Nighty Night

Mitch's parents and my brother-in-law, Mat were over today; and while we were chatting he was perusing my bookshelf.  He picked up my copy of Bear Attacks and asked if I had read it.

I told him I used to read it to the kids before bed.  I never thought that was strange but by the looks I got from Mat and his parents, it was akin to child abuse.  "They liked it!"  I had to say in my defense a hundred times.  Mat paged through and found a story about a man and woman who were stalked and eventually eaten by a grizzly and read it aloud for all of us.  It was graphic.  Lots of blood and ripped-off scalps.  "How old were the kids when you read this to them???" my mother-in-law asked in shock and horror.  "I don't know, I suppose Kira was about seven, and Sam about ten.  Old enough," I replied.

"What else did you read them?" Mat asked in a judgemental tone.  I said, "Well, let's see... Johnny Tremain, Harry Potter, Death in Yellowstone..."

"Death in Yellowstone???" they all said in unison.  I got the book out of the shelf and showed them.

It is a book that lists in order all the deaths that have happened in Yellowstone National Park since its inception, and the stories about how they happened.  Fascinating.  It was one of our favorites.  We especially liked the story about the guy who jumped in a boiling mud pit to save his stupid dog and he was so badly burned that his skin peeled off in sheets and then he died.  At this point I think my mother-in-law was considering taking the kids home with her for good.  I was about to change the subject when bigmouth Kira said, "What about that book called Between a Rock and a Hard Place about the guy who cut his own arm off with a dull pocketknife?  That was good."

Apparently I have to teach Kira that the throat-slitting gesture means to SHUT THE HELL UP.

Authors

One of the reasons I'm so happy that I discovered the blogging world is because I love to read, and I've discovered some great books; and because sometimes they have blogs, I get to actually talk with the authors!  I'm so starstruck by people who take on something like a book and follow through and get it published.  Before I started blogging, one of my favorite authors was Steven Saylor.  He writes books about Ancient Rome.  I LOVE his books.  I finished a few books in his Gordianus series and wrote him an email.  The Gordianus series is about a man in ancient Rome named, obviously, Gordianus.  He's like the Sherlock Holmes of Rome.  He investigates crimes with the help of his trusty sidekick Tiro, a young servant.  In the email I told Steven Saylor that I love his books and had recently finished one of the installments of the Gordianus series.  I said,

 "...I read Roman Blood which I  loved, but I read it late at night when I was very tired, and you know how you get a picture of the characters in your head and usually they are people you know or actors or something?  Well, unfortunately I had Mr. Peabody and his pet boy Sherman from the Rocky and Bullwinkle show in my head for Gordianus and Tiro for about the first half of the book until I could finally make it stop." 

 Steven Saylor not only got my email and read it, he responded!  He said:

"Sarah, 

Thanks for such an enthusiastic and encouraging message. 

I hope you'll enjoy Empire all the way to the bittersweet end. 

Gordianus and Tiro as Mr. Peabody and Sherman is a new one on me. Now I can't get that image out of my head (lol)! 

Best wishes, 

Steven [Saylor]"

OMG.  I can't tell you how surprised and thrilled I was to get an email from Steven Saylor!  I'm a tiny bit sorry that I might have ruined Gordianus and Tiro for both of us, but mostly I'm happy he gave me an "lol."

Now I know bloggers who have written books and that is so exciting.  I'm a teensy bit jealous, but mostly thrilled for them that they published a book, and thrilled for me that I know someone who published a book.  Meg and Chris from 2birds1blog wrote a book called A Misanthrope's Guide to Life which was hilarious.  I wrote a review of it and I actually chatted with Meg a few times over email.

Another blog I recently discovered is Animals Behaving Badly by Linda Lombardi.  It's an exposé  blog about the horrible things animals do and blatantly get away with because they are adorable and "don't know any better."  I got her book for Christmas and haven't read it yet, but it's on my short list.

Right now I'm reading a book by a blogger named Karen Weir-Jimerson who I met  a long time ago. Her blog is called Cat Crossing Farm.  She is a close friend of my aunt and she and her husband Doug live on a small farm in Iowa.  When the kids and I visit my aunt, Karen is gracious enough to invite us over and let us play with her animals for an afternoon.  Karen recently published a book called So Much Sky about life on her farm.  It is organized by seasons.  I've read the spring portion of the book so far and it is fantastic.  She writes about getting chicks in the mail, bottle-feeding baby lambs, tearing down brand new walls looking for a wayward kitten, and finally fulfilling her childhood dream of getting a horse.  Her writing is smooth and expressive, giving the reader wonderful images of life on the farm.

I told Kira that Karen wrote a book and showed it to her.  She grabbed it out of my hand and said, "I know that horse! I've met that horse! I've walked where that horse is!"

see?

I'm not the only one who is starstruck.

I've been tossing around the idea of writing a book about substitute teaching but I'm having a hard time getting into it.  I get started, and then it seems too daunting.  I'm really more of a write/proofread once/publish kind of gal and blogging is perfect for that.  So that is why I am in awe of all the writers mentioned in this post.  I want to do it to say "I wrote a book" and put author after my name, and also I feel like once I get one book published, it will be easier to write more after that. (Like killing your first hooker, it just gets easier after that, right, Jack the Ripper?)  I feel like I have books in me but much like my thoughts, they are an unorganized mess that will require drive and ambition to put together.  I don't know if my potential books will be able to overcome my lack of drive and ambition.

Have you ever gotten in touch with someone you were starstruck by? Have you ever considered writing a book?

The Rifleman, the BOOK

I got the greatest surprise in the mail yesterday!  Remember how I told you that my new favorite old show is The Rifleman?  Well, my aunt found the book pictured below at an antique mall and GOT IT FOR ME!  I love it!  You know why?  They have pictures every few pages.  So what I'm going to do for this fine post is do what teachers are supposed to tell kids to do when we teach them to read.  We tell them to take a picture walk and try to figure out what the story is about.  I am going to do just that.  I bet I'll be pretty close to the real story!  Picture walks work!

Okay, from the front cover I can tell the book is going to be mainly about Lucas McCain and his young, loyal son Mark.  I can tell from the tense, protective stance that Lucas is taking that Mark might be in some danger.  Luckily Lucas's trusty rifle is on the scene.  They look to be outside a dwelling with a thatched roof.  I don't recall people in the Old West living in thatched roof dwellings.  It's not a good idea.  Rats get up there and nest.  You know where else rats liked to go in olden times?  In lady's big bouffant hairdos.  The ladies used to plaster their hair up with lard, and at night when they slept vermin would attack their hair.  That's why when your hair is messy it's called a "rat's nest."  I'm not even kidding.  Look it up.  

Another reason thatched roofs and hair-lard products aren't a good idea:  Fire.  

Here is the first illustration.  Lucas seems to be looking over the rifle of a friend of his.  I wonder if he likes it or not?  Maybe he is giving his friend some rifling tips.  At this point in the story, things are going well for Lucas. 

Mark is doing pretty well too!  "Hey pretty little lady, I like your spats!"

Uh oh, first sign of trouble.  Looks like Mark is getting kidnapped.  AGAIN.  Mark is ALWAYS getting kidnapped.  He lures kidnappers from all over the country to kidnap him.  And they even risk kidnapping him despite the fact that his father is the Rifleman, renown all over the West for his accuracy of shooting anything he wants from the hip without aiming.  Mark is irresistible to kidnappers.  

Oh, wait a minute.  Maybe Mark didn't get kidnapped.  He seems to be just fine and with his father watching a man drive a horse through a body off water.  I don't get this.  Who is that guy?  What happened to Mark's kidnapper?  Shouldn't there be a picture resolving that?  If Lucas took his rifle to the kidnapper, I want to see it in illustration form!  

Now what are they looking at?  I don't know.  This is getting frustrating.

What?  Somebody seems to have died. Four dirty looking men carrying a mustachioed man somewhere on a stretcher.  I would guess they are trying to get rid of the body.  What does this have to do with the kidnapper and the water-horse and the thatched roof?  I don't know.  

Here's Mark getting stalked by bad guys again.  Hey Mark, why don't you just stay home?

Okay, what in the HELL is going on now?  Mark appears to be baking something and from the mean look on his face I am guessing that he is in the process of poisoning the batter.  Maybe he is baking some cookies for all his captors.  Why is Pippi Longstocking in this book???  Mark, be more careful with that poison!  It doesn't grow on trees, you know!

Jesus Mark, again???

Apparently Mark got the shit kicked out of him but then got saved and is getting some medical care from a VERY happy doctor and a pretty lady with a giant bowl of soup.  Perhaps they are considering kidnapping Mark?  I'm almost positive they are.

This must be the epilogue picture.  Mark is healed and he and Lucas are shirtless and fixing fences together. Why not?  When you're working closely with barbed wire, you want as much skin as possible exposed.  They are probably talking about all the kidnappers and the morality of poisoning cookies even if they are for kidnappers.  Nobody expects poison in their cookies, Mark.  Nobody.  Have the decency to use a rifle, for God's sake.  Poisoning is the woman's way of committing Old West murder.  

Well, the picture walk wasn't everything I'd hoped.  It must really suck to be a kindergartener, illiterate little psycophaths.

Book Club

Hi.  I'm teaching high school right now.  Well, not really.  It's my lunch break and I'm writing on the blog, so I'm not teaching anyone anything.  I like this teacher.  He seems to have his act together.  The kids have been super. 

I had book club last night and every time it's a book club day and it gets later and darker, I think to myself, "Oh geez, I don't want to go outside in the cold and drive and freeze my butt off, and park blah blah blah, lazy, lazy, lazy;  but every month I do it and I am so glad I did because those ladies are so much fun. 

Last night we talked about the book for a while (A Circus in Winter), and the general concensus was "eh."  That took about ten minutes.  Then we picked a new book (Undead and Unwed), and then we gabbed for about two hours on a variety of topics such as:

- when do our teenage sons start secretly looking at porn on their various electronic devices and what we should do about it and HOW GROSS IS THAT?  (answers ranged from "ick, I would pretend I didn't know" to "I'd make him watch it with me and tell me if he thinks the actors' parents are proud of them."

- how some of our kids get bullied at school or are struggling with some pretty awful social situations and what we should do about it.  (general concensus:  take the low road and make the little fuckers hurting our little angels PAY.)

- if the show Game of Thrones is or is not about lesbians. (is not)

- don't buy boots from CheapUggs.com because apparently the little Chinese children who make them aren't very concerned about quality.

- a general inquiry into when in your life your eyebrow hairs and pubes stopped knowing that they aren't meant to grow long and luxurious, (after the first baby) and what happens when your surgeon sews your C-section scar crooked (long and luxurious pubes grow at a jaunty angle).

- what is anus bleaching, how did it get so stained anyway; and how terrible a job is that?

And my favorite quote from the whole night was

"I've always considered myself low-maintenance but after today I'm beginning to wonder."

That had me laughing all night.  Then we picked our next meeting place and went home.  I am refreshed for another month.  Then today Dana, our leader, sent out an email that summed up the night with bullet points for the ladies who didn't make it.  It was so funny I stole the idea for this post.  Thanks, Dana!  Thanks ladies!  See you next month!

Book Review

I am reading the BEST BOOK right now.  It is called The Tiger, A True Story of Vengeance and Survival by John Vaillant.  It is about tigers and people who live in the forests of the far eastern Russia.  About a decade ago a man named Markov, who lived in the woods, came across a dead boar, an obvious tiger kill and he took the hocks.  Apparently that is a big no-no because tigers don't like when you steal from them and they know who did it. Markov kept one of the hocks for himself and brought the other one to a logging camp near his home. The tiger stalked Markov for days, destroyed all property with his scent on it, including his latrine, killed his dogs, killed him, ATE HIM, and then stalked the loggers who had the other hock.

The book tells the story of Markov and the tiger and the Tiger Inspection team, but it also tells a very compelling story of how predators and people have gotten along through time.  The chapter I read yesterday outlined the idea of ethology, a concept introduced by a guy named Jacob van Uexkull.  The idea is that all creatures share a common environment, but their realities inside that environment are vastly different.  He says it's like if you blew a bubble around each creature that is full of the perceptions which it alone knows.  His example is of a woman and her dog walking down the street.  She notices a for sale sign, a policeman coming toward her or a broken bottle in her path, whereas the dog notices the scent of cooked meat coming from a restaurant, urine on a pole and crumbs on the sidewalk.  The two are walking down the same path but having vastly different experiences.  The same goes for every creature.  Predators need to get into the minds (or bubbles) of their prey in order to successfully hunt it.  Tigers are especially clever when they do this, so if a tiger decides you look delicious and he's really hungry, or you have wronged him in some way, he is going to get revenge, you are pretty much dead meat.  It's fascinating.  Apparently tigers and people who live in the same environment have had sort of a deal not to kill each other for thousands of years, but sometimes people or tigers break the deal and then watch out!

I have about half the book left to read because apparently this tiger isn't done hunting people.  Yikes!  Can you imagine knowing that a tiger was out there coming for you?  When the Tiger inspection people were investigating the "crime scene" they noticed fresh tiger tracks all around.  They knew the tiger was close, that he considered Markov his kill and the people were interfering with it.  When they realized this, they knew the tiger was probably watching them but they couldn't see it anywhere.  Just then they heard a deep growl that seemed to come from all around.  They left the scene to try to figure out what to do next.  SOOOO scary!

There was also another interesting story in the book about predators and prey.  A scientist was interested in learning why baboons, who have so much bravado in the light of day, stay hidden in caves at night to avoid big cats.  He wanted to see what it would take to get them to go out in the dark, so this man hid in the cave during the day and then after the troop of baboons came in and went to sleep he jumped out and scared the crap out of them.  They totally freaked out, but they would not leave the cave so apparently whatever was inside the cave with them was not as scary as what was outside in the dark.  I don't know how wise it is to scare a bunch of baboons in an enclosed space, but I guess the guy proved his point.  Baboons know how scary big cats can be and will sacrifice one or two inside the cave with the scary unknown rather than risk the loss of the whole troop outside in the dark with the lions.  Spooooooookkkkyyyyyy!!!

I highly recommend this book.  It is very suspenseful and written very well.

I missed you!

OH MY GOD!  I haven't had internet for days and days!  I can get email on my phone and if I'm absolutely desperate I can get on the internet and look at blogs on my phone too, but the screen: she's so very very tiny, it was hard.  I don't know what the heck is wrong with our wi-fi.  It's really starting to get on my nerves.  Anyhoo, since I had no internet service I did things like clean the house, and pay attention to my children, and read books.  BOOORRRIIINNNGGG!!!  Just kidding.  I finished reading Roots and like I've mentioned before, it was hard to read because of how horrible slavery is, so after I finished it I thought, I have to read something totally different, and hopefully lighter.  So I picked up a book I got for Christmas and it was about a mother and a daughter.  Sweet!  I have a daughter!  But after I got into it, I realized it was mostly about the Holocaust.  You know what's more horrible than mid 19th century Southern white slave owners?  Nazis.  Hello again, nightmares!

Last night I went to book club, and I have to say, I love my new book club.  Sure, the book we read was good and we talked about it and all; but we also talked about hot-flashes, fiber-intake (complete with a sample of our hostess's delicious chewable fiber pills), public farting, the Bristol Stool Scale (which I forgot the name of so just googled "broman's poop chart" and got the desired results.  I love you, Google!)

When Dana brought up the poop chart on her computer for us to see, I was pretty proud because I am number one all the way, and number one is the best right?

 Apparently not.  A person should be aiming for number four.  Yeah, that's right.  Number four. 

Then we talked and talked about all kinds of stuff, and one of the ladies told the funniest story.  She said when she was young she heard a joke that she didn't get, but everyone who heard it laughed at it, so she laughed too, and later when she was having dinner with her parents she thought they might like to hear the funny joke.  The joke was "What is better than roses on your piano?  Tulips on your organ."  (get it, two lips).  She told the joke to her parents and then laughed and laughed, and not until years later did she finally get the joke and was immediately mortified that she told an oral sex joke to her parents at the dinner table. 

I'm still laughing about it.

Nightmares

You know what tends to give a gal nightmares every single night?  Reading a terrifying, yet utterly compelling book about the horrors of slavery.  I've been reading Roots by Alex Haley lately.  I've always wanted to read it because I remember when the mini-series was on TV and anyone who was anyone was watching it (I didn't watch it.  I was SEVEN.)  It was a TV EVENT that hardly anyone missed and people still talk about it today. And also, I am a little bit in love with LeVar Burton, that Reading Rainbow Sexpot.



So anyway, I've been reading the book and have nightmares every night about babies getting taken away and the parents not able to do anything about it, which makes sense because that kind of stuff happens in the book, but I'm also having dreams where family members get diagnosed with cancer, and people play baseball with onions, and my dog grows little hands and puts a rat in the rowboat I am riding in.  I am going to be happy when the book is over so maybe the dreams will go away.  I knew slavery sucked, but I guess I didn't realize the intense depths to which it sucked.  Suffice it to say that Southern whites of the late 18th century were not very nice people.  Every day of Kunta Kinte's life of slavery is a nightmare, even though as a slave he's treated better than most.  It's hard to stand it, but what does one do about it now?  One of the main themes of the book is self-identity and knowing who you are, and what you stand for and where you come from.  I'd love to read it with a class someday but there are about five pages of sex parts that would make it inappropriate for school.  Also it's almost 900 pages.  Not really manageable for the average high school student.  And I don't have a job. That puts a damper on all current lesson plans.

How dare he know me so well...

I've been reading a lot about tribal life lately.  I read the book One Thousand White Women for book club. It's a fictionalized account of a secret government program in the 1870s where 1000 women were recruited to be Cheyenne brides and have children with the Indians so that the two cultures would be assimilated peacefully. (Didn't work.)  Now I'm reading Roots by Alex Haley and the beginning of the book is all about African tribal life in the 1700s.  Tribal life seemed to work pretty well for lots of people for thousands of years.  Tribal life is pretty cool!  Now I want to try tribal life! 

I casually told Mitch about the books and he listened to me and said "mm hmm" every now and then, and I thought I was mostly just talking to myself until I said, "I like tribal life.  I'd like to try it," and he said, "YOU WOULD HATE TRIBAL LIFE!  YOU WOULD BE TERRIBLE AT IT!" 

Um, excuse me?  How offensive.  How can this man who has only known me more than half my life know if I would or would not be terrible at tribal life?  So what if I'm not exactly a social butterfly, am a bit of a feminist, would prefer to do things by myself, and am not crazy about camping-out.  SO WHAT.  When I got mad and told him if we were living the tribal life, I'd kick him out of my lodge/hut for insulting me so, he said, "See! You can't even get along with me!  You'd be SO BAD AT TRIBAL LIFE!"

Serial Nerd

I'm watching Magnum P.I. right now.  I watch it every night at 8:00 because I'm a creature of habit to a crippling degree. I have recently started to schedule my evenings around Magnum.

 1984 Tom Selleck.  I'd hit that. (sorry, dad)

I am a sucker for a series of any kind, especially book series, which is good when it's a Harry Potter or a Lord of the Rings, but when it's a Sookie Stackhouse series and I can't stop because the story isn't over yet, and there's about 400 more books, it's not so good.

When I worked at the jail one of the inmates and I were talking about books and I told him I loved any kind of series, mainly because then you don't have to think about what you are going to read next.  (I'm that lazy)   This thoughtful inmate suggested I read the Left Behind series.  The only question I had for him about it was "How many books are there?"  In retrospect, the questions I should have asked:  Is it about the rapture?  Is it preachy?  Is it badly written?  Is it painful to read?  Are there crappy movies starring Kirk Cameron made from the books?

but most importantly - IS IT ABOUT THE RAPTURE?  Don't start a series about the rapture when you're an atheist AND a book-series addict because it's painful to read and it's painful to stop reading.  If you've never heard of it, it's about- you guessed it - the rapture.  One day people are just walking around, doing their thing and all of a sudden, a lot of people are just *poof* gone.  All that is left is their clothes.  They've gone up to heaven (naked) for the rapture and the rest of the people (sinners/assholes) are left to fend for themselves.  Too bad!  Guess you shouldn't have sinned so much!  Ha Ha!  I read the first book in that series.  The whole book.  I managed to stop after that. Barely.

When I was in college I watched a lot of Who's the Boss.  If I was a psychology major I could have written a thesis about the dynamic between Tony and Angela.  (BTW, Mona was the boss. It was a trick question.)  I didn't like the show because I loathe Tony Danza and Judith Light reminds me of a skinny female Sylvester Stallone, but I watched it because it was on twice a day, every day.  I couldn't stop myself.

Question asked, question answered.

Needless to say, I'm dying to see Eclipse, the third movie in the Twilight series.  I made a point this week to brush up on Twilight by watching the first two movies.  

 OMG!!!