Okay, it's your chance to say something. Several years ago, I read a book called The Eyre Affair. To make a complicated story short, let's just say a "real person" was able to read themselves into a book--to become part of the world of books.
Let's say you could do it. And, leaving out the Bible, what book would you want to be in? And why?
I guess I should start. Nope, it wouldn't be one of my own books because I can live there already. I'd love to say Persuasion, but I've worn one of those dresses--yuck. I'd like to try out one of the Harry Potter books, but I'm a bit of a whimp and would prefer not to face Voldemort unless I had to. So, honestly, I'd probably read myself into Haroun and the Sea of Stories. It's absurd, ironic, and gut-bustingly funny.
What about you? I look forward to reading your thoughts in the comments section.
p.s. Thanks to Nathan Bransford who had the idea.
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Ten Top Addendum
(See previous post, Top Ten.)
More GI Joes.
I don't know if these were supposed to be pleas for repair...
......or torture devices.
More GI Joes.
I don't know if these were supposed to be pleas for repair...
......or torture devices.
Monday, July 13, 2009
Top Ten
Top Ten Reasons You Know You’re a Mother of Boys (Sad but true)
1. When you notice that your dining room chandelier has a GI Joe dangling from it.
2. When you find that the boat they’re using to float their playmobile men is actually an athletic cup.
3. When you can’t identify what is actually in your son’s pocket.
4. When you step on legos during the middle of the night on your way to the bathroom.
5. When you realize that soda was invented so that boys could have burping contests.
6. When you can’t find the “extra” taco shells and discover your son ate 22 tacos in one sitting.
7. When you explain to your child that showering once a week isn’t going to cut it.
8. When you find the kitchen “help” having a fencing match with steak knives.
9. When they can quote ERAs, Ks, BBs, and RBIs of their favorite major league baseball players from memory, but can’t remember where the hamper is.
10. When you walk into the kitchen and say to figure standing in front of the open refrigerator door, “You’re eating butter!?”
1. When you notice that your dining room chandelier has a GI Joe dangling from it.
2. When you find that the boat they’re using to float their playmobile men is actually an athletic cup.
3. When you can’t identify what is actually in your son’s pocket.
4. When you step on legos during the middle of the night on your way to the bathroom.
5. When you realize that soda was invented so that boys could have burping contests.
6. When you can’t find the “extra” taco shells and discover your son ate 22 tacos in one sitting.
7. When you explain to your child that showering once a week isn’t going to cut it.
8. When you find the kitchen “help” having a fencing match with steak knives.
9. When they can quote ERAs, Ks, BBs, and RBIs of their favorite major league baseball players from memory, but can’t remember where the hamper is.
10. When you walk into the kitchen and say to figure standing in front of the open refrigerator door, “You’re eating butter!?”
Thursday, July 9, 2009
United Breaks Guitars
This post is for everyone who has ever been abused by corporate America. For example, it took me months to get Compaq to fix a brand new laptop--I got the run-around, the pass-the-buck, and the it must be your fault, not ours. It's no wonder that companies are failing. If they can't be responsible, they don't deserve to survive.
Enjoy this video "United Breaks Guitars." A creative person takes out his frustration with the irresponsibility of United Airlines.
(Many thanks to my tech guru, Ariel, who showed me how to embed and resize U-tube videos--she used her Texas-Instruments-I'm-way-cool-at-math-calculator to reduce dimensions without making everything look weird.)
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
The Great Under-Thirty Conspiracy
Do you know what I hate/abhor/become homicidal about? I loathe being twenty minutes into writing an email or blog post, and then for some reason my finger touches the wrong button and whatever text I’ve written disappears into the electronic abyss. Of course, there’s an “undo” button, but I type very fast and by the time the text vanishes I’ve typed a couple of letters. When I hit the undo button, a “d” or an “s” pops up.
I’ve spoken to the technological geniuses of my home about the situation. Their response is “you shouldn’t type so fast.” Right, that makes me feels better. This morning I was halfway through a blog post and the computer ate it. Who programs these text-eaters? I imagine it’s some skinny kid who’s almost 18 and has been working at Microsoft for 5 years. I don’t know why he wants to make my life miserable. But I’m guessing it’s something like the following: he stayed up too late and his mom had to wake him up to get to work on time. She had to nag him to shower. Then for breakfast she gave him oatmeal instead of Coco Puffs. Then, horror of horrors she ran out of the good coffee and made Folgers instead. (Being forced to drink Folgers would do it for my kids. Folgers would make them ready to lock and load. Actually, when we run out of good coffee, my children send very whiney emails to my mother begging for good coffee since their mother is poisoning them with the cheap stuff.)
At any rate, back to our skinny programmer. He determines to punish all fast typists who are over the age of thirty, of whom his mother is one. So he programs in a “short cut,” which is something along the lines of “double shift Z” or “shift alt.” Some combination of keys that pre-arthritic fingers stumble over. Then he laughs and tells all of his buddies.
A child (Jacob) reading over my shoulder just announced to me, “Hey, Mom, the short cut to delete chunks of text is ‘shift, page-down, and then hit any other key.’” How does he know that?! We don’t have a Short-Cuts Manual lying around the house. I’m sure it must be some great under thirty conspiracy.
I’ve spoken to the technological geniuses of my home about the situation. Their response is “you shouldn’t type so fast.” Right, that makes me feels better. This morning I was halfway through a blog post and the computer ate it. Who programs these text-eaters? I imagine it’s some skinny kid who’s almost 18 and has been working at Microsoft for 5 years. I don’t know why he wants to make my life miserable. But I’m guessing it’s something like the following: he stayed up too late and his mom had to wake him up to get to work on time. She had to nag him to shower. Then for breakfast she gave him oatmeal instead of Coco Puffs. Then, horror of horrors she ran out of the good coffee and made Folgers instead. (Being forced to drink Folgers would do it for my kids. Folgers would make them ready to lock and load. Actually, when we run out of good coffee, my children send very whiney emails to my mother begging for good coffee since their mother is poisoning them with the cheap stuff.)
At any rate, back to our skinny programmer. He determines to punish all fast typists who are over the age of thirty, of whom his mother is one. So he programs in a “short cut,” which is something along the lines of “double shift Z” or “shift alt.” Some combination of keys that pre-arthritic fingers stumble over. Then he laughs and tells all of his buddies.
A child (Jacob) reading over my shoulder just announced to me, “Hey, Mom, the short cut to delete chunks of text is ‘shift, page-down, and then hit any other key.’” How does he know that?! We don’t have a Short-Cuts Manual lying around the house. I’m sure it must be some great under thirty conspiracy.
Monday, July 6, 2009
4th of July Explosion
Last Friday I brewed some Oatmeal Stout. Some for friends, and some for us. (Those dark beers have all the heart-healthy benefits of wine, which Calvin needs because our insurance won’t pay for cholesterol meds though they will pay for heart attack care. The meds seem cheaper to me, but hey, I’m not an insurance executive. The dark beers are good for me because they are about the only thing besides heavy-duty meds that prevent bone loss, a risk for me because I have tiny bones.) Anyway, back to brewing. I brewed, chilled, and poured the wort into the primary fermenter. (Wort is the beer base consisting of water in which various grains have steeped, boiled malts, hops, Irish moss, etc.)
Then, I pitched the yeast. Cal and I have different opinions on yeast. I like the dried yeast—it takes longer to get going, but it’s reliable. Cal likes the pitchable active yeast because it’s faster and more authentic. It is also HUGELY unreliable. In other words, when you pitch 1 billion live yeast cultures into 5 gallons of malty delight, they go crazy. I pitched the yeast and only muttered slightly under my breath. I put in the air lock. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the chemistry of yeast, here’s a primer. Just like bread yeast, brewer’s yeast digests the sugars and releases carbon dioxide and alcohol. (That wonderful smell of baking bread is a combination of ozone and alcohol—but with bread the alcohol evaporates.) The air lock in the fermenter allows the carbon dioxide to escape while preventing the beer from being contaminated with wild yeast. There’s yeast all around us in this wide world.
Of course, 1 billion active yeast cultures produce a lot of carbon dioxide. Before we went to friends’ house for homemade ice cream and fireworks, we checked the beer. Everything was proceeding smoothly. The airlock was releasing the carbon dioxide properly.
We had a lovely time eating ice cream and watching the fireworks. Then, we went home. The children were the first ones in the kitchen. I heard “OH. Wow.”
Needless to say, 1 Billion live yeast cultures release A LOT of carbon dioxide, enough to easily overwhelm an airlock. My first mistake was inserting the air lock tightly into the primary fermenter. If it hadn’t been in quite so tightly, the CO2 would have just blown out the air lock. But, it didn’t. Instead, the pressure built and built...until the lid blew off the fermenter. Imagine trub (the fancy word for yeast by-products, which really ought to be called “yeast scum”) all over the floor, the cabinets, the WHITE curtains, the counters, the stove, and the ceiling. Yep, if it hadn’t been so funny, I might have been frustrated. But trub on the ceiling really is funny.
Cal helped me clean up and then moved the fermenter to the laundry room. Later, just before we went to bed, I decided to check the fermenter one last time. The lid, which is supposed to be convcave, was convex. I decided to release the pressure by wiggling out the air lock. Let’s just say that 1 billion live yeast cultures' by-products pouring out of a small opening travel with great force. I got a faceful of trub. I suppose if I owned a salon I could charge lots of money for yeast-extract facials (read “a faceful of yeast scum”), but I don’t. So, I washed it off and went to bed.
Then, I pitched the yeast. Cal and I have different opinions on yeast. I like the dried yeast—it takes longer to get going, but it’s reliable. Cal likes the pitchable active yeast because it’s faster and more authentic. It is also HUGELY unreliable. In other words, when you pitch 1 billion live yeast cultures into 5 gallons of malty delight, they go crazy. I pitched the yeast and only muttered slightly under my breath. I put in the air lock. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the chemistry of yeast, here’s a primer. Just like bread yeast, brewer’s yeast digests the sugars and releases carbon dioxide and alcohol. (That wonderful smell of baking bread is a combination of ozone and alcohol—but with bread the alcohol evaporates.) The air lock in the fermenter allows the carbon dioxide to escape while preventing the beer from being contaminated with wild yeast. There’s yeast all around us in this wide world.
Of course, 1 billion active yeast cultures produce a lot of carbon dioxide. Before we went to friends’ house for homemade ice cream and fireworks, we checked the beer. Everything was proceeding smoothly. The airlock was releasing the carbon dioxide properly.
We had a lovely time eating ice cream and watching the fireworks. Then, we went home. The children were the first ones in the kitchen. I heard “OH. Wow.”
Needless to say, 1 Billion live yeast cultures release A LOT of carbon dioxide, enough to easily overwhelm an airlock. My first mistake was inserting the air lock tightly into the primary fermenter. If it hadn’t been in quite so tightly, the CO2 would have just blown out the air lock. But, it didn’t. Instead, the pressure built and built...until the lid blew off the fermenter. Imagine trub (the fancy word for yeast by-products, which really ought to be called “yeast scum”) all over the floor, the cabinets, the WHITE curtains, the counters, the stove, and the ceiling. Yep, if it hadn’t been so funny, I might have been frustrated. But trub on the ceiling really is funny.
Cal helped me clean up and then moved the fermenter to the laundry room. Later, just before we went to bed, I decided to check the fermenter one last time. The lid, which is supposed to be convcave, was convex. I decided to release the pressure by wiggling out the air lock. Let’s just say that 1 billion live yeast cultures' by-products pouring out of a small opening travel with great force. I got a faceful of trub. I suppose if I owned a salon I could charge lots of money for yeast-extract facials (read “a faceful of yeast scum”), but I don’t. So, I washed it off and went to bed.
Friday, July 3, 2009
More Books
Okay, here’s another blog on youth adult books. We do read-alouds in our family. This means that most nights (and sometimes breakfasts and lunches if the book is really good) we get together with some treat, anything from a pot of tea to chocolate to ice cream, and I read aloud. Yes, I even do the voices until my throat is scratchy, usually day 6 or 7 of the read-aloud. Currently, we’re reading the book Queste, which is actually, middle grade. It’s in the Septimus Heap series. Even though it’s middle grade, my family indulges me reading it because the characters are engaging, the writing is good (though the third book was not up to the quality of the rest of the series), and the books are witty.
Before Queste, I started reading Max the newest in the James Patterson Maximum Ride series, but the kids had a conniption. The first couple of books were good—the premise of mutant avian kids while not quite believable was fun, and I genuinely liked the characters. But then Patterson started beating his environmental drum so loud it ruined the story, at least for us. One of the cardinal rules of writing is “Don’t preach—tell a story.”
One more good book, Found, Book 1 of The Missing Series by Margaret Petersen Haddix. It also is middle grade. But hey, a good book is a good book, and I already told you that there aren't too many good YA books that aren't girly books. At any rate, I don't want to be a spoiler for Found, but just imagine that you aren't who you think you are...and neither are some others. Enjoy!
Before Queste, I started reading Max the newest in the James Patterson Maximum Ride series, but the kids had a conniption. The first couple of books were good—the premise of mutant avian kids while not quite believable was fun, and I genuinely liked the characters. But then Patterson started beating his environmental drum so loud it ruined the story, at least for us. One of the cardinal rules of writing is “Don’t preach—tell a story.”
One more good book, Found, Book 1 of The Missing Series by Margaret Petersen Haddix. It also is middle grade. But hey, a good book is a good book, and I already told you that there aren't too many good YA books that aren't girly books. At any rate, I don't want to be a spoiler for Found, but just imagine that you aren't who you think you are...and neither are some others. Enjoy!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)