UnPlugged With a Few Upcoming Posts

I’ll be out and about and away from the PC for the next few days.    I will be scheduling a few posts so I look forward to any of your comments next week.

Read-A-Thon Update Hour 20

G’night Readers and Cheerleaders and Organizers and anyone else.

I can’t make it another second but I do think this is the longest I’ve ever was awake for a RaT.    Although, this is the first year I didn’t get a visit to every blog, and that disappoints me.

Oh well!  Congrats on all those pages turned!  

Enjoy this photo of Copley the Lobster at today’s yesterday’s Book Fest:

Read A Thon Hour 15 Remember DEWEY!

Dewey was wonderfully supportive and welcoming and encouraging and SMART and funny and warm and …    A truly wonderful champion for the love of reading and sharing the love of reading.

Happy READ-A-THON Everyone!   CHEERS!!

Read-A-Thon Update Hour 13 (8 pm)

I got back about 2 hours ago and have been trying to establish some kind of system to jump into this RaT and I’m already overwhelmed.   I’ll punch through it (or maybe take a nap?)

Boston Book Fest was INCREDIBLE!   I was very impressed with how well it was organized and I think it was a big success.   I look forward to next year’s.

And I met Dawn!    She’ll have the embarrassing vlog to show, if it works at all.    We’ll all have to wait – she’s still at the Book Fest for a few more hours, I think…

I’m having computer issues / technical difficulties and my printer is printing blanks so I don’t have any tracking sheets to guide me, which is sad but not a huge problem – just an annoyance.   But I can’t seem to get into my blog’s dashboard on my laptop and my PC is a mess – page load times are in minutes people.   I can’t comment and cheer if I can’t get the stupid comment form to open up.  – ok.  I’m whining but I’m really frustrated.

I can’t get photos to load and blahblahblah.

So.   This is my update.   Maybe I should go take a nap…

Randomocity and a POLL

**********  Poll closed.   NLIM finished at 4 pm 07/20/09.   Owen Meany wins!

*****updated to say, poll will be open until I finish Last Night in Montreal.    Cuz I’m crazy like that..

I went into a Borders today and managed to escape without spending any money!   WOW.

I also want you to know that I finished my sixth book for the month and thus will have completed my goal to read seven – assuming that Last Night in Montreal won’t take me to August 1 to finish!  which is my next book.   I suppose that is counting my unhatched chickens and putting carts in front of horses but I think I can do it.

I might even be able to read eight books this month considering how many days are left in the month!      So… I now invite you to help me pick my that 8th possible book:

The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova

John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany

My Detachment / Tracy Kidder – would this count for World Cit????

Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns

or should I buy a book from Eva’s recommendations and get started on the World Citizen Challenge already?!

I had a surprise mammogram today.    They have a new machine and it really wasn’t that bad.    Not comfortable exactly but not painfully painful, either.   The wonderful technician told me I had perfect breasts.     Isn’t that sweet?   I’m also on my way to my goal of getting an ablation.   TMI?   oh well, too bad.   Most of you are my girl’s club, ya know.       And if you don’t consider yourself as such for what ever reason, you may just celebrate good health!  Raise a toast in celebration!   and attempt to only have 3 alcoholic drinks per week?!    hmmm.  (I’m a bit past that mark…  I should cry.)

I finished The Day the World Ended at Little Bighorn and I must say, I learned a lot.   I have sympathy for the Lakota people.    I think Custer was an idiot (which is neither here nor there) and it will all be in my very-likely-too-long review post hopefully posted this weekend but probably next week.    I think it was a 3 pie book – a solid apple pie three slice rating and I would recommend it to anyone interested in our US history.

Don’t forget – you have only to participate in my poll for my next book AND/or scold me to start the World Cit Challenge ASAP.   Thank you and have a nice day.

Winner Announcement

GAVIN!     Gavin is the winner of Popular Music from Vittula!   Congratulations.     Do visit Gavin’s book blog – she’s an amazing reader!   She’s got over 2000+ titles in goodreads.com.

We’ll get all the logistics of book transfer figured out via email…  soon.   I’m off on a quick ‘unplugged’ laying about by the pool reading vacation.

Thank you ALL who provided such fun stories from your childhoods!      It is crazy what we all survive; and as parents try to prevent, huh?     I sometimes wonder if today’s kids never get to do anything;  but that’s another story for another day and extremely biased by the generation gap.   Happens every 15 years, doesn’t it.

Blog at ya later!!!

Wondrous Word Wednesdays

Thank you to Kathy at BermudaOnion for hosting this meme!   

From Popular Music from Vittula by Mikael Niemi

page 109 – tarn        ”… in a rich broth tasting of sweat and forests, with circles of fat on the surface like rings made by nibbling char in a tarn one breezeless summer’s night.”          a mountain lake (especially one formed by glaciers)

p. 123 – tetchily    ”Grandad maintained tetchily that electricity was the most ridiculous invention ever to come from southern Sweden, it pampered and spoild man and beast alike…”        in an ill-natured manner

p. 156 – pastille    ”… how he would wipe the spit from his moustache, which he used to trim with nail scissors, and then slip his son a throat pastille.”    cough drop: a medicated lozenge used to soothe the throat

p. 158 – tyro   “There were many tyro alcoholics who had seen the light and ad every break preached the gospel according to 40-percent proof; where one had trodden, others were keen to follow in his footsteps.”     novice: someone new to a field or activity

p. 181 – viscid   “Blood was flowing freely, red and viscid, his eyes swelled and closed.”   gluey: having the sticky properties of an adhesive

But wait!   There’s MORE!!

I must also share my favorite part of the book.   It was the section when Dad had his heart to heart with our narrator.   In the sauna, of course.    He covers all the big topics but this paragraph was too funny:

The most dangerous thing of all, and something he wanted to warn me about above all else, the one thing that had consigned whole regiments of unfortunate young people to the twilight world of insanity, was reading books.   This objectionable practice had increased among the younger generation, and Dad was more pleased than he could say to note that I had not yet displayed any such tendencies.   Lunatic asylums were overflowing with folk who’d been reading too much.   Once straightforward, cheerful and well balanced.   Then they’d started reading.   Most often by chance.   A bout of flu perhaps, worth a few days in bed.  An attractive book cover that had aroused some curiosity.  And suddenly the bad habit had taken hold.  The first book had led to another.  Then another, and another, all links in a chain that led straight down into the eternal night of mental illness.  It was impossible to stop.   It was worse than drugs.

I’m hosting a giveaway of this book, please click on my post for few of my thoughts on Popular Music, a link to a great review, and contest details.

The Pie Photo

For the start of the story, click on this post fromTuesday, April 21, 2009.

 

   

 

* The pie tastes great but it won’t be winning any awards for execution.   The pastry needed to be rolled thinner (and/or the pie plate should have been bigger) and the apples cooked a bit longer.    The crust tasted too salty for a sweet pie crust.   Hub loved it – called the crust “biscuit dough, but it works.”  I don’t think a taster would know about the bourbon if not told it’s an ingredient.    I just looked again at the recipe and think maybe the dotted butter on top of the filling might have been salted but I KNOW I used unsalted in the crust (recipe p.31, PIE by K.Haedrich)   This was my first time not to do the pie crust by hand – I tried the mixer method and I think it worked well.    I didn’t even intend to make the crust, since Stop&Shop’s brand of rolled up pie dough is wonderful but I only had half a box in the freezer.   I didn’t have any vegetable shortening so All-Butter was the only one to make.    The insides of the pie = awesome!   chunk Granny Smiths that were actually easy to peel even without the thingy gadget and lots of cinnamon, nutmeg, clove….   and bourbon.  (recipe p. 223, PIE by K.Haedrich) 

Update 9 (Four Hours Remain)

Sorry everyone, I am not going to make it much longer!      I’m sure the dog will get me up in a few hours if I don’t wake up anyway, but I can’t hold my eyes open any more.

ZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

 

Total pages read:   261

Wild Calls

I’m thinking about toying with the idea to maybe, just maybe, commit to posting every day in April.   How’s that for a fixin’-to-get-started-to-maybe-try something?   I can be wishy-washy to the extreme.

In fact, I can still remember asking my mother what ‘wishy-washy’ meant after reading one of the Peanuts* cartoons accusing Charlie Brown of being so.    I have always been a little creeped out by Charlie Brown ever since.     Why?   Because , much to my chagrin, I strongly felt an affinity of personality with ol’ CB but much preferred Lucy.   I wanted to be strong and confident and self-assured like Lucy and not like Charlie Brown!

Anyway, I am now WWwwaaaaaaaaayyyyYYYY off topic for what I wanted to yap about in today’s post.     I thought this would be a short quick post, too!

I used to tell everyone and anyone that I hated Jack London.    I don’t know what happened to me in Junior High when I must have been forced to read The Call of the Wild.   I have ever since associated London with boring and COLD arctic writing.   Ugh and BRRRrrrrr.

However.

Maybe I’m matured since then.    Last week while subbing at the high school in the Special Ed Department, my tasks were to play the last chapter of The Call of the Wild and hand out a questionnaire.     Gosh darn it if that stupid CD player quit with about 20 pages left to go!

So, I read aloud the rest of the book.    Out loud.    I think I did a decent job of it, too.    The kids followed along – I could tell because they would flip the page as I flipped a page and we got through it.     I felt like I earned my money that day.

And I was impressed with the writing! I will no longer deride Jack London.    (But I don’t think I’ll run out and read anything, either.)

And maybe I have a new calling to do voice overs and read aloud audio tapes of books!    Do you hear a career calling to me?    That would be wild, huh?

But that would require a decision, wouldn’t it.

*   I learned about the word ’sarcasm’ from reading Peanuts, too.