Author: Holly

last night’s dream

We decided to go to the beach, maybe the river beach. My boss Diane found my orange flip-flops from the dollar store and declared them perfect, she would wear these. The others went out to the car and I was in the kitchen putting my shoes on. The music from the end of Star Wars was playing, the award ceremony part, and I picked up a Star Wars novel on the kitchen table and started reading it.

Diane burst back into the room, going WHY ARE YOU CRYING? I’m not crying, I said, I was reading longer than I thought. Sorry, I know, everybody’s waiting, sorry.

Washing Dishes

As soon as she came in from the garden, Peter came and took the book out of her hands and presented her with a cloth to tie round her waist instead. Then he led her to the kitchen, where the mysterious and horrible process began. Peter thrust another cloth into her hands. “You wipe and I’ll wash,” he said, lifting the steaming saucepan off the fire and pouring half the hot water on the soapflakes sprinkled in the sink. He heaved up a bucket of cold water from the pump and poured half of that in the sink too.

“Why are you doing that?” Charmain asked.

“So as not to get scalded,” Peter replied, plunging knives and forks into his mixture and following those with a stack of plates. “Don’t you know anything?”

“No,” Charmain said. She thought irritably that not one of the many books she had read had so much as mentioned washing dishes, let alone explained how you did it.

DWJ, out to rectify this. <3 <3 <3

Bus

Yesterday my boss and I went out to a rural-ish suburb to conduct a focus group of elementary school teachers and see what they thought of the after-school program. The school draws from a low-income area, and about half the kids speak Spanish at home. Near the end of our session, my boss told the teachers to forget about the grant and its constraints–if the sky’s the limit, what would you ask for to help the kids at your school?

The first answer–and it got a lot of uh-huhs and nods of agreement–was a bus. A dedicated bus, so they wouldn’t have to request one through the district transportation office, which never has them available. They could put the kids on the bus and get them out into the world, go to OMSI, do field trips.

They also told us about how some of the third-graders are getting to partner with an indoor soccer club this year. It’s a huge hit, because the kids are part of the group out there with all the other kids. It brought home to me how hard it is for poor families to get out much or even feel like they’re part of what’s going on.

Happy Birthday ZNH

Both the Google doodle and Writer’s Almanac are celebrating Zora Neale Hurston’s birthday. I thought I’d mention again that I loved the audio edition of Their Eyes Were Watching God read by Ruby Dee. Multnomah County Library has it on CD, for locals.

Eatonville is still around and home to about 2000 people! I don’t know why I thought it was gone.

Weather Machine

The front page of Wikipedia is one of the few websites I let myself visit without guilt while I’m at work. Most of the internet I keep blocked off most of the time with the Strict Workflow (formerly Strict Pomodoro) Chrome extension, but if I get that want-to-chew-my-arm-off feeling, Wikipedia’s allowed.

Anyway, today’s featured article is about Weather Machine, a weather-predicting sculpture in Portland’s Pioneer Square that’s been here since 1988 and I never heard of it til now. How did this happen? I knew about the green and red light on top of that building downtown, but not this?

Must figure out when I can get to Pioneer Square at noon. And actually, I’ll need at least three visits.

2013 Books

These are the books I’ll be adding to my Librarything collection this year, along with the description I jotted down for each one when I put it on my running list of books read. They’ll bring the collection to 99 books I love–although more are represented, because I let one book stand for a series and sometimes for a whole author.

  • Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, by Jesse Andrews. Profane, funny book about kids making bad films, having inappropriate thoughts, and having different connections with each other than the adults think they do. Love Earl’s black-Pittsburgh language.
  • Winterbound, by Margery Bianco. 1936 novel of siblings navigating a country winter in New England. By the author of The Velveteen Rabbit, incidentally. Not much happens, but I liked the characters and the details of day-to-day life.
  • A Little Princess, by Frances Hodgson Burnett. Ridiculous yet addictive. Oh, Sara Crewe!
  • Charlotte Sometimes, by Penelope Farmer. 1969 novel of a girl at boarding school who wakes up as another girl in 1918, and they switch each night. A time-travel story that raises questions about identity and whether the people around you see the “real you.”
  • Fangirl, by Rainbow Rowell. Cath and her twin are both freshmen at UN Lincoln; she’s the shy, anxious one and is also semi-secretly a top fanfic author. Romance, friendship, and family drama ensue. (Note: I only just finished this before the end of the year. Curious to see if it stays prominent in my memory or fades.)
  • The Gentrification of the Mind, by Sarah Schulman. The interrelation of the AIDS epidemic and its fallout with the gentrification of New York City, followed by ruminations on what has been displaced, forgotten, and lost in gay culture and politics. Outstanding, with personal stories about her choices as a teacher and her interactions with Kathy Acker and other icons.
  • Among Others, by Jo Walton. A Welsh girl goes to English boarding school after her twin dies in an auto wreck. The fairies she knew in Wales, are they real or part of her psyche? Many SF and fantasy book shout-outs.
  • The Lake, by Banana Yoshimoto, trans. Michael Emmerich. An art student in Tokyo falls for her neighbor, but he has heavy secrets in his past. Liked the even-toned writing style and subtle emotions; my opinion kept flip-flopping on whether this romance was advisable or not.

What my LibraryThing additions don’t reflect is that this was a wonderful year for rereading. Lots of Mary Stoltz. The Ramona books plus Henry and Beezus and Henry Huggins. His Dark Materials. Zahrah the Windseeker. The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks. The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For.

Also, I combined picture books, poetry, comics, and graphic novels into one category, 22 books (including rereads), yet no new Librarything additions are in that category.

New Year’s Day

I meant to say Rabbit Rabbit when I woke up, I’d thought about it before I fell asleep the night before, but I went upstairs and said, “Good morning, Mom,” before I remembered. But that’s a good thing to be able to say, too.

My mom has started wearing a scarf with her bathrobe in the morning. When sanguinity and I put our bags in the rental car and got out the long-handled scraper that Hertz included, my mom came out on the sidewalk with her camera to capture Sang of the Northwest scraping the windows.

We volunteered to be bumped to another flight, and they gave our tickets away but then “found” us seats on the same flight, in First Class. Unexpected luxuries:

  • a separate in-flight magazine, with lots of stuff about bespoke tailoring.
  • a little cup of warmed almonds and cashews before lunch. Also hot towels for our hands.
  • a warm chocolate chip cookie after lunch. At this point I had a swell of warm “United LOVES me!” feeling.

The PDX carpet was still in place. Bookherd drove us past the horses. No offense, El Musteno, but it’s good to be home.
PDX Butterfield horses

rabbit rabbit!

2013 First Lines meme. This post is to be excluded from the 2014 First Lines meme!

January: I had a lovely holiday season with family and friends and road trips.

February: This is far from the first time I’ve meant to participate in the Wednesday reading meme, but the first time I’ve gotten as far as starting a post.

March: Just finished: Sarah Schulman’s The Gentrification of the Mind, a mix of personal stories, history, and analysis.

April: Yesterday I went to see Eileen Myles at Reed.

May: To my surprise, I was invited to a Jeopardy audition after all!

June: ALL I wanted my dad to do was sign the Reba McIntyre CD so I could send it in and get… um, I don’t remember now.

July: I signed up for my first fic exchange, The Exchange at Fic Corner 2013!

August: [no entries]

September: I replaced my damaged Scarlatti keyboard sonatas CD with one by Dubravka Tomsic.

October: Remember how I was rereading all the Ramona books to get ready for a fic exchange?

November: Last weekend I took Friday and Monday off work, and Sang and I drove out to Stub Stewart State Park to stay in a one-room cabin, sans internet.

December: When I’m idly googling hot fudge sauce, most of the recipes call for cream or evaporated milk, neither of which I keep around.

Ice Cream Fudge

When I’m idly googling hot fudge sauce, most of the recipes call for cream or evaporated milk, neither of which I keep around. Wouldn’t it be better if the main non-chocolate ingredient were melted ice cream, since you’re likely to have ice cream when you want hot fudge sauce?

Surprisingly, I didn’t find recipes– the closest was this one for Ice Cream Fudge. I made a half-recipe. It is not fudge– much closer to a truffle. But re-melted in the microwave, it’s not bad with ice cream. Not as liquid as real hot fudge sauce, but at least it doesn’t form hard little freckles of chocolate, like when you melt straight chocolate and put it on ice cream.

Might be worth trying it with a higher ratio of ice cream to chocolate.

National costumes!

Just saw that Miss Venezuela is the winner of 2013 Miss Universe…and I hadn’t checked out any of the national costumes yet!

Miss Venezuela:
Miss Venezuela National Costume 2013

The click-through on that is to the most complete set of photos I could find, at Oh No They Didn’t. No explanatory notes, but no har-har-har snark, either.

Miss Sri Lanka apparently decided against the bronze statue look she had in advance publicity:

Miss Sri Lanka National Costume Advance Pub

I guess Miss United States and her handlers didn’t mind that Transformers were originally Japanese toys rebranded by Hasbbro?
Miss USA National Costume 2013

Most literary: Miss Denmark as The Little Mermaid.
Miss Denmark National Costume 2013