Monthly Archives: March 2007

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More books

Oh, to play catch up with a bunch of books. Here we go!

The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood: Really quite good. It’s a retelling of the story of Odysseus (from the Odyssey) from Penelope’s point of view, and it brings up some interesting questions. It’s far shorter than the Odyssey, which is fitting because Penelope’s life was pretty boring while her husband was away. Atwood has a great eye for the holes in the myths- which she fills with her own ideas, and they fit pretty well. Only one section toward the end rang a little extreme with me, but over all it was an excellent read. (This book was also on my 50 books to read this year list)
King Benjamin’s Speech Made Simple is a collections of articles about King Benjamin’s speech in the Book of Mormon. They look at everything from historical context to comparable literary forms and tropes that appear in contemporary (to the Book of Mormon) Hebrew texts, and the results of the analysis are really impressive. After participating in NaNoWriMo I came to the conclusion that there was no way Joseph Smith could have written the Book of Mormon off the top of his head in the time he was “supposedly” translating it; after reading this book I know there’s no way he possibly could have written it and included all of the sophisticated and historically accurate literary forms that appear just in the few chapters that contain King Benjamin’s speech- let alone the rest of the book. This is an excellent book, although somewhat dry at times,

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Wherein Debbie Gibson causes my downfall

So remember that cold-turkey-no-celebrity-gossip thing I had going? I was doing great for 8 days, and then I saw this headline on the tricksy tricksy interweb (I’m paraphrasing because I can’t find it again, and I don’t want to look too hard and risk getting pulled in by another headline, which I almost did when I misread “Delp’s suicide reopens wounds for Boston” and thought it said “Depp’s suicide” and I almost screamed.) :

Gibson flies into rage at university

My immediate thought was “Debbie Gibson freaked out at a university? Honestly?”. And so I had to click and check. And of course it wasn’t Debbie, sorry, Deborah Gibson, it was Mel, about whom it really isn’t surprising at all that he’d fly into a rage anywhere.

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Why I am the queen of fasting

So this Sunday was Fast Sunday, and I was all prepared. (For those of you who don’t know, in our church we fast once a month. It’s combined with prayer, usually for a specific purpose that we decide on individually.) Fast Sunday is usually the first Sunday of the month, but because of an upcoming conference it was this Sunday.
Anyway, so I was all ready to fast. It was Saturday night, and I was ready, I knew what I was going to fast for, everything was good. Sunday morning comes, I’m fasting, I’m praying, things are moving along. B gets up, makes me breakfast, I eat it, I’m fasting, praying, we go to church, and they mention it’s fast Sunday, and B says, “It is?”.

I say “Yeah, I thought I told you” and he reminds me of what I had spectacularly overlooked this morning- namely the eating breakfast thing I did in the midst of all my purposeful fasting.

And that is why I’m the queen of fasting.
(By the way, this is in no way meant to put any blame on B- he hadn’t heard Fast Sunday was moved. It’s only meant to highlight my amazing and overwhelming dedication to fasting. :) )

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Cover up tomes of knowledge

I use a handy tool that Google provides to track various things about the visitors to this blog, and one of the things I can check out is what words people entered into a Google search to get here. There are some strange ones that pop up from time to time, but every couple of weeks the title of this post shows up. It’s part of a quote from Daniel Handler’s novel The Basic Eight, that reads in full:

“It says something about school that the first thing our mentors tell us is to cover up tomes of knowledge with recycled paper bags.

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Another report from the haunted apartment

First the background- Zoe has (had) a Little Nemo toy cell phone that makes noises and talks. I say had because she dropped it out of her stroller and into a puddle the other day, and it hasn’t made a sound since. It makes a chime-y sound when you open it, but none of the buttons work- no sound whatsoever.

We had some friends over the other night to watch V for Vendetta in HD. I love that movie. Anyway, we’re about halfway through- at some point when V walks into the room (or maybe Evey comes in) and V

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Ghost in the machine

Picture this: It’s 1 am on the second night we’re in the new apartment. B is in Israel, Zoe is asleep in her room, I’m asleep in mine. The silence is broken by a noise coming from the baby monitor, a cough. But not a little baby Zoe cough, a grown up male cough.

Through the baby monitor positioned in Zoe’s room.

I figure that chances are slim that someone actually made it into the apartment without me hearing anything, so I don’t really freak out, I just go in her room and look around. No psycho killer, which is a positive, only Zoe, who is fast asleep, and definitely not coughing like a 40 year old man. I also can’t hear any coughing coming from another apartment or outside. So I chalk it up to a fluke and go back to my room.

Where I hear coughing on the monitor.

I go back into her room and listen at the wall, to see if maybe the monitor is picking something up that I can’t hear. Nothing. I move the monitor from near the wall where it’s hanging and put it on the floor in front of the crib. Then I listen at the floor to make sure the noise isn’t coming from downstairs. Again, nothing.

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Goal!

Alyssa asked in a recent comment how many items I was able to mark off my uberlist by moving. I’m able to answer this because I was just wondering that myself. Some of them are still in progress, but this is what’s been done so far.

#52 Purge the house in time for the move. I threw things away with a vengeance. I had no pity. I was ruthless.

#53 MOVE! It’s kind of cheating to have this one on the list, but it was a goal and I did it, so it counts.

#59 Get new dishtowels. They’re green and yellow striped and very cute.

#61 Clean out storage closet. Yes, I did that.

#67 Clean out under sinks. There was a lot of junk under those there sinks. There’s a lot less now.

#68 Buy a Spotbot. Ok, so I didn’t actually do this one, because we were given a Spotbot, but the whole point was to have one in our possession, so I think it counts.

#102 Sort through crafting supplies and get rid of stuff I won’t use. It was sad giving away perfectly good yarn and other crafty items, but they’re going to a good home so it’s like they were sent to the farm rather than put down. (Or something, I don’t know, I’m tired.)

I’m in the process of doing #56 and #55, hanging art in Zoe and our bedrooms, but I’m not done yet.

So that’s 7 down, 100 to go.

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You got peanut butter in my chocolate!

One of the things that you only learn after you’ve known me for a while is that I have a thing for Barbie. Hated her when I was a kid, but LOVE her now. It’s kind of a kitch thing, kind of a style thing, kind of a nostalgia for someone else’s childhood toys… but anyway, how much am I loving this. Not so much for the color palate as for the actual product design- the icon is super cute and I love the lipglass design. And I love MAC lipglass, so it’s a double win.

And my birthday’s coming soon……