Janette’s Neighborhood

Finished The Dreaded Feast: Writers on Enduring the Holidays, edited by Michelle Clarke & Taylor Plimpton.

This is basically the anti-Christmas book, and if you have a dark sense of humor, odds are you'll love it.

The first essay is by John Waters, and it's my favorite of the bunch.  But there are also essays from David Sedaris (but not, sadly, The Santaland Diaries), Augusten Burroughs, Hunter S. Thompson, Dave Barry, Robert Benchley, Mark Twin, Jonathan Ames and Chris Radant (the short story that inspired Home for the Holidays), plus a ton more.

Also, the cover is fantastic. 

The Dreaded Feast: Writers on Enduring the Holidays

P.J. O'Rourke

Long ago, when I lived in Boston, my roommates and I had a problem with mice. Now, we were clean people, so it frustrated us that half a dozen mice had taken up residence in our house.

We set out traps and one morning my roommate Julia and I found a poor little mouse stuck to an icky sticky trap. Neither of us had the stomach to deal with it right after waking up, so we walked to Dunkin Donuts and had breakfast.

While we were gone, Kate and Hillary cleaned up the mouse.

Now, living back in California, I have no roommates. So if I go out for donuts, no one will be around to catch and clean up the mouse that is living somewhere downstairs.

I have GOT to get a roommate.

And I need a donut.

My head is absolutely buzzing with ideas and planning, goals, projects and lists. I should be a professional project creator. I have come to the conclusion that there are simply not enough hours in the day. What should one do? Sleep less? Hardly!  But managing my time more effectively would probably go a long way towards helping me accomplish every harebrained scheme I think up.

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What a delightful weekend we just spent. Sherlock Holmes was interestingly done and well worth a watch. I remember my mum reading Sherlock Holmes to me and my sisters at bedtime. The story of the speckled band scared the proverbial crap out of me.  I remember reading the story to Jesse and Libby when they were still quite young (we were living in Hawaii at the time) and they were completely unruffled by it.

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I wanted to go to the zoo today (yes, in December) but the snow was coming down thick and fast.

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 Todd didn't fancy negociating icy roads all the way to Indianapolis so we stayed close to home.

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 Ice skating wasn't the same without our English cousins but we're planning to get them stateside next winter.

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it's a quiet 37th birthday for me, as it usually is. it's what i've come to expect since my birthday is just two days after christmas.

but i can't complain. my cold is almost gone and i had a quiet day with just doug and chaeli.

doug and chaeli baked me a cake and i'm about to have a delicious dinner - spaghetti and garlic bread. doug made the sauce from scratch - tomato puree, crushed tomatoes, ground beef and pancetta. the bread is a freshly made italian loaf from the bakery and the wine is my favourite spanish red.

all these things will make this day memorable.

but what will REALLY make it one not to be forgotten, is the fact that i didn't hear doug and chaeli come home from the market. and the fact that i was dosing off while watching 'love actually' when chaeli came barging into my room. and the very fact that on our 37" high definition, flat lcd screen which towers over chaeli, was the scene from 'love actually' of the two stand-ins talking to one another, in the nude, while stimulating a sex scene (as they were stand-ins for what we are to assume is a porno flick).

and it was at that exact scene, to which chaeli stops right there, front and centre of the TV and asks, "mommy... what are you watching?"

i stumble towards the remote while muttering, "uh... nothing" as i fumble to find the off button.

then, my dear five year old turns to me to say, "doesn't look like nothing."

this is how i sum up parenting. you spend all this energy to shelter your child from things they are too young to see... all the effort and energy, snubbed out in one single split second where you totally fuck up.

Finished Knit the Season by Kate Jacobs.

This is the third book in the Friday Night Knitting Club series, and it's as enjoyable as the other two.

Dakota is trying to balance the demands of the shop (Walker & Daughter) with her own dreams of being a pastry chef, as well as feeling like everything's changing.  (There's a lot going on in this book, most of which are relative surprises.)

These books are pure comfort food, this one especially.  Good book to read at Christmas. :)

Knit the Season: A Friday Night Knitting Club Novel (Friday Night Knitting Club Novels) (Hardcover)

Kate Jacobs (Author)

Over the holidays, I was talking with someone whom I trust a great deal about "letting go". You know, it's the time of year that you reflect on what's happened and look forward to what can be and though I wasn't talking about that particular thing with this person, I thought the conversation was timely.  We were actually talking about the past and how some people feel that to move on you have to "forget" about what's happened in order to move forward peacefully and with a smile. 

drip

1 comment

Father Christmas brought everyone what they wanted, but Mother Nature didn't bring us any snow.

Stephan's nana & papa got him a Fisher-Price camera for Christmas and he's spent time wandering around snapping pictures. Gotta love seeing things from a 3 1/2-year-old's perspective

I started him his own Picasa site and if you'd like to see his first album, the link is here. I weeded through about 2/3rds of the pictures, most of the floor, wall or ceiling and a few too blurry to recognize.

Enjoy my budding photographer!

Finished The Broken Teaglass by Emily Arsenault.

Billy has just taken his first post-college job, working as a lexicographer for a dictionary company.  (Lexicographers are the people who define words.)  While looking through some definitions for words (before deciding to include a word in the dictionary, they create folders for it and use instances where the word appears--for example, a few sentences from a book, so that they can see the word and the context), he finds an excerpt from a novel.  That excerpt seems to be describing his office.

He and a coworker start to do a little more digging (because, really, who can resist a book that seems to be about their coworkers?) and it turns out that the book doesn't exist.  Then they find some more pages from that same author, and a crime may have been committed.

Very fun mystery.  And lexicography sounds pretty awesome. :)

The Broken Teaglass: A Novel

Emily Arsenault