We had a junk food dinner last night – fish sticks and frozen macaroni and cheese and cheese and crackers and fruit.  The prepared stuff was the worst but in a household that does not consume much dairy at all, this morning is a little wonky that’s for sure.  Sometimes though you just have to remind yourself why you don’t eat like that anymore.

I watched Julie and Julia last night and loved it.  Streep is brilliant of course.  I don’t know why I heard a truckload of complaints about Amy Adams’ performance.  I thought she was wonderful and not at all whiny.  Maybe I am the one who is whiny and that character can’t hold a candle to my abilities in that area.  The film did make me want to work my way through Ms. Child’s cookbook.  It could be a project for next winter except I don’t eat beef or organ meats or lamb or …. But boning a duck sounds like fun.  And I love that she smelled everything before she purchased it.  Mmmmm.

The oxymoron of eating junk food and watching Julie and Julia is not lost on me.

The New England Town Meeting is a wonderful tradition that it was my privilege to witness annually during my high school years.  It was and remains a lesson of democracy in action.  As students we tended to pick one Town Meeting and attend the same for our tenure in high school.  I cannot remember the name of the village meeting I attended every February and indeed I am not sure it was in February.  What I do remember is that no matter what the issue there was one woman, always the same woman, who stood up and shouted quite loudly, “I’m against it!”  It didn’t sound like that though.  It can out as “Imma agin it!”  In fact her shouts were such a certainty that the phrase became a mantra through our small high school whether faculty and students attended that particular meeting or not.  That’s what the Republican Party reminds me of these days – that woman, large and unruly, dressed in a rather scruffy house dress shouting “Imma agin it!” It could be a proposition to give everyone healthcare or $200 or a better education and she would shout, “Imma agin it!”  She wouldn’t have a reason, just didn’t like it because it wasn’t her idea or it was someone’s idea and her life might change a little bit.  She might actually be able to buy a new house dress or learn that the good of the whole trumps her own self-interest.  Or it could be that she just liked to be against things.  The other thing I remember from that experience was that the potluck dinner was incredible.

For some reason this Village, the one I live in has a celebration on the beach in July and they call it Mardi Gras.  Yup.  Mardi Gras in July.  Go figure.  On Tuesday several folks celebrated the last day of indulgence before the meditation of Lent by wearing beads.  When told it was to celebrate Mardi Gras one student asked, “Why are you celebrating Mardi Gras NOW?  It’s in July.”  Head.  Bang.  Desk.

And so it goes.

It’s kind of fun to leaf through magazines and see what’s out there….

This looks like it might be kind of fun to play with.  Courtesy of Woman’s Day March 2010 – 10-second style using Happy Tape:

http://www.happytape.bigcartel.com/

Longing for spring made me believe I can grow it all!  This helped – from Body + Soul March 2010 – Six Veggies to Plant Now:

http://www.wholeliving.com/photogallery/six-seasonal-all-star-vegetables?lpgStart=1&currentslide=1&currentChapter=1#ms-global-breadcrumbs

Do It Yourself magazine is fun to wander through.  I didn’t love the color palette this month, but you might, and paint’s cheap so why not play around….

http://www.diyideas.com/

And still….Mental Floss remains one of my favorites.  There are too many little pieces to send individual links, so enjoy in the entire issue with your morning beverage:

http://www.mentalfloss.com/

And so it goes.

The coffee is strong and good this morning.  More snow fell in the night – light and soft – glistening on the earth’s floor.  It should be magical but frankly, I’ve had enough of this season.  February should be easy because it is so short.  It never has been for me.  Those twenty-eight days seem endless.  My mother hated March – the cruelest month according to the poet, but I will take those teasing days that promise spring if it will melt some of this stuff.
At almost 60, it seems silly to miss my mother, but I do.  There you have it.  I hear her voice as I sit here.  That is a comfort.
Random thoughts on a Tuesday that feels like a Monday.  Should I post this when I’ve nothing to say?  I suppose.  We seem to enjoy one another’s meanderings on this little virtual island that is Xanga.  Why do we stay on this one when most folks have moved to other parts? 
I watched Like Stars on Earth last night and cried.  I always do during those films of children overcoming challenges and the adults who help them and believe in them.
I am listening to Eat, Pray, Love read by the author and loving it.  I canot imagine what Hollywood will do with it and especially with Julia Roberts playing the part of the main character – the author.  I believe Roberts’ is more than just a pretty face and have watched her work with appreciation but I cannot imagine the book as a film.  If you haven’t read it you should before you see the film.  I have a bad feeling about the transposition into another medium.
I spent most of the weekend resting my back – going slowly.  I did however manage to change the cloth on the kitchen table and with the pale green placemats and flowered cloth it seems that I am ready for the lightness of spring.  The table makes me smile.  A single rose sits in a fruit jar.  It’s enough for now.
I should probably check the weather and see what the week holds.  Sigh.
Lunch to pack.  Work to do.
And so it goes.

OK, so maybe a book review about a teen angst book wasn’t the best choice for Valentine’s Day, a holiday I always forget.  Let me make it up to you today and throw a handful of picture books into the mix.

Mo Willems’ books are a delight.  Honest.  Especially when shared with young children.  The pigeon is right up there with that mischevious cat of hat fame.  However, when Mr. Wilems began writing beginning readers I was dubious – very – until I turned the first page of the first book and met Elephant and Piggie.  I roared.  Loudly.  Sitting at my desk.  As the tweens and teens looked up to shush me I passed the book around and giggled “Read this!”  They too, cynical little wretches that they are, laughed out loud.  The latest offering, Elephants Cannot Dance! is another raucous experience as Elephant really tries to find the grace and understanding to perform Piggies’ various dance moves.  Wilems’ deceptively simple illustrations and his ability to capture mood with a single stroke of the pen never ceases to amaze me.  These are books to share and share again.  Not even kidding!

I am not generally a huge fan of picture book biographies.  Usually I want more details and more gossip.  That being said, I genuinely enjoyed Barbara Kerley’s The Extraordinary Mark Twain According to Suzy.  Taken from Twain’s eldest daughter Suzy’s childhood biography of her father, the story delights and has a very real sense of Twain’s wry humor.  Edwin’s Fotheringham’s illustrations add depth and dimension to the text.  The addition of little books within the book are offer surprises on every spread.  Check this one out on your next trip to the library and look at Kerley and Frotheringham’s collaboration What to Do about Alice? while you’re at it.  P.S.  There’s a wonderful teacher’s guide on writing an extraordinary biography at the end of the Twain bio that might even help seniors get that pesky college essay out of the way.

Maybe you have to own and love a herding dog but I think Mircea Catusanu’s The Strange Case of the Missing Sheep is giggle inducing whether you do or not.  This twist on the wolf and the sheep and the dog tale is just entertaining and, well, twisted enough to engage the wiggliest listener and the details in the illustrations will keep everyone engaged in observation, laughs and page turning.  Being the proud owner of an Aussie mix who insists that all her sheep stay where they are supposed to, the portrait of Doug the sheep dog had me in stitches.  I swear if I ever get another one I’m naming him Doug. “Sheep!  Get in line!”  Yup.

I don’t know under which rock I’ve been living but I just met Fancy Nancy and she is too much fun!  Nancy loves to be fancy, never wearing a plain shirt when a glittery one is so much better and always properly accessorized.  The fact that her family isn’t fancy at all – they don’t even ask for sprinkles for heaven’s sake – frustrates her sparkly soul.  Lessons in fancy save the day and her loving and willing family pays rapt attention as Nancy sets out examples and lists.  If you haven’t met her yet, introduce yourself to Fancy Nancy with bows and formality the next time you visit your favorite book repository.  See!  I can be fancy too!

And so it goes.

I promised myself that I would catch up on book reviews and reading this weekend.  It’s at least something I can DO since spring won’t come and my body is being painfully uncooperative -still.

“It’s something I have come to call privately the kaleidoscope of crazy – shimmering and beautiful in certain lights, paisley and horrifying in others. …  I know him as well as myself and not at all.  All I can figure to do is hold on.  He is my only brother.”  After her brother Will attempts suicide in a very public way and not for the first time, Katie Kittrell is sent to boarding school to start a new life and do the only thing she feels she CAN do – swim.  Katie makes friends, keeps secrets, gets a boyfriend, loves her roommate, and generally behaves in a manner expected and acceptable to parents, peers and teachers.  But under the surface of her life is Will, always present, always there.  Katie loves him and hates him, holds on to him even as she tries to let go of him.  What moves this novel out of the realm of “typical teen angst/coming of age novel” is that love/hate relationship, the constant presence of Will in Katie’s life.  Warman does a brilliant job of drawing real characters and real situations.  Without sentimentality or saccharine she pulls the reader into Katie’s world and life.  It is only in the water that Katie can truly breathe.

Every once in a while one of the kids gets their hands on a book before I do and insists, with an insistence that is both annoying and demanding that I read this book right now and follows it up with days of “Have you finished it yet?”  Sometimes they are right on the money and Courtney was with this one.  Breathless is Jessica Warman’s debut novel and a beautiful one it is. 

I am thinking of spring.  It seems the only thing to do as the white stuff falls and falls and falls.  Last summer I built a small garden late in the season and was still able to have handfuls of grape tomatoes and watch the sunflowers bloom.  I also had a couple of eggplants and some sweet banana peppers for stuffing, a recipe I will perfect this year.  I dream of doubling the little plot so that there can be a zucchini and some lettuce.  More pots of herbs are planned for the patio.  That will be fragrant and fun.  Of course there is always the pot of marigolds.  I am allowed to do whatever I want with the flower beds – ahhhh.  So off with the layers and layers of mulch and on with new top soil.  Maybe roses along the side where the sun pounds all day.  A clematis to add some height in the front.  I am not a gardener, really.  Don’t know much about any of it even though I grew up on a farm.  I prefer the indoor work.
I like the housework of spring.  Really.  I take pleasure in washing walls and changing curtains and bed spreads and inhaling a house full of the freshness of open windows and cleanliness.  Please don’t misunderstand this as being a job I consider to be the sole purview of women.  I don’t.  I honestly LIKE housework.  No, my friends, I am not for hire.  Nonetheless, I dream of spring.  I think much of this dreaming is the result of being cooped up with THE BACK and missing the movement and exercise, the physicality of the work – whether garden or house.  I long for the mornings of dawn at 5 a.m. and walking the dogs without the encumbrance of jackets and boots and gloves and hats and heavy coats.  Winter weighs so much.  Spring is lighter, requiring more and less at the same time.
I remember the arrival of the seed catalogs when I was little.  Even though I had not much interest, there was beauty and anticipation that arrived with Gurneys and Burpees and Jackson-Perkins.  Indeed, I smiled when I was out shopping last week and saw the beginnings of spring in the racks of seeds in local stores.  Maybe radishes?  And onion sets?  Hmmmm.
And so it goes.

The snow plow rumbled past the bedroom window.
I looked across the bedroom and Bonnie pricked up her ears -
“Out?  Time for out?”
I looked at my watch -
Almost 5 a.m.  Might as well get up and start the day.
We wandered downstairs, flipped on the coffee,
and then the three of us stood in the early morning white world.
6 inches at most.
Not bad.
So much for a snow day.
Came in, gave the dogs their treats, poured coffee, tuned in NPR.
Hey!  Where’s Morning Edition? Look at clock on computer.
3:53?
?
Look at watch.
3:54.
Look at kitchen clock.
3:55.
Oh for crying out loud!  It’s 4 a.m.  What on earth am I thinking.  Back to sleep.  Toss.  Turn.  Nope.  Not happening.
It is going to be a very long day.
And so it goes.

First the meanderings -
Thanks for the advice about bikes.  I think I will go to Dick’s to start.  It feels like the midway point between just buying something at K-Mart or going to a specialty shop.
It seems rather silly to be sitting here like a grade school child waiting for the snow to start at 7 a.m.  Oh how I hope the weather people are right and we are going to get buried today and tonight.  This from the person who doesn’t have to travel anywhere…
Pain is the strangest thing.  It can become the complete and total focus of one’s life in the blink of an eye.  But I promised no more of that and I meant it.
And now the magazines -
I grew up in a house that did not subscribe to typical magazines.  Mother took The Nation which is hardly Woman’s Day.  It was impossible for me to do those elementary school assignments that involved cutting out picture from magazines to match the letters of the alphabet or find pictures of 10 mammals or whatever.  In fact, when the children were small I actually subscribed to Redbook just so they could complete those sorts of assignments without being embarrassed.  I’ve no idea why I chose Redbook except that I liked some of their fiction better than that published in other magazines.  Now, without young children at home, I borrow magazines from the library.  Most of the time, I grab Vegetarian Times, Woman’s Day, and Martha Stewart Living to glance through recipes and crafty ideas for young children.  Eating and work – yeah.  A friend got me a subscription to Vanity Fair and I scoff and browse and scoff as I browse, but I admit that it’s fun to look at the models and Annie Leibovitz’s photographs.  A guilty pleasure.  All of that being said there is one magazine that I read cover to cover every month – drum roll please….

The Sun Magazine is an ad free literary magazine that is positively brilliant.  The cover photos are always enticing.  The black and white layout is rare and beautiful in this colorized, apps-for-everything world. The poetry is generally powerful and carefully crafted.  There is always an informational interview with a little heard of expert about the environment or the human condition or the psyche.  Politics become personal in this little diamond of a publication.  The photographs – all black and white – invite one to look deeply, not only at the photograph but at the wider world.  Take a look at it the next time you’re at the book store.  Invite your library to purchase a subscription and then borrow it. I love this one enough to subscribe to it because it is one of those pieces that won’t go to recycling but will have its own shelf so it can be revisited again and again.

And so it goes.

We didn’t get enough snow to close anything.  That’s a disappointment.
I could take another day – the ER folks gave me two on my return to work slip.  Part of me thinks I should tough this out, and the rest of me is so darn sick of being house bound that I am going to venture in to work, sore or not.  I need a change of scenery.
The tramadol made me sick as a dog so there will be no more of that.  Still taking the super strength ibuprofen which helps as much as anything.  I am done talking about this back thing now.  How incredibly boring for all involved!  I am fascinated though by how quickly one can become hyper-focused on not feeling well when one has been relatively healthy.  I should be kinder to my body.
If I cared about football at all I would be tickled pink that the Saints won the Superbowl.  I am a huge supporter of the underdog.
I am contemplating what bike to buy in the spring.  Any suggestions?  I just want something to cruise back and forth to work on and perhaps take the dogs on trail rides now and then,  Is there one bike that will do both? 
And so it goes.

This American Life on NPR is one of my favorite programs EVER.  The story rebroadcast this afternoon is wonderful.  Sit around the radio and listen:
http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=199

Boring health update:
Tramadol made me sick.  Done with that. 
High powered ibuprofen and a heating pad seem to be doing the trick.
Feeling much better and like a baby but I will take care and be careful.
Back to reading and crocheting.
And so it goes.