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!