Discovery

SPOILER ALERT: All seven Harry Potter novels

I am a nanny. During the day, it is just me and the littlest kiddo, who is 15 months. In the afternoons, I get her brother, T, who, despite his lack of Robin Hood knowledge, is a generally good kid. I've gently coaxed him this year into almost enjoying reading, and had the pleasure of introducing him to the (life-changing? spectacular? mind-blowing?) Harry Potter novels.

It is an amazing thing to watch, in him, the same process I went through when I was first discovering the books. He hasn't seen the movies. He doesn't know about Snape killing Dumbledore, about Voldemort coming back, about Umbridge and her detestable faux-sweetness, about the epic battles that make up the last three books. I sincerely hope no one spoils it for him.

He is most of the way through the third book, and is still where we all were, thinking Sirius Black a murderer, not knowing about the Time-Turner or that Lupin is a werewolf, certainly not realizing Scabber's true identity. Voldemort is still, at this point, a bad guy in the distance, his return not even a possibility on the horizon. T is busy coming up with theories, most of the dead wrong, but who's theories weren't dead wrong at this point?

I am loving his shock at each new revelation, his loyalties toward certain characters, and his predictions of what is to come.

Potter for President, that's what.

Because I need something else to waste my time...

www.fabric.com

Your welcome.

Excuse me, I need to go sew something.

Shuggling

I am an aspiring writer.

And by "aspiring" I mean that, while the baby I take care of sleeps and I am supposed to be doing laundry, I plug in my portable hard drive and type.

It's a glamorous life.

Anyway, one of the tribulations joys of writing is that the characters and such don't always do as you tell them. Take Levi, for instance. He is my protagonist, and one of my favorite characters. His story is supposed to be written in the third person, but he will insist on telling it himself. I have finally given in, and in the process of going back over the last 15 or so pages and switching the "him"s to "me"s, I came across this sentence:

"He bent and began shuggling my papers into a pile"

"Shuggling"? What on earth is "shuggling"? Did I mean juggling? shrugging? Was I trying to be presumptions and make up a word? What does it mean?

I can only assume that I meant "shuffling", which makes sense, and that my finger slipped over to the G by mistake.

The moral of this story, children, is always proofread your work. If you don't, you may find that you've shuggled it all up.

Mockingjay - Midpoint

I'm only three chapters into Mockingjay, and Katniss...

Oh Wait.

Spoilers.

Sorry.

Anyway. Katniss is driving me INSANE.

"I'm emotional and sad and my response is to be useless and ungrateful to everyone around me!"

Unacceptable, Katniss. Get your s**t together.

Dogs

I don't like Dogs.

Actually, that's not true. I like little dogs. Sweet, fluffy, lick-your-face-with-their-tiny-tongues dogs. Those are sweet, and hardly count as dogs. More like canine-esque kitty-kats mixed with a bit of gerbil. Big dogs, on the other hand, make me break out in emotional and mental hives. This is incredibly inconvenient, because I am apparently a dog-whisperer. I have never met a big dog that didn't think I was just the most amazing, wonderful thing it had ever met and proceed to ignore everyone else in the room until I had petted and loved on it.

I work as a nanny in a home with a Pit Bull and a Chocolate Lab that I detest. To say that I hate these dogs is an understatement akin to saying that Hitler was a painter with some anger issues. They are my own personal Marley. They jump, they drool, they steal the baby's toys (and eat them), and they wait until right after I put the baby down to find something offensive in the street that must be immediately barked at. My hatred, which I do all I can to project toward these animals, has absolutely no affect whatsoever on the drooling, obnoxious love they insist upon showing me. I suppose I could find greater meaning in this, something about how dogs love unconditionally, blah, blah, blah.

But I won't. If I did, I would have to admit that she does, in fact, have redeeming features, which, while it may or may not be true, I refuse to do.

I like cats quite a bit, although I wish I could get through a bowl of cereal without a furry face in mine asking "You gonna finish that milk?" To which I sulkily reply "Apparently not"

A Story

I'm going to tell you a story.

When I was little, my sister and I used to go to my grandparents ranch/hay farm/house in the summertime. Not every summertime, but a fair few.

Anyways, usually my cousins, who were fantastic, would join us, and a fun time would be had by all.

During these trips, if there were no adults accompanying us to ruin the fun, my cousins and I would get to sleep in the "Little House", which was a small one-room cabin that stands on the property. We aren't sure how it got there. All we know is that the Little House, with it's circa-1985 electric blankets, dodgy plumbing and rattling, boggart infested heater, has always been there, and being able to sleep in it was the epitome of grown-upedness, second only to being allowed to sleep in the 1985 Winnebago.

This particular trip, for whatever reason, we had been allowed access to the Little House, and my cousins and I were having a super-groovy dance party. We had all watched "Stepmom" that morning, and we were now obsessed with the song "Ain't no Mountain".

Somewhere during this party, we thought jumping on the bed would be a good idea.

After all, this is childhood. Jumping on the bed is ALWAYS a good idea.

How very wrong we were.

About ten minutes into our jumping extravaganza, there was a jarring thud, a horrific breaking sound, and the bed became about six inches shorter on the top right hand side.

OMG

Upon further inspection, it was discovered that we had put the bed through the floor of the Little House.

OMGOMGOMG

Children break many things.

Toys

Books

Electronics

Bones

But never, in my entire 12 years on the planet, had I managed to do permanent damage to an actual structure.

As the eldest, it fell to me to approach my grandmother, most wonderful woman on the planet, and explain to her that I had broken the Little House. I don't know why I didn't finagle my younger cousins into doing it. Or my sister. Maybe I tried, and they, like intelligent people, said "No Way, Jose"

I don't remember what happened the rest of that day.

I do know that we slept on couches in the big house that night.

The end.

TV is BACK!!

I am not a big TV watcher. I don't judge those who are (Just kidding, I totally do.), I just don't have the emotional wherewithal to commit to watching a show for an entire season.

However.

Oh, however.

There are two (actually three, but I don't get Comedy Central, so one of them doesn't count) shows that I have been countig down too since last May. And next week, they are totally back.


Big Bang Theory has moved itself to Thursdays, which means I can't watch it with my husband, but so much the better. Who needs boys, anyway?
Oh, Sheldon, how I've missed you and your anti-social ways.

More importantly,

GLEE!!!


Tuesday nights

Oh, Happy Day

Mr. Shuster is back to save the day

And also Puck, with whom I am in love

Also, I didn't mean for that last part to rhyme.

The point is, my life is about to become a bit more reclusive on Tuesday and Thursday nights, so don't call me.

I mean, you can, but I won't answer unless its a commercial, and as soon as the show is back, you are getting hung up on.

I still love you, you know.

You always hurt the one you love.

Jules

I love this girl:

She is my best friend

She was my bridesmaid


She is my movie date and my silliness partner, and she puts up with me being utterly ridiculous, all the time.

She didn't smack me when I asked her if I could sing Ave Maria at her wedding, even though she is neither engaged nor Catholic.

She sits next to me in church and laughs with me when the pastor says he's going to go "mug" people.

She even came to Kohls with me once and picked out my husbands tie because I didn't want to go alone.

She's super.

And I love her.

BOOK REVIEW: The Road

My first RIP V review! YAY

The Road.

Post-apocalyptic.

Pulitzer Prize.

Viggo Mortenson.

Wait. Strike that last one. He's only in the movie.

This was my first foray into the world of Pulitzer Prize-winners, a genre that always brings to mind stuffy men in monocles, smoking pipes and saying things like "Good show!" and "Right-O Old Chap"

I'm really not sure what that says about me.

The Road is about as far from that image as I think it is possible to be. Except maybe Christopher Moore. But I think we all know he's not winning a Pulitzer anytime soon.

Anyway.

The Road.

I had a hard time, at first, deciding whether or not I was enjoying the book. On the one hand, it is dark and depressing and there is so little humor or happiness in it. It's very gray reading, if that makes any sense.

On the other, the love between the father and son, the struggle to continue living and surviving, the pure effort that each day brings, is so incredibly palpable that this book is almost impossible to put down.

As with any post-apocalyptic novel, there is the occasional step into man's inhumanity to man, but it never becomes the whole story. The cannibalism, theft and murder that some of the world has descended into is only ever a step along the journey, the trouble of one day before moving onto the next. I appreciated this in the book. I also appreciated that nothing was solved. This was not a story about fixing a broken world or rebuilding one society from the ashes of another. It was the story of one man wandering the world with one boy, trying not to make a new life, but to survive the old one for as long as they can.

I wouldn't call this "Pleasure Reading", necessarily. I didn't really enjoy it in the traditional way that one enjoys a book, and to say that I enjoyed a book that contains so much darkness and unhappiness would sound almost like sacrilege anyway.

The best I can say about The Road is that, while not really an "enjoyable" book, it is a good book. Maybe even a great one.

Highly recommended as a one-time read.

RIP V Challenge: The Book List

After many recommendations from the wonderful readers in my life, I have chosen the four books I will be reading for the challenge.

1. The Road by Cormac McCarthy

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Recommended by: My SIL, Sara

I'm 95 pages in, and while it is slow going, It's a very good read so far. It took me a little while to get used to the fact that Mr. McCarthy doesn't use quotations and that the Man and the Boy don't have actual names, but I've gotten over it and everything is alright again.
Also, every time I read the author's name, I misread it as Cormac McLaggen, who is a fictional Hogwarts student, not an author. I have read Harry Potter far to many times.
2. The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova

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Recommended by: Goodreads

It's about Vampires (sort of), and who doesn't love a good vampire story?

3. Interview with a Vampire by Anne Rice
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Recommended by: My Uncle Lance

His actual recommendation was "Anything by Anne Rice", and this seems to be one of those "read before you die" books.

4. Firestarter by Stephen King

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Recommended by: My mother and sister

I've never read anything by Stephen King, but apparently this particular title is very Koontz-esque, and I do love Dean Koontz.

I have the first one on loan from my SIL, and the other three waiting for me at the library. Should be a good two months.

RIP V Challenge

I'm not sure how I didn't know things like this existed, but they DO!

It's like Christmas in September.

Image Source and Also to figure out what I'm talking about

By "things like this", I mean book challenges. I like nothing better than to be given guidelines. I love them. Put me in a library and say "pick anything you want", and I crumble into an incoherent wreck, rocking in the corner. Say "find something that means guidelines x, y and z", and I'm a kid on a scavenger hunt.

It's totally healthy and well-adjusted of me, I'm sure.

I don't normally read scary books (unless you count Harry Potter as scary, which I do which no self-respecting adult does), but I am at the end of my to-be-read shelf, and I need inspiration. This challenge seems like just the thing. Plus, it forces me to read outside my quite narrow book-comfort zone. I'm not really sure where to begin. It feels like cheating to start with something like Twilight, which, while about vampires, is about sparkly vampires, which negates the whole "scary" thing a bit. I do like Sherlock Holmes quite a bit, and that seems like a relatively calm entrance into the world of spooky/scary/creepy stories. I must let myself in gently.

I'll try very very hard to remember to review the books as I read them. This isn't strictly a "book blog", but who am I kidding? I rarely talk about, you know, my life on here. Mostly I just talk to you about books I read, movies I watch and my feet swelling for no apparent reason.

The point is, I'm enabling my terrible habit of writing about books rather than about me. This is a terrible thing for me to do, as no one could ever have enough me.

I'm still going to do it. Scary books! Scary book reviews! Book Challenge!

Huzzah!