13 Down

Posted on 10/04/2009 by chick

I have to confess that I started the Marple Marathon (or should it be called a “Marplethon”?) early. It was about 11:30 p.m. on the eve of the 15th when I actually started the first book. I hope you won’t hassle me over a half an hour. I wanted to read a little bit before sleep and was between books. It just made sense to get started on the Marple book.

The Tuesday Club Murders by Agatha Christie
Grade: A

The Tuesday Club Murders is a collection of 13 short stories featuring Miss Jane Marple. The overall format for each story (except one) is the same. A group of people gather socially and decide to play amateur sleuth together. In turn, they each tell a story about a mystery to which they know the outcome. Then each of the others puts forth a theory based on their own personal experience. It is Miss Marple, with her intimate knowledge of village life and human nature, who always solves the mystery, earning her the esteem of the former head of Scotland Yard. Within that framework, Christie manages to keep the stories fresh and different from one another, no small feat… Continue reading →

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Tomorrow

Posted on 10/02/2009 by chick

Tomorrow must be the most wonderful day, both fun-filled and productive. Too bad by the time I get to it, it has already turned into today.

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Ooopsy Sundays

Posted on 10/01/2009 by chick

I’m not surprised that recent Sundays have been lacking Sunday Stories posts, but there’s really no excuse for it. I will try to do better in the future.

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Another Year Older

Posted on 10/01/2009 by chick

September is over, but it deserves mention as a lovely month in both form and content. It was made of gorgeous late-summer and early-fall days. It was filled with fun things like campfires, family get-togethers, a visit to a farm, and birthdays.

The campfires, as I’ve already mentioned, were wonderful. There’s nothing better than a hot fire on a chilly evening.

We saw my family on Labor Day weekend and Faithful Reader’s family a couple of weeks later. Our son wasn’t nearly as well behaved as he usually is, and his crankiness presented us with some challenges, but it’s good to know that we can handle it. Otherwise, we’d never want to leave the house with him.

We went to the local apple farm last Saturday. We bought apple cider, peaches, jam, Indian corn, and donuts (i.e., all the sorts of things one must buy on a beautiful autumn day in New England). We also bought some fresh boiled peanuts because we’d never tried them before. The boiling liquid was made with beer, root beer, cajun spices, and ham hocks, among other things. The peanuts, after being boiled in the stuff, looked like poo. Wet slimy poo. We weren’t sure how to eat them at first, or even if we wanted to, but finally we decided they should be eaten just like unboiled peanuts. So we tried them and they were strangely good, spicy, with a texture more like a vegetable than a nut. They sure were messy eating, though!

September is a three-birthday month in my family. There’s my aunt, my sister-in-law, and of course, me! Happy Birthday to all of us. I’m grateful to be another year older. Thanks to everyone for the great presents, especially my Faithful Reader who surprised me with gifts from my favorite “store.”

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Fall Highlights

Posted on 09/29/2009 by chick

Two weeks ago my Faithful Reader surprised me with a campfire in our yard. It was a clear, cold night and the stars were bright, a perfect night for a fire. It was so much fun that we resolved to have a fire once per week as long as the weather allows. On Saturday, we had our third fire and we added food to the ritual—hot dogs and s’mores cooked over the flames. Yum!

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Toad and Frog

Posted on 09/26/2009 by chick

There is a breakfast dish that my father taught me how to make when I was a child. He called it “toad-in-the-hole.” You take a slice of bread, cut a hole in the middle of it with a drinking glass, fry it in some butter, drop a raw egg in the hole, cook until it’s brown on the bottom, then flip the whole thing and fry it until the other side turns brown. I recently taught my Faithful Reader how to make it. Now he has his own way of doing it. He fries the cut-out piece too, puts it on top of the cooked egg, and calls it “frog-in-the-hole-with-a-door.”

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I Love My Peeps

Posted on 09/25/2009 by chick

I am grateful for Peeps.

When Peeps ran away, I worried about her. We live on a heavily traveled road and there are coyotes and fisher cats in the woods. I thought it likely that either speeding car or hungry beast would do her in, and I felt so sorry for her. It wasn’t fair that she should die like that. That said, I was also relieved to go back to having just two cats. Three cats is really one too many for us, a lesson we learned the hard way.

But Peeps came back, and she came back sweeter that when she left. What’s more, she has since proven her worth. Peeps, as it turns out, is a first-class hunter. From mosquito to moth to mouse, she hunts it and she hunts it well. The main part of our house is usually mouse-free, but sometimes the mice manage to sneak in from the outer parts of the house, which still need some work to seal them up properly. Our champion hunter has caught three mice within the last couple of days. Go Peeps!

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Ain’t That Nice?

Posted on 09/25/2009 by chick

I awoke the other morning to the smell of baking bread and when I went to change the baby’s diaper, I found a note saying, “Bread will be done at 8:30 a.m.. Take it out, let it cool, then eat it with some butter and jam. Love, FR.”

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One Weird Book

Posted on 09/20/2009 by chick

Salamander by Thomas Wharton
Grade: B-

Salamander is about a printer who is given the task of creating the ultimate book, one that is infinite, with no beginning and no end. Naturally, such a task necessitates a quest, for he needs the perfect paper, type, and ink. Along the way, we hear the stories of the people he meets.

The road you were on is known in these parts as the Dragon Vein Stretching a Thousand Miles. Every mile of it is crowded with people like me, like the ferryman, like yourself, people with stories. And all of these stories are in some hidden way linked to one another, like the blood of the dragon flowing beneath its impenetrable hide.

Although the style is difficult to get used to, with dashes (rather than quotation marks) to indicate when someone is speaking, and sentence fragments aplenty, I still felt a sense of excitement as I devoured the first 100 pages. At last, I thought to myself, I have found the perfect book to give as a gift to my friend, K—, who shares my love of reading. But the rest of the novel did not live up to the promise of the premise. It became, I am sorry to say, more than a bit weird and silly.

Salamander is not all bad. It certainly has a haunting quality, and one can feel the author’s passion for books, which is something that any serious reader loves to sense. It fails spectacularly, but perhaps because it reaches so much higher than your average book, and so I think  I must keep an eye on this author. He might one day write that novel that I can’t wait to share.

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Bad Cat, Bad Cat

Posted on 09/16/2009 by chick

Mojo ate my blueberry muffin. On a day of leaky house plumbing, leaky diapers, and the final judgment that my son isn’t gaining enough weight, Mojo’s naughtiness was especially hard to take. All I wanted was a snack. Was that too much to ask?

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