Home again, home again

We had a lovely five days off. It was cool--even cold--but it didn't rain, so it was bearable. Bob would get up early in the morning and go out and fish while I stayed in bed, then he'd come back a couple of hours later and we'd go out to breakfast, then we'd take a drive somewhere, or he'd fish some more while I sat on the bank in a folding chair and read or knitted. I had packed a tote bag with yarn and books--my two indispensibles, my talismans against boredom--and I was perfectly happy.

We ate breakfast every morning at the Bennet Spring Dining Lodge; we ate dinner there one night, ate at Applebee's in Lebanon one evening, drove into Springfield and had dinner with Bob's friend Phil and his daughter Laura last night. We saw Serenity one afternoon--it was wonderful. The whole time we were away was just great. I love this place so much. I'm so comfortable there, and we have such great memories. We've been going there for 30 years! We spent our honeymoon there, in a pup tent, showering in the public showers, Bob fishing, then cooking fish over a campfire.

We don't camp anymore, though. We had booked a kitchenette unit at the motel where we were staying, but it was only available for two nights; we had to move to a regular room for the rest of our stay. It was annoying, but the second room turned out to be nicer than the first one, really. We really didn't need the kitchenette--we weren't going to be doing any cooking--but those units are larger and it's nice to have the extra room. The room we moved to on Friday was almost as large, though, and seemed newer, or at least better cared for.

Unfortuntely, though, they were having problems with the cable television. The first room only got three television channels--two fuzzy local network channels and ESPN. Which was fine, really, since I don't care much either way about television and at least Bob could watch sports. But then the second room got three channels, too--two fuzzy local network channels and CNN. Which was crummy. No one wants to watch news all evening long, and there were games on that Bob would have liked to have watched, so that was disappointing. He watched it as long as he could stand it, then asked if I had any books that he would like to read.

I had been catching up on Jim Butcher's Dresden Files books. Harry Dresden is a wizard who lives in Chicago and fights supernatural crime with the help of a policewoman friend and various other cohorts, supernatural and otherwise (a vampire, a werewolf, a disembodied spirit, etc.) I'd read the first three a couple of years ago: Storm Front, Fool Moon and Grave Peril; then I just couldn't get into the fourth one, Summer Knight. I'd started to read it a couple of times, but found it hard going. Then I saw that there was a new one out in hardback, the seventh book, Dead Beat, and I put it on the request list at the library.

Then I figured I'd better get with it and get caught up so that I would be reading them in order. So I took Summer Knight, along with the fifth (Death Masks) and sixth (Blood Rites) books in the series with me, and read them all while we were gone. Summer Knight picked up after awhile, although it's still probably my least favorite. Death Masks was very good--I enjoyed the story more--and that was the one that I gave to Bob to read. He read the entire thing last night, in three or four hours. I'm not as fast a reader as him, although I guess I did read about one a day.

Anyway, now I'm up to speed and ready for Dead Beat whenever it's ready. I'm next on the list, so it shouldn't be too long. I guess if Bob is really interested in the series, I might end up buying it. He wants to go back and read them from the first so he can see how the characters develop, and obviously that would be the ideal way to do it. Although a lot of times I'll read the latest installment of a series just to see if I like it enough to go back and start from the beginning. What fun, though, to find a new series character that you enjoy and get to go back and read five or six (or more) books all at once.

It's always fun, too, to have Bob read something that I've read. It doesn't happen all that often. It was nice to sit in the room with him, both of us reading, and hear him chuckle over a humorous passage, or have him ask, "Who's Bob?" (Bob the Skull -- an "air spirit"/Harry's "research assistant" who resides in a skull on a shelf in Dresden's workroom) or ask him, "did you read about the Archive yet?"

The books are apparently going to be made into a Sci Fi Channel television show next year, according to this article in Variety, produced by Nicolas Cage:

Story follows Harry Dresden, a wizard who makes his living as a Chicago-based private eye. Using his extraordinary abilities to see the paranormal forces behind crimes, Dresden helps the police solve their more baffling cases.

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October is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month

Couple of things

As I mentioned over in the Weblog, I've been having a terrific time building my library at LibraryThing. Liora introduced me to it, and I've been entering books whenever I think about it -- right now it's mostly books that are either within my eyesight either at home or at work, or are ones that I just think of randomly, and remember that I own. I'm up to about 150 now, I think.

One of the cool features of LibraryThing is the ability to see other peoples' libraries; one feaure that I particularly like is sorting them by similarity, so I can peruse people who have a lot of books that I also have, and maybe find some new books that I might enjoy by virtue of the fact that we appear to share interests. It doesn't always work that way, of course, but it's sort of like being able to look through someone else's bookshelves and getting an idea of their personality through the books they own.

My bookshelf is here; if anyone builds a library there (it's free for up to 200 books, $10 for more than 200), I'd love it if you'd send me the link to your library so that I could add you to my list of "watched" users.

Bob and I are going down to Bennett Spring for a few days so he can trout fish and I can knit and read and hopefully relax a little bit. I won't be posting anything here until we get back (I don't think the motel we're staying at even has phones, but I intend to post some pictures at the Mobile Blog from the (cell) phone periodically.

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October is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month

Halloween surprises

I had the best surprise when I got home tonight!

When I called Bob to tell him I was in the car getting ready to come home, he said I had a box from Yankee Candles. Okay, actually, what I thought he said was, "You have a package from Naked Candles." I said, "What? Naked Candles? I have a package from Naked Candles?" and he said, "No! Yankee Candles." "Oh," I said. "I don't remember ordering anything from them, either."

Then I thought, well, I remember looking at the site a couple of weeks ago, and thinking about ordering some things . . . could I have placed an order and forgotten? Could I have put some stuff in my shopping cart and somehow managed to order them without even intending to? It was a mystery. But I figured even if I had ordered something accidentally (not likely), it would be okay, because I adore Yankee Candles.

But no! It was a surprise! It was a darling little black cat tealight holder with a box of yummy "Witches Brew" scented tealights, two amber colored glass candle holders with copper outer holders pierced with stars, and a bag of "Trick or Treat" scented votives, all from my friend Val in Indiana. I've never met Val, but we've corresponded for years, and she sent me this surprise out of the blue because she knows I love Halloween. I was actually having kind of a bad day, but that snapped me right out of it.

I think I'm going to take the little black cat to work with me and put it on my desk in my office. My office is looking really cool lately. I've got two light-up jack-o'lanterns, this sign on my door:

Clings on the window:

and you can just barely see the Halloween garland above the white board in this picture.

Kurt came in this morning and said, "Your office is really scary!"

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October is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month

Food and opera

This entry at The Traveler's Lunchbox made me remember a lot of things about my childhood that had to do with food. Nothing as interesting or odd as corn chip and ketchup sandwiches, but we did have peanut and banana sandwiches, one of my dad's specialties (not fried, like Elvis', though!).

My dad also made Jell-O for us when we were sick, using orange juice for part of the liquid, which makes it kind of a different texture, somehow thicker, almost chewy. My grandmother would make sugar sandwiches for us when we wanted something sweet and she didn't have anything else in the house--white bread, butter, and sugar--brown sugar was the best. I think that's what made me start thinking about the subject, since the first item on that link was "The Sugar Box." At home, in my cabinet, I have a jar that my grandmother kept cocoa in, and I use it for sugar, and think about her every time I get it out.

I remember tea parties that I had with the little girls next door. We had tiny little teacups filled with tap water, and bread and butter to eat (nothing elaborate here, but it obviously made an impression on me). My mother would make "picnics" for us that we would take out in the backyard and eat; I don't really remember what kind of food was in them, but I remember sitting out in the backyard on a blanket and eating. Whatever it was, food always tastes better outside.

Food always tasted best at grandma's house, too. My mother's mother made wonderful fried chicken, I remember that, and the dish I remember most from my father's mother's kitchen was oyster plant casserole at Thanksgiving. A very odd dish, and one that I don't think any of my other siblings would ever try. And something that I've never seen anywhere else, or tried to duplicate. "Oyster plant" is the common name of salsify, a root vegetable. I don't even know whether I could buy it in the store; maybe I should try. These recipes sound good.

My mother always let us choose what she fixed for our birthday dinners, and I always chose Swiss Steak--cubes of presure-cooked beef in a tomato-based sauce over mashed potatoes. And for my birthday cake, Devil's Food with a white icing that was almost like divinity. She would color the icing different colors with food coloring; one memorable year she made a several-layers high cake with different colored icing between each layer.

Which makes me remember my childhood birthday parties. Oh, she went all out for us! We would dress up in our party dresses and invite our friends over, and mom would make the decorations. Flowers made from tissue paper or actual tissues, gathered with wire. She would buy little pipecleaner ornaments, like bumble bees, at the dimestore, and attach them to the flowers. We had the parties down in our basement, and would play pin-the-tail on the donkey and musical chairs. We also had hats that Mom made out of tissue paper. I'll have to see if there are photos of those sometime when I'm home. I know there are home movies.

As for the opera part of the title, well, I don't know anything about, or care for, opera as it is generally thought of. I don't like "show tunes," I can't stand musicals of any type, in fact, I don't like live theater at all, but that's a discussion for another time.

Musicals just seem so contrived to me. When I watch a movie, I want to be able to suspend disbelief, to at least try to believe that the scenes I'm watching could actually be happening. Of course, most real life situations don't come with background music, but they could; more importantly, we usually don't burst into song at the slightest provocation. Well, Bob does . . .

But against all reason, I've become a fan of what I think I've seen called "Popera," that is, opera sung to a rock beat, or modern songs sung in the style of opera. Who would have thought? Certainly not me. First it was Il Divo, and now it's the East Village Opera Company, whose album has become my preferred workout music. I think it's probably just because, by virtue of the fact that it's sung in a language I don't speak, it can become background music, but it's not boring background music.

I really have no idea. I just know that I love it.

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Annoying the cats

I seem to be waking up early again, like at 4:30, and lying there awake thinking about all the things I have to do. Then I fall back asleep, only so be so deeply asleep at 6:30 when the alarm goes off that I reach out and hit the snooze button without even realizing it, and do that several times until I finally surface about 7:15 and realize I have to get up if I want to make it to work on time.

Yesterday morning I really didn't want to wake up; then I got to work and my computer wouldn't wake up.

Macs outnumber PCs at my office; four of us are on Macs (me, Cello, Kurt and Dave) and John and Dan are on PC's. And Eugene, but he's offsite currently. But anyway, Cello is the Mac hardware go-to guy, and fortunately he was there yesterday. We spent most of the day working on it -- getting it to come back on, then reinstalling the OS, then frantically backing stuff up in preparation for the next time it won't start up. He thinks the hard drive is going out. Hopefully it won't go out before we get a new one.

Other than that excitement, things are pretty quiet. Bob went to the lake last weekend, so I spent most of the weekend cleaning and doing laundry. I cleaned out my bookcase in the front room and hauled a couple of boxes of books to the basement, and I even started alphabetizing the CDs in the living room, but my legs started hurting from sitting on the floor so long, so I abandoned that somewhere in the "B's."

I tend to go on cleaning sprees when Bob's out of town. I think it's a combination of things. One, it's partially boredom, I guess. And secondly, I don't want him to think I just lazed around all the time he was gone, I want there to be some concrete evidence that I actually did something, although I'm not really sure why. It's not as if he criticizes me for not doing anything. It's probably just mostly a way to fill the time with something productive. And it's always fun to annoy the cats with the vacuum cleaner.

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