Life is Like a Box of Chocolates...

You never know what you're gonna get. I thought I was going to get an ordinary Tuesday evening sitting in front of the television, watching a movie with my family, checking my e-mail, taking the dog out to pee, maybe making some popcorn. But nooooooo, instead I got a night of heart pounding fear, the ER, and no sleep.

Hubby has this annoying habit of trying to die on me every couple of years, usually by some sort of bizarre medical emergency. I'm starting to take it all a wee bit personally. Whatever, I'll tell ya, it's BEGINNING TO PISS ME OFF!!!!

This time he had some sort of seizure/passing out thing. Not sure what caused it. He'll have a work up early this coming week. In the meantime we're keeping watch over him to make sure he doesn't do anything weird or unusual again. Which is difficult because he's usually doing something weird or unusual, so I have to sort out which behaviors are his ordinary weird and which are medical weird.

So, not a lot of blogging the last part of this week. Of course no matter how large the crisis, it's always the little things that are the last straw. I can't get my blog to scroll for me. I think there's a photo that won't load and it's making the page unresponsive. But it's more than just not loading, it makes the complete page, even the toolbars, unresponsive, so that I have to delete the entire page and start fresh. GRRRRR.

Is anyone else been having trouble with my page? Hubby says he has, but other people have been commenting, so maybe it's just our computers? The only thing I can think to do, short of deleting all the recent photos, is get them to fall off the main page, so I'm just gonna rattle on here for awhile about nothing much, in hopes of fixing things.

Speaking of chocolates, which are your favorites? Any you leave in the box to dry out and toss? I go for the dark chocolates first, milk chocolates only when the darks are gone. Nuts and caramels first, then maybe chewy or coconut or a light truffle. Cream fillings are last. I was eating enormous amounts of chocolate there for awhile but recently I've lost my craving. Or rather, I've become more selective in what chocolates are worth the calories. I'm all out of my favorite chocolates and the rest of the stuff in the house is just sitting around getting old.

We went to a potluck and football scrimmage last night at the high school. William's been having spring football practice after school for two weeks. It's a way of getting the new combination of players (the juniors from the varsity team moving up to seniors next year and the sophomore JV team moving up to varsity as juniors next year) to start to work together as a team. I'm always so ready for football to be over by November but now it was fun again to sit in the bleachers, say hi to old friends we don't see much between seasons, and watch the boys play. This was just a "flag football" scrimmage. The weather was cool, the clouds were picturesque. The rain held off until the boys were done and then the sky (and umbrellas) opened up and poured. Even that was fun.

Uhm, let's see, what else. Oh, right. I've decided to join this Refashion pledge group. I can't tell though if the information on the sidebar is up-to-date or old and useless. I tried to see the other participants but the link doesn't work. And it says the next round starts June 15th. Is that 2008 or was that last year's info? I guess it doesn't really matter, I'll just join and add a button (if I can figure out how to add it that is). What does matter, or rather, what's stalled me from actually signing up, I can't decide whether to sign up under this blog or my studio blog. It fits in this blog because my goal is more focused on not buying new clothes than the actual refashioning part. But I like the refashioning idea and if I were to miraculously get organized and find the time and energy to do any refashioning, well, then that would be better to post over on the studio blog because it's arty and sewing and all that creative stuff. I don't get near as many readers on my studio blog and I'd like to encourage people to visit there too, so maybe that's another good reason to sign up with my studio blog? Or will that just mean people will miss it altogether? So, what do you readers think? Here? Or there?

La la la la la.... what now.

How about books? I got a new book order in the mail today - YAH! And I've almost finished up the books I really felt I needed to finish before I could dig into these new ones. There are a few more half read books sitting around, but they are things I can read in bits and pieces without losing interest, so I'm not worried about finishing those up yet.

I joined a book club. It's a brand new one that we're all creating together. We haven't figured out how we'll select books each month yet, but we've gone ahead and picked the hostesses for the first three months and decided to let each of them select that month's book, just to get us started. The first book selected for next month's meeting is Plain Truth by Jodi Picault. I've never read Picault but her books seem very popular. The July book is some sort of color/personality self help book that's not even in print any longer. I have to admit to being less than thrilled about the choice. The combination of out-of-print and the fact that I'm planning to be out of town helping with a new grandbaby during the week of the July meeting leads me to believe I won't be reading this title.

I decided to hostess August, get it over with while the weather was nice and perhaps we could meet in my garden - I have a tiny living room. That meant I got to pick a book. I decided to let the group pick from the stack of books I'd brough to the planning meeting as suggestions but they all insisted I choose, so how could I resist - I picked Joshilyn Jackson's first novel, gods in alabama. It will be fun for me to reread it and I know everyone will enjoy it. How do I know this? Well, I have yet to meet anyone who hasn't lost sleep trying to stay up all night finishing it.

I was delighted to discover that Joshilyn's books weren't unknown to the group - several women had read her second title - Between, Georgia, and loved it. They were excited to hear she had a new one out as well (The Girl Who Stopped Swimming), but I didn't pick that one because the practical consensus was that we wouldn't select hardcovers.



I just finished Charles DeLint's Memory and Dream. I so love DeLint's world and so I don't know why I haven't read my way through his books more quickly. This is probably the eighth or ninth book of his I've read and there are so many more. I grabbed this book to read on the plane and while in Paris because a) it was compact but thick and b) I had a duplicate so if I finished it I could leave it behind and have more room in my suitcase. I didn't finish it until now, for some reason it was dense and slow going, but I don't mean that it was difficult to read or that I didn't enjoy it. It's just that it made me stop and think so often and I've been busy. It turned out to be, in an intuitive "coincidental" way, the perfect book for Paris as it was about the world of writing and painting and the magic that comes of messing with the muse.




Another book that's really been slow going for me is The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama. I'm about 100 pages from the end and trying to finish it, but even more than DeLint, I find myself stopping to reflect or question or mentally respond to some point or story at least a couple times on each page. I'll find I've been staring off into space, lost in my own thoughts for a couple of minutes, and then have to find my spot on the page again. Again, a worthwhile book, just not a fast read for me.


Last night I finished The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon. It's a mystery that's written from the first person perspective of a 15 year old autistic boy named Christopher. I find I can't decide if I liked the book or I didn't like the book. In either case I couldn't not read it. It was compelling. Sometimes I found myself relating to some of the different ways that Christopher sees the world, in the sense that we all have our own unique realities, something that we don't think about very often. Sometimes I found myself relating to the adults that he interacts with in the book and feeling sad and frustrated at how difficult it is for him to deal with a world that isn't designed to fit the needs of someone "different." A couple of minor points bothered me. I really couldn't get past the dog dying (which happens on the first page, not a spoiler) and since I have such a fear of literary spoilers, there were a couple of times in the book when Christopher talks about a book he'd read and in the process tells the entire story. THIS BOTHERED ME SO MUCH, each time it happened I had to shut the book and leave it for days and days. It doesn't slip past me that there's a certain irony in the fact that my quirks made it difficult to handle Christopher's quirks.



I just started Donna Andrew's Owls Well That Ends Well because I needed something to make me laugh and Andrew always delivers the guffaws. And a damn good mystery. And a great collection of characters. This is the the sixth in her Meg Langslow series and I had to laugh when I realized it was about a woman trying to declutter and simplify her life by having the mother of all garage sales. Sometimes I deliberately select a book to read that goes with the theme of my life at a particular moment in time, but it's amazing how often parallels between my life and my reading choice happen without any intentional planning on my part. I guess the universe plans it. Or the faeries.

Speaking of faeries.... I'm already getting totally psyched about this year's Faerieworlds. We had such a good time last year and this year is gonna be more friends and family coming, more days, more costumes, more music, and more time with the faerie crowd (we're camping at the festival's main campground location). I've been trying to hold off of blabbering on about it here until we get a bit closer to the dates (first week in August), but since I'm trying to find things to talk about to fill up space, I couldn't help myself. I haven't had time to work on my costumes yet, but I've plans for two of the three going on in my head. I hope I can work on them before the last minute, I really want to have time for all the little details I'm imagining. I also want to make some faery decorations for the pop-up camper, to make it look a bit more .... magical, gypsy, fae. That reminds me, I want to do some thrift store treasure hunting. I'm on the lookout for some tent draping fabrics, as well as some baby clothes for the upcoming July grandbaby.

Well, maybe that's enough blabbering. Hope I didn't make any of you snooze off. Unless, of course, you needed the sleep. Let's see if I unstuck my page.