Book Review-In Her Shoes

This book was like a chick flick in 500 pages. Actually I guess they DID make a move out of it. I'm sure it was a chick flick. (I didn't see it. But now I'm kinda tempted to. I want to know if it's better then the book) Let's see if it contains all the necessary elements of a chick flick:

* Lots of talk about ridiculously expensive shoes? Check
* An estranged grandmother who sends birthday cards that a parent hides because they think it will be "best" for the kids. And then one of the kids find them hidden in a shoe box in the closet (of course) and then she confronts the parent about how he hid them from her and there is a sappy crying scene. Check
* Someone has a boyfriend that cheats on her. Check
* The protagonist dumps the cheating boyfriend and then finds her "prince charming" who she knew all along, but overlooked him because she was all caught up with the sleazy cheating boyfriend: Check
* There is a wedding. Check

Now as you read those details about this book, couldn't you have replaced the title "In Her Shoes" with any other generic chick flick book. (I know that the work FLICK means movie, but you know what I mean)

I found the book enjoyable enough. I went through it in 2 days, it was like cotton candy. I didn't like how things were all tidied up in the end. Like a girl has had a learning disability for 28 years and then all of a sudden she sneaks into a few classes at Princeton and now she can read and recited poems like a freaking master.

And one sister steals another sister's boyfriend and that sister walks in on them . . um. . doing stuff and then in a few months all is resolved, and they are happy with each other again. Tra-la-larita-la.

And they are all happy at the end, one big happy family with a big white wedding dress that somehow amazingly makes her size 14 body look like a size 6. It was just to NEAT and clean for me. Not enough angst. Not enough tragedy.

Maybe I have been reading too much Ian McEwan and too much Marquez, but this one just felt so contrived and just too fluffy. It didn't make me want to change my life and it didn't make any smarter after I finished it. It almost felt like it was insulting my intelligence. Like it thought that I couldn't understand more complex or deeper issues to it had to spell them out for me really slow like and keep it simple. I wanted to say, "I can take it, you can delve a little deeper. I swear, I'll follow you."

There were some enjoyable parts. Rose is a lawyer and someone tries to tell her a dumb lawyer joke and she plays dumb. She says, "What? I don't get it. Say it again. Are you sure you have the joke right?" and the guy feels dumb and starts to talk away and she shouts after him "wait, you can't go yet!! you have to finish explaining the joke to me!!" Hilarious.

So if you want some fluffy reading that won't stay with you after you close the book, definitely pick this one up.

Jam

Did you guys see that episode of Friends where Joey is obsessed with Jam? Here is a little clip to remind you.



That's EXACTLY how I feel about jam too. NO KIDDING. I love jam. And my mom makes the best jam in the whole world. It's Blackberry and the berries are fresh. Usually picked that day. Whatever we didn't use in a cobbler or in a pie we make into jam. See, I'm from the Pacific Northwest and blackberries basically grow everywhere you look. It can be annoying when you are trying to walk to school and then your jacket is snagged by a blackberry bush. I've lost many an article of clothing that way.

But the nice thing is that there are whole patches where they grow and they are free to the public to go and pick them and eat them. My Grandma's back fence has a sizeable growth and her neighbor's has even more. It's worth every scratch you might get to get those berries.

I had two grandmas named Grandma Bingham and we designated one as the "swimming pool grandma" (because she lived in AZ and had a pool-Duh!) and the "Berry Grandma" because she lived in Eureka with rows of blackberries out back. And when my mom wanted to get rid of us so she could talk to the adults she would ask for some containers and we would go out and pick berries. Truthfully she never had to force us out because we would ask to go out there on our own. And of course OF COURSE the berry picking rule is this: put 1 in the bucket and then put 3-4 in the mouth. So when my mom called us in to show her our "spoils" we had black/purple teeth and tongues and only about 7 berries in the bucket. Good times. No wait, GREAT TIMES!

So back to this Jam that my mom makes: It's heaven. It's so good. The best is on a piece of homemade bread that has been toasted (Holy crap, my mouth literally just watered as I typed that!!) Jules and I would make the toast, and use a SPOON to apply the jam. Why a spoon, you ask? Well, with a knife, you just put the jam on the bread with no fanfare. But with a spoon, you use the back of the spoon to spread it, and then whatever is left over in the concave side of the spoon is yours to lick off. It's the rule.

So you use the spoon for one piece,and then you lick the spoon. And then you use it for the other piece and again, you lick the spoon. (YES, there is double dipping in my house. Wanna make somethin' of it? Fine! you can't have any of my jam!!) And then you stick the spoon back in the jar one more time for good measure and lick the spoon for the last time. You basically aren't making the toast for the bread: it's all about the jam. You need a vessel to bring more jam to your mouth, and a piece of toasted bread is the easiest/most delicious option. Trust me. We've tired many different jam conveyances. Toast is the awesomest.

There has been a line for jam in my house before. If you use the last of the jam and there is no more, expect one or more of your siblings to ask for a "bite" and then chomp off half the piece of toast with the jam. There is no mercy when it comes to blackberry jam. We love the stuff.

So my mom made some Strawberry/Blackberry jam with my nieces and nephews when they were in Eureka the first week of July. (The majority of the blackberries aren't ready until late August, so that's why she had to use some strawberries and couldn't use all blackberries.) Anyway, she makes this jam and brings back 3 jars of it here to Utah. These are not big jars. These are like 1 1/2 cup jars. What is that? like 250 mL? Anyway, they are not big. She had one for Marcelo and I , one for Jacob and one for Nate/Denisse. She didn't get Julie and jam because she didn't have enough, and she figured that Julie was going to Thailand and wouldn't use the jam up before she went. I think mom forgot about our devotion to jam. But oh well.

So she SAYS she loves all her kids equally, but apparently when that love is translated into jam, one person is left out. But Julie went to Thailand and I don't think she was none the wiser about the jam. So my house has 3 jars of jam. Mom keeps trying to tell me to take the jam to my brothers. She put them on top of the fridge so that they would see it and remember grab it when they left. They didn't. And then we moved. And then Jacob moved to Vernal. And Nathan is a WHOLE CITY AWAY. I didn't know what to do!!

I'm lying, of course. I stole their jam. Maliciously, deliberately, and without regret. I stole it. And Marcelo and I ate nearly 3/4 of a jar of it today on our waffles that we had at 11:00 pm. AND IT WAS WORTH IT!!! Oh man. There is one jar left. The only reason it's still here is because I'm trying to eat less, so I don't have bread in the house anymore. If there were a slice of bred here, you'd better believe it would' have jam on it in an instant.

When I go to Eureka this week, I'm so excited for the berries and the berry jam. I might even make enough for some SPECIAL people to try. Then again, I might just eat it all myself. We'll see.

P.S. How many times did I use the word jam in thins post? Holy crap, I think I like jam a little TOO much!!

Book Review-On Chesil Beach

On Chesil Beach
Ian McEwen
203 pages

Yes, I read another book today. You SHOULD be impressed about this one. Because I did it in about 3 hours. I didn't have so much time today because I spent all day at Lisa's house to celebrate her birthday. In case you care, you should know that we only got through about 2/3rds of the songs before the wicks ran out and we had to end so that there was eventually SOMETHING to blow out. We should've done more songs. Happy Birthday Lisa!!!

Anyway, even though this one was only 203 pages, you should still be impressed. I also made breakfast for my husband and fixed the TV. I rock. Begin praising now.

So this book is a little "racy." By "racy" I mean that the main theme is sex. It's all about sex. Or rather the miscommunication that happens between husbands and wives about sex. See, it's about this newly married couple and they are in their honeymoon suite and the guy is READY to go, and the girl not so much. They are both virgins, inexperienced, nervous. You know what I'm talking about. I think most (if not ALL) of my readers have TOTALLY been there.

But there is a little more then just "nerves" on her part. But I'll get to that in a minute. The main part of the book is a nice set of flashbacks about how they met, and their families and things like that. The boy is a history major and the girl is a musician and in a string quartet. And they meet and fall in love and get married. And the guy is ready to go.

And the girl is terrified. More then terrified, she realizes that she really has no desire for sex. She wants kids, she likes kids. But she wants to have them "immaculately conceived" like Jesus. She's not looking forward to the act. She wants nothing to do with it and never wants to think about it if possible.

But she decides she needs to do her "wifely duties" and buck up and just do it. She loves her husband and wants to make him happy and it's been obvious in their courtship that they love each other lots. And it's obvious also that the husband has NO IDEA that she's feeling this way and he fully expects things to go great on the wedding night. Sure, she's been a little modest (AKA prude) before the wedding but he figures that's just her being chaste. He never things that will happen after they are married.

I actually thought that there would be more to the story. Like maybe she had been abused as a child, or that she had walked in on her parents in some sort of weird sex act and that is why she doesn't want anything to do with it. But no. That's no the case. She just doesn't have a desire, the thought scares her, and she's just not interested.

So back to what I said about it being racy. It goes quite in detail about the very limited amount of foreplay that goes on in the honeymoon suite. TMI if you ask me. But that's not what the story is about, so you quickly move through that to get to the real story. Which starts when she eventually runs out on him after some over excitement on his part (You know what I'm talking about here. Don't make me say it) and that's where the story gets upsetting.

They both blame each other for the mes they are in. He thinks she's been deceiving him. Why didn't she bring this up before? Why has this become a problem now? Why did she let him even touch her if she didn't want that?

And for her part, she's pissed that he's pushing for it. She's pissed knowing that if they go back in the bedroom, it will just be more of the same: him wanting it and she not. And she's mad that he can't see that she's just not comfortable doing it. She just wants to be with him and love him and be his wife and not have to do THAT.

But here's the aggravating part: THEY NEVER SAY THESE THOUGHTS AND FEELINGS TO EACH OTHER OUT LOUD!! You, the reader are the only ones that get to see their full thoughts and feelings, their fears and worries. To each other, they get frustrated, angry and then start accusing each other of irrelevant things. She talks about how she wants to play music, and that is her goal. And he talks about how she comes from all this money, and how that's so important to her so she forced him to take a job with her father and he never wanted it.

What? Money? Music? What? No!! You aren't mad at him about music and you aren't mad at her about money! You are feeling frustrated about what just happened ind in the room 10 min ago, TALK ABOUT THAT, YOU IDIOTS!! And you are mentally screaming those things to the characters in the book. But they don't listen. Morons

And so what happens? It's not good. Like the book Atonement that I finished yesterday, this book does not have a super happy ending. I'm going to spoil it for yo and and tell you that they break up. And 8 hour marriage in the crapper because of some lousy communication. And as the years go by, they both never marry again. They live their separate lives and accomplish things alone, but they never get married. And in the end, they both lament that they didn't go back and talk on the beach. He laments the beautiful girl he never got to grow old with, the children they might have had, and the life they might have lived. She laments that he didn't call after her when she walked away form him. She would've gone back to him if he had just called for her. And it would've been all different.

Point simple: It was a depressing way to spend 3 hours. The moral of the story is this: most people are nervous about sex so you have to talk about it. Silence can ruin everything between two people. And I think that holds true for everything, not just sex: Silence can ruin anything in a relationships if you let it. So talk to each other people!! And don't let misunderstandings ruin your relationships and wonderful times that could be.

Book Review- Atonement

Atonement
by Ian McEwan
480 pages
Rating: Tragic and Melancholy. Makes me happy that I don't live in England during World War II. And that I was never falsely imprisoned.

Yes, I read this book in one day. But I think you need to know somethings about me before you are horrible impressed:

1. I still don't have TV. We have it all hooked up, but our old house and faulty wiring doesn't allow the TV to be plugged into a breaker with any other electronics. So I kept tripping the breaker all day today when I was trying to get it to work. So with no TV I had to waste some time. Turns out I can get a lot of reading done when I don't watch TV!!

2. My baby slept so much today. Last night we had a late night going to bed because we were finishing moving the last of the things from the old apartment. We were probably awake until 1:20 in the morning, and then we had to give her a bath, and then feeding, and then bed. So she slept in and then continued to sleep the whole day. I don't know if the heat had something to do with this. Like she wanted to get away from the heat and sleep was the only way to do this. I know I feel that way sometimes. So that is the other reason I had so much time to read.

3. And finally, I'm just a fast reader. I don't know what it is about me. I like sense the words before I actually see them. And I don't really read the words, I let them come into my brain visually. I think everyone does this, but I'm a visual person ANYWAY, so that's how I read. That's why I pronounce words so incorrectly (Lynn, I know you are thinking about the "admonent" situation) I just saw the word for so long, and never had to pronounce it till that day.

Anyway, that's why I was able to read this book so quickly. Plus the fact that it was awesome. I saw the movie that was made out of this book, and for some reason I read the book hoping it would end differently. I don't want to give too much away, but let's just say that it doesn't have the wonderful happy ending that everyone wants.

It's about a young girl who sees her sister and the son of their house lady (who has been her childhood friend forever-he grew up in a house living on their property) involved in a little, um flirtation? Can you call it that? It's more like they were fighting and they didn't know that they liked each other. Which I think is literary bull crap. Of COURSE you know if you like someone!! They just put that in there to be more "romantic" and "English" :)

Anyway the little girl is 13, and she sees her sister of 23 get in a fight with the boy and this vase is broken and a piece drops in the big fountain and the girl in her "unthinking state" strips down to her 1935 underwear (which you can assume is pretty modest compared to underwear these days) and gets in the fountain to get the piece that is lost. She still feels like she's mad at the neighbor boy and only does it to "show" him. Show him what? That she doesn't "need him" or that she's "immodest?" Anyway, in her mind at that time it was a bold move to show him that he may have graduated first in his class at Cambridge (where they both went) but he wasn't better than her.

Why does she think getting in a cold fountain will do this? I don't' know, and neither does she after she thinks about it. She immediately regrets it and is embarrassed to see him again. Well he has been thinking about her in a different way for some time, and the little fountain incident
(actually, I think we can call it an EPISODE) makes him want to tell her how he feels.

He writes a letter. His first draft is somewhat crude. He laughs to himself as he imagines her reading it. He decides to write out the revised letter again. You can guess what happens: He picks up the wrong letter. He doesn't realize it until he asks the young 13 year old to run ahead of him and give the letter to her sister before he gets there. She reads the crude letter. She thinks he's a "maniac" and a sexual deviant and this prejudices her and makes her make a HUGE mistake.

I'm taking too long in this summary, but it's just a great book. It's told from the point of view of the 3 principle characters: Briony, the 13 year old, Robbie the housekeeper's son and Cecelia, the sister of Briony. It's a story about mis-understanding and how "out of the mouth of babes" isn't always a reliable source when someone's life is on the line.

The book takes place in England during the second world war, so right there you know it will be sad. And it is. And I didn't want it to end. Again, I was hoping that it ended differently than the movie. But the movie and the book are very different similar. The movie does a GREAT job of telling the story from the different perspectives of every major character, and we can see how misunderstandings happen. The book does this even more diving into the thoughts of the characters as these things are happening.

Oh, and it's a quick read. Well, if you have a sleeping baby, nothing to distract you and you are a lightning fast reader. Otherwise you can slow-poke it out with the other "average" readers. :)

Oh, and congratulations to Jen (Delahunt) Sanders who got "Love Story" right on the last book review blog. Has no one read that book before? Go and read it, right now. It will make you bawl. If it doesn't, you are heartless and we can't be friends.

Book Review-100 Years of Solitude

417 Pages
Author: Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Rating: Fanciful, Awesome and Magical

"What do you say about a 25 year old girl who died? That she was beautiful. And brilliant. That she loved Mozart and Bach. And the Beatles. And me."

Who can name that book that I just quoted? You get a prize if you can name that book, and NO CHEATING. No Googling it or anything. Anyway, like the "Mystery" book i just quoted above, One Hundred Years of Solitude has the awesome habit of telling the end of the story before it actually tells the story. This is actually a great habit of Marquez that he repeats in lots of his other books. In "Love in the time of Cholera" he talks about the heroine's husband's death that day. But before he talks about how he dies, he goes on about a parrot, and suicide and a mulatto woman and her kids and, well, you get the idea.

But I LOVED this book. BAAAAAA!!! It talks about the history of a family for 100 years and how they are just destined for destruction and solitude and sadness. The book ends with the total destruction of their line. There are no more descendants to further their family name but I think that's a good thing. Why? BECAUSE THEY KEEP NAMING EVERY KID THAT COMES OUT AURELIANO!!

One Aureliano is a soldier and he is referred to as "Colonel Aureliano Buendia" (you know, to keep him distinct from the other ba-zillion Aurelianos) and sews his wild oats all over the country. And one by one the women come and bring them his sons. . .there are 17 of them. And they are all named Aureliano.

That is just one of the crazy things that happens in this book. I really loved how the author weaved magic into the story and didn't make a big production about it. Like he will be talking about how Aureliano Segundo was upset about something, so he went into the study of his father, where the ghost of the gypsy waited for him and had a conversation with him. And it was just normal. Actually, at the end, the two last surviving members of the family are happy to be walking around with so many ghosts because they know that when they die they will not be gone but will continue to inhabit the house walking around still together. Just magical stuff like that happened all the time.

Oh, and one more thing. Hey Beth, remember when you were taking that history class (I know, I need to be more specific that that, right?) and you talked about how millions of Chinese died and how the government lied and said it never happened? Or am I making that up? Anyway, that happens in this book. There is a whole deal with a Banana Plantation being set up, and then they get mad when the workers revolt, and they call them into the town square and kill over 3,000 of them and haul them away in trains.. And then they lie and said it never happened. Not only that, they say that there never was a plantation there. And for some reason, everyone kind of accepts it, because they change the history books to say that it never happened. Of course, it makes no sense, right? That's part of the magic.

Anyway, I loved this book. It took me a really long time to finish it because I got so confused with all the Jose Arcadios and the Aurelianos and the Remedios. But mostly with the Aurelianos. Actually the women in this book usually were a lot better off then the men. They almost always lasted longer than their male counterparts. But that might've been because the men kept running off with the gypsies and to go to war. Who knows?

Anyway, I give this book 5 out of 5 stars. It's a classic. Go read it now. You'll thank me later.

Sweatin' to the Oldies

The reason I have been off the map lately is because we have been moving to another apartment. And we don't have Internet there yet until Thursday. So I have to some back to the old apartment to do my email, fill out forms online, look for jobs and watch TiVo. I do miss Tivo. I'll be so excited to get my TV and internet all set up for good. (I feel like Miranda in that one episode where she needs her DSL installed and as soon as she gets it, she's desperate to look at her Tattler online. I have no desire to look at the Tattler. My needs are Blog based)

The good news is that with all that non-TV time, I have finally made it through "100 Years of Solitude" which was much longer than I thought. I'll have a review for you soon. Let's just say it was awesome and fanciful and full of magic. Not like the lame kind of magic where they make a rabbit come out of a hat. But the awesome life lengthening, sleep preventing, ghost seeing type of magic.

Anyway, I just wanted to post a quick blog and tell you that my apartment is hotter than Satan's Balls. I'm sorry if that image is tough for you to take, but it IS. I know some of you say, "oh, I live in Arizona, It's 115 degrees out today" or others say, "In Texas it's been about 100 for 3 months now AND we have 88% humidity" To you people I say the following: Do you have A/C? Do you stay indoors most of the time? And do you have a car with functioning A/C? If you can answer yes to any of these questions, then I win.

I am not kidding when I say that it was 100 degrees INSIDE my house yesterday. Inside, under the shade, in my front room, in the bedrooms. There is no relief anywhere I go. I'm not messing around when I say that I wanted to die. There is a thermometer in our kitchen stuck to the fridge and I looked at it yesterday. I was thinking, "It has to be a hundred degrees in here!!" and then I looked at the thermometer and it confirmed my wild postulations. There is no A/C in the house. The oven is close to the living room and it's "old fashioned" which is a quaint way of saying "no insulation around the metal box pumping out 400 degree heat."

The main part of the house including the living room and the baby's room have windows facing West. That means that from about 3 pm to 8 pm every day, I can cook an egg off my window. And there is no A/C. I did mention that, right? We do have a million fans up and running. But they are only pushing around 100 degree air. We have to suffer in silence until the sun goes down and then the fans can suck in cool air.

But we are looking forward to fall. And I think in winter we'll be toasty warm. Even though the house is old (like our first home. Remember that hell hole, Reagan?) I has better insulation than that, and I think we will be really happy there. And we do have 2 of those window A/C units. But we were just trying to do without them for a while. I think the time has come when we need to suck it up and put them up, however. My poor baby was covered head to toe with a heat rash yesterday. I can't let that happen again.

Anyway, It's hot. My baby is suffering and it's time to fix this.

Oh, on another note, it's Education Week around here. I think I might go to some classes while my mom watches the baby. We'll see.

And finally, I need to tell you about how I've been waking up at 6 am to exercise. I'm too tired to talk about it right now. Good Night!

My Baby's Silky Smooth Coat

To answer Reagan's comment on my last blog, the move is going slow. And how many houses have we lived in? Well, we have lived in 5 houses in the last 12 months. Take into account the 3 houses we lived in before that, and we have had 8 houses since being married. Averaging to 2 moves a year. I want to vomit just reading that. I don't want to move again. EVER.

Anyway, back to our anniversary. We almost forgot. There was just so much going on, and for the past few days none of us have been real aware of the actual date. And so I realized almost too late what time it was. Mom volunteered to watch Evi so we could go out and I took her up on it.

Evi has had lots of mocos the last few days, and it's been hard for her to breathe. Nursing has been hard, and she didn't take a long nap all day yesterday. I mean she would crash for like 20 min or a hour at the longest. But mostly she was just awake and fighting to breathe. It was rough listening to her breath fighting to get out, but those darned mocos wouldn't come out with the snot sucker.

Well, I feed Evi and then we left. I called from the restaurant and mom said she had given her a bath and she was OUT. She said she was so tired that her eyes were closed even before she laid down. I was happy and we finished our date and came home.

Just so you know, we did do something fun for our anniversary. We went to La Carreta. It's a Peruvian restaurant. It's the closest thing we can get to Ecuadorian food around here. Anyway, we got there very late and we were the only ones there. It was fun to just sit and talk to each other and not have a baby screaming.

Well, the next morning I noticed that there were some strange bottles on the floor of my shower. Some body wash, the dog shampoo, my shampoo, shaving cream, etc. I thought that was weird until I realized that the baby shampoo was over at the new house.

Then a horrible thought hit me. What did my mom use to wash my baby? I asked her and she said, "oh, you had some 'soothing oatmeal' shampoo so I used that." I went to the shower and pulled out a bottle and said, "is this the stuff you used?" and she said, yes. Yeah, it was the dog shampoo. My mom washed my baby with dog shampoo.

I don't blame her. Here is a picture of the shampoo bottle:


So do you see the word DOG stamped anywhere on this bottle in BIG BOLD letters? I totally can understand her confusion. There is no picture of a dog, and the only place it says dog is in teeny tiny letters right under the "G" logo. It says "For Dogs" really tiny and then it talks about "coat hydrating" properties in the box below. That could be for humans, right? If you are crazy and refer to your hair as your "Head coat" or "chrome pelt" as I like to call it. Then this bottle might work for you.

As it is, it's just funny. What ISN'T funny is the box on the back that says "keep out of reach of children so as to avoid consumption." And my mom said that she put the baby in that to swim around. Great! Awesome!! My kid was covered head to toe with horrible flea and tick killing, yet still nourishing, toxins. (I think all this oatmeal talk is terribly hyped up. Does the oatmeal neutralize the skin burning effects of the chemicals? Discuss) I am a horrible mother that bathes her child in dog shampoo toxins. I'll be accepting my mother of the year award this weekend. Thank you for all attending the ceremony held at Utah County Jail.

And to reply to Judd's comment, I will stop calling my dog "The little girl." I must admit that reading that and the phrase "300 bees" together is enough to stop someone's heart. But this latest debacle tells me that maybe I can start calling Evi "puppy girl" as a term of endearment. HA!

I'm a bad mother. The end