Imagine someone is relentlessly and continuously chucking molatov cocktails at your child. Not in any regular pattern, just haphazardly, so you never know when to expect them. Sometimes you can see the bombs sailing through the air from fairly far away and can quickly throw a makeshift shield -- your own body, if necessary -- in front of your child. Other times they come from out of nowhere with no warning -- crash, scream, flames. This isn't some sort of punishment for past deeds. Your child is absolutely innocent and undeserving of such a thing. It just happens. Just one of those things that happens to a random minority of people. No one is to blame. It's the luck of the draw.
Your only weapon against this relentless firestorm, your only hope of helping your child, is ... a thimble. Tiny, fingertip-sized, it holds maybe a couple of milliliters of liquid. Oh, and the nearest water source? It's 10 miles away, surrounded by an electric fence and razor wire, and owned by someone who is armed to the teeth, devoid of empathy and reason.
So the bombs come, and your child screams and burns, and you go running with your thimble that whole 10 miles, as fast as you can. You can see the water there, a whole lake of it, but you can't reach it. It's off-limits to you. You ask, "Please, may I fill up my thimble? My child is burning!" But the person who owns the water doesn't believe you. "Your child isn't REALLY burning. And even if he is, how bad can it be? Why should I take your word for any of this? Bring me a letter from an expert on fire who will swear that your child is, in fact, burning."
So you run back, all the way back, the whole 10 miles with your empty thimble. Maybe the flames have gone down a bit on their own. Maybe a kind soul has stepped in and tried to dampen the fire. Maybe, miracle of miracles, a tiny, temporary trickle of water has been discovered nearby! Or maybe the bombs have continued to fall and there is no other water and things are so much worse.
You find the expert. He can't evaluate your child for months, maybe even a year or more, and meanwhile the bombs keep falling and your child keeps screaming and burning, but finally you get that all too valuable piece of paper. You run 10 miles with your empty thimble back to the water.
"Look, the expert says my child is burning! Please, can I fill my thimble in your lake? Just one thimble full of water?"
But the answer is no. "I need more information. Is your child on fire ALL the time, or just some of the time? When he's on fire, does it keep him from performing ALL of his basic functions, or just some of them? How do I know your child is burning enough to really NEED the water?
And anyway, what have you done to fireproof your child? You have to help
yourself, you know. You can't expect other people to do it for you. Oh, and what are you feeding him for breakfast? Are you married to his father? Did you take drugs when you were pregnant? Here, you'd better fill this out. In triplicate."
So you do. You fill out the forms. You explain about the fireproof clothing and the shields and the safe rooms and all the things you've done since the day the bombs started coming. But there are so many bombs coming all the time. There is just too much fire. Just a little bit of water would help so much. But the answer still is no. "Other people need that water too, you know."
Now you have to actually bring your child the 10 miles to the lake, your child who is on fire. So you run 10 miles back home with your empty thimble. You grab your child and struggle to carry him the entire 10 miles back to the lake. It takes ages and ages. Maybe the flames go out on the way and your kid is just a burnt husk but not actually on fire by the time you get there; that means no water for you, regardless of the objective certainty that the bombs will never stop coming. Maybe you get "lucky" and your child is completely engulfed in flames when you reach the lake. Then -- and ONLY then -- are you allowed to fill your tiny little thimble and throw a few drops of water on the fire. That's assuming you can afford to pay for the water. Oh, did you think it was free? No, silly. You have to pay for it. Probably more than you can afford.
But if you need more water than that one thimbleful? Or if it takes you a while to get the money together to pay for it? Well. Be prepared to repeat this process all over again from the very beginning. Every last miniscule step of it, for every tiny little thimbleful of water you need. While the bombs keep falling.
Sometimes good things happen. In your 20-mile round-trip journey to the lake and back, you see other parents running, limping, dragging themselves along with their own thimbles and their own flaming children. At first you keep a wary distance from one another. Pretty soon you find yourselves nodding and waving. Before you know it, you're trekking along together, comparing notes on where any creeks or ponds might be located and which doctors make the best burn ointment.
Every now and then the clouds lift, the angels sing, and the lake gets a new owner who takes one look at your battered thimble and your scarred hands and says, "Kid on fire? Right. I can have 50 gallons delivered to your house, free of charge, every week. Let's see how that goes for a few weeks and then re-evaluate. Sound good?" But these reprieves are rare and always temporary. Before too long you find yourself once again making that long trek, thimble in hand, clutching your burning child.
And you just keep on doing it, carrying that thimble wherever you go in case you find water closer to home. You do it over and over and over again until you are exhausted, and sometimes you get so numb that the crash of the bomb doesn't even make you jump, and you hardly hear the screams, and you barely feel the heat. Other times the flames lick out in your direction and you burn and scream right along with your child, feel your skin blister and peel, and not a drop of water to be found. Either way you find yourself time and again halfway to the lake, soot-streaked, clutching your thimble, before you're even fully conscious.
You keep doing it because you love this child more than anything in the world. Because he is worth a thousand million treks to and from that lake (barefoot, over broken glass). Because he's done absolutely nothing to deserve what's happening to him. Because you're all he has. And because the only thing worse than continuing is the thought of what might happen if one day you just stopped and let him burn.
Wednesday, May 2, 2012
Tuesday, April 24, 2012
An update for your Tuesday
Hello, it's a gorgeous day here and the dog is staring at me because he thinks we're going for a walk. We are not. At least, not right now.
Our new next-door neighbors have moved in, I think, because this morning there were two cars in the driveway. They were supposed to move in last night but I never heard a peep nor saw any sign of a moving truck (not that I was spying out the window all evening or anything)(for reals, the only window in our house that faces their house is the one over the toilet in the master bath, so no). I'm guessing they are the quietest movers EVER and now I can never move again because we make a lot of noise and block up the entire street for days when we move, OMG. I am retroactively embarrassed for us now.
A few people have asked for an update on C's misophonia, and all I can really say is that he has good days and bad days. As I've said before, we are not opposed to medicating him for this if that seems the best way to go, but since no one in our area appears to have experience treating misophonia we wanted to try other things first. So far what we have tried are neurotherapy and a nutritional supplement that's a combination of l-theanine, GABA and 5-HTP. The supplement seems to help take the edge off of his anxiety, so that's good. He's been doing the neurotherapy for 6 months or so now and I do think it helps. It was helping a lot over the winter when he was doing it twice a week without fail -- he still wasn't able to be around us when we were eating/drinking, but he was able to hang out with us otherwise and have long (for him) face-to-face conversations without being triggered. But this spring has been crazy with his school schedule and his therapist's schedule and various things that have come up, not to mention the $200/week out of pocket that's not covered by insurance (although our healthcare FSA through P's employer FINALLY agreed to start reimbursing us a couple of weeks ago). So his therapy schedule has been a little more sporadic lately and unfortunately it shows.
We are beginning to suspect that C's misophonia falls under the same anxiety umbrella as his OCD and Tourette Syndrome. His OCD and Tourette's are mild, his misophonia is not, nor is the depression he's experiencing as a result. Frankly I do expect him to end up on anxiety/depression meds eventually, sooner rather than later, because I'm beginning to think the misophonia and OCD and Tourette's are just really severe, complicated symptoms of a larger underlying problem with his brain chemistry. Maybe we should quit focusing so much on the symptoms and try to get the underlying cause under control? Especially since they do have meds for that? I expect we'll be making some doctor appointments pretty soon.
In other news, I'm reading John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany for the first time ever (though I did see that somewhat horrible movie with Ashley Judd several years ago) and realizing that not only have I never read this book, I've never read ANY Irving whatsoever in all of my 45 years. I know. It's appalling, the gap in my literary education, especially when you consider I was in TAG English for 4 years in high school and minored in English in college. All we did was read, and then write about what we read! Eight years of that, and no Irving. I mean, really. (Also no Austen, no Bronte sisters, no London, no Stevenson, no Dostoyevski, no Tolstoy, no Eliot.)(What WERE we reading? A whole hell of a lot of Orwell, Vonnegut, Hemingway, Flaubert, Hawthorne, Crane, Melville, Ellison, Hesse, de Maupassant, Chaucer and Shakespeare. I know, right?)(Also, Flaubert and de Maupassant can both bite me, EXCEPT I THINK THEY MIGHT ENJOY THAT.)
So yeah. That's what's been happening around here.
Our new next-door neighbors have moved in, I think, because this morning there were two cars in the driveway. They were supposed to move in last night but I never heard a peep nor saw any sign of a moving truck (not that I was spying out the window all evening or anything)(for reals, the only window in our house that faces their house is the one over the toilet in the master bath, so no). I'm guessing they are the quietest movers EVER and now I can never move again because we make a lot of noise and block up the entire street for days when we move, OMG. I am retroactively embarrassed for us now.
A few people have asked for an update on C's misophonia, and all I can really say is that he has good days and bad days. As I've said before, we are not opposed to medicating him for this if that seems the best way to go, but since no one in our area appears to have experience treating misophonia we wanted to try other things first. So far what we have tried are neurotherapy and a nutritional supplement that's a combination of l-theanine, GABA and 5-HTP. The supplement seems to help take the edge off of his anxiety, so that's good. He's been doing the neurotherapy for 6 months or so now and I do think it helps. It was helping a lot over the winter when he was doing it twice a week without fail -- he still wasn't able to be around us when we were eating/drinking, but he was able to hang out with us otherwise and have long (for him) face-to-face conversations without being triggered. But this spring has been crazy with his school schedule and his therapist's schedule and various things that have come up, not to mention the $200/week out of pocket that's not covered by insurance (although our healthcare FSA through P's employer FINALLY agreed to start reimbursing us a couple of weeks ago). So his therapy schedule has been a little more sporadic lately and unfortunately it shows.
We are beginning to suspect that C's misophonia falls under the same anxiety umbrella as his OCD and Tourette Syndrome. His OCD and Tourette's are mild, his misophonia is not, nor is the depression he's experiencing as a result. Frankly I do expect him to end up on anxiety/depression meds eventually, sooner rather than later, because I'm beginning to think the misophonia and OCD and Tourette's are just really severe, complicated symptoms of a larger underlying problem with his brain chemistry. Maybe we should quit focusing so much on the symptoms and try to get the underlying cause under control? Especially since they do have meds for that? I expect we'll be making some doctor appointments pretty soon.
In other news, I'm reading John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany for the first time ever (though I did see that somewhat horrible movie with Ashley Judd several years ago) and realizing that not only have I never read this book, I've never read ANY Irving whatsoever in all of my 45 years. I know. It's appalling, the gap in my literary education, especially when you consider I was in TAG English for 4 years in high school and minored in English in college. All we did was read, and then write about what we read! Eight years of that, and no Irving. I mean, really. (Also no Austen, no Bronte sisters, no London, no Stevenson, no Dostoyevski, no Tolstoy, no Eliot.)(What WERE we reading? A whole hell of a lot of Orwell, Vonnegut, Hemingway, Flaubert, Hawthorne, Crane, Melville, Ellison, Hesse, de Maupassant, Chaucer and Shakespeare. I know, right?)(Also, Flaubert and de Maupassant can both bite me, EXCEPT I THINK THEY MIGHT ENJOY THAT.)
So yeah. That's what's been happening around here.
Tuesday, April 17, 2012
Sixteen
Here are 16 awesome things about today:
- It's son C's 16th birthday! Holy crap, I'm the mother of a 16 year old!
- (Also born on this day: Nikita Khrushchev, Senor Wences, Thornton Wilder, Harry Reasoner, Don Kirshner, Boomer Esiason, Liz Phair and Victoria Beckham! Awesome!)
- C has his learner's permit but no interest in getting his actual driver's license. (Yes, this is an awesome thing. If you have a 16 year old, then you know. Oy.)
- I genuinely surprised him this morning with a massively massive mylar birthday balloon and he is IMPOSSIBLE to genuinely surprise because of the teen ennui and whatnot, so YAY ME.
- When given the choice of elk burgers or spaghetti for dinner he chose spaghetti, which is awesome because we only have canned tomatoes and I require fresh tomatoes on my burgers and that means I don't have to go to the store and can instead hang around the house all day in ratty shorts and flip-flops. Which is what I'd much rather do.
- No one in our house has any meetings or appointments tonight. Awesome, and rare.
- It is a gorgeous day, sunny and summery. C would prefer it be raining, but this isn't his blog, dammit, it's mine, and I require sunshine, OKAY?
- All four of my tomato plants have tiny green tomatoes on them. YES.
- I'm almost done with Louise Penny's Still Life and it is FABULOUS and I can't wait to read the rest of the series, except...
- The Bloggess's book is out today! So as soon as I've finished Still Life, I can start Let's Pretend This Never Happened (by Jenny Lawson, in case you don't know who The Bloggess is and don't feel like looking it up).
- Or if I want to prolong the anticipation a bit, I can read one of the other hundreds of books I already have loaded up on my Kindle. (Have I mentioned lately that I love my Kindle? I LOVE IT SO MUCH.)
- My awful dog and I took a walk on the greenbelt this morning and saw literally thousands of tiny butterflies (there's a lot of thistle on the greenbelt and apparently that's butterfly crack).
- Speaking of my awful dog, I took an (awesome!) artistic photo of his butt.
- Speaking of photos, one of mine showed up on The Pioneer Woman's website today (it's that first one, which may look familiar to you)(it's not another photo of my dog's butt, in case you're afraid to look).
- I found a hidden, forgotten stash of Cadbury Cream Eggs in my closet today. THEY ARE ALL MINE.
- But the very most awesomest thing about today: I do not have staples in my abdomen, nor am I vomiting constantly and clawing at my own skin in a fit of post-surgery morphine-induced psychosis like I was 16 years ago right now! So that's good.
Friday, April 13, 2012
Triskaideka
I'm still having way too much fun with Instagram, obviously.
This is a super busy week here at the saltycrunchy house. P's birthday was yesterday and C's birthday is this coming Tuesday and we are celebrating both of them on Sunday, because we can't do it on Saturday because C will just be coming home from an overnight band thing and H has to volunteer at a charity function. Whew! I am tired. And I still have to make two birthday cakes, zut alors!
I'm typing this with Blogger's new interface and I super duper hate it. I'm also still hating DirecTV, in case anyone was wondering (it's like 4,000 home shopping/infomercial channels and maybe 100 sports channels and like 50 actual for real channels, ugh).
But I have lots of love to throw around this Friday the 13th, oh yes. To whit:
- I have tiny green tomatoes! On my tomato plants! A slug ate one of them but I killed it. DO NOT EVEN MESS WITH MY TOMATOES, SLUG(S).
- Also, plums! On my plum tree! Which has not given us plums in the whole 8 years we've had it!
- My roses have been going nuts. This time of year, before it's too hot, the blooms are bigger than my fist. It's insane.
- My cooking mojo has returned. This week I made kale chips, coconut-almond granola (sweetened with agave this time, which worked better) and chai tea concentrate (I am STILL eating that salad) in addition to P's birthday dinner of bone-in ribeyes, baked potatoes and grilled artichokes. BRING IT.
- They did a controlled burn near my neighborhood yesterday and I guess there were mesquite trees involved because my whole end of town smelled like barbecue all day.
- Six more weeks until summer vacation. We aren't going anywhere, but still.
Wednesday, April 4, 2012
New toy
Instagram for Android is available as of yesterday (free from Google Play, which is what we're calling the Android Market now, apparently). I've been having way too much fun with it, as you can see. I love the camera apps I've been using since I got an Android phone, most notably FX Camera and Retro Camera, but I have to admit it's fun to be part of the Instagram party now, too.
Monday, April 2, 2012
Random for your Monday
I was waylaid by a malady last week. When I took to my bed it was spring, with the flowers and the mild temperatures and the dampness and the leaves budding out everywhere. But when I shuffled outside a couple of days later and peered, mole-like, up at the sky, it had become summer. Yeah, it's like 90 over here. The bulbs are done. Everything is green. And oy, the humidity.
There is a cage match going on in my guts right now, probiotics vs. antibiotics, but I am mostly feeling better. Of course, now the kids are sick (with something completely unrelated)(yes, I'm sure) and home from school today. Ain't that always the way?
Being ill for a couple of days had one advantage: it allowed me to catch up with Season One of Game of Thrones. Ho. Lee. Crap. That is my new favorite show. We didn't have HBO when it first aired, and we won't have it anymore starting about halfway through this current season (we have a free trial right now because of our recent switch to DirecTV)(which I still HATE), but I will enjoy it while I can. P is reading the first book now, so shhhh! No one tell him anything! He doesn't know about Ned yet! Or Viserys, even! Also, I'd like to take this opportunity to go on record as having been a huge Peter Dinklage fan since WAY before this series started. Hello, 13 Moons, anyone? Am I the only one who saw that movie? Probably so. Anyway, I have dibs on the Dinklage, is what I'm saying.
I am reading Barry Estabrook's Tomatoland right now and it is blowing my mind. I knew that off-season grocery store tomatoes didn't taste like anything, and that the conventionally grown ones were covered in pesticides, but what I didn't know was that they were most likely picked by slaves. Actual slaves, as in people "owned" by other people with absolutely no civil/human rights. I'm not quite halfway through the book but already I have vowed never to buy another out-of-season grocery store tomato, or a non-organic grocery store tomato, or a tomato grown in Florida, ever again.
Let's see, what else is going on?
Today is Autism Awareness Day and son C, who has an autism spectrum disorder, is vehemently opposed to the entire concept. He explained why very eloquently on his Facebook page, and I won't copy and paste his words here, but I will say he gave me a lot to think about.
Our next-door neighbors to the east have moved away and the new neighbors haven't moved in yet and I am nervous, because I don't like change. Or people. Or people who change. I liked the old neighbors just fine -- they were a couple maybe 10 years older than us whose children were grown and out of the house and whose dog never barked (their cat pooped in my garden though, I'm pretty sure). We know nothing about the new neighbors except that it's a family and the dad is from the same neighboring state as P. What if their children are obnoxious? What if their dog barks? What if they tear out all the beautiful landscaping, like we did when we bought this house? I might need medication to get through this, you guys.
(Incidentally, if any of this sounds incoherent it's because H has come in and interrupted me about 4,783 times since I started typing. Yeah, she is SO TOTALLY going back to school tomorrow. What is it about the sound of fingers on a keyboard that brings children and spouses running? And P wonders why I haven't written that novel yet. HA HA HA.)
In closing, here are some things I've tried and liked lately:
* This is NOT a sponsored post. All of the products mentioned were purchased by me with myhusband's own money.
There is a cage match going on in my guts right now, probiotics vs. antibiotics, but I am mostly feeling better. Of course, now the kids are sick (with something completely unrelated)(yes, I'm sure) and home from school today. Ain't that always the way?
Being ill for a couple of days had one advantage: it allowed me to catch up with Season One of Game of Thrones. Ho. Lee. Crap. That is my new favorite show. We didn't have HBO when it first aired, and we won't have it anymore starting about halfway through this current season (we have a free trial right now because of our recent switch to DirecTV)(which I still HATE), but I will enjoy it while I can. P is reading the first book now, so shhhh! No one tell him anything! He doesn't know about Ned yet! Or Viserys, even! Also, I'd like to take this opportunity to go on record as having been a huge Peter Dinklage fan since WAY before this series started. Hello, 13 Moons, anyone? Am I the only one who saw that movie? Probably so. Anyway, I have dibs on the Dinklage, is what I'm saying.
I am reading Barry Estabrook's Tomatoland right now and it is blowing my mind. I knew that off-season grocery store tomatoes didn't taste like anything, and that the conventionally grown ones were covered in pesticides, but what I didn't know was that they were most likely picked by slaves. Actual slaves, as in people "owned" by other people with absolutely no civil/human rights. I'm not quite halfway through the book but already I have vowed never to buy another out-of-season grocery store tomato, or a non-organic grocery store tomato, or a tomato grown in Florida, ever again.
Let's see, what else is going on?
Today is Autism Awareness Day and son C, who has an autism spectrum disorder, is vehemently opposed to the entire concept. He explained why very eloquently on his Facebook page, and I won't copy and paste his words here, but I will say he gave me a lot to think about.
Our next-door neighbors to the east have moved away and the new neighbors haven't moved in yet and I am nervous, because I don't like change. Or people. Or people who change. I liked the old neighbors just fine -- they were a couple maybe 10 years older than us whose children were grown and out of the house and whose dog never barked (their cat pooped in my garden though, I'm pretty sure). We know nothing about the new neighbors except that it's a family and the dad is from the same neighboring state as P. What if their children are obnoxious? What if their dog barks? What if they tear out all the beautiful landscaping, like we did when we bought this house? I might need medication to get through this, you guys.
(Incidentally, if any of this sounds incoherent it's because H has come in and interrupted me about 4,783 times since I started typing. Yeah, she is SO TOTALLY going back to school tomorrow. What is it about the sound of fingers on a keyboard that brings children and spouses running? And P wonders why I haven't written that novel yet. HA HA HA.)
In closing, here are some things I've tried and liked lately:
- Yes to Blueberries cleansing facial towelettes (large, soft, non-irritating, they remove all my makeup and they smell nice)
- Covergirl & Olay Tone Rehab foundation (feels and looks lovely on the skin)
- Covergirl Lash Perfection mascara (removes with plain water but doesn't smudge!)
- the Green Machine flavor of Naked juice (looks so gross, tastes so good)
- wearing my hair in a ponytail (it's almost long enough not to need clips, and it's either this or cut it all off again)
- showering at night instead of in the morning (saves time, helps me sleep, and makes a lot more sense during pollenpalooza season)
- Garnier Miracle Skin Perfector B.B. Cream (felt icky on my skin, did not like the fragrance, and the lightest shade is too dark for me)
- Method fabric softener (the pump weirds me out and it doesn't soften as well as my usual Seventh Generation)
- the new Seventh Generation fabric softener bottle (WTF with that redesign, Sev Gen?)
- unsweetened 100% cranberry juice (oy)
* This is NOT a sponsored post. All of the products mentioned were purchased by me with my
Saturday, March 24, 2012
Friday night and Saturday morning
It's really spring here, now. Everything is green. I've bought my herbs and tomato plants. Yesterday the weather was absolutely gorgeous and dinner was cooked 100% on the grill -- sausages, asparagus, potatoes and onions (in the big foil packet), artichokes (in the smaller foil packet), wine for me. Delicious. I will be grilling EVERYTHING from now until it gets too hot, which is usually sometime in July. And then I'll grill everything again from mid-September until the time changes in November and it gets too dark. That's just how I roll.
This morning after dropping H at a theater contest, P and I took the dog to the farmer's market. I just started going again after not going for months and months. I get out of the habit in the fall -- this market is only open on Saturday mornings and we can't do anything then during football/marching season because C has contests every Saturday. Last week I came home with eggs, beets, radishes, asparagus, artichokes (the ones we ate last night, actually), strawberries, mushrooms and broccoli. This week it was eggs, strawberries, asparagus, mushrooms, bloody mary mix, pecans and dog shampoo. And a food truck breakfast from The Peached Tortilla -- chorizo-egg taco for P and bacon jam slider for me. So good!
Now I'm back home drinking an iced coffee. It was damp and foggy and grey up until about 5 minutes ago; now it's sunny and gorgeous again. I think it's going to be a good day.
(All of these photos were taken with my Droid 3 phone using the FX Camera app, ToyCam setting, Dreamy Blue and Vignetting (Soft) filters. NOT a sponsored post; it's a free app I've had forever and I love it.)
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
Oak pollen is bad, m'kay?
Oh, hi! Hello there! I did not mean to disappear for so long, I swear I didn't. It's just that last week my kids were on Spring Break, and this week my mucus membranes are so caked in oak pollen and I am sneezing so often and so violently that it has taken me three hours to type what I've typed here so far. Not much that's supposed to be getting done around here is getting done, you know?
Also I'm still recovering from something very traumatic that happened a couple of weeks ago: P switched us from Time Warner to DirecTV. I know. It's awful. I am the worst person in the world when it comes to change, or learning curves, or things not staying exactly the same forever and ever and ever. I do not like this DirecTV thing, I do not like having to learn it, I do not like how it keeps recording shows I don't want and not recording shows I do want and changing the channel all by itself when I'm watching something I want to watch. I think it might be possessed, or maybe I'm just stupid. I'm pretty much watching all of my TV online now, which I also do not like. Argh.
There are some things I HAVE been liking just fine, though. Like, the bluebonnets are up! I have no photos to show you, alas, because they're all along the highways and I'm bad at taking pictures out the window of a moving car. Especially when I'm the one driving. Plopping your kids down in a field of these suckers for a photo op is kind of a thing down here, but I have never done that with my kids, because hello! HIGHWAY. Moving cars. Death, doom, destruction. Also, bees. *shudder* (Also, my kids are teenagers now and one of them is bigger than me so my kid-plopping days are over before they even began. If you want to hum a few bars of "Sunrise, Sunset" somewhere in here, I won't stop you.)
More things liked recently: two very different books. The first was I Want It Now! by Julie Dawn Cole, the actress who played Veruca Salt in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (that's the one with Gene Wilder, kids)(also known as my favorite movie of all time). The bulk of the book deals with her experiences filming the movie, though she does bookend that bit with the story of her childhood and how she came to be an actress, and the various projects she's done in the 40 or however many years since the movie came out. Really wonderful and fascinating stuff. I kind of fell in love with her. And there are a TON of pictures. I got this book for free on my Kindle Keyboard (it's not free anymore) but went ahead and bought the paperback so I could get a better look at the photos, letters, postcards, etc., of which there are many. However, both the Kindle Keyboard and the paperback are black and white, and some of the photos are actually in color, which I found out by paging through the Kindle version on my laptop. So! If you can find a way to read this sucker on a color screen, do. It's delightful.
The other book I read and loved was Lauren Groff's Arcadia. Oh, how I loved this book. It follows (with some serious time gaps) 50 years in the life of fictional character Bit Stone, from his childhood and adolescence in a '70s hippie commune to his life as a middle-aged father caring for aging parents. Wait, that sounds kind of boring. It probably could be in other hands, but Groff is seriously one of the most lyrical, beautiful writers I've ever read. The whole thing is a bit like a wonderful dream, the kind that comes when you're dozing in the sunshine on a gorgeous balmy day and the sun shining through your eyelids as you nap makes everything look all funny when you open your eyes. It's an absolutely lovely book, but not ultimately a very HAPPY book. More of a melancholy, bittersweet book. Don't let that keep you from reading it, though. I loved it anyway.
In other news, Mark Bittman is confusing.
"This will probably kill you, but here's how you should cook it." Alrighty, then.
(Dear Everyone: Eating meat is not bad for you if your body can't metabolize non-heme iron. In that case, NOT eating meat is really REALLY bad for you. Just saying.)
Okey doke. Back to sneezing and complaining.
Also I'm still recovering from something very traumatic that happened a couple of weeks ago: P switched us from Time Warner to DirecTV. I know. It's awful. I am the worst person in the world when it comes to change, or learning curves, or things not staying exactly the same forever and ever and ever. I do not like this DirecTV thing, I do not like having to learn it, I do not like how it keeps recording shows I don't want and not recording shows I do want and changing the channel all by itself when I'm watching something I want to watch. I think it might be possessed, or maybe I'm just stupid. I'm pretty much watching all of my TV online now, which I also do not like. Argh.
There are some things I HAVE been liking just fine, though. Like, the bluebonnets are up! I have no photos to show you, alas, because they're all along the highways and I'm bad at taking pictures out the window of a moving car. Especially when I'm the one driving. Plopping your kids down in a field of these suckers for a photo op is kind of a thing down here, but I have never done that with my kids, because hello! HIGHWAY. Moving cars. Death, doom, destruction. Also, bees. *shudder* (Also, my kids are teenagers now and one of them is bigger than me so my kid-plopping days are over before they even began. If you want to hum a few bars of "Sunrise, Sunset" somewhere in here, I won't stop you.)
More things liked recently: two very different books. The first was I Want It Now! by Julie Dawn Cole, the actress who played Veruca Salt in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (that's the one with Gene Wilder, kids)(also known as my favorite movie of all time). The bulk of the book deals with her experiences filming the movie, though she does bookend that bit with the story of her childhood and how she came to be an actress, and the various projects she's done in the 40 or however many years since the movie came out. Really wonderful and fascinating stuff. I kind of fell in love with her. And there are a TON of pictures. I got this book for free on my Kindle Keyboard (it's not free anymore) but went ahead and bought the paperback so I could get a better look at the photos, letters, postcards, etc., of which there are many. However, both the Kindle Keyboard and the paperback are black and white, and some of the photos are actually in color, which I found out by paging through the Kindle version on my laptop. So! If you can find a way to read this sucker on a color screen, do. It's delightful.
The other book I read and loved was Lauren Groff's Arcadia. Oh, how I loved this book. It follows (with some serious time gaps) 50 years in the life of fictional character Bit Stone, from his childhood and adolescence in a '70s hippie commune to his life as a middle-aged father caring for aging parents. Wait, that sounds kind of boring. It probably could be in other hands, but Groff is seriously one of the most lyrical, beautiful writers I've ever read. The whole thing is a bit like a wonderful dream, the kind that comes when you're dozing in the sunshine on a gorgeous balmy day and the sun shining through your eyelids as you nap makes everything look all funny when you open your eyes. It's an absolutely lovely book, but not ultimately a very HAPPY book. More of a melancholy, bittersweet book. Don't let that keep you from reading it, though. I loved it anyway.
In other news, Mark Bittman is confusing.
"This will probably kill you, but here's how you should cook it." Alrighty, then.
(Dear Everyone: Eating meat is not bad for you if your body can't metabolize non-heme iron. In that case, NOT eating meat is really REALLY bad for you. Just saying.)
Okey doke. Back to sneezing and complaining.
Friday, March 9, 2012
The bright side
Okay, well:
Happy Friday.
- It's a cold and rainy day.
- My car battery is dead. Which I found out in the cold and rain!
- My fibromyalgia is in flare.
- My cough is back.
- While making breakfast, I accidentally dumped half a tub of organic baby spinach on the garage floor, OMG. (I was not making breakfast in the garage. That's where we keep the refrigerator. It's a long story.)
- It's the last day of school before Spring Break. Which means I don't have to get up at ridiculous o'clock for NINE WHOLE DAYS.
- There is literally NOTHING written on my calendar for today and there is nowhere I have to be.
- I have something like 60 unread books on my Kindle.
- I have Season 1 of Game of Thrones and Season 3 of True Blood on DVD.
- My bed, it is so comfy. And I see no compelling reason not to spend most of today in it.
Happy Friday.
Monday, March 5, 2012
Spring
It's full-on Spring here and the weather has been mostly fantastic. I missed my chance to take photos of bare branches against the winter-grey sky because now everything is either blooming like crazy or leafing out in a green so bright it hurts your eyes. Or both.
I've been grilling dinner pretty much every night and walking the dog pretty much every morning and sneezing my head off and trying to just BREATHE whenever I get a chance, because from now until late May it's going to be one long thrill ride of band concerts and theater competitions and high school course selections and birthdays and standardized testing and summer camp registration. Whew! I kind of wish I hadn't written all that down.
... breathe ... breathe ... breathe ...
In other news:
- Son C bought a trumpet. Yep. He plays tuba in his high school band, and before that he played it three years in middle school, and he has no desire to switch to trumpet, you know, professionally or whatever. He just wanted one and saw a used one on Craigslist that he could afford. This kid can play any instrument you hand him, so it was no surprise that in less than 24 hours he sounded like he'd been playing for a year. I don't know where he gets this freaky savant-like musical talent. I only know he didn't get it from me.
- Daughter H is getting ready to say goodbye to middle school and hello to high school, which I sort of can't believe. Didn't I just give birth to her a couple of years ago? She already has a dress for the 8th grade formal, which is like a mini-prom, and she's picked out all her classes for next year and her graduation track and everything. So super exciting. H is a planner and she has pretty much her entire life mapped out. I hope she lets me visit her at her summer home in Paris someday. I mean, SOMEONE will have to dust all those Oscar, Emmy and Tony awards, right?
- I've been reading House of Thieves, a short story collection by Kaui Hart Hemmings, and it's pretty great. Hemmings wrote The Descendants, the book on which the movie was based, as an expansion of one of the stories in this collection and boy howdy, I haven't seen the movie or read the book but I can hear George Clooney's voice delivering every line of his character's dialog in the short story. That was some perfect casting, right there. I'm not sure what I'll read next but I am SUPER excited about Lauren Groff's Arcadia, which will be out later this month. I haven't been this excited about a book since Joshilyn Jackson's A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty, which was excellent, by the way.
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