Sponsored Schtuff
More Cooking Schtuff
RSS Schtuff
The Recipes
Main dishes. Side dishes. Desserts.
Over 155 recipes for you to peruse - and more coming all the time!
The Photographs
Pictures, pictures and more pictures.
Join me in my journey with a Nikon D90 (and a very tolerant family).
The Rest
Spin Cycle. RTT. Family.
Click here for a sampling of everything else. A little of this, a little of that...
Archive for the ‘Literature’ Category
When Beloved’s out of town, our schedules don’t change much. I don’t cook as much or as elaborately. The Young One needs a little more prodding to do his chores. I work longer hours. The dog whines for attention a little bit more. The house is quieter. But, for the most part, things ramble on as usual.
Except at night.
I’ll be the first person to admit that I have trouble sleeping when Beloved’s not home. I have trouble settling down and have trouble staying asleep; I also tend to get up earlier in the mornings. Beloved calls it “empty bed syndrome” and claims he suffers from it on the nights insomnia (and his snoring) send me to the sofa in the living room. And it could very well be what it is…at least partly.
It also could be that I’m afraid of the dark.
I know it’s silly; I know it’s irrational. Especially when you consider that whatever monster under my bed would probably eat me whether I was alone in my bedroom or not. But the dark doesn’t bother me when Beloved is home, even on the rare occasion I go to bed before him. I just have an overactive imagination – possibilities have always intrigued me, often far more than reality does. And my imagination tells me that my husband will keep all the icky monsters away.
Either that, or the man just doesn’t give me enough time to worry about whatever might be living under our bed.
I don’t think much about my fear of the dark until I find myself alone in it; then it kicks into overdrive and every scary movie I’ve seen and scary book I’ve ever read begins traipsing its way through my brain. It’s times like that when I wish I’d never watched movies like The Ring. ‘Cause that little girl crawling out of the television at the end of the film?
She is out to get me.
I don’t think Beloved was aware of my fear of the dark until recently when I mentioned that I make sure the closet door is firmly closed and the bathroom light is left on at night when he’s out of town. I mentioned this with some trepidation, because the man is RABID about lights left on all night, but he was more amused than anything.
“Really??” he asked. His imagination is somewhat different from mine – he’s perfectly fine with the possibility of cosmic strings and magnetic monopoles, but pubescent young women chucking film directors out of windows and down long flights of stairs? Pshaw, he says. I, on the other hand, was tempted to cancel my account with Verizon after reading Stephen King’s Cell.
Ah, well. I’ve lived 46 years without being eaten by a monster, or even threatened by one, and I’m sure I never will be.
Let’s just keep that bathroom light on and ignore the smell of garlic, shall we?
This week’s Spin Cycle is “Favorite Books” and since I’ve written about this subject before and am yet again (still?) overwhelmed at work, I have decided to repost this. Written nearly a year ago, the first half of the post is still relevant. The second half? Well, let’s just say that I read the saga I mentioned, and was singularly unimpressed. In fact, the books in question alternately amused, disgusted and pissed me off. Would I recommend them? Not for their intended audience, no.
~~~~~~
Further Proof I Am Weird
If any is needed.
I love to read. I’ll read just about anything – books, magazines, blogs, cereal boxes, junk mail…even the Podunk Suppository, when I’m in need of a good laugh or feel a burning desire to bathe in provincial ignorance. To say the local newspaper isn’t exactly a hotbed of unbiased, professional journalism is something of an understatement. Oh, the culture shock…
But I digress.
Mostly I read books, a passion Beloved and Darling Daughter both share. Two walls of our family room are literally covered in books, and our next large purchase in the way of furnishings will be custom-built bookshelves.
Before I met him, Beloved read non-fiction almost exclusively. Oh, he’d read everything Ayn Rand ever published, including her cumbersome novels, as well as a good many of Gore Vidal’s historical novels, but that was about it. And while I have introduced him to the likes of Stephen King and Jean Auel, non-fiction remains his chief source of reading material – because of that, we have books on such diverse subjects as economics, American History, philosophy, religion and quantum physics on our bookshelves.
I read my share of non-fiction, although it is mostly in the form of cookbooks (which are a marvelous source of information on other cultures), web development and associated software, biographies, paleoanthropology, medieval history, art and film, but to be honest, most of my reading material is pretty damn plebeian. I don’t read “mainstream” literature very often, although I own everything ever written by Stephen King, Jean Auel and J.K. Rowling, but most of the books I own are of very specific genres, and the authors I read reflect that: Robert B. Parker, J.R.R. Tolkein, Philip Jose Farmer, Anya Seton, Kenneth Robeson, Ed McBain. We do have a lot of the “classics” on our shelves as well, which simply means that when the kids are required to read them for school we don’t have to hunt them down (nor are they permitted to get away with Cliff Notes). We’re also fans of Shakespeare and have several volumes devoted to his works and the analysis of them.
Not that I’m claiming weirdness because I read – I’m well aware that I’m not alone in my love of books; it’s more a matter of what I read, which is sometimes pretty damn obscure…even if I am poised to read all of Stephenie Meyer’s teenage vampire novels (hey, you can’t pass up what’s being hailed as the “next Harry Potter”). (*Note – yeah, you can.*)
One of the reasons I’m only poised to read Twilight and it’s sequels is because of Beverly Lewis. The covers of her books claim she is a NY Times bestselling author, but I’d never heard of her until I moved to Ohio. Basically, she writes fiction (I suppose you could call them “romances”) about the Amish. I’ve seen her books on countless shelves in stores down in Amish country, where they are prominently displayed; in Podunk, she’s been relegated to the tiny “Christian fiction” section of Borders. Her books are a wealth of information about the Amish, who are absolutely fascinating…at least as far as I’m concerned. She also writes very well, and really knows how to tell a story. So much so, she has me – the least religious of people – picking up each new book in the Abram’s Daughters series, exclaiming things like, “Oh, I hope that bitch of a sister of hers gets what’s coming to her in this book!”
Probably not exactly in keeping with the steadfastly held Amish beliefs of forgiveness and pacifism.
And yes, I am ALL caught up in what amounts to an Amish soap opera. In fact, I finished the third in the five book series last night, and since I found myself out and about today at lunch, I decided to see if they had the remaining two on hand at the local Borders. They didn’t have both, but they did have the fourth, so I’m good for at least another two or three days (they’re very quick reads). While I was there, I picked up the first two Stephenie Meyer books – I’d have bought all four, but they were out of the third book in the series and I’m positively anal about things like that.
Checking out was interesting.
Clerk: Did you find everything you needed?
Me: Well, you didn’t have all of the books I wanted in stock, no, but you had enough.
Clerk: Oh, we can look for you – what did you want?
Me: The third in this series of vampire books and the last in this series of Amish romances.
Clerk: …Oh, well…I suppose we can check…are these gifts?
Me: No, they’re for me.
Clerk (eyeing me warily): Okay…(pushes a piece of paper and a pencil towards me)…just give us your name and phone number and we can notify you when they arrive…
Me: Nah, that’s okay – I’ll just check back in a few days; I’m still looking for “Nuclear Armament for Dummies” and the collected works of Anton LaVey.
I don’t know WHY he ran off like that…
So, we’ve got the new bookshelves up, locked and loaded. For some people, new bookshelves might just mean putting books on them, but not us. Nope – we must make a full-blown production out of it. Fortunately, the men who delivered them set them up where I directed and bolted them together, so all we had to do was position the removable shelves and fill it with books.
Easier said than done.
I left most of the job to Beloved, because he’s positively anal about his books far more organized than I am; I helped out when he yelled at me to come into the living room needed, because I am a clumsy twit who can hurt myself as well as the house in situations like this was busy doing something else that I’ll go into in just a minute.
This is what they looked like right after we started – Beloved had only gotten the history section up:
This second picture is for perspective – you can’t tell they’re 15 feet long from end to end in the first.
It quickly became apparent, for Beloved anyway (I am a complete moron when it comes to anything spacial), that we were going to have a lot of extra space after we got all of the books on them. I was astounded – I had visions of us agonizing over which books we were going to have to cull and take down to the basement to reside on the old shelves. It also left us with a dilemma – how do we fill the empty spaces?
We stood back and scrutinized Beloved’s our handiwork, and after a few moments consideration, Beloved said the wonderful words:
“We’re going to have to go to the craft store, aren’t we?”
Well, twist my arm; I may be a clumsy twit with no sense of direction or size/space, but I am a great decorator. And I love the craft store, which just so happens to have a new home furnishings addition and garden center. Woo-hoo! So off we trot to the craft store, and we return with vases, baskets and enough fake greenery to decorate a Rain Forest Café.
And this is what we ended up with:
You can see the greenery garland Beloved put across the top, as well as the arrangement in the basket on the shelves (Beloved’s handiwork) and the arrangement in the vase on the table at the end (mine). We also had another empty shelf, so I took some of my Jim Shores out of the curio and put them out as well.
Which brings me to the lovely pictures. If you care remember from last Monday, I was reduced to taking photos with my phone, for I could not find the power cord to my little Sony Cybershot point-and-shoot camera. By Saturday, I still couldn’t find it and was getting horribly frustrated – I didn’t want to be reduced to taking pictures of the furniture (to say nothing of our trip to Washington D.C. with Miss Jacki and The Young One next week) with my damn cell phone. So Saturday morning we walked into Best Buy to purchase a power strip (the shelves cover the outlet we use on that side of the room) and a couple of other minor necessities, when I wandered over to the camera section.
I’ve been wanting a “real” camera for quite some time; I enjoy taking pictures and editing them in Photoshop. And while I’ve had reasonable success printing some of the pictures taken with my little Sony, I’ve been wanting to make it a more serious hobby – especially with Jolly’s Little Bundle Of Joy on the way (yes, I can already tell you I’m going to be one of THOSE grandparents). So after a brief consultation with one of the sales people, I found Beloved perusing the jump drives and dragged him over to the cameras waited patiently for him to finish his shopping before I asked him to look at cameras with me.
After a further, more in-depth, consultation with yet another sales person (Jared at the North Podunk Best Buy, you are a GEM and they don’t pay you nearly enough) I walked out with a brand-new Nikon D90 digital SLRS (Me, practically sobbing: “Thank you! Thank you for letting me get my new camera!” Beloved, cheerfully: “No problem dear – now you’ll NEVER HAVE TO BUY ANOTHER ONE.”).
So, faithful readers, now you get to be bored shitless join me on my journey as I learn about things like exposure and aperture and shutter speed and ISO and depth of field and perspective. Aren’t you thrilled???
Okay, maybe not so much. But I am, and I promise not to bore you.
Too much.
But I took a picture of a bowl of Reese’s Pieces last night.
Don’t believe me?
One if by land. Two if by sea. We’re getting four.
They must coming via hot air balloon.
Okay, lame attempt at humor aside, Saturday we were planning out the rest of our extended weekend which was supposed to include lots of gardening, when we got a call asking if someone would be home this Friday to receive delivery of our new bookcases. Beloved will be out of town, so I’ll have to be at home when they come.
I’m just devastated.
At any rate, that meant our gardening plans had to be postponed (again, I’m just devastated) so we could take the old bookcases down to the basement to make room for the new ones, which are considerably larger and taller than our old, cheap ones. Which means we had to do something with all of the books on the old bookshelves. If you’re going, “So?” you simply don’t understand how many books we have.
Allow me to illustrate. Oh, and I apologize for the poor picture quality; I cannot find the charger for my camera, so these were taken with my phone.
This is just the non-fiction, folks, stacked along one side of our dining room. By genre, no less – reference books, books on economics, books on economic theory, books on American history, constitutional history, world history, medieval history. We have your general science, anatomy, physics, quantum physics, anthropology, paleoanthropology; there is politics, philosophy and a section devoted to fun pastimes – card games, word games and having babies. (How the hell did that get there?!?) There is sociology, biology, and geology. Down at the end of the rows is an anachronistic stack of the classic hardbacks we picked up the last time we were at Half Price Books up in Cleveland.
This is a little less than half of the fiction. For some reason Beloved stacked my collection of autobiographies in this section (?) and in the foreground is my small collection of graphic novels, mostly Batman and Wolverine, since they’re my favorite comic book characters (we won’t go into my disappointment about the new Wolverine movie being universally panned right now).
This is more of the fiction – a lot of this is Robert B. Parker, Stephen King and Anya Seton. Yes, I’m fully aware of how weird I am.
This is what is remaining of the fiction, hurled placed on an old shelf in the guest room upstairs by The Young One. It’s mostly mindless paperbacks – fantasy, science fiction, the few romances I own and duplicates of books collected by both Beloved and myself. On the left is a pile of clothes waiting to go to Goodwill and on the left is Darling Daughter’s Barbie collection, along with a few Madam Alexander dolls I bought for Miss Jacki when she was much younger. Yes, the walls are really that hideous shade of purple. It was that color when we bought the house and I just haven’t gotten around to painting it yet because I don’t go in there very often. It’s one of those “out of sight, out of mind” things.
Of course, once we got the shelves down in the basement, I saw how filthy the carpet, heating grates and walls were back there, so we spent a good amount of time cleaning. Now Beloved is pestering me to paint at least that wall of the family room since it’s bare this afternoon, so I guess I’ll head on out to Home Depot and look at paint colors. While I’m there, I’ll also look at paint for the dining room, since we’ve been wanting to paint below the chair rails ever since we got the new furniture in there. Oh, the joys of home ownership.
Once we’ve got the bookshelves up and filled again next weekend – although how we’ll fit them all on the new shelves, as big as they are, I don’t know – I’ll take more pictures and post them.
Hope you’re having a lovely holiday weekend, y’all.
There will be no Money in the Bank post today. My most sincere and abject apologies to Smart Mouth Broad…but did I mention we decided to buy the bookshelves?
For those of you who might have missed it, we have been debating on whether to buy some solid oak, hand-crafted bookshelves from some lovely Amish guy who does stuff like that or a stupidly expensive 200-pound ceramic smoker/grill.
The bookshelves won out. So, a couple of weekends ago we toddled down to the Amish furniture store and ordered them. They’ll take 10 – 12 weeks to be completed (these are BIG bookshelves), but that’s okay because it gives us an opportunity to decide which books we’re going to keep in the living room on our pretty new shelves and which will be relegated to the basement on our old, tired and mismatched bookshelves.
Yes, we have that many books.
So, we found ourselves in Half Price Books in Cleveland Saturday afternoon where I bee-lined it to the cookbook section and Beloved bee-lined it to the non-fiction section; I emerged with two of Julia Child’s cookbooks, a cookbook of wok recipes and The Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink, a fascinating compilation of articles and essays on just about everything to do with how we eat and drink in the U.S. Beloved got a book on Oswald, one on Nixon and a couple of other things that I’m sure will put me to sleep in no time flat are equally riveting. After that we mosied over to the “literature” section where I found both an Anya Seton and a Robert B. Parker Spenser novel I didn’t own (“I didn’t know there were such things,” observed Beloved) and he got more insomnia cures riveting material by Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal.
Then we looked up and saw…THEM. On the top of the shelves, row upon row of classic books, in excellent condition (“I don’t think these were ever opened!” marvels Beloved) and instead of wearing jackets or dust covers, each was ensconced in the niftiest little box/case you ever saw. We gasped as our eyes widened and we clutched each other. Then, at the same time, we both said:
“Oh, those would look SO COOL on our new shelves!”
Because we’re nerdish like that.
So we began pulling them down. Or rather I bellowed squeeled things like “OHMIGOD LOOK AT THAT TWO-VOLUME EDITION OF GONE WITH THE WIND” and “I MUST HAVE THOSE THREE COORDINATING VOLUMES OF ALL THE SHERLOCK HOLMES STORIES” and “HOLY COW THAT COPY OF GRIMMS FAIRY TALES IS GORGEOUS” and Beloved pulled them down, because he’s 6’1″ and I’m only 5′ tall.
All in all, we walked out of there with two huge boxes of books. And we were just as pleased as punch, because we’re nerdish like that. Afterward we went and checked into our hotel and then went to go see B.B. King, which was something of an adventure that I’ll write about later. (Let’s just suffice to say that at 83, the man can still belt out a song.) And as planned the next day we spent several hours touring the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, which was also a great deal of fun (I’ll write more about that later, too). At one point, we strolled into the museum gift shop.
Where we saw…THEM.
A set of polished bookends made from petrified wood found on the Oregon/Nevada border. We gasped as our eyes widened and we clutched each other. Then, at the same time, we both said:
“Oh, those would look SO COOL on our new shelves!”
Because we’re nerdish like that.
So we spent waaaaaaaaay too much money this weekend for me to participate in anything that has to do with actually saving it.
And petrified wood is freaking heavy.