They liiiiive!!!

I have not yet killed my little plants! They live! They grow! Some may even be close to thriving! (Although I can't be sure - my idea of thriving is very limited considering I find it miraculous when something I tend doesn't die straight off). I ate a leaf off of my lettuce yesterday - very lettucy! I also bought some more planters because the chard and basil finally look big enough to re-pot and I need to thin out the carrots and give the tomatoes a lot of space to grow. Whether or not my tomatoes actually produce quantities of fruit is almost secondary to the pure nostalgia of the plant. We grew tomatoes in our backyard when I was a kid and I remember helping Mom and Dad in the back yard. I loved it when Dad would pull off the tomato hornworms and let us hold them [Note: I always thought Mom and Dad just called them tomato hornworms because they didn't know what they really were - turns out everyone calls them that. I'm sorry I didn't fully credit your intelligence!]. They were huge and very soft and kind of friendly and goofy looking in a terrifying way.

Your soul is miiiine! ...To SNUGGLE!

The SMELL of tomato plants, though, that just kills me. It's such a wonderful, deep, fresh alive smell. It smells like summer and home and my family and the backyard and sun and happiness. I love watering my new tomato plants because if I even touch the leaves the smell lingers on my hands for a while.

I am very proud of myself. I like playing in the dirt!

Races and Ritters

I ran my race! I am not dead! I suppose I didn't really think I'd fail, considering I actually made an effort to train and I'd run 10 miles the previous weekend without a crisis, but it's still a major accomplishment for me of the couch-and-tv-and-food-are-my-best-friends lifestyle. 2 hours, 22 minutes and 27 seconds. If only I'd run five seconds faster, it would have been all 2s! O, wild calamity! I had a BLAST doing it. I was so jazzed at the end I yelled, "Let's do it again RIGHT NOW!" but that was just the insanity talking.

I done runned the hell out of that race!

I ran the whole way, only walking long enough to take the water they hand you along the course and drink it without throwing it in my own face and the weather was perfect. It's so much easier to run when people hand you drinks and Gu and cheer for you the entire time. I kept what I thought was a pace I could maintain the whole time, then two miles from the end realized I had SO much energy left that I basically sprinted the final mile which felt good, but oddly disappointing. Maybe part of me wanted to have a sweaty, collapsing, "I beat you, Death, I beat you! I surviiiiived!" kind of finish, but I will accept sprinting. Also, I got to litter indiscriminately (done with your water? Toss the cup on the ground! They'll rake it up for you!), AND I got to run through a tunnel and on the freeway! How often do us regular folk get to run on the FREEWAY!?

The rest of Saturday was a lot of lying down, Saturday night/Sunday afternoon I sang my final two concerts of the season then went to our end-of-season party where I had the most delicious pineapple infused vodka in existence and sat around being goofy with my fellow altos.

Sunday night Joanna took me to a Josh Ritter concert - LIFE-CHANGING AMOUNTS OF JOY!!! He was the single happiest, bounciest human being I have ever encountered. His bass player has an amazing handlebar mustache. Their music filled me with wonder and energy and joy. I smiled so much it hurt. I crippled myself for him - I was in sharp, physical pain from the kneecaps down, but it doesn't matter. If you have the chance to see him in concert, GO, for the love of God, GO!

Gogogogogo!!!

I Have A Life, Really!

I haven't updated in a while, but as my life is not generally a raging whirlwind of action and life-altering drama, I think we'll all manage to survive somehow. My time has been divided into a few categories:

Work - Currently planning 2011 education, our Fall Conference (it may be at the end of November but that doesn't mean we're not already harried and behind schedule), and working on cleaning out old files and doing some basic organization. Yeah, off-season!

Sooooo much shelf space!

Half-Marathon Training - Yes, contrary to popular belief I am physically active.

And this is what happens when you're not wearing your glasses while being physically active.

The race is on the 26th so this is my last week of hard training. I'm running 10 miles on Saturday(!!!). Liz is running it as well, and miss Joanna is flying up from CA to run it with us! (Yes, she is insane. That is why I like her.) Of course, these last two weeks of training also coincide perfectly with...

Choir - Two concert weeks in a row. This week it's Mendelssohn's Lobgesang, next week it's Bernstein's Chichester Psalms. I feel easier about the latter because I've sung it before and it's just plain fun. So I'm daily running too much, working, and then singing too much. Next week will be full of glory and exhaustion: a full week of work and rehearsals, then Saturday AM I run a half-marathon, sing a concert Saturday PM and another Sunday afternoon. I am taking Monday off so I can die in peace.

Etc. - My spare time lately has consisted of reading (a lot of fantasy, actually), watching FAR too many episodes of Bones on Netflix instant watch while knitting and I've also been trying my hand at container gardening. I thought I'd add it to the knitting/cooking mix to form a trifecta of domesticity. I've got some alyssum and two geraniums (looking kind of bedraggled right now), Liz brought me some chives that a co-worker gave away and I even started some vegetables from seed - chard, carrots, lettuce, tomatoes and basil.

I'm particularly fond of these little guys because I got them for donating to KUOW, the local public radio station - am I a double nerd?

I'm amazed at how terrified I am of killing these little guys. I haven't lost one yet, but if I do I'll probably be wracked with guilt. We went to visit Liz's family over Memorial Day weekend and I cannot tell you how fearful I was of leaving them alone for three and a half days.

And that is my life. I'm enjoying myself, but I'm also excited for July when I'll have more free time. I'm hoping that by the time I'm freed up the weather will have gotten better and we can start hiking! Oh, summer, I look forward to you.

Things I Read 'N' Things I Thought 2010: Part 1

I seem to have read at a swifter pace in 2010, so I thought I'd take a look back at my readings with a mid-year update. Looks like a lot of fantasy books. I guess I'm on a kick.

1. Beastly by Alex Flinn - Affably bland and unnecessary "Beauty & the Beast". Wish I could travel back in time and see what I'd think of YA books like this if I were an actual teenager.
2. The Book of Three by Lloyd Alexander - I highly enjoy Eilonwy's constant use of analogies.
3. Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister by Gregory Maguire - He seems less unwieldy and enamored of his own writing style, meaning I can understand him. Tentative thumbs up.
4. A Curse Dark As Gold by Elizabeth C. Bunce - Not at all crappy retelling of Rumplestiltskin. Don't know why I read it because Rumplestiltskin has always disturbed me. Witness this other terrifying illustrated version.
5. The Dark Divine by Bree Despain - He's a werewolf, we know, just spit it out.
6. The Dream-Maker's Magic by Sharon Shinn - More of a "follow these characters through life" story than an "I have a story to tell" story and I don't think I mean that in a good way (it makes sense).
7. Fables (Vols. 1-11) by Bill Willingham - Fairy tale characters are real. And immortal. And living in New York. Not life-changing, but pretty damned amusing.
8. The Fantastic Mr. Fox by Roald Dahl - Glory.
9. The Golden Apples of the Sun by Ray Bradbury - Did you know that when man gave up fiction in the name of science that the ghosts of authors and their stories went to another planet and now man is flying in spaceships to that planet and Edgar Allen Poe wants to make a glorious last stand but Charles Dickens is having no part of it?
10. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell - So long, so good, so exactly like the movie. Scarlet is hilarious, hateful and sympathetic all at once.
11. His Majesty's Dragon by Naomi Novik - Dragons are branch of the British military during the Napoleonic Wars. Go. Read it now.
12. I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith - Wish I were this British girl. I don't talk nearly well enough.
13. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte - It will never be anything other than spectacular.
14. Just an Ordinary Day by Shirley Jackson - Not as mind-blowing as The Lottery, but Shirley is always entertaining.
15. Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder - I want to go barefoot on the prairie and spend my days knitting and cooking. I'll skip the malaria and blizzards and locusts and possible starvation.
16. Lisey's Story by Stephen King - Lisey. Her slightly crazy sister. Her husband's horrible life. Inter-dimensional travel. A good read.
17. Matilda by Roald Dahl - She likes book and has psychic powers and she's British? Done.
18. The Problem of Pain by C.S. Lewis - You know what the problem of pain is? We don't like it.
19. Snow White and Rose Red by Patricia C. Wrede - Magic and spellcasting are logical and fairly matter of fact. A less rage-enducing retelling of "Snow White and Rose Red" [see: Tender Morsels]
20. The Story Sisters by Alice Hoffman - Unending drama. If I didn't love her use of language and delicate, soul-clutching magical realism so dearly I don't think her stories would interest me all that much.
21. The Strain by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan - Vampires are disgusting. Vampires are parasites. Watch out! your blood will turn white.
22. Tender Morsels by Margo Lanagan - I try not to think about this book because it fills me with rage and confusion and wild disappointment and frustration and unbearable sadness. I will never recommend this to anyone. I desperately wish she'd left out 70% of this book and stuck with the 30% that had such amazing, heart-wrenching, human potential.
23. The Walking Dead (Vols. 10-11) by Robert Kirkman, et al. - Zombiiiiies! Human dramaaaaaa!
24. Watchers by Dean Koontz - One of my all time favorite books of ever anywhere.
25. Wildwood Dancing by Juliet Marillier - 12 Dancing Princesses meets Frog Prince set in Transylvania. Quite enjoyable! Gogu just about broke my heart.
26. The Witches by Roald Dahl - Do not accept chocolates from women in wigs.
27. The Year of Living Biblically by A.J. Jacobs - Yea, for he hath grown a mighty beard and did make me both laugh and think, even unto the end of the book.
    

So Shall It Be Written, So Shall It Be Read

I like "reviewing" books when I am confused by or dislike or am disappointed by them...

I am on a continuing quest to find good retellings of fairy tales. A long, non-consecutive and somewhat haphazard quest, but a quest nonetheless. Combined with my love of movie trailers, this lead me to read Beastly, a modern Beauty and the Beast retelling by Alex Flinn. I heard about a movie a while back and last night saw the trailer with that girl from High School Musical (playing one of those super attractive losers with impossibly perfect hair - you know, like those ones in your high school? uh....) and one of the Olsen twins (I am strangely fascinated by them) and some dude I've never heard of. I did a lot of eye-rolling and so of course I thought I'd give the book a whirl (bless you, digital library books).

I'd have to categorize it as "superfluous". I'm not opposed to retellings that hew close to the original and don't take risks and turn the story on its ear. Fairy tales are usually so slightly written that you can expand rather than alter and that's great. Go ahead and stick to the basics, but you have to give me SOMETHING - use new and interesting language, give us a deeper look into the characters, make us care more somehow. Flinn's writing was technically proficient, I suppose -- I understood her sentences and what she was trying to convey (and there were no grossly overwrought sentences a la Twilight) but I didn't identify with any descriptions or feel moved, amused or impressed by any of her phrases or images. Nothing struck me as beautiful or true or right. As for the characters, I'll give them a solid "meh". I didn't find anyone becoming an interesting, well-developed person that I cared about -- even the beast narrating from first person couldn't interest me much. The witch who cursed him was the most intriguing one I encountered but she barely featured so it just left me wanting more.

The biggest "superfluous" point against it is its setting. She placed the story in modern New York where apparently cool, 15-year old guys still say "Duh" and doctors encountering a strange unknown "disease" would rather just tell a rich boy "Well golly, we're stumped, you'll never be cured so just go home," than continue to work on his case and delve into something brand friggin' new (doctors aren't into that shit). It doesn't suffer for being modern it's just...pointless. I'm honestly not sure why she bothered to knock it forward a few centuries other than she could. She doesn't make much use of even the most obvious modern science/skepticism vs. magic bit (most characters think, "Whoa! Magic? Okay" and are never bothered by it again). The trimming is all modern but it felt heartless -- if she hadn't decorated with a cell phone or a Wii every few pages you'd never even notice it had a specified time period (product placement as literary device?). Extending from this, the one thing that rang completely, frustratingly false in this book was a series of chat transcripts from an online support group for people who have been transformed. The screen names were all cutesy, face-kickingly blatant fairy tale names for the Beast, the Little Mermaid, the Frog Price, and the Bear from Snow White and Rose Red. And the group is moderated by Chris Anderson (LOL...?). [Side note: I will accept the Frog Prince's explanation that he "sneaks up to the castle" to use the internet and the Bear's that there's wireless everywhere these days, "even in the woods", but tell me: where does a mermaid (PRE-humanity switch, mind you) get a computer underwater? Back to the time-period griping.] Supposedly the chat transcripts range from the beast joining the group near the start of his curse to the happy ending and this is the "opportunity" for him to tell the other participants his story -- the bulk of the book. I think the author was aiming for an interesting framework, but to me it was just an obnoxiously cute "hip" way of screaming, "Hey! LOOK! Its modern! R U totally impressed w my cul2ral relevnz?" Rather than making use of modern technology and socialization in the story itself she slapped (in my estimation) some modern trim on and called it current. I actually found the "sassy" chat transcripts so jarring from the beast's otherwise gentle narration and so unecessary that I just skipped them as I went along.

Overall I wouldn't recommend this book - I wouldn't NOT recommend it, though. Let's just say that while I didn't get much out of it, I won't be filing a complaint with the universe to get back those few hours of my life.

If you want to read Beauty and the Beast from his point of view I would much rather recommend Beast by Donna Jo Napoli - now THAT lady has a knack for keeping the basic plot while giving it a swift kick to make it feel shiny new, completely steeped in its time-period and emotionally relevant. (While you're at it, go ahead and also read The Magic Circle, her lovely and utterly heart-breaking version of Hansel and Gretel. Yes, Hansel and Gretel.)

Choral Orchestral Goodness Explosion Happy Fun Times

We finished the Ravel Daphnis et Chloe concert recently and boy am I glad it's over - I didn't find it too thrilling to sing, save the last section where it sounds like the wind in a storm (I didn't read the synopsis of the ballet, bad musician that I am, so I don't know what it's SUPPOSED to be, but let me tell you, I have never heard a better musical hurricane). The piece itself, though, is rockin'. As our director said (and I paraphrase) "There's not a movie composer who can touch Ravel's FEET." It is by turns ethereal, threatening, gorgeous, comic, dramatic, wild and perfect.

This time I also became very aware of something I've thought of in passing before - how unique and delightfully amazing an experience it is to sit on stage behind the musicians. It's 3-4 opportunities to watch and hear the process in its entirety. When you're performing you can't drift off like you can in the audience - even if you're composing the weekend's grocery lists in your head (a common occurrence) you have to be at least present enough to track where you are in the score so you can stand up and sing on time. And if you take the opportunity to pay attention you learn it better, hear it better, notice something new, every time.

I love that you can hear something new on Thursday and anticipate it every performance following. Every night I add something new to look forward to and to thrill at when it arrives.

I love that I can see the conductor's face and not just his back. Seeing their back from the audience you think, "What, they're waving a stick? What do you need them for?" But when you can really watch what they do from the front, it's unbelievable - you'd never again ask why orchestras and choirs need a conductor (and believe me, several people have asked me that question).

I love that I have the chance to watch new musicians every night - tonight the horns, tonight the bass, tonight the bassoon... I've actually come to enjoy instruments that never interested me much one way or the other because now I see them, hear them, now I can focus on them and know them. How AMAZING and clear and rousing is the trumpet when it's played with skill? And how can you NOT like the bassoon in all it's deep, yet nerdy and even kooky character - seriously? Timpani are not just some low drums that go boom - have you ever really watched someone play them who knows what they're doing? So fascinating! What a deft touch it takes. And I always thought flutes were kind of dippy and bland - NO. Spectacular and agile and soothing and flirty and piercing. In Daphnis et Chloe they're bird songs at sunrise.

Sigh.

Yar, I loves me books!

It has been years since I read the Little House series and as of recently, I own them all again and am really excited to reread them. Last weekend my roommate and I went to a used and new children's book store (I want to live in there and be that woman) and I was absolutely thrilled to find a complete set. I know you can buy them new easily at just about any bookstore, but this was both a matched set (came in a "fancy" cardboard box with illustrations on the sides) and an OLD set - it was the old blue covers I remember from childhood (we had a mix of yellow and blue covers). And the paper was all browned and it smelled like the used books we always bought when I was a kid. Big deal, right? Well, if you know me, you know my dark secret: I'm really particular about my books. It is almost painful to me to own a series of books if they're not all the same edition or if I don't like the edition. I will make do - I'm not quite hardcore (or wealthy) enough - to replace books I already own for the sake of matching a set, but I will try my very very hardest to buy the right edition. I have two sets (two of my favorite children's series, incidentally) where I have one that is out of place. It KILLS me. I also am pretty controlling about the condition. When I lend people hardcover books, I usually keep the dust jacket so nothing happens to it. I refuse to dog-ear pages and it's still hard for me to underline or write in books - even text books I don't like. I have a set of books I have owned since at least early high school, if not before, and they look brand new even though I've read them about 10 times each. Add to that a heavy dose of nostalgia (I LOVED my childhood books) and you've got a girl who has wanted this series for years but refused to buy a shiny plastic-wrapped set from Borders. When I have children, I may end up buying them their own copies of books I already have so that they don't scribble in them or get food on them or bend the corners of the pages. I will be the worst mother. But the best book mother.