Wednesday's achievement

I finally finished reading a book!   It only took me six weeks, too, for a 267 page book!  (Yes, that is sarcasm.)

And the summary--

Book #1 Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer, by Novella Carpenter

An urbanized daughter of former hippies planted a community garden and then ventured into food animal production--all on an abandoned lot in Oakland that was up for sale to build high-rise condos. 

The book is divided into three sections--Turkey, Rabbit, Pig--as she takes on more complex challenges in the raising, killing, and eating of food animals.  The turkey section hurt my heart.  The rabbit section made me want to join the peace corp and go teach impoverished families to raise meat rabbits.  The pig section?  It made me feed weird.  I eat pork, you know--and her particular porkers had a happy, happy life on their way to death and dismemberment.  But killing and eating our fellow animals is not the stuff of which poetry is made...or should it be?

Her description of dumpster diving experiences are both skin-crawling icky and snicker-tickling funny.  The times when she lost animals nearly made me cry--don't read this if you don't want to feel the hurt.  The experiment where she ate only food she'd grown herself was contrived, a bit, but still so very worth the while.  And in the end, she found--

Not telling.  Read it yourself.

One-and-three-quarters thumbs up.  (On a scale of two.)

Notable quote:  "...when I considered my messy house; it was a sign of a busy, full life."  Does that apply to my messy house, too?

Tuesday woes

If life were a Rex Stout novel, it would be called Misery in Triplicate.  Work stinks; I get out late and traffic stinks, I have to walk dogs after dark and no jogging first, which stinks, and I have to clean up the dog's diarrhea from last night and that truly stinked; now I find my Winzip has somehow been updated to a trial version--when did that happen?

Forget it--I'm switching to 7zip.  But it looks like I'll have edit the registry to get rid of WinZip...eventually.  I'll brute-force it off of here.

Somehow, in spite of all my optimism on Sunday, I have still not managed to finish reading the very first book on my list.  Maybe today.  Meanwhile I can enjoy the memory of my weekly cooking adventure...

Seafood  
 Pasta Primavera

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Peas with mushrooms and other good stuff.

Sunday - bonus hour

Daylight savings time just kicked off a new hour in my day.  Maybe I'll spend it reading!

Or maybe I'll spend it catching up on the laundry, editing my daughter's essay, installing software on her computer, and loading food into the freezer.  I need to look at my cooking schedule, too.  And finish the dining room chairs.

Maybe not.  I'm still dealing with the empty bowls left after throwing away half the contents of the freezer.  And I just rearranged my cooking/dog walking schedule.  Dogs first, cook second.

Speaking of dogs, it looks like someone finally figured out what a dog house was for.

 About that book list...I just realized how confusing it is to start a year-long reading challenge on the 4th of November.  The revised challenge: ten books by the end of the year.  Then I'll start over.
The list.
 1. Farm City by Novella Carpenter
 2. Around My French Table by Dorie Greenspan
 3. Bridget Jones's Diary, Helen Fielding
 4. Bridge to Terabithia, Katherine Paterson
 5. High Tide in Tuscon, Barbara Kingsolver
 6. The Book Thief, Markus Zusak
 7. The Cain Saga #3, Kaori Yuki
 8. The Cain Saga #4, Kaori Yuki
 9. 1776, David McCollough
10. Fractured Fairy Tales by A. J. Jacobs

[jogging: T + 3, the usual light day]

Saturday - work, work, work

I must have misplaced a couple of days in my year of blogging about Socializing the Incredibly Unsocialized Dog.  Day 1 was on October 31, but day 365 didn't come until November 2.  It's all I can do to keep myself from going back and figuring out where the missing days went.


Luckily I have better things to do.  Like reading the Girl Detective blog.  She managed to read 100 books in one year.  And blog about them.  I couldn't do that--that's like a book every 3.5 days and I don't manage one book a month.  Even if I included an occasional graphic novel--like she does--I couldn't do it.  Maybe I should set a goal of my own...24?  No, not "round" enough.  How about 10?

I could make a list of all the books I've already purchased and plan to read, then add in the ones on my amazon.com wishlist...that would probably be a nice round fifty.  But...no.  She's a stay-at-home writer and mom, so I'll let her win this challenge.  Right now I've got a garden to uncover.

Later.  The garden plans got cancelled.  See:



Almost 80 degrees and not even noon yet.  Sunny and sticky.

Beside, why did I think I could defrost a huge upright freezer crammed full of food and still have time to work in the garden?  I'll be lucky to get the freezer done and all of the wasted food hauled to the garbage can.
The things I'm throwing away are mostly those of indeterminate age, like bowls of homemade turkey broth and chili and chicken soup.  They're probably only a year old, but who knows?  I typically put dates on vegetables from the garden, but the homemade foods used to get rotated pretty well.

But they're all scary now.  The freezer door wasn't closing right, so anything near the door has been thawed out. 

Back to the book list.  I was afraid of this...the recently-added, unread books on my shelf adds up to 21.  There's at least one unread book on the Kindle and another 18 on the amazon.com wishlist.  That doesn't leave much wiggle room.  I didn't count the uncounted number of books I bought several years ago, which got mixed in the bookshelf when Ed rearranged my books.  I had carefully separated "read" and "unread" books--but he didn't know that.  He put them all in alphabetical order.

So here's the top of the list, my bookshelf.

 1. Farm City by Novella Carpenter
 2. Around My French Table by Dorie Greenspan
 3. Bridget Jones's Diary, Helen Fielding
 4. Bridge to Terabithia, Katherine Paterson
 5. High Tide in Tuscon, Barbara Kingsolver
 6. The Book Thief, Markus Zusak
 7. The Cain Saga #3, Kaori Yuki
 8. The Cain Saga #4, Kaori Yuki
 9. Louisa May Alcott, by Harriet Reisen
10. Fractured Fairy Tales by A. J. Jacobs
11. 1776, David McCollough
12. Reaching the Animal Mind, Karen Pryor
13. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Seth Grahame-Smith
14. 11/22/63, Stephen King
15. Asimov's Guide to the Bible, Isaac Asimov
16. The Year of Living Biblically, A. J. Jacobs
17. The Pianist, Wladyslaw Szpilman
18. The Name of the Wind, Patrick Rothfuss
19. Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan
20. Infidel, Ayaan Hirsi Ali
21. The Know-It-All, A. J. Jacobs

But first, a movie review.

Wreck-it Ralph

How did they manage to cram so much sensory overload onto one 98-minute movie screen? 
plot: good. Surprising at times.
special effects: not excessively stomach churning but not worth the 3-D premium
characters: superb
overall: remarkably good but don't take a little kid to it.  It's a little dark at times and they've never heard of Q*BERT.
I did hear some scattered applause at the end.

[jogging: turn plus 7 telephone poles]

Day 365 - A year of work and worry...summary to come

So it's been a year.  I need to look and and sum up...but not today.  The end result is she's everything I could ask for in a companion dog.  She does almost everything normal dogs do as long as you're not staring her in the face.

Today I'm too preoccupied with tomorrow.  The Garden awaits--except--I have to make a detour into the garage first.  We have a malfunctioning freezer filled with food.

Day 364 - watching for squirrels

She's been eating pretty well the last few days, both breakfast and supper.  I'd been having to put the other two dogs out when I leave for work to keep them from stealing her food, but when the weather turned cold I hated to.  And suddenly, I didn't have to.  Yay!

This morning was weird.  She was sitting by the mostly-empty food bowl, and as I went toward the back door Zack approached it.  She jumped up and leaped toward him--almost but not quite jumping over the bowl.  Food flew everywhere.

Only twenty or so kibbles, luckily.  I picked most of them up and restored them to the bowl.
So was she guarding her food at last?  Or just playing?

Day 363 - garden report part 3

After tilling.  Not a good, deep tilling, but just enough to get the bigger clumps of grass broken up.  On a first tilling of overgrown ground, I have to stop and cut/jerk/unwind the grass stems from the tiller blade shaft  once every 15 minutes, which makes for very slow progress.

Now that's over, I can do it right.   So...next weekend, south bed.

Followup to yesterday's gripe--I actually made the insanely stupid mistake of looking forward to a hour of peace and quiet while the family went to church.  But...they didn't.  An injury kept one of them home and the TV blared just as loudly as always.