Fatuous Observations

Saturday at the post office

2012-01-30T07:11:00.000-05:00

A fiction I tell myself is that the post office is closed on Saturdays, when in fact, the main branch is open. I don't want to believe that the post office is open on Saturdays because I don't want to expose myself to that scene, ever. It has, however, become inevitable that I make Saturday trips to the PO, and this Saturday was the day. I had already been to Whole Foods---it is a measure of how far I have progressed that I can now shop at Whole Foods on a Saturday.

Mailing a package ought to be pretty straightforward. You present yourself to the counter, your package is weighed, you pay, you leave. Two minutes, tops. WHY then, are other people's transactions at the post office so protracted? You'll be standing in line, there will be two clerks, one of whom will be dealing with a guy with a manilla envelope. Beware people with manila envelopes! Their transactions always take the longest. The other customer will be a guy who speaks only Russian. He will have a huge, bulging, poorly-taped package that must be sent to Irkutsk overnight and if it doesn't get there overnight, everyone in his village will be put to death and what do you mean you don't accept rubles? The guy with the envelopes will finally leave, tearful, because whatever it was that had to happen with his envelopes can not be done and he is now financially ruined. The next person in line will plop a moistly leaking package onto the counter and demand that it be delivered to Alaska before it spoils. (I had a friend whose mother used to send her raw chorizo sausage through the US mail.) I wouldn't be surprised if someone walked in with a live goat, expecting to mail it to Antarctica. But a live goat isn't perishable, fragile, liquid, or potentially hazardous.

On this particular Saturday, the business that was holding up the line involved a young man, his two young companions and a huge box of cardboard tubes and assorted small packages that each needed to be mailed individually somewhere--a transaction of such breathtaking complexity that it required the attention of two clerks and multiple trips out to the car by the two companions. I'm not saying anything against these people. They have as much right to use the post office as I do. It was just my bad luck that the day they decided to mail their multitude of cardboard tubes was the day I finally decided to brave the post office on a Saturday.

The other clerks were occupied with a guy with envelopes (envelopes again!), a Spanish-speaking woman, a woman attempting to pick up a registered letter that the clerk was unable to find, and a Pakistani family awaiting a package. Their clerk emerged, panting, after a very long delay, from the back room with a huge, bulging, poorly-taped package, that no doubt had held up the line at the PO in Pakistan. A nice symmetry.

I was uncomfortably conscious of the groceries melting in the back of my car. The people with the cardboard tubes finished their business at last--the clerk who'd been helping them abruptly left the counter and never returned. The other clerk who'd been helping them was now free and the line moved faster. My turn came, my package was weighed and payed for in under two minutes.

It's worth mentioning that yesterday was the thirty-fifth anniversary of the Blizzard of '77, which buried Buffalo, NY under 158.4 million cubic feet of snow. Looking at that slide show, I can hardly believed I lived through a disaster of that magnitude, although I was, in fact, stranded away from my family for two full weeks. It's also incredible that there were only twenty-nine deaths. One casualty was our school crossing guard, a kindly man who helped us across Main St. on our way to St. Benedict's. I urge you to watch the slide show below, for some unbelievable images. That is a real winter.

Friday Reading Assignment

2012-01-27T06:55:00.000-05:00

Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis is the funniest academic comedy I've ever read. Jim Dixon works as a junior professor at a second-rate college in England. His career must be sustained by constant sucking up to a senior professor, which means attending a weekend party, which leads to drinking too much, which leads to a description of the aftermath that is possibly the funniest passage in all of English literature. That scene alone makes the whole book worthwhile.

I hesitated to include Lucky Jim in my Friday reading assignment, after reading an author's thoughts on rereading novels. Some books, when reread, provide more insight and pleasure, while others are disappointing the second time around. The author specifically mentioned Lucky Jim as a book in the second category. Now I'm afraid to reread it myself.

The Involved Parent

2012-01-25T07:28:00.000-05:00

Science Fair has come and gone. A few years ago, I wrote a post in which I calculated the number of children I have times the number of school years that require science fair participation minus the projects my children had already completed and came up with an appalling total of fifteen science fair projects still to do. And now, with Ian and Brigid in college and Grace nearly halfway through high school, we have just seven more science fairs to go.

This was Seamus' first science fair. His project: to compare what happens when you deep fry a snickers bar, to what happens if you boil it in milk, to what happens if you boil it in water. Lame? Yes. Parent friendly? Absolutely. (Unless you have a problem with allowing a twelve year old to deep fry things in your only saucepan, but I became resigned to that ages ago.)

Speaking of "lame" here's a public school parent's expose of what passes for science for first graders in her district.

Anyway, Seamus is not the only kid to do a project of dubious scientific value. I remember the mother of one of Grace's classmates telling me she had to go home and help her daughter watch ice cubes melt. I thought she was being sarcastic. She wasn't.

I applaud that mom for not getting sucked into an elaborate, expensive, parent-driven project. Ever since I heard of it, I've been trying to pawn that ice melting project off onto my own kids, but they're not interested. The expectation nowadays is for parents to be "involved" in their children's education. We're told that the children of "involved" parents do better academically. We're not specifically told to micromanage our children's assignments, but clearly, this is how many parents interpret the "be involved" message. I've never been the type of parent to do my kids' projects for them, but I used to be "involved" in the sense that I participated in PTO--I was even PTO co-president of my kids' elementary school, an experience so traumatic that when it was over, I removed my kids from school and homeschooled for two years.

My kids did get better grades during the years I was "involved" but it's far more likely that this was because I was at home full-time and was able to provide a stable home life. The years of nursing school and working as a nurse--especially when I was working night shift-- were utterly chaotic.

Now I carry a burden of suppressed rage against our school district--for various reasons-- and avoid most school events. Sometimes the rage erupts (indeed, a pent-up volcano of rage is coming to the surface in writing this post) like the time Seamus had to write a description of his parent's occupation for a DARE assignment. The idea was (I guess) that people who are gainfully employed are less likely to do drugs. How does this even make sense? "Hey kids, find someone you know who has a JOB so that you won't do drugs." Anyway, the sheer stupidity of the assignment prompted me to make Seamus write "pushes narcotics" as my occupation --an entirely accurate description of my job at the time as an ortho/trauma nurse, if you define "push" as "IV push."

But do you see the conflicting message? Parents are expected to have careers so as to be good role models for their children (so they don't do drugs!) but they must also have unlimited time to devote to fundraisers, field trips, classroom volunteering, sports, parent-teacher conferences and homework.

Before I became PTO co-president, I edited the parent newsletter, was room mother for Grace's first-grade classroom, baked cookies, helped grade math workbooks, chaperoned field trips, and on one godawful occasion, assisted nearly forty 6-year olds in making gingerbread houses out of graham crackers, milk cartons, and frosting.

A constant lamentation of our PTO was that the less-privileged parents were not "involved." In my innocence, I honestly believed that these parents ought to be involved. I soon learned that PTO board members tended to pay for small necessary items--the stamps with which to mail hundreds of thank-you letters, for example, out of their own pockets. Technically, one applied to the treasurer for reimbursement, but there was intense social pressure not to do so. It's generous to willingly absorb these costs, if you can afford it, but I couldn't afford it. Particularly odious was the spring carnival for which I drained my meager checking account buying bags of ice. The little cash I had left went for tickets for my children. I told them they could play games or eat dinner, but not both because I didn't have enough money. So don't sit there from your vantage point in an exclusive, unwelcoming clique of parents and wring your hands about parental involvement.

In Which Jon is Pranked: The Brief, but Exciting Life of Delores Davoli

2012-01-23T07:10:00.000-05:00

It was the after-dinner doldrums. My sister Margaret and I were bored and I was irritated with Jon for going off to the house of a neighbor where he could smoke his cigar inside. We decided to play a prank. We decided to give him a stalker.

We sketched out our plan: when Jon got home I was to casually mention that the day before I'd been approached at the grocery by a woman who claimed to know him, one "Delores Davoli," (my sister came up with the name) and--very odd indeed--she had called the house asking for him while he'd been out smoking his cigar.

He fell for it. He fell for it hard, immediately grabbing the house phone and scrolling through the list of recent callers, and then dialing a number. This was entirely unexpected. I had to pretend to be engrossed in putting pots away in a lower cupboard in order to hide my face, and when I heard Jon say, "Hello, someone called me from this number?" I had to insert most of my upper body into the pot cupboard to conceal my laughter. Things were not going as planned.

Jon hung up the phone in disgust. "That was 'Jerry,'" he said. "He says he didn't call us. Who the hell is Jerry?" I was asking myself the same question, and as soon as I had the opportunity, I scrolled through the caller ID list. There were no unfamiliar numbers on it, but there were several calls from Jon's own cell phone. I retrieved the last number dialed--"Jerry's" number. It was the same as Jon's cell phone, except for one changed digit. Incredulous, I realizedv that Jon had seen his own cell phone number in the caller ID list, failed to recognize it (it's identified merely as "Virginia call") and then dialed it wrong, getting "Jerry" totally at random. "Maybe Jerry is Delores' husband," I suggested.

Jon's blunder with the phone seemed to be telling us that the Universe WANTED us to prank him. Quietly gloating, my sister and I decided that Delores needed a Facebook page. We created her account using images of a woman that we found on the internet. We decided she should be about four years older than Jon and we made her a graduate of a suitably random college--Alfred University--and Facebook obligingly gave us a list of people she might know. Delores friended them all.

The next morning "Delores" logged into Facebook and got a stern message telling her that she had been friending people she didn't really know. Nevertheless, she now had several "friends," and--most alarming--a personal message from someone. I couldn't bear to read it without my sister, and we needed to play it cool for a while anyway, to give our prank some authenticity. We didn't mention Delores during the course of the day.

That evening, my sister and I decided it was high time that Delores make a friend request to Jon. We then read the message Delores got from one of her former "classmates":

Hey Delores, I think I remember you. Are you the person who approached me at that convention last month? I'm not sure why you are trying to friend me now on Facebook. If there's anything I can do for you, let me know. Cheers.

I was appalled. Delores appeared to have developed a life of her own. A little while later, Jon checked his Facebook and yelled out with alarm when he saw the request from Delores. He called one of his friends to ask if he'd ever heard of this woman. "Maybe her family owns that restaurant," I suggested. "you know, Davoli's, up on 29 North." (There is no such restaurant.) Jon called a different friend, "Have you ever eaten at Davoli's?" he demanded. "This woman who works there is stalking me."

We suggest he send her a message. I went quietly upstairs to my laptop to reply. Jon asked Delores how he knew her. Delores replied that she had attended one of his mindfulness seminars and that he had touched her deeply. Jon responded by saying that he had spoken to Jerry the other night--her husband? Delores said that, alas, Jerry was her husband but she wished he wasn't. Jon responded pointedly that he was married. Delores said, "I do not like you wife...." At which point Jon became convinced that Delores was out to kill me. Another unforeseen circumstance was that Ian was now worried about Delores, this clearly unstable woman who might do herself harm when she realized her obsession with Jon was to come to nothing. Our joke had gone too far. I sent my sister a text message telling her that we ought to come clean, which we did to everyone's amusement and relief. I think my sister's husband had suspected all along that Delores was a fake, but stayed silent to humor us.

I closed Delores' facebook account--she had acquired a few more friends by this time--and mentally apologized to the man who'd sent her the message.

Friday Reading Assignment 1/20/12

2012-01-20T07:23:00.000-05:00

I've had to turn to comfort literature lately. Today's assignment is Excellent Women by Barbara Pym. We've already discussed another of her novels, Some Tame Gazelle. Excellent Women is about Mildred Lathbury, a spinster in her early thirties, in London, around 1950. Of course it's ridiculous now to consider a woman Mildred's age to be a "spinster" or to even use the word spinster, unless you are Bridget Jones.

Poor Mildred, even her name is dreary. Her peaceful life is disturbed when Rocky and Helena Napier, a glamorous young couple, move into the flat below hers. There are blushing references to the bathroom that the two flats share. Soon they're sharing more than just a bathroom as Mildred becomes more involved in the Napier's lives than she would wish. Meanwhile, her usual circle of friends is disrupted by the introduction of an attractive but pushy young widow.

Mildred may appear to be dull, but she has a sense of humor and Barbara Pym is marvelous about narrating her characters' thoughts. I feel ambivalent about the ending of this novel, although I can't really say why, without spoiling it for you. To me, with my heavy responsibilities to children and husband, Mildred's solitary life seems like paradise.

Cars and Trucks and Things that Go.

2012-01-18T06:48:00.000-05:00

The other night at the C&O for dinner, Jon turned to our companions and said, "Patience has a passion for trains." Is there any statement that could make a person look more like a total prat? A passion for trains? Are you freaking kidding me? I admit, I am a geek about trains--and other forms of transportation --planes, helicopters, ships--those big lake barges that we used to see in the Black Rock Canal while rowing. There's nothing like being in a boat so fragile you can put your feet through it, and being passed by a million-ton oil tanker. It's pretty awesome, actually.

I found this image from Buffalo Rising that illustrates the experience.

I also like snowplows-- not the puny examples of plows you see in Virginia but the great big ones we had in Buffalo. When I was a kid, we liked to play chicken with the plows. The game went like this: You walked in the street. The snowbanks along the side of the road were sometimes higher than your head. You'd hear a snowplow coming up behind you. The object was to scramble up the snowbank, out of the path of the plow at the last possible second before it ran you over. It really was dangerous, partly because snowbanks can be unpredictable when you try to climb them, but mostly because those plow drivers would have had no qualms about crushing us.

I was trolling youtube, looking for examples of proper snowplows and I found a movie of a train that is also a snowplow. Ten minutes of rural train tracks in Western New York being cleared of heavy snow. It's awesome. The video is followed by eight comments written by people who are even geekier about trains than I am. ("Nice trestle shot!"--It sounds like train geek porn.)

Of course, running to beat a train is a thrilling experience too. I guess what attracts me to these vehicles is their ability to kill me. Raise your hand if you have a childish fascination with cars and trucks and things that go?

Friday the 13th, or a Day in the Life of a Working Mother

2012-01-16T07:16:00.000-05:00

I'm not superstitious, but a lot of unlucky things happened to me last Friday. My alarm didn't go off, and neither did my emergency back-up alarm. Jon and I had one of those fights couples have when it's garbage day and you're both running late and you have to drag all your crap to the curb--which you should have done the night before, but didn't.

No sooner was I settled at work, when I was confronted by stern-faced boss telling me I had not gotten my required flu shot and the deadline was some date in the distant past and I had to get down to employee health pronto.

"Are you feeling OK today?" the nurse asked, before giving me my injection. I considered: breakfast of double espresso and ibuprofen + fight with husband + severe stress over a work project and surprise IM injection = nausea, headache, chest pain, and palpitations. I told the nurse I felt fine.

Then there was work craziness compounded by power outage, compounded by the non-stop keening of the emergency alarm that got triggered by the high winds--the same high winds that knocked out my back up alarm. There is no explanation as to why my cell phone alarm didn't go off, other than that I am cursed.

At 4:00pm I got a call from Brigid, who is back at school, telling me she needed $300 for textbooks and could I transfer it to her checking account immediately please, because her balance was zero. It was a payday Friday afternoon followed by a Monday bank holiday. As soon as I got back to my desk, Grace called to ask where the broom was. You know, because since I was at work, I would know the EXACT LOCATION OF THE BROOM.

After work, I took the Trolley downtown to refill a prescription. I spent the fifteen-minute waiting period picking up milk and other items at the grocery store. Back at the pharmacy, they told me their computers were down and my prescription would not be ready for at least another twenty minutes. I told them I'd return in the morning. I walked home from downtown--it is nearly a mile--with the heavy grocery bag cutting into my bare hands which had nothing to protect them from the formidable windchill.

By the time I got home, I had no feeling in my fingers and I had to immediately start dinner, which had as its starting point a bag of frozen solid chicken breasts which the children had forgotten to remove from the freezer as requested. I did manage to turn them into a respectable chicken pot pie and even got dinner on the table by 7:30.

Friday Reading Assignment: A Short Story about Short Hair

2012-01-13T07:20:00.000-05:00

Gaah! I am in a panic because I have been insanely busy at work, and have had something difficult and time consuming to do each evening after work so I have not given this week's Friday reading assignment any thought at all. I am sitting in my bed with my laptop, eyeing my bookcase to see if anything suggests itself to me. It ought to be something light, after last week's 779-page Tome of Doom. Why don't we forgo reading an entire book this week and go with a short story instead? "Bernice Bobs her Hair" by F. Scott Fitzgerald is a story I've always liked. I don't remember every detail of it, and I'm certainly not going to reread it right now, but basically plain, socially awkward Bernice spends a holiday with her beautiful, popular cousin Marjorie. Marjorie thinks Bernice is a big drip and is embarrassed to be seen with her. Bernice is resentful. Bernice gets revenge. The end. Some of you may have been assigned to read this story in high school. I believe that is how I first read it. Thoughts?

Since we're discussing books, I'll tell you about what I'm reading right now: The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler. This book is irritating the dickens out of me. Six friends meet once a month and discuss the novels of Jane Austen. You probably saw the movie. (I didn't. Tell me if I should bother.) I don't mind the parts where they discuss Austen and the characters themselves and their present-day stories are OK. What's driving me crazy are the back stories. Fowler insists on dredging up people from each of her characters' pasts. Their stories are curiously flat and uninteresting. Reading this book is like listening to someone go on and on about someone you don't know and don't want to hear about.

I'm also reading The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years by Bernard Lewis. Edifying, to be sure, but as dry and humorless as a dust pile in the Sahara.

Pickles and other matters

2012-01-11T07:11:00.000-05:00

Company Pickles

Our dear, dear friends came to visit us last weekend and besides their delightful company, they graced us with a jar of pickles, made by their aunt. They were labeled Company Pickles. Having special, extra-delicious pickles for guests implies that there are also inferior pickles for everyday use. But why not make all your pickles "company" pickles and not bother with the inferior ones at all? I asked my friend what was special about the company pickles and he said, "Cloves make it company."

Charlottesville in the movies

I watched Swedish Auto the other night, which was filmed entirely in Charlottesville. I liked it, but I wouldn't recommend it to others without reservation--there's not a whole lot of action. Still, it won some awards and if you're into indie movies or want to see January Jones before she was Betty Draper, this film is a good place to start. It was fascinating to me because of the Charlottesville setting. Much of the movie was filmed in places that I walk past or visit almost daily. I half expected to see myself walking past in the background. It is very recognizably the real Charlottesville, and yet different somehow as well. The Charlottesville in the film seems sweeter and quieter, a true sleepy southern town. In pondering what it is about the Swedish Auto Charlottesville that is different from the real Charlottesville, I realized that in the movie, you don't see or hear any traffic.

Girls on Film

My friend Jen on the Edge is doing a project, encouraging people to post real pictures of themselves. The origins of the project was her realization that many women hate their own looks so much that they avoid being photographed. I'm definitely one of that group. Most of the time I look absolutely horrible in photographs and I'm so anxious about not looking horrible that I have a frozen deer-in-the-headlights look. Anyway, as part of her project, I'm putting up a real-life, non-posed, no-make up picture of myself (and family) taken this weekend. Since it's a candid photo I don't look posed and frozen. (And what I'm doing is trying to hit Jon. I think it's brilliant that I was caught with hand upraised.)

Fun in Richmond

2012-01-09T07:24:00.000-05:00

"Richmond is toilet," or so I told my children last summer when we moved Brigid there for school. Calm down, I meant "toilet" in the nicest possible way, and anyway, I was being facetious. I'm actually very fond of Richmond. It's the closest real city to Charlottesville. It's relatively big and impersonal, unlike Charlottesville, and nobody gives a shit about what you are doing or how you are dressed.

I like Richmond because it reminds me of Buffalo, NY. Both cities had a grand past but are past their primes. We were on Broad St. near VCU, in Richmond the other day, and the juxtaposition of trendy little shops and empty store fronts gives the impression that Richmond is a skinny old lady wearing a dress that is ten sizes too big. It's a little sad, but it still has beauty. And I like the Swedish crosswalk buttons at the corner of Broad and Belvidere. It's jolly to find a Swedish system installed in such an unlikely place as Richmond, Virginia. The buttons tick like a metronome, and when it's time for you to cross, they increase their tempo to a frantic pace. So much more fun than Charlottesville's talking crosswalk buttons that alternately scold and exhort.

But I digress. What's awesome about Richmond right now is that it is the first city to show Brigid's art. She's had her art in Charlottesville galleries, but always in shows that were featuring the local public schools. This is the first time she was invited to make a piece for an exhibit based purely on contacts she made independently which I think is pretty awesome for a first-year art student. Even if I am her mother.

Brigid's final assignment for her space research class was to make six identical three-dimensional objects and give them to six different people--they had to be strangers--and record how the giving went. Brigid made six stuffed people and walked into six random businesses and gave them to whoever happened to be working at the counter. The recipients had varying reactions. One person was deeply suspicious of the object, another--the owner of a little gift shop--promptly put it for sale in his window and asked her to make more. A man in a coffee shop erroneously believed Brigid had made the gift for him, personally. And one person, at the shop Quirk on Broad St, happened to be the owner of an art gallery that was putting on an exhibit of stuffed items.

The exhibit name is Grab It! Each artist was given a vintage suitcase and told to fill it with soft objects that you would take if you were a child escaping from the apocalypse.

The artists' reception and opening night were last Thursday and the gallery opened to the public the next day for First Friday. It was exciting to see Brigid's pillar.

She had less time than anyone else to get her pieces together and sewing is not her specialty. She made her creatures from thrifted clothes and scraps.

So I'm sorry I ever called Richmond a toilet. And the Quirk gallery is lots of fun, by the way. It's also a shop, of the sort that people drive to the downtown mall in Charlottesville to see.

Friday Reading Assignment 1/6/2012

2012-01-06T07:04:00.000-05:00

Today is Epiphany, the official last day of Christmas. It's back to work and no more fun and games for a while; the perfect time to begin an ambitious reading project. This week's assignment is London: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd. At 779 pages, it will keep you occupied until spring.

Unless a couple of layovers at Heathrow count as having "been to London" (which I'm sure most people will say don't count) I have never been to London. However, if you made a stack of every book I've read that was set in London, you would have a very, very tall stack. From all that reading, I do feel somewhat acquainted with the city, at least more so than with, say, Berlin or Oslo. It's definitely near the top of the list of places I want to visit.

London: The Biography is not a linear history of London, but instead is divided into sections describing various aspects of London: its criminals, its prisons, its architecture, its vices, its underground life. The parts I found most fascinating were those that discussed the organic nature of London--its origins as part of the sea, its rivers. Most of London's rivers were covered up long ago and now flow underground. Ackroyd notes that most London houses believed to be haunted are built near the course of these buried rivers. There's the curious way that the same activities have been happening in the same places since prehistoric times. For example, churches that exist today were built on ancient pagan holy sites. London burned and was rebuilt numerous times in its 2,000 year history, but even in the face of attempts to create a new city, the old lanes and economic pursuits persist in the same areas. It's like the city itself has a life of its own and can assert itself.

A DIY

2012-01-04T07:00:00.000-05:00

Have you ever wondered how it would be possible to divide a room with a curtain? Most likely not, but if you live in a quirky old house like mine and have to walk through your daughters' bedroom to get to your own, a circumstance about which they complain vociferously, you might try to find a solution. Our solution was to hang a curtain along the length of the room. It's not perfect, but it has stopped the girls' complaints. They have a semblance of privacy and I have a "hallway" that isn't pitch dark.

We used this article from Apartment Therapy for instructions. Pottery Barn Teen sells wire curtain hanging kits for $50, but please don't buy one because you can buy the parts you need at a hardware store for much less. Ikea also sells a kit, for around $30, but I believe we spent only $15 for our equipment, not counting the fabric. And we have about 80 feet of leftover wire. I'm going to use it to do the same thing across the front of the washing machine alcove and the *one* shared closet in our house, which are both in the bathroom.

How it's done: You screw a hook into the wall from which you want to string the cable, and put another hook on the opposite wall. This was easy for us because we never bothered to clean up or paint over the chalk line that was snapped when the old wall was put up, oh, forty years ago.

You slip a turnbuckle over your hook and the wire attaches to the other end. Repeat on the opposite wall and use the turnbuckles to tighten the wire.

The instructions make this operation seem hideously complicated, but Jon and Grace did it in about ten minutes with very little fuss. My job was to make the curtain.

I don't really like being boxed in by the curtain when it's closed, but Grace will be moving out in less than three years, and I can put up with it for that long.

The irony is, when we moved into this house, there was a wall, exactly where we hung the curtain. There's still a remnant of it, as you can see in the photo above. It was made of cheap paneling and not original to the house so we ripped it out and made this large, central bedroom into the "children's room" where all four kids slept for a while when they were little. Once all the kids are gone, we'll tear down that remnant, gut the shoddy, unprofessional drywall and shitty "crown molding" (we did NOT put that there--it's a remnant from three owners ago) and turn this into the master bedroom. Our current bedroom will become my study and Jon can reclaim the small bedroom for his study. Guest room schmest room. We plan to build a studio in the back yard for guests.

The 2011 Recap

2012-01-02T08:42:00.000-05:00

I've always felt that even years were luckier than odd ones, so I feel optimistic about 2012. Twelve is a happy number, whatever the Mayans say. 2011 was not a great year and I hope the dark cloud that has been sitting over Jon and me will lift.

This started out as a contemplative post, but I started reading through all I wrote in 2011 and my contemplations have become a recap of the year. I'm warning you, this is a me-centered post.

In February, I asked readers to help me identify the mystery machine in my basement. In March, Brigid and I took a girls' trip to Chicago to see SAIC for ourselves. A bad bus ride inspired me to ride all of Charlottesville's bus routes and blog about them. I cooked a tongue for St. Paddy's day. Seamus lengthened his spring break by a week by getting the chicken pox. In May, I bought a new car and wrote a very, very long post about it. In June, I had a bad day at work. This was a special bad day because it prodded me to get serious about finding a new job. Then I went on a diet and tried to break up with Anthropologie. In July, I abandoned a career that literally made me want to kill myself and started a new job that offers more money for less stress. My new job required that I travel to Madison, Wisconsin--I spent nearly two weeks there over two trips. Technically, I was working, but I had a great time. No sooner was I back at work then the great central Virginia earthquake hit, which provided enough diversion to enliven a dull work day. In October, the universe tried to prevent me from using an ATM. In November I wrote a guide to the most infuriating parking lots in Charlottesville. In December, I made an advent calendar.

You're supposed to eat black-eyed peas for new years, which must be a Southern tradition because I never heard of it until we moved to Virginia. I dislike black-eyed peas but I followed my friend Megan's recipe for cranberry beans and made collards and corn bread to go with. I love a meal of beans, greens, and cornbread. It's thrifty, it's healthy, and cooking these things makes me feel virtuous and capable.

Friday Reading Assignment 12/30/11

2011-12-30T08:36:00.000-05:00

Remember the nineties? That glorious time of a shit economy and nothing to do but hang out with your friends and bitterly criticize the baby boomers who were hogging all the jobs and why couldn't they just die already? The nineties live on in today's assignment, The Tightwad Gazette by Amy Dacyczyn. I chose it because it's the time of year when people contemplate making a fresh start, and the Christmas credit card bills are arriving and we are just becoming dimly aware that soon we will have to pay taxes again.

The general vibe in the early nineties was one of tightening belts, of making do, of going without. People were concerned about the environment, but the emphasis then was on using less, not on consuming more as it is now. (If your cruelty-free sunscreen comes in a plastic bottle, it's not exactly eco-friendly. Sorry.)

One cold winter day in 1993 in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where Jon was in grad school for comparative religion(!) I was watching Phil Donohue. The guest was Amy Dacyczyn, sharing her tips for frugal living. Phil's mouth-breathing audience was giving her a hard time. They could scarcely believe the deprived environment she had created for her children in which they were never taken to McDonald's and wore clothes she bought at yard sales. When she described how she used a cheese grater to scrape the burned layer off of cookies the audience all but stoned her. I admired how Amy handled their horror with aplomb. A cookie is a cookie, motherfuckers. This was a woman I could learn from and I immediately bought her book which is really a compliation of issues of the frugal newsletter she published from her house in Maine.

My pressing concern at that time was how on earth we would afford two babies in diapers. I had a diaper service for Ian, but diaper service for two was beyond our budget. Amy Dacyczyn has six children, so there is a LOT of information about diapers in The Tightwad Gazette. When I read that the Tightwad solution to diapers was to wash them yourself, I realized my diaper problem was solved. It had never occurred to me that I could wash diapers myself. We didn't own a washing machine, but if Amy could take her kids' diapers to the laundromat, (which she did) then so could I. (This was, by the way, long before the advent of trendy super-expensive cloth diapers.)

Diapers aside, the driving force behind The Tightwad Gazette was Dacyczyn's refusal to conform to the notion that it is impossible to raise a family on one income. Not only did the Dacyczyn family want to raise their family on one income, they wanted a large family and they wanted to buy a farmhouse with attached barn in Maine. They were successful because they made such a stellar effort to spend less and save more. Furthermore, their lifestyle seemed fun, not deprived.

I'm no stranger to thrift--my parents were thrifty and drilled their habits into my head, but there's always more to learn. From The Tightwad Gazette I picked up a mindset that allows me to creatively come up with my own money-saving ideas. For example, I wondered if I could set my dishwasher to do a "top rack" wash with dishes in the bottom rack. I discovered that dishes on the bottom rack WILL get clean during a top-rack only wash, as long as you load it lightly. The top rack wash cycle runs for 38 minutes and uses less water than the regular cycle, which runs for over 70 minutes.

But you're saying, "Patience, I have money to BURN. I don't need to read about washing and reusing zip lock bags." That's fine, but what sets The Tightwad Gazette apart from other frugal lifestyle books is that it's so entertaining, particularly the letters from readers. Nothing beats a New England yankee for parsimony and most of the letters come from New Englanders. There's also the environmental factor, since a frugal lifestyle is kind to the environment and here you will find a wealth of information on reducing your footprint and none of it involves buying expensive organic products.

When our economy turned sour in 2008, I hoped that there'd be a silver lining: that people would return to thrift and decreased consumption, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Or maybe I've become so affluent I've lost touch. I no longer need to make homemade baby wipes out of paper towels and baby shampoo, but I reread The Tightwad Gazette every so often to give myself a reality check. I think it's time.

On fait le Christmas Pyramid

2011-12-26T09:47:00.000-05:00

And so it came to pass that another Christmas happened in which we did our annual Christmas pyramid, a tradition that dates all the way back to 2004 or thereabouts. Here is this year's movie, which you should watch if only to hear my sister's famous laugh. It's so infectious that two companies have actually tried to buy it from her. Once, she was yukking it up in a bar in Buffalo, NY when she heard, "That laugh! Take me to that laugh," and so found herself being introduced to Frank Gorshin who played the Riddler in the Batman television show. If the Riddler thinks you have a great laugh, you really have something going on. But that is my sister's adventure, not mine.

We edited out a LOT of arguement and discussion, unlike last year when I posted a full three minutes of drivel. You would think that after six years, we'd have mastered this thing, but you would be wrong.

My sister and her husband are still here, and since we have exhausted everything Charlottesville has to offer the girls are going to take a little trip to Richmond while the boys go for a hike in the Blue Ridge.

In which: Jonukkah

2011-12-22T07:30:00.000-05:00

Tis the season to do a blog post about your Christmas decorations. Friend Jen on the Edge puts together a holiday homes tour every year which I didn't participate in because I judge my house to be not worthy. However, it is fun to see what other people have done. My own style can best be described as slapdash.

But what the hell? Why not post a few pictures? I also can't resist linking back to the story of one of my favorite absurd predicaments. Here's how we got a free Christmas tree and erroneously believed we had committed a crime on the property of James Monroe, the fifth US president.

Our tree.

This year, I bought the tree at Whole Foods, after buying groceries. Being too inept to tie it to the roof of the car, I stuffed the whole thing into the back of my little scion, along with the groceries (and Seamus). The back door wouldn't close, and as we drove away, some of my groceries fell out of the back of the car into the middle of Hydraulic Rd. where I couldn't retrieve them without getting killed. Another Christmas tree fail.

We gave up on the family trip to get a tree years ago. After the fiasco linked above, we returned to Ashlawn the following year. No crimes were committed but just when we were in the middle of the pasture carrying a heavy tree, a herd of cows appeared. All the cows I've ever seen have been behaving placidly, but these cows were actually galloping, as if they were pursued by the hounds of satan and we were the corn of salvation. It was disconcerting, to say the least, but then the farmer appeared with a cart full of feed and they thundered past us to tear at the feed. Those cows were hungry, and I swear--herbivores or not--if that feed cart hadn't appeared, they would have eaten us. The next year, we drove out to a farm in Nelson county and the effing tree fell off the roof of the car when we were still a good twenty miles from home. We had to retie it with bits of whatever--mostly shoelaces. After that, our trees came from catalogs and grocery stores.

The mantle.

I like shiny glass ornaments, like this friendly duck.

I made this treetop angel, back when I was an at-home mother and actually had free time.

Our house doesn't look quite so trashy after dark.

But Bubbles feels right at home.

You don't know Bubbles? Watch Trailer Park Boys.

What is this Jonukkah referenced in the title? It's a special holiday, invented by Jon (get it--Jon/JONukkah) for those of us who ~~have no self control~~ can't wait until Christmas. Such people are allowed to open presents that have been sent by out of town relatives. By the time Jonukkah is over (Christmas Eve) Ian, Jon, and Grace have no presents left. Brigid has ALL of hers and Seamus and I are somewhere in the middle.

Jon's present to me: he hired a piano tuner to come to the house and fix and tune my piano. It was all done secretly while I was at work. One of the hammers in the piano broke off, so I have had no F sharp, in the first octave for the right hand for TEN years! The piano used to be my grandparents, then my mom's, and she left it to me when she died. The tuner who came the other day showed Jon the 20 watt bulb inside the piano's innards and the electric cord that had been hidden--for over fifty years!--with which to plug it in and keep the piano warm and dry. The whole concept that my piano is supposed to be plugged in, and the fact that the fifty year old lightbulb still works, is more surprising than the gift of the tuning and repair, lovely as it was.

A Literary Meme

2011-12-20T07:11:00.000-05:00

I can't resist a good literary meme. I got this one from Mad Housewife.

1. What author do you own the most books by?

Barbara Pym, if I discount books that belong to the same series.

2. What book do you own the most copies of?
None right now, but I used to own multiple copies of Anne of Green Gables and Thimble Summer by Elizabeth Enright.

3. Did it bother you that both those questions ended with prepositions?
No.

4. What fictional character are you secretly in love with?
I have to pick just one? My top literary hotties are Lord Peter Wimsey, Lucius Malfoy, Frank Greystoke from The Eustace Diamonds by Anthony Trollope, Almanzo Wilder, Aragorn, Captain James Aubrey from Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series, and Harry Flashman.

5. What book have you read the most times in your life (excluding picture books read to children, i.e. Goodnight Moon does not count)?
Little House on the Prairie

6. What was your favorite book when you were ten years old?
Ten was a tough year for me. We moved to a new town just before Christmas and I was miserable at my new school and our new house was ice cold all the time (we discovered 10 years later that the heating ducts had never been connected to my bedroom) and I couldn't master long division. I was drawn to books about lonely girls who hated their schools. The one that stands out is The Secret Language by Ursula Nordstrom. Also The Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnet.

7. What is the worst book you’ve read in the past year?
The Mists of Avalon by Zimmer Bradley. Another huge best-seller that is total crap. It's the story of King Arthur told from the women's perspective--Morgaine and her crowd. A heavier, more humorless book you will not find anywhere.

8. If you could force everyone to read one book, what would it be?
The Evolution Man or: How I Ate my Father by Roy Lewis. This is one of the funniest books I've ever read. When I finished it, I felt a strong urge to go out on the streets and press copies of it into people's hands.

9. Who deserves to win the next Nobel Prize for Literature?
I have no idea.

10. What book would you most like to see made into a movie?
The Eustace Diamonds by Anthony Trollope.

11. What book would you least like to see made into a movie?

The Flashman novels would be disastrous as films. Once you edit out everything that's offensive, there's nothing fun left.

12. Describe your weirdest dream involving a writer, book, or literary character.
I read The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner all in one day, cramming for an exam in college. I had weird dreams that night.

13. What is the most lowbrow book you’ve read as an adult?
Forever Amber by Kathleen Winsor

14. What is the most difficult book you’ve ever read?
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

15. What is the most obscure Shakespeare play you’ve seen?
Alas, I've only seen well-known Shakespeare.

16. Do you prefer the French or the Russians?

The Russians. In high school, our AP English teacher was a Russian. This was at an all-girls' school that had just two other men on the staff: the American history teacher and the janitor. So along comes Mr. Roman the Russian with his mournful, vodka-soaked Russian accent, and we were all in love within the first five minutes of our first class. The entire curriculum that year was Russian literature, except for a brief, brain-killing detour through the works of James Joyce.

17. Roth or Updike?
I am embarrassed to admit I've never read any Roth. He's on my list, I swear it! So I will have to go with Updike.

18. David Sedaris or Dave Eggers?

I must be the only person in the US who has never read David Sedaris. I know that some serious literary people sneer at A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, but I liked it. His descriptions of his mother's illness and death are very similar to what I experienced when my own mother died. And I could relate to his encounters with the pretentious parents of Berkley--he calls them the "Berkley parentiscenti" and they sound an awful lot like a some Charlottesville parents I know (and wish I didn't). I'm giving this one to Eggers.

19. Shakespeare, Milton or Chaucer?
Chaucer.

20. Austen or Eliot?
Austen but I also like Eliot.

21. What is the biggest or most embarrassing gap in your reading?

I don't think I've read even one book that was published in the last two years.

22. What is your favorite novel?

Who could ever have one favorite novel? If I want something delicious and cozy: Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann. If I want to laugh: My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell. If I'm gently melancholy: Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor. If I'm in a pre-war state of mind: Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood. If I want to be miserable: Dubliners by James Joyce. If I want to feel better about getting older: The Diaries of Jane Somers by Doris Lessing. If I am feeling wicked: anything by Iris Murdoch or Flannery O'Connor. If I want romance: The Balkan Trilogy by Olivia Manning.

23. Play?

Reading plays is unnatural. If I HAVE to pick one, then let it be The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde.

24. Poem?
Pied Beauty by Gerard Manley Hopkins.

25. Essay?

"The Crackup" by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

26. Short story?
"Revelation" by Flannery O'Connor.

27. Work of nonfiction?
Again, it's hard to pick just one, but since I just finished reading it and it was excellent, I'll go with London: the Biography by Peter Ackroyd.

28. Who is your favorite writer?
This is just like asking me to name a favorite novel.

29. Who is the most overrated writer alive today?

John Grisham.

30. What is your desert island book?
Buddenbrooks, maybe? Or The Complete Short Stories of Flannery O'Connor.

31. And…what are you reading right now?
Flashman and the Dragon by George MacDonald Fraser

Friday Reading Assignment 12/16/11: Christmas

2011-12-16T06:14:00.000-05:00

I don't read much holiday themed literature, but here is a list of my favorites, such as it is. Most of these are children's books.

The Doll's Christmas by Tasha Tudor. I have always been in love with Tasha Tudor's illustrations and I love this sweet little book in which two girls and their dolls enjoy a Christmas party.

Becky's Christmas by Tasha Tudor. Tudor's "Becky" books are charming and I used to love reading this one (and The Doll's Christmas) out loud to my children. This is a nostalgic look at a traditional American country Christmas, greatly enhanced by Tudor's delicate illustrations.

The Story of Holly and Ivy by Rumer Godden. An orphan, an unwanted doll and a childless couple come together in this story that would be awfully sentimental if it weren't written by Rumer Godden, whose other doll books I loved as a child, especially The Doll's House and Impunity Jane. Excellent illustrations by Barbara Cooney.

The Christmas books of Miss Read. I believe all the titles are Christmas at Thrush Green, No Holly for Miss Quinn, Village Christmas, The Christmas Mouse. I don't know if I've actually read all of these, but I started reading Miss Read during a dark period of my life in which our move to Virginia followed hard on the heels of my mother's death. Miss Read, whose real name is Dora Saint, writes gentle stories of life in country villages in England. When we first moved to Virginia, while I was still relying on Miss Read for comfort lit, I was indignant to find that Miss Read's books were shelved at the Charlottesville library under "R" for Read instead "M" for Miss as they were in Buffalo. I took this as a sign of a backward society. (That, and the appalling discovery that the public libraries here use the Dewey decimal system instead of Library of Congress.) Yes, I am a nerd, but I worked in a library in high school and all through college and my grandmother was a librarian, so I take these things more seriously than most people.

What are your favorite holiday books?

Oh Christmas Tree Stand

2011-12-14T07:15:00.000-05:00

I'm finding it difficult to accept that the stock of Christmas tree stands in local stores sells out every year. A Christmas tree stand is a durable item, so I can't understand why, at this time of year, everybody rushes out to buy one. Don't most people already own one? Or if some people don't, can it really be possible that the total number of tree stands for sale in stores can be less than the number of people who need to buy them? It can. And this, considering that you can also buy them from catalogs, is astonishing.

Last year, I tried to buy a new Christmas tree stand, and stores were sold out, so we made do with our old one for another year. Our old one was my grandfather's. It has been in use yearly since about 1957--hence my surprise at our population's urgent need to buy out stores every year. Our stand is trashed, probably because of my method of extricating the tree after the holidays--a brutal process that involves shaking it like a gorilla with a baby doll until the tree eventually falls out.

I really wanted one of those classy cast iron stands from L.L. Bean, but they too appear to be sold out. A boy in Grace's class told her that there were tree stands at Roses. Ordinarily, I wouldn't take advice from a fifteen year old boy, but THIS boy, I know has a sensible mother. If they got their stand at Roses, then to Roses we would go. In thirteen years of living in Charlottesville, I'd never been to Roses, but I must say that the NO FIREARMS ALLOWED sign in the window (illustrated with a picture of a hand gun) was promising. I'm sure you will not be surprised to hear that Roses did not have tree stands.

I won't bore you with all our perambulations, except to say that I was ready to attempt to put up the tree without the benefit of a stand. We could suspend it from the ceiling. We could pile heavy books around the trunk. But then Grace suggested K-Mart, where, on a vast, empty expanse of shelving, was the last Christmas tree stand in all the land. It is plastic, it is ugly, it is the furthest thing imaginable from the classy cast iron LL Bean one, but it only cost $8.

Pride & Prejudice movie showdown.

2011-12-12T07:17:00.000-05:00

Get your Jane Austen geek on because here is a guide to the Pride & Prejudice movies.

1940: Pride and Prejudice starring Laurence Olivier and Greer Garson.

How does this movie annoy me? Let me count the ways. The ditzy chickens in the hen house soundtrack is one clue that Jane Austen is turning in her grave. I am not the first person to observe that the costumes are from the wrong time period but good Christ, the gaudy fabrics and appalling bonnets are caricatures of an uninformed mixture of styles from the 1830's through the 1860's. It's like they hired Chris March and instructed him to design a "fantasy" Pride & Prejudice.

Jane Austen was hardly a feminist, and 1940's Hollywood certainly didn't make it a priority to portray women as anything but sex objects, but in this Pride and Prejudice, the irritating music the chatter, the giggling, the absurd costumes, the bows, ruffles and ringlets, the appalling behavior (such as the carriage race between Lady Lucas and Mrs Bennet, both in a rush to make their husbands call on Mr. Bingley first) all send the clear message that women are very, very silly creatures indeed with no object in life other than to catch a man. Even Lizzie, who is supposed to be sensible, is only distinguished by being rather less ditzy than the other women. Austen's works are known for lampooning the faults of human nature, but she always presents a dichotomy: the sensible vs the idiots. Here, all are idiots.

Laurence Olivier's D'arcy is the most genial, the least haughty of the D'arcys. His appearance is close to how one imagines D'arcy should look. As for Greer Garson in the role of Elizabeth, I can't get past her over-tweezed 1940's eyebrows and false freaking eyelashes. She looks wrong and while she tries to exude the sparkling personality of the literary character, I think she mostly fails. I just can't warm to her. Edward Ashley as Wickham and Melville Cooper as Mr. Collins are both competent in their roles although both are too old, and it is a stretch to consider Wickham as handsome. Lady Catherine De Burg is a horse-faced monster. Charles Bingley gets about three seconds of screen time, and Frieda Inescort as Caroline Bingley is perhaps the strongest performance of the entire cast.

This movie does have its moments, such as the "ball" at Netherfield (a ghastly imitation of the big party at Twin Oaks in Gone with the Wind) where Elizabeth Bennet and Caroline Bingley insult each other so effectively.

1980: Pride and Prejudice starring Elizabeth Garvie and David Rintoul

The typical low-budget BBC film. You wonder why they bothered, until you remember that when this movie was made, it had been forty years since the last adaptation. This film is not visually exciting. The houses are not much to look at--the Bennet's house, with its Palladian windows looks like something you'd see in an American cul-de-sac. The costumes are uninspired and cheap. David Rintoul way overplays Mr. D'arcy's haughtiness and seems to be always cradling a little pile of pebbles on his tongue. Elizabeth Garvie is a likeable Lizzie, but she can't save this film. The rest of the cast left no impression on me so we will have to conclude that their performances were forgettable.

1995: Pride and Prejudice starring Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle

This is the movie generally held up as the best adaptation. It is certainly very well done and the entire cast is excellent, although I can't say I love Jennifer Ehle as Elizabeth. She's too heavy, somehow, and I don't mean fat, just a tad ponderous for someone who is supposed to be lively and playful. Colin Firth plays Darcy as a smoldering hunk of repressed lust which is very effective, I must say.

This six-hour miniseries follows the book closely and with great accuracy. Some of my all-time favorite scenes in movie history are here: Sourpuss Caroline Bingley facing the horrors of Cheapside, Mr. Bennett saying, "And yet I am unmoved" in response to Mrs. Bennett's declaration that a little sea-bathing would set her up forever. Mrs. Bennett shrieking about wedding clothes at the news of Lydia's elopement, dimwitted Lydia asking “Where is everybody?” as she is marched up the steps of the church to her wedding, Mary informing her sisters that the loss of virtue in a female is irretrievable, the piano scene at Pemberly, and Eliza and Darcy dancing at the ball.

Alison Steadman is the Mrs. Bennet and plays the part with comic brilliance. No one else can touch her in this role, with her nerves, her flutterings, her scheming, her facial expressions, and a voice that drills itself into your eardrums. Every time she opens her mouth, she says something hilarious and she manages to steal the scene even when she's just in the background.. Indeed, without her, this movie would be altogether too serious for what is supposed to be a comedy. Benjamin Whitrow is the best Mr. Bennet of the bunch as well. David Bamber as Mr. Collins is funny but also far creepier than I think Austen intended him to be. Lucy Scott exerts a presence as Charlotte Lucas and Anthony Calf is charming in the small role of Colonel Fitzwilliam. Adrian Lukis as Mr. Wickham is not handsome enough and appears shady from the beginning, which is all wrong

2005: Pride and Prejudice, starring Kiera Knightly and Matthew Macfadyen

This is the most visually stunning of all the movies. Everything: the costumes, the sets, the landscapes, is gorgeous. I love the Bennet's house in this film, which looks truly lived in. The colors, the clutter, the laundry hanging in the back yard, the enormous pig, and the geese are all perfect. The costumes are the best of all the P&P movies. Some of you may say that Elizabeth's clothes are drab--and she does spend too much time bundled into a shabby old coat--but the details, the delicate prints, the simplicity are all lovely. There are no bountiful bosoms unlike the 1995 version, in which everyone displays a deep decolletage except for poor, pimpled Mary. In this age of Victoria's Secret, birth control pills and breast implants, it's expected that all women have enormous breasts. I'm glad no one was artificially enhanced for this movie.

A movie like this will always be judged according to how closely it follows the book, but as I watched this P&P, I realized that if the producers had tried to create an exact retelling of Austen's novel, it would have come out as a bad imitation of the feted BBC version. This movie is a skillfully unique production. It doesn't try to live up to the BBC version, in which nearly every line comes verbatim from the book. Also, where authenticity is concerned, the Kiera Knightly version, I think, gives a more accurate picture of life in the early 1800s. The 18th century, with it's freer manners and moral standards, had barely ended when P&P takes place, and this is apparent in the new movie, both in the fashions—the young girls wear empire gowns, but the older ladies cling to the tight bodices and big hair of their own youths--and the behaviors. Yes, the manners are formal, but when Caroline Bingley wonders, at the ball, if they will all be forced to chase a piglet, you can see why she asks. I loved the aprés-ball scene, in which the Bennett family is clearly hung-over.

The cast is good too. Brenda Blethyn is a more motherly, anxious Mrs. Bennet. She's not as funny as Amanda Steadman, but she's more sympathetic. Donald Sutherland is a grave and serious Mr. Bennet. Rosamund Pike is my favorite Jane. Jena Malone and Carey Mulligan as Lydia and Kitty look like the very young girls they're supposed to be---you can see why it is so shocking for Wickham to pick Lydia to run away with. In the BBC movie, Lydia looks more adult, and with her confident manner, it's more like she's the one taking advantage of Wickham, rather than the other way around. I'm glad Mary was allowed to be pretty in this movie--why should being bookish mean you must be ugly? When I read the book for the first time, I was younger than any of the Bennet girls, Mary and Kitty were the characters who fascinated me, because they were peripheral to the story and thus an unknown quantity. Rupert Friend plays Wickham--a handsome Wickham at last! Unfortunately, he's in barely three scenes. Simon Woods is the most appealing Mr. Bingley. Tom Hollander was a good choice for Mr. Collins, who, in the book, is described as being twenty-five years old. Why all the other movies had to make him middle aged is beyond me. The young Mr. Collins here is perfectly ridiculous, but not creepy like David Bamber. Kiera Knightly is not my favorite Elizabeth. She reminds me of Winona Ryder trying to be Jo in Little Women. (Knightly's not that bad, and she's good in the other historic roles she plays, but she just doesn't seem like a Lizzie to me.) Matthew Macfadyen as Mr. Darcy never seems truly haughty, but instead just shy and sensitive. At the movie's opening, I thought he was all wrong, but his D'Arcy becomes more appealing as the movie progressed. This movie has the best Elizabeth/Darcy sexual chemistry.

2008: Lost in Austen starring Jemima Rooper and Elliott Cowan.

In this movie, Amanda Price lives in modern London, has a dull job, an oafish boyfriend and a cynical mother. Her idea of a good evening is one spent curled up on the couch with a glass of wine and a Jane Austen novel. One day she finds Elizabeth Bennett in her bathroom, where the door behind the pipes turns out to be a conduit to the Bennett household, which Amanda enters just as Netherfield Park has been let at last. Elizabeth stays in the 21st century, and Amanda is trapped with the Bennetts, where no one behaves quite like they do in the novel and the plot unravels in an alarming way.

I love this movie. It's the funniest of all the P&P's and it's certainly the only Jane Austen movie you'll ever see with a reference to a pubic topiary. Since the story goes all awry you are dying to see how it turns out--another novelty in a Jane Austen movie. Jemima Rooper is hilarious as Amanda Price, although you can't help wondering how she maintains her artfully straightened hairstyle while living in the 19th century. Gemma Arterton looks the most like how I imagined Elizabeth Bennet does in the novel, but since she spends most of the movie in Amanda's world, we hardly see her. We have another superb Mrs. Bennett in Alex Kingston and Tom Riley is the best Mr. Wickham in Pride & Prejudice movie history. The Bennet sisters are all delightful, especially Ruby Bentall as Mary. Guy Henry as Mr. Collins takes the role from creepy to straight up pervert. The only disappointment is Elliott Cowan as Mr. Darcy who is appears to be wearing wooden underwear and who has zero chemistry with the character who is supposed to be his love interest.

Friday Reading Assignment 12/9/11: Gritty

2011-12-09T07:00:00.000-05:00

This week's assignment, A Feast of Snakes by Harry Crews, belongs to the Grit Lit genre, which means (as I understand it) painfully realistic, darkly comic literature, set in the American south. A Feast of Snakes has it all: sex, violence, crime, murder, and high school football. It's set in the town of Mystic, Georgia, which is about to host its annual event, the Rattlesnake Roundup. Readers may have difficulty with the misogyny and the violence--I found the abuse of pit bulls and their fights to be particularly upsetting. Nevertheless, it was this sort of lit--Flannery O'Connor's writing is a precursor of the style--that made me think I might be able to tolerate living in the South. In college, I was an ardent admirer of southern lit. I actually felt that I needed to live in the south to become a better writer. It's still my opinion that the south has a richer literary tradition than the north. A Feast of Snakes is a tragicomic white trash opera. I love it because of its unashamed declaration that people are bastards.

Pinterest-schminterest

2011-12-05T06:59:00.000-05:00

I have a pretty poor track record when it comes to crafts. Whenever I attempt a project, even if I follow the instructions carefully, the result is usually a fail. Take, for example some Christmas cookies I saw in a magazine a few years ago.

These are the cookies as presented in the magazine.

This is what happened when I tried to bake them.

The other day, I saw these cookies on Pinterest and I was tempted to leave a comment about my experience with it, but I decided against it. There are some things people need to learn for themselves and anyway, the Pinterest crowd doesn't seem to be very interested in reality.

Pinterest is where I saw this Advent calendar.

Source: sundayinbed.tumblr.com via Aileen on Pinterest

I liked its clean red and white pallet. How hard could it be to paint a bunch of clothespins and glue them to a board?

For years I have wanted to make an Advent calendar. Upscale catalogs have nice ones but they're usually things you could make yourself with fabric or yarn scraps and it's ridiculous to pay $98 for twenty-four tiny mittens on a string at Garnet Hill.

I've tried to knit my own tiny mittens, and always got bored before finishing even the first one. This time I was determined to succeed. I found twenty-five clothespins and gave them to Seamus to paint while I went out to buy the rest of the materials. I did some calculations: twenty-five clothespins spaced three and a half inches apart meant I needed an eighty-seven inch board. That's more than seven feet. For some reason, the Pinterest photo had led me to believe that the Advent calendar would be small and manageable, you know, like the size of a photograph on pinterest. Now it appeared I was making the world's largest Advent calendar.

No doubt I amused the Lowe's shoppers who saw me attempting to scan the end of an eight food board at the self scanner and nearly take a guy out by the ankles. I also smacked it into the top of the doorway when leaving the store. At home, Seamus had painted ALL the clothespins red even though I had told him that we needed to paint half of them white. I will spare you all the painful details, but in the end, I didn't even have a wall long enough to hang it on and had to resort to the space over a doorway.

Jon was not happy with the hooks I bought to hang it with as he felt they would work themselves off of the nails and the calendar would fall on the unlucky head of someone walking through the doorway. I like excitement, but not that much excitement, and allowed him to improvise a way to hang the thing with leather thongs. Leather thongs don't exactly say Christmas, but neither does an Advent calendar that doubles as a guillotine.

The finished product. Not only is it long, it is heavy. See my left hand, straining to hold it up in this picture?

There aren't packages hanging from all the clothespins. That's because wrapping twenty-five tiny presents is HARD. Hanging them is hard too, when you've accidentally painted the clothespins shut. Don't worry, I got them all wrapped and hanging eventually. Note that the gifts are out of reach of the children.

After all that work, I read about how to make a clever Advent calendar from rolled-up pages from the Anthropologie catalog.

Friday Reading Assignment 12/2/11

2011-12-02T06:55:00.000-05:00

I don't read many best sellers, but one popular author I love is Bill Bryson. He never fails to make me laugh and if you haven't read any of his books yet, what are you waiting for? This week's assignment is one of his earlier, less well-known books, The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America. Starting in his hometown in Iowa, Bryson makes a road trip through much of the United States, specifically looking for the ideal American small town. Bryson hadn't quite reached his writing stride when he wrote this, but it is worth reading, nevertheless.

Bryson is mostly disappointed. He envisions a small friendly place with a green courthouse square, useful shops along Main St., a centrally located post office, movie house, library, and residential neighborhoods within walking distance of downtown. What he finds are mostly dreary towns whose businesses have succumbed to competition from big box stores on the outskirts of town. It sounds grim, but Bryson has a talent for becoming embroiled in ridiculous situations, some of which are even to be found in the index.

Bryson City, North Carolina 87-91
panty shields incident in A&P, 90-91

Before I owned a copy of this book I used to read the library's copy and someone wrote elegant little margin notes refuting some of Bryson's assertions. I think I may have left my own elegant little margin note on the page where he declares Lake Erie "dead." Since Bryson's writing is less mature than it is in his later books, he indulges in a few cringeworthy judgements, but mostly I join him in being appalled at the disintegration of the American small town. And road trip books are awesome.

For Better or for Worse

2011-11-30T07:52:00.001-05:00

Yesterday was our twentieth anniversary. We celebrated by going to a very fancy restaurant and we did enjoy it but I'll be honest, this has not been a good year for our marriage. Below is a picture of us shortly before our wedding. We were so happy!

Here we are on Thanksgiving. I was pissed at him for something and am elbowing him away from me.

Our marriage is not one that's all sunshine and rainbows and saccharine facebook statuses. Those lovey-hubby posts always irritate me anyway. On the other hand, this is no Kardashian marriage. When we stood before the priest and vowed "for better or for worse" we didn't know how much "worse" we were in for. A lot, it turned out.

We spent our honeymoon driving to Michigan where Jon was in graduate school and had to return to class. We didn't care that we weren't getting a proper honeymoon. We were in love! We'd have a honeymoon someday. (Hasn't happened yet.) Our first anniversary was spent driving from Buffalo to Michigan in a snow storm with a crying baby. We got to our ice cold house late in the evening and--I remember this particularly--ate vegetarian hot dogs that looked like scalded human fingers and freezer burned wedding cake. I was already pregnant again. Our second anniversary was the day of Jon's brother's funeral. He died tragically young of a brain tumor. We had two babies by then.

And so it went, an opera of mishaps both comic and tragic: home renovations, deaths, illness, road trips, DIY carpentry, hurricanes, blizzards, leaky roofs, being robbed, shitty landlords, mice, rats, squirrels, birds, ants, fleas, poverty, broken down cars, puppies, the occasionally appalling behavior of our children and much much more. Much of this blog is a catalog of our more comic disasters. To give one example, here's the story of how I had to help him find the suitcases so he could leave me.

Lately we've been facing a new crisis and seeing a counselor. She gave us an assignment for the night: to go out to dinner and discuss what we'll be doing twenty years from now. It's always fun to make plans for the future and the exercise served its purpose--for us to visualize ourselves together.

Black Friday in Charlottesville

2011-11-28T06:57:00.000-05:00

Our Thanksgiving was lovely, although if you saw my panicked Facebook and twitter updates, you might have gotten the impression I've never cooked a Thanksgiving dinner before. It has actually been my responsibility every year since I was in my twenties and my mother died.

This year, the main difficulty was I had no time to do much advance preparation. Add to that the fact that I overslept by two hours on Thanksgiving, and the cooking got off to a very late start indeed. It seemed we wouldn't be sitting down until midnight, but in the end, dinner was served at 8:00pm. The menu: roast turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, rolls, mashed potatoes, "golden winter puree," bacon-wrapped green beans, pumpkin pie with whipped cream, maple cheesecake with maple-cranberry compote. All of this was made 100% from scratch, with the help of Seamus. After all that, we sat down at the table and Jon said, "Where's the gravy?" I could have punched him. The problem with gravy is that you have to make it after the turkey is finished. You're tired, you feel like this meal should be done already, but OH NO, you have to stand over the roasting pan and labor over a revolting concoction of fat and meat juices.

At least we were all together for the holiday. That's Seamus in front, on Brigid's lap. The back row is me, Grace, Jon, & Ian.

I actually shopped a little on Black Friday. I went downtown, which was crowded with out-of-towners. How could I tell they were from out of town? Charlottesville people, surely you too are able to immediately identify who is local and who is not. Perhaps because local people don't tend to stand like statues in front of crosswalk buttons. And we're not likely to exclaim, "Oh look! They have...." while gazing slack-jawed in shop windows. I shouldn't be uncharitable, after all I have been a tourist myself in many places, but it would be NICE to be able to go downtown on the weekend without it being overrun with people who are here because they read in The Washington Post that C'ville is a good place for a day trip. You just want to buy stamps or pick up a prescription and you have to run an obstacle course of people who want to stop and take photographs directly in front of you and who take up ALL the restaurant tables. I know there are advantages to living in a place that attracts people, but it's irritating all the same. At any rate, I did officially buy two Christmas presents at local businesses. Every year I think I will start shopping early and I never manage to buy gift one until after Thanksgiving, and sometimes I don't start shopping until well into the middle of December.

Yesterday I put Ian on a plane back to New York. At the airport was another college student and his parents who were literally weeping as he left them. I felt like crying a little too, even though Ian will be back home in three weeks for the Christmas break. Later I drove Brigid to her school in Richmond. And so our holiday weekend has come to an end.