, sit, and propel yourself forward to reach the keyboard, because the door on the left won't open out any further, and there's a fold-down table on the right. It's a tight fit.

Show & Tell Friday

 



My computer, oh my computer. This is about as low as it gets around here - my breakfast dishes, stacks of unopened mail & unfiled papers, letters to reply to, old notebooks and scrapbooks stashed under the laptop...and oh yes, a desktop, too. To top it all off, I usually sit in a very ergonomically correct rocker, pulled up to my desk (which I assembled singlehandedly!) Someday I'll get rid of that desktop, but not while it still holds everything I ever wrote in college. The laptop is a recent aquisition, bought from Kate when she switched to Macs. 

of passports, baths, and sponges

I just dropped by my parents' (to return a disc of 24 episodes that my brother made for me - "illegally, of course," in his words) to discover a strange state of affairs.

First, my dad is in Costa Rica. Which I knew about, but the strangeness of it still strikes me. My pale, red-headed, easily burned father is fishing in Costa Rica. My three grown cousins invited him on their annual trip in lieu of their dad, my uncle, who died last year.

My dad had to get a passport for the trip, his first ever. Good thing he started applying for one early, because he had a lot of trouble convincing the government that he exists. Or that he is who he says he is. There was some mix-up with his birth certificate not being official. He ended of having to get the only other surviving member of his generation or older, blood-related, to notarize something confirming his identity. Good thing he still had a living blood-relative, his aunt who's twelve years older than him and relatively hardy, compared to the rest of the family (well, my great-grandmother lived into her 90s and lived at home till the end, but the rest have perished relatively early).

Second, my mom, who had been looking forward to a nice quiet house while my dad was away (my brother, you could say, works at being neither seen nor heard, and my sister has a house with friends), was woken up at three the other morning. She heard some splashy noises in the bathroom, and figuring my brother would only be up if he were sick, she knocked on the door.

"It's me," Lucy says. "I'm just taking a bath."

Apparently she had stopped by, watched a movie, had a snack, and decided that a bath was in order. Why she couldn't do all this at her house, I have no idea. I promised my mom that I would never show up at 3 am to take a bath.

At the moment, I'm trying (perhaps not quite my hardest) to read Criss Cross and see what the Newbery committee saw. Last time I tried reading it, I got as far as page 16 and this paragraph:

The guitarist on the stage, tuning his guitar, let pure drops of sound fall into the noisy room, making the pockets of quiet. The drops fell into the middle of conversations and hushed them. The drops of sound fell on an unmoistened sponge that was waiting somewhere inside Hector. In his heart or his mind or his soul. He didn't realize that he was in a sponge state but, having been separated from his moorings - couch, TV, pizza - and led into unfamiliar territory, there was a spongy piece of him left open and receptive to the universe in whatever form it might take, and the form it took was a guitar.

And then I stopped. It's trying so hard and it ends up being so clunky. Reading the first chapter a second time, I can't help but think, "If I were back in a fiction writing class, and this were someone's short story, I would be groaning and trying really hard to think of nice things to say when I critiqued it.

I'm so glad I bought that basil. 

The man behind me? A complete stranger. But I love this picture, especially amped up with some extra warmth.  

Now for some actual self portraits. Although Bee has to take the actual picture-taking credit. London 2002, with basil. 

Self Portrait Tuesday

 
There are always those times when you attach a huge significance to a certain date. It resonates in your head for months in anticipation. You don't have to stop and think in order to answer a question like "when do you leave?" And then the same thing happens with the day you come back.

And then you find yourself four years later thinking, has it really been four years? And when did I leave again? And the date is gone. You pull out your notebook from January 2002. You flip through days that sound vaguely familiar, like something you once read in a book.

And if you open the photograph album and see the house you once lived in for three months, it looks only familiar.

Until you remember that you only took it on your last day, on your way to the High Street Kensington tube station with your backpack on an April morning. That the park was at your back and to one side of the building was the line of visa applicants outside the Dutch embassy. Until you remember what you kept in your kitchen cabinets, and the feel of the wallpaper, and the step up to the bathroom, and talking on the phone at the bottom of the stairs, and pulling the couch out on to the balcony on a warm day. 

this is what happens when you intentionally misspell things

You are the first result if you google "hot hors orderves recipes." Try saying that out loud.

a dark day

I would like to have you all think that I was sunk into such a great, deep depression after awakening at the crack of dawn yesterday (actually before the crack of dawn, since it was 6 am Pacific) to find out what won, particularly the Newbery but also the other lovely awards, that I could not bring myself to share my reactions. Because who wants that kind of anger and disgust?

What actually happened was that I got up about 8:30 yesterday, well after the crack of dawn, and went for a run with Kate, and then we ate an apple pancake and drank some coffee, and then she went to class and I opened up all the windows and started cleaning the house. Never once did I think, "I wonder what won the Newbery?" as I have been doing compulsivly for the past several weeks. I didn't even turn on my computer.

It wasn't until this bright sunny morning (sun! I'd forgotten about the sun! It still exists!) that I glanced at my bookshelves, lined as they are with Newbery winners & honor books, and wondered, "what will win the Newbery?" Suddenly the realization dawned on me that I could find out so I rushed to my computer, to Kate's confusion, and swore. Loudly.

Criss Cross?

Whittington?

Princess Academy?

I am glad that Hitler Youth got two honors - Newbery and Sibert - but otherwise the whole experience was pretty damn disappointing.

good hats

 


Show & tell this week has the theme of "good hats." I hope these pass muster (is that the right phrase or did I somehow mess it up? Does one indeed 'pass muster'?) These were taken in August in Seaside. I particularly like the faux trapper hat. I have an rather large skull and don't find myself owning very many hats. I once owned a cunning little vintage lovely, but it managed to disappear in one of my many moving shuffles. Perhaps it resides in one of my father's sheds.*

*Given my mood this morning, I would like to paraphrase and say, in my father's yard there are many sheds...There's a running joke in my family about sheds. My cousin acquired the nickname "Two-shed Jonny" after installing his second. Now my dad is "Two-shed Jimmy." Even though his name is not Jim or Jimmy or James, that is his nickname. 

but don't take my word for it

I like how it looks from the back - same as always after a cut.





 
 


But this is how I feel about the front. Please note that I took the picture this morning, after washing it and now blow-drying it. I lack the energy for a hairdryer today, preferring to put what little I have into making French toast and crying over Behind the Scenes at the Museum which I finished and it excellent. To use a word I've heard much talk of lately, distinguished.

[Edited to re-upload the picture of the back that mysteriously disappeared.]

the tale of a parking lot and a courier bag

 


This is what I needed last night to carry all my things home from the library. One of our courier bags. You see the fill line? To stop overzealous (and strong) library workers from overfilling a bag and pissing off the county courier? I filled it to the fill line.

The thing is, we have this little parking problem at the library. After years of neighboring an empty grocery store parking lot (when we moved here when I was five, that was the first grocery store I ever went to with my dad) (then the store closed and the building was used as: a haunted house, a kids' club, space for the library book sale) (the parking lot was used for: park & ride, parking for the Sunday farmers' market, overflow library parking), the lot is being developed and we are down to our own tiny lot. Staff must now park a couple blocks away by city hall. And must listen to patron after patron complain about the parking. An indignent "What's going in next door?" (Response: hand them a flier.) A peevish "When will you get your parking back?" (Never.)

So when it's your turn to host a coworker's birthday, and you need to carry two empty Pyrex dishes (formerly home to chocolate pecan cupcakes), 2 books, 2 books on tape, 2 DVDs, and your bag (which is pretty capacious on its own), you follow your instinct and grab a courier bag. I kind of want to keep it - it's the perfect size for library days. Or maybe I just need to reconsider how much I cart to & from work. 

self portrait tuesday

 


personal history - on a light note. pigtails & pigtails. some things never change...until tomorrow when i get a haircut. 

it's time for a book report

Someday I should try plotting on a graph (oh, who am I kidding) my waxing and waning desires to read. I always want to read, naturally, but there are those days and weeks when it's just consuming, and I find myself at work pulling books off the shelves and stashing them away on the bottom shelf of my book cart as I trundle around the library, allegedly shelving. Or there are days like yesterday when the young teen section will not give me enough room to shelve just two more titles, so I quickly scan for anything I've been meaning to read. So that I can pull those off and replace them with the ones that needed to be shelved. It's rough, I tell you.

Recently I've read:

Everything on a Waffle by Polly Horvath. Personally, the idea of eating everything on a waffle is repellent, but I managed to get over this and love the book. The ending is a bit sappy, but Primrose is delightful. How can I not love a book with a character named Miss Perfidy? There are recipes. I'm going to have to try the waffle one, because if there's anything I love on a waffle, it's butter and syrup (just like the heavenly buttermilk pancakes that Kate and I consumed for breakfast (at about 11:30 am - not because we were lazy and slept that late, but because we'd just been on a virtuous hour-long walk/run (with the running occupying about 1/12 of the time))).

Love, Ruby Lavender by Deborah Wiles. Perhaps better than Each Little Bird That Sings, but without the fantastic names (Comfort, Declaration, Tidings? Can you beat that?) I liked the portrayal of friendships. I'm feeling uneloquent about this.

Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson. Actually, I'm still reading this one but I'll recommend it anyway. There are footnotes (which are whole chapters) that fill in family history backstory. There's delightful forshadowing, especially about deaths, but it still manages to feel minorly suspenseful. There are wonderfully irritating characters. Dark humor. Great sense of time.

And my bookshelf, it overfloweth with titles.

this is what I did yesterday instead of show & tell

 
I think I enjoy the process of baking more than the end result. Especially the way the buttermilk drips down the side of the measuring cup. And the beauty of a good buttercream frosting at ten in the am. 

belated show & tell

I promised blackbird pictures and then I ran off and baked a cake and made lunch and went to work and stayed up till midnight reading Behind the Scenes At the Museum (thanks for the recommendation, you know who). So here they are:


I picked our living room as my favorite room (doesn't that sound like the beginning of a grade school essay?) It's the biggest room in the apartment. It contains the couch, source of all comfort. And one of our two mango walls, which I never tire of.

Here is the basket where we keep blankets, hats, mittens, and anything else that gets dropped when we walk in the door. A more accurate picture would have shown that white blanket abandoned on the couch and my bag, water bottle, and book taking its place in the basket.

Here is our knitting corner.


Yes, that's a gorilla on the couch. I've had that plant in the corner forever - it's desperately in need of a new pot.







No photo-survey would be complete without the huge ass TV that inhabits our living room, courtesy of Keith. I included the chair next to it for perspective. Because, you know, we need to see Jack Bauer's head larger than life.

Now it's a whole week!

It's National Delurking Week.

Do your part.

view

 
 

Personal History

 




Self Portrait Tuesday's theme this month is tripping me up a little bit. It SOUNDS so easy. I just kept scrolling through all my pictures, finding nothing in particular to say about any of them. This one, though, says something to me because it wasn't all that long ago. If this were part of the GRE, I would make some elaborate example about how I've changed in a short time, blah blah. That the small changes can be more potent than the big ones. But I can't just say that because it's sappy and I'm not. At least not here. Not often. But this picture, yes, does make me sappy happy. And kind of blows my mind because that tiny baby in the picture will have another tiny baby join the family. And in that time, what's happened in my life? A whole lot of nothing, in the big picture (I graduated from college inbetween when Q was born and that picture was taken), but it's all about the details. This morning I suffered through the GREs with the hopes of one day going to library school. And now my tiny glass of wine is proving overpowering and it's time for me stop thinking. Happy Tuesday. 

pictures! and more pictures!

I just wrote this beautiful, witty, incisive, insightful, superlative piece of prose,* which my newly reconstituted laptop is now dining off of. I can hear its contented chewing and swallowing as I type, and I am torn between love and hatred. I love that I have my laptop back, fully functional, from Joe's "I promise to fix it" computer hospital. I hate that it just ate my writing. Shall we have some photos instead?

Here he is, the man-child who keeps his promises. Took him a month or so, but I think he secretly delighted in removing and reinstalling windows, saving my files on an external hard drive, and making sure I use firefox instead of explorer. I also now have open office instead of word, except the shortcut is labeled "word" as his idea of a joke. I think we'll keep him around. He can be seen here humoring me by posing for this picture in a delightful and entirely unuseful hallway in the caretaker's lodge at Pittock Mansion. And now, the mansion itself:

We used the free pass from the library and went on a family field trip. We used to go here as kids - Lu and I would swoon over the old furniture and grand staircase and the old-fashionedness of it all. This time I was all into taking a gazillion pictures of the exterior. And the kitchens. Because I love kitchens.



Please ignore the glass "soap bubbles" that are someone's idea of whimsical, and just pay attention to that sink! It curves! I want it!


I was attempting to sum up the annual house-blessing, the frantic cleaning (and by cleaning I mean hiding half the contents of my room in my closet and quickly vacuuming), and my thoughts on how priests get these tours of everyone's houses. My inner voyeur was coming out.

Which is probably why I enjoy housesitting as much as I do. Apart from a barely repressed obsessive-compulsive tendency to want to leave everything EXACTLY as I found it, and the occasional freaky pet, housesitting is a delight. Especially with ample compensation. But I love love what you can learn about people by spending two weeks alone in their house. Not that I'm a snooper, but the first thing I do it open every single cupboard in the kitchen. And sc an their bookshelves. You get the idea.



*which I can say because it's gone and no one can ever prove me wrong.

ps

and oh my goodness I didn't even tell you why I liked the books. What am I becoming?

Good Brother, Bad Brother and Hitler Youth were both good gripping history with great photographs to accentuate the text. My main reservation with Hitler Youth is that I don't think it would be nearly as good without photos. And we're not really supposed to weigh photos unless they distract from the text. (I love the phrase "the text," by the way.) There's also a new bio out on Eleanor Roosevelt that I peeked at that's supposed to be good, although it wasn't on our list to consider since it just came out. And I still hold to my philosophy that if you want to learn about a subject without totally diving into it, children's books are the way to go. I'm all into non-fiction now! Another one on our short list was Guinea Pig Scientists which, gasp, actually makes science interesting. To me, at least.

Maude March was just good fun. The main characters all felt like they lived and breathed (even the dead aunt), the style was consistent, there are great newspaper excerpts included, it's thought-provoking, not just fluff. Love Maude and Sallie.

Each Little Bird was fun. If there were an award for best character names, it would win. Maybe a bit over the top, but recommendable.

Chicken Boy was just not what I expected. I expected: depressing, hicks, a boy-book. Instead there were great characters, spare style, a great narrator, and a look into the soul of the chicken.

mockings & scourgings, part deux

So I bet you're all just dying to know what the Oregon Library Association (or whatever they're called) (or rather, those of us who bothered to drive to our fair capital this morning in the pouring rain) chose in our mock Newbery! Yes, dying! Well, now I'm the one dying to see what the ALA will choose this year (or rather, those lucky 15 who have to look at over 400 books during a year and then be secluded for three days while they choose).

After two rounds of balloting, not quite official Newbery style, we picked Hitler Youth (by Susan Campbell Bartoletti). Which, shamefully, was one I hadn't finished reading. It was my bedtime story last night, but I put myself to bed relatively early because I had to meet my carpool at 7:30 this morning - for me, an ungodly hour. The year of nonfiction! Our honor choices were Criss Cross (Lynne Rae Perkins), Chicken Boy (Frances O'Roark Dowell), and Each Little Bird That Sings (Deborah Wiles).

There were about 30 librarians there - we were in three tables. First we covered the criteria for the Newbery, and the woman leading the workshop talked about her experiences on the real committee last year (that would be the committee that gave us...Kira-Kira. I don't know anyone who likes Kira-Kira. Anyone? She was a big fan of Lizzy Bright and the Buckminster Boy, one of the honor books, so I suppose that redeemed her.) Then we discussed each of the fifteen books in our small groups, and had our first round of voting. Between the three groups, that gave us I think seven titles. We discussed those as a large group, and then did our next round of voting, which produced a winner.

The amazing thing to me was how people LOVED books that I couldn't even make myself finish, and how other people tore to pieces the ones that I loved.

My top five, because you're dying to know, would probably be (in no particular order):

Chicken Boy
Good Brother, Bad Brother
The Misadventures of Maude March
Each Little Bird That Sings
Hitler Youth (although I'm not quite finished with it...)

The best part was sitting there with a bunch of people and hashing it out. Pros and cons. Fiction vs nonfiction. I kept thinking of people like these and what they would contribute to the discussion. Would you slap us silly? Pat us on the back? What's the most distinguished?

What would be Christmas (Part Deux) if my pictures were downloaded

My sister and I instituted what I hope will become a Christmas tradition - Making the Rounds. This involves, quite simply, staying on the move. Going where we want, seeing lots of people, being fed lots of orderves (back before I knew how to pronounce hors d'oeuvres, I thought that they were something entirely different than appetizers - hors d'oeuvres were one thing, and "orderves" were another thing). The only problem with this is that my sister made me drive, in spite of her recent aquisition of a car, and thusly I was not able to finish the delicious yet large glass of mulled wine that was poured for me at stop #2.

We spent the morning en famille, with a very satisfying array of gifts. On recent Christmases I've been plagued by that sense of disappointment that comes not from receiving gifts you don't like, but from receiving gifts that you can't play with. You open them, you think "great, just what I wanted!" and then what do you do for the rest of the day? I didn't really receive any "toys" this year, but I did manage to escape that feeling. Constructing a Lego airplane with my brother (on behalf of our six year old cousin who lacks the patience for ten pages of instructions) probably helped.

Then a stop to visit Bee & Soph and exchange gifts, then a last minute decision to stop at Q's grandparents with Lu and hang out in the garage with the middle-generation - all these kids that I've lived down the street from and gone to school and church with on and off for years, warming ourselves by the woodstove and playing pool and drinking beer. Then inside to converse with the parents and answer all the "how's your mom/dad?" questions. Then to the cousins' for ham and holiday slaw and lots of pie. And the aforementioned legos. We gave H the first Harry Potter and he exclaimed, "How did you know that I like Harry Potter?" The words every library-godmother (like a fairy godmother, but only giving books) wants to hear.

Now I need to go make a dent in my leftover New Year's roast lamb and potato mushroom soup - and Annie, you must post the recipe for that soup so I can replicate it!