Something growing in the garden

Spinach is unmistakable; radishes are cute.  This picture also reveals a serious deficiency in my spacing.









Other than that, all I have is volunteer cilantro and a little horseradish starting to green up.  But I haven't been out to check since Sunday--to do so would mean checking in the dark with a flashlight and I'm not that far gone.

 #17 on the 100-book challenge

I have to review The Pianist by Wladyslaw Szpilmannow but I don't want to.  It's an important book but not exactly riveting reading.   Told in first person by a survivor of the Holocaust, it spans the years from 1939 to 1945, taking place in Warsaw, then the Warsaw ghetto, then Warsaw again as he was assigned to a work crew and eventually made contact with an old friend who agreed to hide him.  He drifted from place to place without discovery until, near the end, he is found by a German officer.  When the officer asks him what he does, he replies that he is a pianist.  The officer has him play--Nocturne in C-sharp minor--and offers to help his escape to the country.  But he can't do that--being Jewish, there is no escape.

The book isn't a novel and so it doesn't read like one.  The deaths--the so many deaths and suicides and cruel torture--just roll off your brain like statistics.  They die like farm animals and their deaths mean nothing because we know nothing of their lives,  The book leaves it to our imagination to turn each death into a life.  But I won't complain--he was a pianist not a writer and he told the story as history, shortly after the experience.

My own surprise in the reading was learning how many Polish people were killed along with the Jews.  Germans firing into crowds, destroying homes, arresting and torturing people for unspecified offenses.  Then came Hitler's order to destroy Warsaw--destroy an entire city!  How many people died in the rubble?

Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote,
Warsaw has just now been destroyed. No one will ever see the Warsaw I knew. Let me just write about it. Let this Warsaw not not disappear forever.

One more Judy Blume, then it's off to other YA authors for a bit

Then Again, Maybe I Won't






This is a book that's really hard to pin down.  Tony is nearly fourteen and coping with all the hormones and emotions and anger that is teenager.   Suddenly his dad sells an invention, gets a new job and moves the family to the rich neighborhood on Long Island.  It's 1971--remember when we didn't have the Internet to teach kids about sex?   (I sometimes wish we didn't have it now).   If your parents don't do it and your peers don't do it, where's a kid to turn?

So all those worries--growing up, strange family, new neighborhood--all had to go somewhere and Tony stuffed them all inside, ending up with a terrible case of Charlie Brown Stomach.  Or so we think--I'm not giving away the end.

I'm kind of mad at Judy Blume for not coming to a satisfactory resolution regarding his grandmother.  It makes me want to write a sequel.  I can't, of course, since she's still alive and her characters are her own, but darn it!  If she refuses to do it, why shouldn't I?

Maybe I will, when I get started writing again.  Then again, maybe I won't.

Now for the weekly adventure in gracious living/wholesome cooking/fooding/lunacy

Broiled Swai Parmesan



and Buttermilk Chive Biscuits.



Heavenly and good.  Gently broiled fillets of white fish, spread with a mixture of butter, mayonaisse, Parmesan cheese and lemon juice, then broiled two minutes until the cheese browns. 

Healthy, low-fat fish + fat, fat, and fat = what's not to like?

Next time,  if I can stand to do such a crime to fish, I'll melt the Parmesan cheese in the microwave first.  It had texture.

The biscuits had a good flavor but they didn't rise.  When I tried the test of mixing a spoonful of my baking powder with hot water, it turned the water white but didn't fizzle.  I think I'm going to chuck the rest of the container even though the expiration date was January, 2013. 

And add some cheese next time.  Fat is good.  Need.  More.  Fat.

Free day until...

Remember, "The Devil made me do it"?  If you were as old as me, you would.  Today, for me, Callie made me do it.  We played tennis for an hour and a half.  It felt okay but I got winded a lot.  Prior to that, I'd spent an hour this afternoon clearing out the front fence line.  Bending, stooping, straightening.

When the tennis was over I sat in the car for fifteen minutes on the drive the Target.  And when I got out of the car...

Agony.  I just took the dogs on the shortest walk we ever do and it wasn't even 6:30 yet.  I can hardly hold my right arm up to tilt the water down my throat.  My legs are lead legs.  I'm Tin Man without the oil can.

(If there was one) garden report

Lows of 30 tonight and tomorrow.  WIth a clear sky, that means frost.  We gardeners have to keep an eye on that kind of thing.  I haven't checked since Sunday whether or not any of that spinach I planted came up.

Technically speaking, this weekend I should plant Swiss Chard and beets, plus finish the row of greens.  It won't be easy--the ground is solid mud.





Look!  Baby broccoli.  And onions!

Book #15

is another of the young adult series.

I loved this book.  It made me cry.  I was in the dentist's waiting room at the time so I just blinked my eyes real hard a few times and tried not to sniff.

I totally identified with the heroine, Davey.  Full of emotion--in her case, way over the norm of fifteen-year-old angst--yet so willing to do the sensible thing and act like nothing was the matter.  I didn't suffer the kind of crisis she did, nothing like it.  (It opens with a funeral--her father's.)

As you'll read on the cover, she's helped out by the mysterious stranger who somehow seems to share the pain she's unable to express.  But stay awake--there are two mysterious strangers and I think the second one helped even more than the first.  He taught Davey to celebrate the life that was her father, not the death that ripped them apart.

One question it left me with--was the extreme distrust and fear that the Los Alamos people felt for the Hispanics in Santa Fe--and vice-versa--real?  It must have been--I wouldn't accuse Judy Blume of making something like that up.  So, was it accurate for the time (published 1981) or for an earlier time?.    Maybe it was set at an earlier age, closer to the war. 

After planting more spinach, lettuce, radishes and arugula

finally finished

11/22/63 by Stephen King.





Let me start by saying that I'm not a Stephen King fan.  I was five years old in 1963 and have never had the slightest interest in the mysteries and conspiracies surrounding that date.  And...

this book was so darn good it made me want to visit the Texas school book depository and see for myself.

The genre is sci-fi/fantasy, not horror.   What if a normal, mild-mannered schoolteacher from 2011 had the opportunity to travel back in time to 1958, five years before the title date?  Plenty of time to plan out how to change the future, place a couple of "sure thing" bets, and fall in love.  Huh?  Fall in love?

I'm embarrassed to admit I've had the book for two years and only just now finished it.  About a third of the way through, there's a protracted action sequence so intense that after racing through it with my breathing on hold and my eyeballs popping off the page, I had to put the book aside and rest.  Job and life intervened and it didn't get back to the top of the pile until now.

It's getting a special place on my shelf for when I retire and can re-read books full time.

Bird feeder report and later.

We've been endowed with white-winged doves for the last couple of winters.  I wonder know where they go for the summer?

Later.   I get to add musical reviews to my book and movie reviews!  Today we saw our first Dallas Summer Musical (yes, I know it's only February), Catch Me If You Can.

I thought it was going to be dumb and boring and boy was I wrong.  It was fast moving, full of smooth jazz, and had at least two heartrending musical numbers.  Plus, FBI agents can sure jive dance!

Technically speaking, there were a few points in the musical numbers where the voices and the music were a little out of kilter, especially toward the end.  Music a little loud so you couldn't hear the voice or the voice a little--what's the technical term?--shrill.



No matter.  We loved it.

Book review of the 3.65-day interval,

I think I mentioned before that I'd never read a Judy Blume book until I started this challenge, but if I had, man, this wouldn't be the one.  It's told by a pre-teen girl named Jill who is pretty much normal althought slightly lacking in the introspection/empathy department.  The girls in her class get bored one day and tag the nickname Blubber on the dumpy girl with the potato-shaped head--Linda.  Jill goes along as an active participant, partly because the ringleader is a bit of a bully but mostly because it's fun.  The nickname sticks and the bullying explodes into near-torture.

If I suspected Ms. Blume of manipulating the reader, I'd say she wrote it to make kids cry in outrage and demand to know why the heroine didn't try to stop it.  At first Jill was able to step back and feel a little empathy, or at least curiosity, about Linda's behavior and wonder why she put up with it.  But after Jill gets herself into trouble by egging a neighbor's mailbox, she develops the paranoid suspicion that Linda was the one who told on her.  Even her level-headed friend Tracy couldn't talk her out of it.  The whole "blaming the victim" syndrome brought home in a very personal way.

In the afterword, Ms. Blume said she was inspired by her own daughter's experiences and that she wanted to tell the tale of bullying from the perspective of a normal girl, just trying to survive in the back-biting world of Fifth Grade girls.  I've been there, for sure, and so has my daughter.  It's an ugly time and if you don't have a best friend you might as well lock yourself in the closet for the duration.

It would be interesting to know if Ms. Blume was also relating her daughter's observations about the clueless indifference of the adults surrounding her.  I should ask my daughter if she felt that adults were not to be trusted.  At that age, I sure did.  I know my parents cared--a lot--but they didn't know what I went through and I wouldn't tell them.  Why?  Partly because it was none of their business, but mainly because...I didn't want to hurt them.

The teachers stink, too.  Classrooms have changed since the sixties and I hope for the better.  There's no way a teacher in today's times could be as clueless as theirs was...or Ms. What's-her-name math teacher back in my fifth grade...or the science teacher in my sixth grade.

As painful as this book is to read, it's important in one more way.  Lizzie Skunick cites it as the book that inspired a generation of woman authors, because--

What was Linda's story?

On cinnamon, the ugly brute

Chicken Tikka Marsala, Golden Spice Rice, and those green things

Yesterday being another fellowship dinner at church, I didn't cook for the family.  It's been two weeks, now, and I'm afraid to look at the chives that were purchased for the Parmesan Swai--they could be scary.
So instead I cooked for me, alone.  And incidentally, relearned a lesson that I've already learned twice before--

No Cinnamon In Meat Dishes.

I thought it would be different, this time--the cinnamon was in the marinade for the Chicken Tikka Marsala.   But now the whole house smells like burnt cinnamon and the chicken, while it wasn't totally inedible, wasn't improved in the slightest by it.

No cinnamon.

I cheated by buying a canned sauce mix and it was pretty good.  I'd like to make my own, though.

Zombies are the new vampires.

Warm Bodies.


 What's not to like?  Zombies, brains, bullets and young love.   Nicholas Hoult whom you probably know as Beast (X-men First class) mastered the zombie shuffle admirably. 

One of the funniest scenes in the movie comes when Julie--the human--tries to fake the undead walk.  It's worth the price of admission alone.

Now, number 12...

Pride and Prejudice 
and Zombies

 by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith


All you Jane Austen fans out there will spurn me, but I found the addition of "unmentionables" actually improved the novel.  Improved it to the point that I was actually able to finish it.  I've tried reading it a couple of times, but always get stuck on the utterly boring, inconsequential, nitpicking quality of their lives.  The heroines I create visit the poor and do good before they get swept up in the arms of a dashing, unsuitable suitor.

But P&P&Zombies is true to the form and spirit of the original, with the only changes being that the balls, visits, dinners and drives are spiced up with an occasional pack of zombies to be beheaded and burned.  Jane and Elizabeth are zombie hunters by nature and trained in the finest Shaolin style.  With sword, dagger, and musket, they hitch up their skirts and dispatch the undead mercilessly.  Plus a few not-so-undead (but that comes later.)

I would have liked if it had been a couple of chapters shorter and had a little more undeadly humor, but all in all, I wasn't disappointed.  It was LOL at times but maybe not ROTFL...plenty of snigger, smirk and chuckle.  (Which is good because I did most of my reading at work.)

The best part of all was the Reader's Discussion Guide at the end.  "We hope these questions will deepen your appreciation and enjoyment of this towering work of classical zombie literature."

Shopping I love not

Drat Whole Foods Market.  Yeah, Local Yokel.  All I wanted was a couple of pounds of free range chicken breast, but all I could find at WFM was "barn."  I assume that's the kind where they cram chickens into a shed so tightly they can only move in unison.  Maybe the chickens don't care, but I care.  I want a chicken who's been out in the air, scratching.  Eating grass.  And bugs.

Luckily Local Yokel had said chicken and I am now in possession of a couple of bags of it, plus a jar of Tikka Marsala curry sauce.  I was going to make it from scratch but I couldn't find all of the ingredients (another mark against WFM.)  It turned out that the "green cardomon pods" on my list were for the rice, not the curry, but I didn't know that.  I'm still planning to marinade the chicken before I grill it, but I'll cheat on the sauce.


Tune in Sunday for the results.

Unlike most of the books...

I had read A Wrinkle In Time as a kid.  I vaguely remembered how the children used mathematics to resist mind control.  The name Auntie Beast sounded familiar; and of course I remembered the five dimensions and the whole wrinkle/tesseract description. But I must have been too young for it, because my major recollection was that it was hard to follow.  (It's not!)

What I didn't remember was Meg's anger at her father--which so makes it a coming-of-age book.  A big part of the business of growing up is figuring out that your parents can't fix everything with a band-aid or a kiss.  It makes you mad at the time.  Only later--if you're lucky--you find out that just because a person doesn't have magic powers doesn't mean they don't have powers.  And that failing isn't the same thing as giving up  Maybe your parent can't stop bad things from happening, but they can help clean up the mess...and make it better next time around.

Another thing that I totally glossed over was the occasional mention of God.  The big 'G' God.  How odd to find it cropping up in a science fiction book, even one written in 1959.  And especially in a book that is saying that the loss of free will is the greatest of all evils.  Thank heavens it's not a religious book and it doesn't take the matter a step further, as most religious people seem to do--free will is a gift from God but you'll only be happy when you choose to surrender your free will to God's will.  Such a koan!

So, that's my take on A Wrinkle In Time--a fun book with some really cool images in it, one nicely rounded main character, and a message I enjoyed hearing:  Alike and equal are not the same.

And don't you got to love a mentor who sends you off into battle with the most powerful gift of all? 

I give you your faults.

NTR, so a couple of pics from the weekend

 Here's what happens when you ask the dogs to pose for a picture.

And here's what happens with the cat

And you wonder why I prefer to photograph food?

#9 on the challenge

After years of work with clicker training (and whistle training and "good pony" training and even "tap on the glass" training), she writes about it all--and finishes up with a trilogy of short training courses.   Train your cat to high-five, teach your dog to hand target, and teach your coach to tag you.  Although the technique she pioneered is called clicker-training, what it's really about is primary reinforcement, secondary reinforcement, and cues.  Not commands, cues.  It's a mindset.  Commands imply do-or-else; cues imply do because you want to.

Read this book.  You'll be converted, run out and buy a clicker, and start teaching your budgie to answer the telephone when a phone solicitor calls.  Go for it.

The absolutely most fascinating chapter (that's saying a lot) is on creativity.  Starting with a trained dolphin who already knew a bunch of tricks, they started reinforcing when she did something new and different--a wave of a fin; sticking her head up; making a funny jump. Repeating the new thing didn't get a reward--she had to come up with something new each time.  When she eventually rans out of new things to offer, she sulked for a day, then,

"...circles around the tank once, building up speed.  Then she rolls over on her back, sticks her big wide tail into the air, and coasts, without power, so to speak, about forty feet, from one side of the tank to the other."

None of them had ever seen a dolphin do that and it certainly wasn't trained into her.  She invented it.
The story doesn't end there but I'm not giving out any more spoilers.

I've started clicker training already, teaching Zack how to fetch my socks.  As expected, the hardest part is training the trainer.  Wonder if I could use her methods on eliminating some of my self-destructive behaviors?

My weekly food post a week late

Last Sunday's home cooked meal was:
Barbecued pork chops using Ina Garten's sauce recipe, potato salad, cole slaw and grapefruit for dessert.




As a sauce, her recipe was great, but I tried to use it as a marinade and it just didn't soak in.  Maybe slow-cooked at a really low temperature would have been the way to go...so many recipes call for a quick sear followed by slow cooking, covered.  For chicken, that just ends up with a runny mess, and for pork, it seems to draw all of the juices out of the meat into a nearly liquid sauce.

This recipe started the cooking with three minutes on the Foreman, then thirty minutes at 375 degrees.  The meat turned out moist but the sauce pretty much disappeared.  I want the juices in the meat and a crisp, caramelized sauce on the outside.

And if you haven't already noticed, this meal didn't even pretend to be healthy, other than the free-range pork and eggs.  But it was good.

Another book in the "leaving childhood" series,

and another winner!

Are You There God?  It's Me, Margaret.  by Judy Blume

1970 cover

I don't think I ever read a Judy Blume book as a kid or even a pre-teen.  There was no especial reason for that, except I tended to chose adventure books, boy's books, and those starring horses in a leading role.  The Hobbit, Danny Dunn; Black Stallion;  Misty of Chincoteau.

But I should have, because I can really identify with Margaret.  I was happily content being a "kid" until  my eighth grade friend introduced me to makeup, fashion, and Vogue magazine.  It suddenly wasn't good enough to be me--I had to be "in" and to do that, I had to be noticed by boys.  All the girls in the class fell for the same, unbearably cute guy...the jerk who only noticed you to make fun of you.  I still wish I'd punched the lights out of Johnny Whats-his-name for messing up my chess game.

Margaret has other issues, just as I had at that age.  She's the child of a Jewish father and  a Christian mother, and they're leaving her free to make up her own mind about religion.  When she's ready.  I had a nonbelieving dad and a non-practicing mom so I, too, was on my own. I had a Christian great aunt; she had a Jewish grandmother.  I joined a Baptist church but found it disappointing; she, visited her friends' churches but didn't settle on one.  I also searched for God but only found him in the quiet of my room.

It's a book that girls of all times and all places will recognize as their own story.  Not the time or the place--the heart.