Best Christmas present ever

Today's post is not about dogs, gardening or reading.  Not even cooking.  It's about

Shelling.  Using man's most ingenious invention.  This device and a bag of itty-bitty Texas pecans, and you have a bowl of delight.  Snacktime!

Ow!

Next up is

From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler

by E. L. Konigsburg


Q: Who is Saxenberg?  Did she ever tell?  Oh, yeah--I finished it kind of late and didn't catch that she told later in the book.  Anyway, I'm not telling.  You'll just have to read the book for yourself.

This is the kind of book we should make kids read in school, so they can find out reading doesn't have to be punishment.  It's fun!  And it expresses a feeling that every kid goes through sooner or later (I've still not lost it)--a feeling of wanting to make something happen.  To do something different--even great--something that makes you uniquely you.

At least that was my take on it.  Others may explain that I missed the point.  I never was good at ferreting out deep, hidden meanings in literature.  I just like the stories.

Oh--I just reread Lizzie Skurnick's interpretation of the book and I see both why she included it and what it meant to her.  And I think she's right...it was an end of childhood experience.  A first step in growing up.  Having more important concerns that the frivolous plays of childhood.  "...she's become, like the Angel, a singular entity with her own history, her own mystery." --Lizzie Skurnick, Shelf Discovery, 2009.

Book #7 under my belt

and in my stomach.  Not tummy.  Don't you hate it how clothing advertisements for women refer to "tummy control"?  I'm a grown woman--I don't have a "tummy."
I do got a gut.

Anyway, it's

Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women  by Harriet Reisen

First, the good.  Ms. Reisen sure knew her subject.  Her research is phenomenal and she clearly read everything she could get her hands on--old journals, all of Louisa's writings, probably a good bit of her fathers' and I hope she read Emerson and Thoreau and had a familiarity, if maybe not mastery, of Dickens.  At some points I could hardly put the book down.  And I do recommend it.

But for the bad.  I started it over a year ago and put it aside after one chapter.  The first quarter of the book deals with Louisa's father and mother's lives in excruciating detail.  Sure, they're important--parents are always important.  And in the case of the father, extremely important.  He was a transcendentalist and a kook.  He believed in cold showers (for health) and forced a vegetarian diet of the worst kind on his family until his wife put her foot down and insisted on milk for the baby.  By his inability to hold a job, he caused constant unheavals in the childhood hearth, the home.  Aspiring to be a teacher, he experimented on his pupils with teaching techniques that seemed to have no grounding in experience or logic.  School after failed school was result, and then he tried to establish a self-subsistent farming community.  Which failed.  The most obvious influence he had on his daughter's character was to give her a deep, burning desire to provide for the basic needs of her mother and sisters.  Because he never did.

Louisa did, once she was old enough, by writing thrillers and sensational stories for the trashy newspapers of the day.  We don't know if she was embarrassed about them, as her literary avatar was, but she did keep her nom de plume well hidden.  Not until 1942 did a couple of enterprising literary detectives trace the pseudonym A.M. Barnard to her.  (Which adds another book to my reading backlog: Old Books, Rare Friends: Two Literary Sleuths and Their Shared Passion by Leona Rostenberg.)

Embarrassed or no, for the most of her adult life Louisa kept a small income flowing until she finally hit it big with Little Women.

Ms. Reisen's biography was--to me--almost unbearably dull until Louisa started writing and selling her work, coming into her own as a person with ideas and hopes and dreams.   I don't mind a certain amount of "back story," I just disliked her parents and got tired of reading about them.

A couple of other things I wanted but didn't find--the petty details that absorb the life of a growing child.   A gnawing stomach.  An unexpected cake.  The disappointment of having her mother laid up from a miscarriage, unable or unwilling to care for her.  (I know she felt it.)

It could be that this level of detail just wasn't available.  Louisa and her sisters were required to keep journals.  (Wish I'd made my kids to.)  But they were also expected to share the journals with their parents.  Not in a "punishment" kind of way, but in a "how was your day, today, dear?" kind of way.  Even as a kid, if you were writing down your innermost thoughts and feelings and you knew your parents might read them....would you write, "I hate my mother!"  or would you write something more appropriate for adult consumption?  Like, "...I was feeling very naughty today."

And the other thing I wanted was a peek at Louisa's trash.  Although Ms. Reisen quoted frequently and copiously from Louisa's poems and works for children, I don't recall a single quote from the pulp thrillers that paid the bills.  Louisa must have enjoyed writing them, and I'm itching to read one.  Project Gutenberg doesn't seem to have any but I can probably find some at the library.

Last, the ugly.  Nowadays we take it for granted that physicians can heal--they have antibiotics and steroid shots; pain-killers, ultrasounds and vaccinations.  But not then...not in 1865 when Louisa became deathly ill with typhoid pneumonia and was laid up for weeks.  Not when her sister died or...well.  I won't go on and spoil the book for you.  It's a biography.  Everybody dies in the end.

Still reading the biography of Louisa May Alcott

It's so sad to read about the hurt done to her body by her wretched diet while growing up--bread, apples, and sometime oatmeal were the family meals for weeks on end.  And futher damage done by the physician who gave her mercury (calomel) for a typhoid remedy.  (fyi, it doesn't work and mercury is poison).  And who knows what else misguided behaviors, common for the times.

Will the people of our future look back on us and feel sorry for the people who die of cancer, dementia, and diabetes, thinking, "Those poor, misguided people!  All they needed was gene therapy, elimination of such-and-such from the diet, and fresh, wholesome foods."

If only I could live to see the day.

Later...and later in the book.  Several modern-day doctors reviewed the records.  They don't think that the blue pills (mercury-based) given to her in the Civil War hospital caused her later-in-life illnesses.  Based on her symptoms and paintings from the time, they think it was lupus.  There's still no cure for lupus.

Dogs and smells

Here are my observations on a matter of very deep and revealing proportions.  Zack takes twice as long to explore a smell than Izzy, and Werewolf takes the least time of all.  My conclusion is:

The smaller the schnozzle the slower the smeller.

Hope I no need bread because

 I just scooped out my No-Knead bread, "Bread so easy a four-year-old can make it."  It's supposed to rest for 15 minutes, then I somehow have to make it into a ball and encase the ball in towels.
Here is is what it looks like, resting.

 

Hint: this is not supposed to be what it looks like.


Many people said their dough wouldn't make a ball, either, but that it still turned out well.  But was their dough more like a seeping, watery mass on the cutting board?  Dare I add a little extra yeast?  

No, I'll just ball it up and let it do its second rising.

Later.  It's hopeless and I'm a failure.  I can't even make No-Knead Bread.  It turned out flat as a tortilla with the texture of a brick.

On the other hand, the recipe posted for the 4-year-old varies slightly from Smitten Kitchen's.  I'm trying the 4-year-old version next time.  And there will be a next time.

Also, I think it needed more flour and a warmer rising place.  And a 7-1/2 quart Dutch Oven.

Book #6 is

The Great Brain
by John D. Fitzgerald
 illustrated by Mercer Mayer.

A gem, truly.  A picture of a time and a place and three absolutely unique boys with a father who bought the town's first indoor water closet.  Tom, the Great Brain of the title, proceeds to sell kids a demo of  "the indoor backhouse that doesn't stink."  Until he gets found out and has to give the money back.

Some of his escapades succeed, helped by the devoted (or extorted) silence of his brothers.  And some fail a few times before they succeed, like the time when he decided to get rid of the mean schoolteacher who paddles him.  But if there's anything this kid has, it's grit.  He learned to try and keep on trying--success gets to be a habit, as Pa Ingalls says in an entirely different kids book

It's still a kid's book, not a teen book...but now I wonder if Ms. Skurnick's book was maybe mislabeled "teen" by a misguided publisher.  I've heard of such things.

But I absolutely adore The Great Brain.  And I cried at the end.   And I really wished I'd read it to my kids, as several commentators on amazon.com are doing right now.

Oh, and I recognized the illustrator's name, Mercer Mayer, but couldn't quite place him--he's the illustrator of the Little Critter series.  We loved those books!

Mockingjay

Here goes.  Book #5
Mockingjay
by Suzanne Collins

Read it.  Read it now.  Read it for sure if you were prone to watching war movies in your younger days.

Because that's what this is--a war movie.  You'd have expected no less from the author of The Hunger Games and Catching Fire.

Damn!  I wish I'd written it.

A lot of people won't like the ending, but you know?  Since when do you ever like the end of a war movie?  People die.  Good people die; bad people die; and a whole lot of people who never really do anything all that good or all that bad.

And that, my dear friends, is the point.  Any good war movie is really an anti-war movie.

Dogs...

meet Chickens

Very interesting.

More ratatouille

gotta love it.

Okay, I re-read the introduction to Shelf Discovery's chapter on YA heroines we'll never return.  The point behind the book choices was that these were books from the hero or heroine's perspective.  Not just a Nancy Drew mystery, where a teenager is drawn into an adult story.  But books where the hero was telling the story, living the story, and in the story.

I don't totally agree with the age of her heroines, but I sort of understand.

Sunday night cooking

Last night I cooked breakfast--always a favorite.  Pork sausage (free range, of course), eggs from the chickens down the road, grapefruit from somewhere (hopefully South Texas), and sugar muffins from Ed's mom.  Okay, maybe she didn't cook them, but she supplied the recipe a number of years ago.  Ed and his brothers grew up calling them 'sugar muffins' but the recipe shows them as 'French breakfast puffs.'

I have one issue with the recipe...other than the fact that they have an excess of butter and sugar and no nutritional value whatsoever.  My issue is that the recipe calls for 1/3 c soft shortening, part butter.  Do I really think "The French" would have used shortening other than butter?  One of these days I'm going to try them with all butter and see the results.

Book #4 is

Roald Dahl's
Danny the Champion of the World.
 
Let me say this first:
    `    This is a great book.
It's funny and endearing and so very British.  If I'd read it as a kid, I'd have loved it.  You should read it with your kids.  I wish I had read it to mine, back when they were six to twelve years old.

But it's not a teen classic.  Ms. Skurnick, what were you thinking?

Monday is going to bring a trip to the library, to get the next couple of kid's books and check out Shelf Discovery again.  Because I just don't get her point.

Saturday, rain,

...and something I'd never seen happen in 14 months of living with my baby girl from the breeding kennel, my Izzy.  The baby who became a mommy by accident when she wasn't big enough or strong enough to breed.  The dog who spent at least two months of her life in a 6x10 foot cage, only coming out twice a day while the kennel was cleaned.  The dog who may have never seen rain before.

She went in the dog house to get out of the rain.


Just to make a point--the phrase "puppy mill" makes you think, "poor little puppies.  Cages and cages of sad-eyed puppies, nothing to play with and no one to love." But that's not the way it is.  The puppies get it good.  They get toys, and play, and lots of socializing attention. It's the breeding stock that sees the real misery.  Why bother training?  Why give them exercise?  Why let them outdoors?  Their purpose is to turn out as many healthy puppies as possible until they die.  Like a machine.

That was then; this is now.  When I put her out it was drizzling but the temperature was still warm, seventy or so.  But after a while it came a good shower  Ed peeked out the curtain and said, "Well look who's in the dog house."  It took me a second look to believe it.

Izzy figured out what a dog house is for!

Here it goes

Book #3


Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins



You know what I like most about Katniss Everdeen?    Her brain, or lack thereof.   It's really great identifying with a character who isn't a superbrain and clearly demonstrates that.   Not that she's stupid--she's just normal.   She reminds me a lot of Frodo Baggins.

This book surprised me as much as the first movie did, which was surprising in itself.  I was thinking that maybe Suzanne Collins just got lucky the first time--I really didn't think she could do it again.  But she did.  It's just as much of an emotional roller-coaster as the previous, but in such a different way.

Why couldn't Bashar al-Assad have read this trilogy before he started murdering his own citizens?   The harsher the repression, the more desperate the revolt.  There always comes a point when people care more about freedom than they do about their own lives.

Several of my guesses came true but some are yet to be proved/disproved.   (I can't say what they were without risking spoilers.)

All of our old friends are back, minus, of course, the dead ones.  Maybe I didn't fall in love with any of the characters as I did with Rue from the first one, but in a way, this kept the book from hurting as much.  And still,  the surprising ending suggests plenty of hurt yet to come.

Weird dog behaviors, part 3

Can you spot the balloon in this picture? 









Werewolf can.  He does not like balloons.  On our walk Monday, I had to turn him around and walk away from the balloon to get him to stop barking.

And then what did it do?  Went over us and landed in front.

More progress...Book #2

Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself

by Judy Blume


If I'd read this book as a pre-teen, I might have loved it.  Or not.  I can't really guess...it doesn't resonate with me; doesn't keep calling me back like other books have.  All kind of books have that power whether they be adult, kids', pre-teen, teen or even young adult.   (Not sure what the difference is between teen and young adult--you tell me.)

When all this is over, I need to check out Shelf Discovery again and see what Lizzie Skurnick thought of it--and why she included it in her book.  Because to me, this is less of  a "teen classics we never stopped reading" but rather a, "pre-teen classics that we read to death and moved on from."

I may have to make up my own list.  There were several books on hers that I would not have called teen books.  They were great kids' books--but not teen books.  Farmer Boy, for example--why that and not Little Town on the Prairie?  I read Little Town to pieces when I was a teenager.  It didn't have hog-slaughtering, but it did have hay-stacking and rebellious feelings and finding out your parents were people, too.

All that said, I loved Sally J. Freedman.  She was me, in so many ways.  And I loved all of the deliciously round characters that Judy Blume populated Sally's world with.   Sally's brother, the smothered, desperately trying to emerge, adolescent.  Sally's mom, the quintessential Jewish mom.  Even her dad--I didn't like him at first, but he grew on me.  He was a really good Dad but not just a really good Dad--he was a man who wanted to have sex with his wife.  (Although not in so many words.)

And what I liked the most was the frustrating way that adults never wanted to answer Sally's troubling questions.  I've been there!

Progress on the 100-book pledge

Book #1 The Passage by Justin Cronin


Magnificent and mystifying; dreadful and hopeful.  A science experiment failed thirteen times before it succeeded and left the world to deal with the results...yet somehow, it all comes down to one.  One person--one little girl--and a handful of people who can somehow reverse the evil that man has done...is it possible?

I doubt it but I have two more chances to find out.

The ending seemed a little even rushed even though it dragged on a bit too long, wrapping up loose ends and foreshadowing the future.  But it was necessary--after so many disasters, dashed hopes and deaths, he had to present some sort of path to the future or you'd never want to read the sequel.  Or the sequel's sequel, because, yes--this is planned to be a trilogy.  I'm not in a hurry to read the next one right now--I need a break--but I'm sure I will be ready to continue long before the third book is published.

What else to say?  If you're an addict of suspense, you'll find your fix here.  If you're a literary type who craves the well-turned phrase?  Got it.  A sucker for unique characters?  Full of 'em.  Fond of dead people who....

Oops.  That would be telling.

Sunday slips away...

We saw The Hobbit yesterday, mainly to see how Peter Jackson managed to stretch a short book into to three long movies. He added a subplot and brought in parts of the "big picture" story, the parts that are simply alluded to in the book or mentioned in Lord of the Rings.   Since everyone has seen LOTR already, it works.



I'll forgive Peter Jackson for making up the subplot of the pale orc--it was unnecessary but interesting.  But I'm not sure I'll forgive him for downplaying the whole "burglar" theme and giving Bilbo a lot more credit for bravery than he actually possessed.  Not that he wasn't brave--at the least, his actions were brave--but he was never "heroic", in quotes.  Just sensible.  Like a Hobbit.

Dog table manners

I've accused Izzy of being a messy eater but she's not.  She just likes to eat the good stuff first, and since I hide the good stuff at the bottom of the bowl, what's a girl to do? 

No matter--it's good enough just to see her eating.

Keeping the bird feeders safe

Not much blogging this week.  I'm frantically trying to finish the first book in my 100-book challenge.  Sure, it would have made more sense not to start off with a 750 page book, but that's how it turned out.  If I finish it by Saturday, I'll be on schedule-ish (whatever that means.)

Of time and teenagers

Yesterday being a rotten day, I promised myself a New Year's day of reading and throwing things away.  A good day; a fine day; a day for me.

Needless to say, I broke my promise.    After worrying about Edward for many hours of the night (probably needlessly), I woke late, did very little reading and even less throwing away, and spent the afternoon helping Callie organize her room.  The job couldn't be finished without the storage bins she required, so she wanted to go to Walmart and then go to eat sushi.  And we did.  (The dogs got walked first.)

Maybe I'll make a New Year's resolution--eschew expectations.  Make plans and plan for plans to be disrupted.  Enjoy the time you get, in spite of teenagers.  Live like there's no tomorrow--it'll be preempted by teenagers, anyway.