We've gone green.

Ah, that first lawn mowing of spring

green feet   green belly

Finally--reading--

One of the kind of books I hoped to find with this reading experiment--one I couldn't put down. 


To Take a Dare by Paul Zindel and Crescent Dragonwagon


The teaser on the cover says,
Sometimes the only way to hang on to yourself is to leave everything else behind.

That says it.  This is the kind of teen book I want to write myself.  It's honest, flawed, not preachy--but saying something that teens need to hear during those hard years.  When adults' many imperfections are in your face and you've got to go your own way, go it.  In her case, the imperfections amounted to downright abuse--failure to love from a mother and verbal abuse from a father.  You cry at that point but the authors have warned you beforehand, allowed you to prepare yourself mentally for the worst so the tears stay inside.

(That bugged me, by the way, just like it did in The Book Thief.  On the other hand, if I hadn't been forewarned that the main character would find love in the end, I might have stopped reading at the sad point.   (FYI, this isn't a spoiler.  She tells it in the first sentence.))

So, if you're a teenager, you should read it.  And then go read some of my books.

Here's one happy dog.

I'm scared to check the garden after the freeze last night.  It's not that I plan to do anything about it today.  If it's dead, it's dead.  I'll replant on Saturday.

Onions (store bought)

No gardening this weekend, but I did take a look at things.
 

 This is how the onion slips looked when I planted them weekend before last, but on Sunday they looked remarkably perky. 

There's a pretty heavy frost scheduled for tonight.  They'll survive; the spinach will survive and I expect the lettuce and radishes to be only a little damaged.  But the baby beets and Swiss Chard...we'll see.

Musical #2 is

And you ask--how can you take a movie so iconic and turn it into a halfway decent musical?

Here's how:  cut the movie into 10 or 12 snippets.  Shuffle them, throw them in the air, pick most of them up from the floor but leave a few.  Paste them back together in random order, add a couple of brand-new songs.  And above all, replace the merry-go-round horses with Greek statues that come to life.  (Fig leaf very evident.)

It was surprising and enjoyable.  The new Bert made a pretty passable substitution for Dick Van Dyke but Mary Poppins was in no way comparable to Julie Andrews.  Her voice hit all the notes but the sound system just didn't get it right--I winced a couple of times and wanted to cover my ears.  We also had complaints about the children's lines and singing--it's as though they were having to talk a little too loud and it came out hard to understand.  I don't blame the kids, just the sound mixer.

Best part of all?  Seeing so many little girls in pink dresses sit still for so long.

Book 22 the bible as humor

Next, I finished up another book I'd started a while back and then put away.



The Year of Living Biblically by A. J. Jacobs. 



And once again, I had to go back and re-read most of what I'd read before.  Old brain don't retain.

My recommendation is, yes! mostly.  It's not as hilarious as the cover would suggest, but it's sincere, honest, really honest, and real.   He admits up front what his motivation is--he's going to spend a year observing the Bible as literally as possible--in order to write a book about it.  But you find out along the way that he has some ulterior motives...to figure out his heritage and how he might connect to it.  To become a better person.  To see if acting as though you believe in God might actually make you start to believe in God.  And to learn, learn, learn...about this mysterious thing that is The Bible--it has started a thousand wars, comforted a million souls, and damned a million more to hell for all eternity.

If you're at all interested in religion, it will delight you as well as amuse you, and you'll end up liking A. J. Jacobs and all his highly functional OCD.  After all, what's not to like about a guy who blows a horn at the beginning of each month (Jewish as well as western), stones an adulterer (with pebbles), pays a shochet to sacrifice a chicken for him, and tapes the ten commandments to his forehead?

His wife should  write a companion volume--The Year of Living with a Madman.

Werewolfisms

I just saw Werewolf do one of the funnier stupid dog tricks I ever saw.  We were walking up the hill when all of a sudden he smelled a scent!   Side to side he scanned the ground, stressing the leash and my arm.  Something was up for sure.  About five steps later, with me scanning the groud as eagerly to see the treasure, I spied a...a....

Curly fry!

He scarfed it down and resumed the normal pace.


All this time when dogs sniffed the ground, I thought they were seeking out marks or droppings from prey animals.  Duh.

Book #21 (of 101)

A Ring of Endless Light by Madeleine L'Engle

There really needs to be a sequel to this one.  The first time I finished it, I woke up next morning angry because she'd left so many threads unspun.  So many plot lines dangling.  So many lives unfinished.

So I re-read the last few chapters in the light of day.  And see now that she told the story she meant to tell--a love story.  A whole lot more got mixed into it, but basically, it's a love story between a girl and her boy.  And her dolphins.

"What happened next" for the other characters would have been nice, but I'm not going to go looking for it right now.  One thing I will say--I've never seen so many fascinating, un-flat characters in a kid's book.  Maybe only two of them--Vicky and her Grandfather--are truly round, but almost all of the others are definite semicircles.  That's why I want to know what happened to them--I grew to care about Zachery and John and Leo, Rob and Suzy (Vicky's younger brother and sister), and even the old guy, Jeb who ended up in the hospital.  Didn't anyone ever tell his favorite dolphin friend, Ynid, why he wasn't coming around anymore?

To sum up--read it if you're a teenage girl who wants to be in love.  or--just maybe--if you're a parent or a friend of a teenage girl.  You'll understand.

Taters in!

I took a look at my taters today. 




Looks exciting, don't you think?  I only have hope that somewhere, somehow, under that icky black clay...something is stirring.

Sunday's cooking adventure--

Was a misadventure. 

Braised chicken with lemon and herbs; cornbread dressing.  The dressing was good but almost nobody ate any--not my fault.  The chicken had a nice texture and that's the nicest thing I can say about it.  The lemon made it bitter; the spices were overpowering; and it was way too greasy.  What a waste of free-range chicken!

I shall be moving that recipe into my "Do not try again" folder.

Re Asimov and elephants

I am now officially behind schedule on the challenge, but there's a 1294-page reason why.




Asimov's Guide To The Bible, by, of course, Isaac Asimov.
Did you know Asimov was a founding member of CSICOP?  Cool.



This is an analysis of the historical aspects of the Bible and some of the Apochrypha.  He  follows the order and text of the King James Version but uses material from the Revised Standard Version and the Talmud; plus of course, historical documents and writings of the time.  I think of it as a "somewhat" scholarly book--an excellent work of research by an excellent author who was motivated to tell the story well.

I, as a common reader, admit that I got a little bored among the endless chronologies of Kings and the endless battles of the Israelites.  In the New Testament I was a little disappointed to read the details of the geographical path taken by Peter and Paul and the others, but to read nothing of the philosophical and social path taken as the new religion assumed form and life.  But that was not Asimov's intent.

Here's something I didn't find boring--learning how much out of order the books are.  I didn't realize that Chronicles simply repeats the history found in the earlier books, but in a different voice.  I didn't realize that modern scholars think the the epistles in the new testament are arranged mostly by length, not chronology.  Nor that several of the ones attributed to Paul (via secretary) were probably not written by Paul at all.

Nor did I realize that some of the books are generally believed to be works of fiction--good literature that was carefully "fitted" into history but most likely never belonged there.  Ruth and Job are the classic examples.   I did not know that the books of the prophets were written in a later time but described people and events from a much earlier time.  Daniel was set in the period of the Babylonian exile (maybe 597 B.C. - 520 B.C.?).  It extends in visions to the the Greek period (300 B.C.), but may have been written as late as 165 B.C.   Asimov gives an outline of the evidence, inside the book and out, that makes this seem obvious in retrospect--for example, it is much more accurate about things happening in Daniel's future (the present time) than in Daniel's present time (far-distant history).  Parts of it were written in Aramaic, which was the common speech of the people in the 300 B.C. to 165 B.C. time--Hebrew was only used by the educated.

I've always wondered about the supposed gap from the last book, Malachai, to the first book of the new testament.  Did the Jews stop writing?

Nope--they wrote lots but the writings ended up in the apocrypha.  Asimov says that the ancient scholars believed that the "prophetic impulse" stopped after the return from Babylonian exile and the rebuilding of the walls and temple of Jerusalem.  So any writings after 430 BC could not be included in the books of the ancients...unless they were attributed to ancients.  Such was the book of Jonah, written around 300B.C. but attributed to a contemporary of Jonah writing in 780 B.C.

The book of Maccabees 1 and 2 tell the missing history.  They are parallel works--1 Maccabees was written sometime between 135 B.C. and 100 B.C. and covers the period from 175 B.C. to 135 B.C.  It was originally written in Hebrew but no copies of that version survived, only a Greek translation which is included in the Apochrypha.  2 Maccabees, written about a century later, retells the same events but ends earlier, at the death of Judas Maccabeus.

                   2 Maccabees 2:23.  All these things, I say, being declared by 
                   Jason of Cyrene in five books, we will assay to abridge in one volume.

There were three more volumes of Maccabees, not considered canonical and not included in the Apocrypha.  One is a work of fiction, one a sermon, and the third a retelling of the history from 1 and 2 Maccabees and Josephus.

Two last things I'd not known before.  One, Asimov points out a good number of places where prophetic writings from the old testament are "creatively translated" (my words) to predicate the coming of Christ.  In Daniel, the KJV capitalizes Son of man, making it indicate that the Jesus is the one who will come to the Jewish new kingdom; the Revised Standard Version leaves it as as lower-case 'son'.  Most likely, the writer was contrasting the coming kingdom of the Jews, led by the likeness of a man (mankind), to the kingdoms of the heathen, led by the likenesses of the beasts in his vision.   But of course, the King James Version translator were divinely inspired.  And good Christians.

Two, elephants.  In the last years B. C., armies actually fought with elephants.  Real elephants.  Sad.

In dog time

Funny, since the DST change,  to the dogs it seems like I come home earlier.  To me, it seems later.



In any event, they get their walk in daylight.  Yet I don't get my sit-down at the computer time until 7:30 or (like today) even 8:00.


My loss, their gain.

Feels like Monday except it's Tuesday

This, in case you don't know, is an absolutely beautiful planting of spinach.  If the weather will just stay cool a few more weeks, I'll have salad!







(The small plant near the top, the one with the many-lobed leaves, is a weed.  I shan't be eating that.)

Here's a riddle

What is scrap lumber in the garden good for?

Hiding places for copperheads and...walk ways for humans planting potatoes in the mud.  Also beets--it's time they were planted and a little mud wasn't going to stop me.

Does it look like a garden yet?

Simple Saturday

Gardening and tennis are pretty hard to do in the rain, and I tried to do both.

Movies, on the other hand, pair up with rain nicely.





Wasn't so very bad.  Unnecessarily violent--don't take kids.

Springtime alert

On our walk tonight, rabbit!  Werewolf is awfully strong for an old dog.  Luckily I'm stronger.

I'm so tired of waiting for my seed potatoes to get here, tonight I cut up a batch that had sprouted in the refrigerator.  What the heck!

The Cat Ate My Gymsuit

by Paula Danziger


is firmly planced in the1960s...but somehow, eternal. 

The 1960s gives us the unconventional new teacher who dresses like a kid and cares about her students enough to make them think. The other teachers treat education as a nine-to-five job, but for her, it's a calling.  I had nine-to-five teachers sometimes, especially in grade school.  I don't know how they got into that mindset--whether they started out trying to care but were mired into conventionality by the system; or whether they started off seeing teaching as a decently well-paying job with no layoffs or night shift.  Anyway, I hated them and didn't learn much from them.

Not many teachers are like that nowadays.  Probably because teacher's salaries are so low, only people who really want to be teachers will stick with it.

The eternal theme of the book is the family dynamic--with a verbally abusive dad and a mother who won't stand up to him, Marcy has grown up so ashamed of her body that she refuses to change into a gym suit.  You come to learn that she's exceptionally funny, smart and talented, but she knows none of these things about herself...she just thinks she's fat and dumb because that's what she hears every day.  Her four-year-old brother gets the abuse too--can you imagine a grownup yelling at a four-year-old because he sucks his thumb and carries a teddy bear?  How screwed-up is that kid going to be? 

So, once again, I don't recommend it unless you're a pre-teen.  But if I were a teacher, it's the kind of book I'd hand to a lot of my students.

Marking the mark

So...you're walking three dogs and two of them stop to smell at the same interesting marker.  One of them gets done smelling first, and decides to deposit his own mark on top of it.

With any luck, it's the smallest dog who gets done first.  But usually it isn't.

I won't post a picture of this.

Mmmm.

Beef Daube from Dorie Greenspan's Around my French Table.  What's not to love?  When I set the cooking pan in the sink to fill it with dishwater, I reached in with my fingers and scraped up the scraps, shoved them between my lips...and I nearly died.

To go with it I sauteed some mushrooms and fried up a couple of zucchini.  I need to feed the dogs before I eat or I might never feed them...just keep stuffing it down.

I've just fallen in love.  I ate my first parsnip, ever.  Last time this happened was with delicatta squash.  What other delights of the vegetable family am I missing out on?  I think I'll try hummus, next time I get to cooking.

It may have been a mistake....

...to put a 1200 page book on the 100-book challenge list.  That's like 200 pages a day to even pretend to stay on schedule.

So be it.  Meanwhile, here's the YA book I finished last weekend,


Sister of the Bride by Beverly Cleary



Unlike Judy Blume's YA books, I'd read some Beverly Cleary before and one of her books, Ellen Tebbits, was on my comfort reads list for years.  This one was a little less endearing but still a book I couldn't put down.  It's honest, and it's eternal.

While Cleary's bride of the sixties disdained the China registry and preferred instead to buy dishes from some friends who ran a pottery studio, the bride of the eightees would have preferred gift cards to Chili's and the bride of today, extra memory cards for small electronics.  Time goes on but the one constant in this world is that children coming-of-age want something different from what their parents wanted.

But the Grandmother's bridal veil, it turned out, was eternal.  A beautiful bridal veil is timeless.  (So are evil cats!)

It was a hoot watching the bride cave in on one wedding anachronism after another.  And it was fun seeing the conflicting sides of the heroine, the sister, as she watched her big sister grow into a woman whom..."for the first time the thought came to Barbara that Greg was lucky to be marrying her sister."

Funny thing, this book isn't written in first person but I never realized it until I looked up a quote.  Beverly Cleary is so good about getting into a person's head and staying there that she makes third person seem like best friends.  Way to go!

The summary?  Recommended only if you're a pre-teen girl.  Otherwise, a lovely, timeless anachronism that you probably don't need to read.  Still--I enjoyed it!