As She Likes It

Best Books of 2010 -- Better Late Than Never!

2011-01-12T14:34:00.002-05:00

So one of my 35 things to do before I turn 35 is "blog more." I have it in writing. And yet, here I am, six(ish?) months since my last post. Bad form, Rosaline. However, another goal on my list was to read 100 books in a year, and yays! This I totally did.

And since I read so many books in 2010, it's time for... 2010'S BEST BOOKS LIST*!
*Maybe I should eta: 2010'S BEST BOOKS (THAT I READ BUT WERE NOT NECESSARILY PUBLISHED THIS YEAR) LIST!

1. The Passage by Justin Cronin*
2. The Walking Dead Vol. 1: Days Gone Bye by Robert Kirkman
3. How to Buy a Love of Reading by Tanya Egan Gibson
4. Pegasus by Robin McKinley*+
5. Sunshine by Robin McKinley^
5. The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness
6. Zombies Versus Unicorns edited by Justine Larbalestier and Holly Black*+
7. Stolen by Lucy Christopher*
8. Room by Emma Donoghue*
9. The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaimon^
10. The Fire Rose by Mercedes Lackey

* = published in 2010
+ = lucky enough to read as an ARC
^ = made the cut from "The Best Books of 2010 (January to June)"

Some of the books on this list came as a real surprise to me (The Passage and How to Buy a Love of Reading come to mind). I mean, I was looking forward to reading them -- some were even books I asked for as birthday/Christmas presents -- but when I picked them up, I could not put them down. Seriously, the week I spent with The Passage, I couldn't wait to get home at the end of the day and just sit and read. Which is generally what I did. For like four hours at a time.

I highly, highly recommend every book on this list. (This is the part where I was going to say "especially this one or that one," but honestly, they're all amazing!)

Happy 2011! Here's to many more good reads!

SADDEST. ROADTRIP. EVER. or The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness

2010-08-03T10:31:00.000-04:00

This book. Oh, God, this book.

I wasn't sure I was ever going to be able to write about it, but then Dystopian August started over at Presenting Lenore, and I thought, "What dystopian books have I read recently that I can post about?" And this book (this book!) popped into my head, and I said, "No, because just thinking about it makes me cry." And then I couldn't stop thinking about it. And I was like, "I'll write the review, and then I can put it away again because I will cry if I think about it."

So. Brain, this one's for you.

As The Knife of Never Letting Go begins, Todd Hewitt lives with his guardians, Ben and Cillian, and he has grown up believing that his home, Prentisstown, is the only remaining town on a new planet that was settled and then decimated in a war between the colonizing humans and the native Spackles. This war, he knows, also led the Spackles to release a virus that killed all the women and made it so that all men can hear each others' thoughts, creating an ever-present Noise. Even animals' thoughts are a part of the Noise, and some animals can talk, like Todd's dog, Manchee.

But as Todd approaches his thirteenth birthday -- the age at which every boy in Prentisstown becomes a man -- he and Manchee discover a pocket of silence in the swamp near town, and Ben and Cillian, increasingly wary of Mayor Prentiss and his designs on Todd, force Todd and Manchee to flee Prentisstown and the terrible fate that awaits him there. Pursued by the Mayor and his growing militia, Todd discovers that the world is nothing like what he has been taught and that he must make difficult (and often heartbreaking) choices to avoid becoming a pawn of the Mayor's twisted plans.

Ness's writing style is amazing; the story is written from Todd's point of view, and it's very easy to get so caught up in the rhythms of Todd's narrative that time just bleeds away, and suddenly it's midnight and you've read two hundred pages. Todd's journey is full of suspense, but so, too, is his (and the reader's) gradual understanding of Prentisstown, its history, and its place in New World. Too, the story is gripping and terrifying; this is not a book that's easy to break away from or to forget about once it's done.

And I'm just going to say it: Manchee is the best dog character in the history of literature.

The Knife of Never Letting Go is one of the most powerful, most original, and most upsetting books I've read in a long time (and I powered through Living Dead Girl by Elizabeth Scott in one afternoon at Barnes and Noble). I may have misled you from my intro above, but Knife is a damn good book. Maybe one of the best I've read this year. But it's difficult, too, because the world that Ness has built is a gritty, often misogynistic world that offers hope for redemption but at a terrible price.

The Knife of Never Letting Go is the first in the Chaos Walking trilogy. The second book, The Ask and the Answer, was published in 2009. The third book, Monsters of Men, is scheduled for release in September 2010.

Why can't we be friends (and talk to each other psychically?), or, Pegasus by Robin McKinley

2010-07-21T12:49:00.000-04:00

I don't know that I've fully expressed my love of Robin McKinley yet on this blog, but she may in fact be my favorite living author -- a conclusion I came to this morning on my way to work, when I realized that I've read (or reread) a number of her books over the last six months and that they are all amazing. Original. Transcendent. Beautifully written.

(I have more adjectives, but I'll move on.)

I already wrote about Sunshine, McKinley's alterna-verse vampire novel (though honestly, calling it a "vampire novel" would be like calling In Cold Blood a "murder mystery"), one of my favorites of 2010, in a previous post, and I'm mentally composing a "Robin McKinley is Fabulous and Brilliant and You Should Read Her" post in which I'll cover, among others, her fairy tale retellings.

So. I finished Sunshine last month, and I thought, "Hm, I wonder if she's doing a sequel?" (because it has sequel possibilities, though a sequel isn't a need so much as a want, for me the reader). (Sidenote: she's not doing a sequel to Sunshine.) Anyway, when I went to ALA with Jess last month, there, on the very first publisher's table I walked past, was a stack of McKinley's newest novel, Pegasus.

I think I may have shoved past some people to grab a copy. (I was very excited.) I took Pegasus on vacay to Cozumel with me and really ended up savoring it as a result, because it's the kind of book you have to -- and want to -- savor.

McKinley is the queen of world-building, to start. Pegasus is high fantasy at its best, as it takes place in Balsinland, a country won from beasts such as nourindours, rocs, and taralians then settled by humans. The humans were aided in their settlement by the peaceful pegasi, and the two peoples came together to form an Alliance that has lasted over eight hundred years.

The main character is Sylvi, the fourth child (and only daughter) of the current king. She is shy and self-conscious, and she is unsure about her place in the kingdom -- about what she wants to be and do. This changes when she turns twelve and is bound to Ebon, the son of the pegasus king. The problem is that humans and pegasi can't communicate without the aid of magician Speakers -- but Sylvi and Ebon can communicate; they can read each other's thoughts, and this is an issue for the magicians (who have always believed themselves the vital link between humans and pegasi) and for many others who are concerned about what this means for the Alliance.

What I love about this book is how gentle it is. Sylvi is beautifully drawn, and we really have an opportunity to watch her grow up over the course of the story. Ebon, too, is wonderful; his snarkiness and boldness are a brilliant contrast to Sylvi, and their bond is simply lovely.

McKinley also tends to develop wonderful family relationships as well (she's not one of those seriously-messed-up-families-make-my-protagonist-stronger authors), and Pegasus is no different -- Sylvi's parents and brothers (especially Danacor) are supportive and loving, and the pegasi royal family parallels the human royal family nicely.

Pegasus isn't a thriller, nor is it full of action; rather, it's about court politics, certainly, but it's also about relationships that develop between individuals and between groups (especially dissimilar groups), it's about bridging gaps and finding true understanding, and it's about accepting that your understanding of the world can (and should) change -- in three weeks, three months, or a moment.

Pegasus is scheduled for release in November 2010.

Settling an Age-Old Question, or, Zombies Versus Unicorns, edited by Holly Black and Justine Larbalestier

2010-07-19T11:10:00.000-04:00

I am suffering from serious YA-sparkly-vampire-exhaustion, so when I was lucky enough to get my hands on an ARC of Zombies Versus Unicorns at ALA, I saved it for my mid-July Cozumel vacay, thinking it would be the perfect by-the-beach read. Happily, I was not in any way disappointed! The book, which is edited by Holly Black and Justine Larbalestier, is a collection of short stories, each of which is about zombies or unicorns (or both, in some cases), and while some of the stories are certainly stronger than others, all of them were original and compelling.

The standouts for me were

"Princess Prettypants" by Meg Cabot, in which a girl receives a unicorn for her seventeenth birthday and discovers that it's good for more than just looking pretty and farting rainbows;
"Purity Test," by Naomi Novik, in which the age-old question of whether a virgin girl is the only one who can see or assist unicorns is put to the test;
"Bougainvillea," by Carrie Ryan, which takes place during the early days of the Return in the Forest of Hands and Teeth universe and explores the consequences of dictatorship and the question of power in an unstable world;
"Prom Night," by Libba Bray, in which an isolated town of teenagers attempts to celebrate life in the midst of a zombie virus that has wiped out of the rest of the world as they knew it;
"Cold Hands," by Cassandra Clare, in which a town that lives peacefully with its resurrected dead is the center of an aristocratic murder mystery.

What I loved most about this collection is how the stories differ in tone; I laughed out loud while reading a number of them ("Princess Prettypants" and "Purity Test" were hysterical), and others ("Prom Night" and "The Third Virgin") were truly frightening. Overall, this was a fun (and sometimes haunting) read, and I highly recommend it.

Also? Team Zombie!

Zombies Versus Unicorns is scheduled for release on September 21, 2010.

Top Books of 2010 (January to June): Part I

2010-06-10T14:23:00.014-04:00

It's summer again! Which means that I am back at my summer job and already zzzzzzz-ing about alphabetizing evaluations. But! It also means that I can return to my poor, neglected blog and talk about some of the truly fantastic books I've read since I last posted (so long ago!).

(BTW, I am working my way toward reading one hundred books in a year, and as of Sunday night, I finished #68. I might actually make one hundred this year!)

Having read 68 books in six months, you'd think my best-of list would be longer, but (1) a number of my books were read for a grad class in Romantic and Victorian Children's Lit and (2) I've apparently gotten pickier about what I read and how much I like it. I also don't think my reading has been quite as eclectic as usual (in part because the aforementioned grad class combined with the numerous ARCs I've managed to pick up at NCTE in November and ALA in June have led to a glut of YA in my reading rotation). But! I'm saving a number of long-anticipated books for my upcoming vacay with BFF Jess (including but not limited to coveted ARCs of Pegasus by Robin McKinley and Behemoth by Scott Westerfeld), so I imagine my July to December list will be longer.

Anyway... to part one of the best of!

1. The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaimon

This is my favorite book of the year so far -- one of my favorite books of all time, in fact. I read it as a paired text with The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling for Romantic and Victorian Children's Lit, and it was amazing. Gaiman deftly straddles the line between life and death, comedy and tragedy, beauty and horror. It's a lovely, bittersweet coming-of-age tale that brought me to tears.

2. Sunshine by Robin McKinley

Now this is how you do vampires. I think Sunshine was written before Twilight became less a series and more a craze, but either way, McKinley builds an intricate world in which the supernatural is everyday, though strictly regulated by the government. Rae is an incredible heroine -- funny, cynical, brave, and independent -- and I love how her imprisonment with (and ultimate rescue of) Con is only the beginning of her adventure into understanding herself and her world.

3. Z For Zachariah by Robert C. O'Brien

My love for end-of-the-world stories is well-documented, and Z For Zachariah is a beautifully written addition to my collection. You have to suspend your disbelief a bit (fallout from nuclear war somehow manages to float over a particular valley?), but once you do, Anne's story is both frightening and moving. O'Brien writes from Anne's point-of-view in journal form, and I'm pretty impressed at how realistic and gripping the narrative is.

4. Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld

I read Westerfeld's Uglies series, and while I wasn't always thrilled with the plot, I loved his world-building. Leviathan marries that amazing world-building with a gripping and fascinating plot and characters (Deryn and Aleks) that I loved following through both their individual and intersecting plotlines. Like I mentioned above, I got my hands on an ARC of Behemoth, the sequel to Leviathan, at ALA, and I can't wait to read it!

I have more top books, but my work computer is crazy slow -- apparently it takes issue with performing any action in less than five minutes -- so I will continue praising lit another time!

So If She's a Duchess, Is He a Dutch?

2010-01-06T20:31:00.003-05:00

Today at the end of my last class, I'm running through a quick character intro before my freshmen start Romeo and Juliet. We've just started on the Montagues, and I say, "Okay, so Lord Montague is the head of the house of Montague. And if we call him Lord Montague, what do you think we would call his wife?"

A boy in the back raises his hand tentatively. "Lordess?" he asks.

Oh, my huggable freshmen.

Best Books of 2009

2010-01-05T13:57:00.003-05:00

So I know it's now 2010, but I've finally gotten around to reviewing my 2009 reads on Goodreads (all 85 of them -- not the 100 I was aiming for, but that's what the new year is for, right?), and I'm ready to post my best of 2009 book list for your reading pleasure!

(In a way, it's kind of sad, because the majority of my best of 2009 list comes from my best of 2009, January-July, that I posed earlier this year. Either I didn't read as many great books in the second half of '09, or I spent too much time re-reading old favorites, which are sadly ineligible for this list. Oh! But now I'm thinking I need a Best of Rereads list!)

Anyway, what follows are the 10 best books I read (for the first time) in 2009:

1. World War Z by Max Brooks

2. Before I Fall by Lauren Oliver (I got the ARC at an NCTE conference in November -- seriously, buy this book when it comes out, because it is amazing.)

3. Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi

4. Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins

5. When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead

6. Troy trilogy: Lord of the Silver Bow, Shield of Thunder, Fall of Kings by David Gemmell

7. Fade by Lisa McMann

8. Looking for Alaska by John Green

9. Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

10. The Language of Bees by Laurie King

Oh, books! So wonderful!

TGHPR-R 2009: The Goblet of Fire

2009-08-13T11:11:00.002-04:00

This is the first Harry Potter book I actually had to wait for. My college roommate got me Sorcerer's Stone and Chamber of Secrets for Christmas one year, and Prisoner of Azkaban was published not long after, so I was able to read books 1-3 right in a row, whereas I had to wait a year for Goblet of Fire. I remember that, on the day it was officially released, my family was on its way to Lancaster for a day trip, and I begged my father to stop at the bookstore on our way out of town so I could buy my copy.

(He was awesome and complied. This was before the midnight release parties began and which I attended for the last two books. That's a story for book 6, however.)

Okay, so I'll be honest: while I do love Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, I also think it's the most bloated of the Harry Potter books -- books 1-3 are more streamlined (read: shorter) and books 5-7 are, for the most part, necessarily long -- and while Goblet of Fire has numerous important storylines, there is a lot of filler that would make it a quicker, more intense read.

It's Harry's fourth year at Hogwarts, and instead of holding the annual Quidditch/House cup, the school will be hosting the Triwizard Tournament, in which three champions from three different wizarding schools compete for a thousand galleons and the glory of his or her school. This means we finally learn about two other wizarding schools in Goblet of Fire -- Beauxbatons and Durmstrang -- and meet their respective headmasters: Madame Maxine and Igor Karkaroff, both of whom contrast really delightfully with Dumbledore.

Harry isn't planning on entering the tournament -- in fact, he's looking forward to cheering on the Hogwarts champion, hanging out with Ron and Hermione, and crushing on Cho Chang from afar -- but when the Goblet of Fire spits out his name, Harry has no choice but to participate, despite the fact that he is slowly beginning to believe that someone entered him into the tournament in the hopes that it would kill him.

We meet or revisit a number of other characters in Goblet of Fire, some of whom are very significant to later books: Victor Krum, the Bulgarian Quidditch player and Durmstrang champion; Fleur DeLacour, part-veela, Beauxbatons champion, and later Bill Weasley love interest; Rita Skeeter, the queen of yellow journalism; Mad-Eye Moody, the famous Auror and newest DADA teacher; and of course, Cedric Diggory, the (true) Hogwarts champion and all-around decent guy, who suffers one of the most upsetting fates in the Harry Potter series.

(Seriously, if you can read the section where his ghost asks Harry to return his body to his parents, where Mrs. Diggory talks about how at least Cedric "died happy" while Mr. Diggory sobs in the background, where Dumbledore gives his "Remember Cedric Diggory" speech, without tearing up, you're made of stone, I tell you! I'm tearing up at I write this!

Now I feel kind of lame, but I think it's a testament to how well-drawn Cedric Diggory is. He's a fairly minor character in the grand scheme of things, but Rowling makes you feel his death profoundly. He's a genuinely good guy who dies because he refuses to claim victory in the tournament alone -- he believes Harry deserves it more and only touches the cup when Harry suggests they share it. I mean, seriously, how honorable is that? *TEAR*)

Anyway, I love the character and backstory development here as well. I was most interested in the history of the Death Eaters and the continued slow reveal of Snape's involvement with them and with Voldemort (this is, of course, especially important when you consider where Snape's storyline is going as we head into the later books). Again, it shows remarkable planning on J. K. Rowling's part -- we're slowly learning about the prophecy, about why Dumbledore trusts Snape, and so on -- which I appreciate as a re-reader.

The overarching "villainous plot" is a little convoluted (I'm not quite sure why Voldemort's faithful servant/spy couldn't have cooked up a Portkey before the third task in June), but it does offer a lot of payoff for events and characters throughout the book. Voldemort's resurrection is pretty terrifying, and the conflict that arises between the "good guys" at the end (the Ministry of Magic's refusal to believe that Voldemort has returned) is realistic and sets up book 5 well.

Ultimately, Goblet of Fire is way too long, though, and could do with a good trim (or chop, depending on how much you feel is unnecessary). I think Hermione's fight for house elf rights, while totally in character, is too drawn-out and doesn't really pay off enough in later books to warrant so much space in this one. The three tasks are also spread out so much that I feel the entire competition loses its intensity (part of me wonders, "Really? They cancelled the annual Quidditch cup for 3 tasks over 3 days out of the whole school year?").

I also think that the World Quidditch Cup scenes at the beginning of the book go on a little long, and the character of Ludo Bagman could probably be excised without too much being lost. Too, Rowling tends to offer a lot of previouslies here instead of trusting that her reader is familiar enough with the first three books and doesn't need an explanation of Hagrid's love of dangerous creatures, for example, or the entire plots of books 1-3...

Oh, and don't get me started on Voldemort's chapter-long, post-resurrection monologue (I kept imagining Syndrome from The Incredibles: "Oh, ho ho! You sly dog! You got me monologuing! I can't believe it!").

We see Harry start to grow up here, along with Hermione and (to an extent) Ron. Voldemort rises again. A major character dies. The wizarding world is at odds, as the book ends. Overall, Goblet of Fire is a solid transition between the innocence (of sorts) of books 1-3 and the darkness to come in books 5-7.

As Hagrid very wisely notes, "What's comin' will come, an' we'll meet it when it does."

Those Who Can...

2009-08-10T13:13:00.005-04:00

I wrote a whole long post about my (continued) pathos about teaching, but rather than subject you to it -- it's very prosaic -- I'll just link the article that resonated so strongly with me:

"Why I Left Teaching Behind" by Sarah Fine (The Washington Post, 9 August 2009)

I feel much the same about teaching as Fine does, for many of the same reasons, especially as she discusses the current perception of teachers -- "the fact that," as she writes, "a portion of the American public sees teaching as a second-rate profession."

One of my least favorite quotes of all time is "Those who can, do; those who can't, teach." Because, please. The Simpsons says it best:

Dance Instructor: Marge, there's an old saying about those who can't
do...
Marge: Teach?
Dance Instructor: No, they go home. How can you teach if you can't
do?

And... word.

Ros Needs to Relax: The Car Dance Remix

2009-08-06T10:10:00.004-04:00

I am so needlessly stressed out by my summer job. It's not what I'm doing (because, to be perfectly honest, a monkey could probably do this job, so long as he followed the building's strict dress code) but rather the people I'm working with.

They are driving me crazy. Let me give you an example:

As I've mentioned before, a lot of my job involves alphabetizing evaluations and sending them to the file room by the box. I've probably sent about 8 or 9 boxes to the file room over the last four weeks.

So yesterday afternoon, the AA who supervises me calls me. "We're looking for [insert name here]'s evaluation," she says. "Have we received it?"

I look at my (carefully kept) records. "Yes, we received it a few weeks ago," I say. "It should be in the file room."

Twenty minutes later, AA comes to my desk. "Can you go down to the file room?" she asks. "They can't find the evaluation."

Would you like to know why they can't find it? They can't find it because they haven't filed a single box that I've sent down since I started working here. When I got down to the file room, I found the evaluation in five minutes. In a box. That I sent over a month ago.

Seriously, what do these people do all day? They work in the file room. Shouldn't they be, I don't know, filing?

... Anyway. It's frustrating, and it makes the endless traffic that I sit in on my way home from work even worse.

So when I got home yesterday afternoon, knowing that I'd be turning around and driving back out to Jess's, I decided to make a CD of songs that would inspire more car dancing and less swearing:

I Got a Feeling -- Black Eyed Peas
Inside Out -- Eve 6
Monkeywrench -- Foo Fighters
That's Not My Name -- The Ting-Tings
Mercy Me -- Alkaline Trio
Right Round -- Flo Rida
Love and Memories -- OAR
Sexbomb (Peppermint Disco Remix) -- Tom Jones
Original Prankster -- Offspring
Untouched -- The Veronicas
How Far We've Come -- Matchbox 20
Rock Star -- Prima J
Who Do You Love -- Ted Leo and the Pharmacists
Timebomb -- Beck
So Sad to Say -- Mighty Mighty Bosstones
Shut Up and Let Me Go -- The Ting Tings
We Used to Be Frieds -- Dandy Warhols
Don't Trust Me -- 3Oh!3
Blue Skies -- Blue October
American Idiot -- Green Day

In the end, car dancing was the ultimate destresser. I just turned up the music superloud and sang along (superloud) and danced as I drove (superflail!).

(This was especially helpful when, driving home from Jess's, I got caught up in unexpected roadwork, and the normally 35-minute drive was... an hour and a half. Closing three out of four lanes of traffic on a major highway? Not cool, road guys. Not cool.)

TGHPR-R 2009: The Prisoner of Azkaban

2009-08-04T08:52:00.003-04:00

Taren at The Chick Manifesto posted a question about spoilers last week that made me pause a bit before writing this post. I find it difficult to write about books without giving away too much, but I really do think that, for Harry Potter at least, the no-spoiler rule expired a while ago. So if you haven't read Harry Potter yet, (1) get on that (2) before reading the rest of this post.

So Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is definitely my favorite of the early Harry Potter books. (In my head, I split the series in half -- books 1-4 are rerise-of-Voldemort and books 5-7 are how-do-we-redestroy-Voldemort.)It's also the last of the streamlined books in the series -- I started re-reading The Goblet of Fire last night, and holy macaroni, I can barely hold it -- but despite this, Prisoner of Azkaban packs a lot of story, backstory, and character development into what is, comparatively, a short read.

The story begins, as always, at the end of Harry's miserable summer with the Dursleys, but Harry's stay with them ends this time on his own terms, as he packs up and storms out after a galling (and funny) incident with Aunt Marge. Harry catches the Knight Bus quite by accident, but not before he learns about the escaped criminal Sirius Black and sees the big black dog that seems to follow him throughout the rest of the story.

Once Harry returns to Hogwarts for his third year, we begin to learn more about Harry's father, James, and his time at school, as well as about the circumstances surrounding Harry's parents' deaths, which are more complicated than we (and Harry) originally thought. We meet Remus Lupin, the new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher and one of my favorite characters in the series, who has a number of secrets that affect Harry greatly. Lupin is such a tragic figure -- I would argue more so even than Sirius Black -- but he bears his burdens with dignity, recognizes his errors, and tries to rectify them.

(Obviously I think Snape is the most tragic figure in this series, for reasons that are not revealed in Prisoner of Azkaban but that we see inklings of in his interactions with Sirius during the climax. Poor Snape. Knowing his history and what is to come, I feel a lot more sympathy for him in rereading the series.)

We also meet the Dementors, the Azkaban guards who have come, ostensibly, to protect Hogwarts from the threat of Sirius Black but whose true motives are suspect. (I mean, even Dumbledore hates them, and I tend to trust Dumbledore's judgement.) The Dementors are seriously frightening, and the fact that whenever Harry is around them, he hears his mother about to be killed by Voldemort, well, that doesn't make them any more cuddly.

But the Dementors lead Harry to work with Lupin more closely and to learn the Patronus spell -- which of course plays a significant role in the rest of the series but also leads to one of its most powerful scenes as well, when Harry sends his fully formed Patronus -- a stag -- against the Dementors in order to save himself, Hermione, and Sirius from the Dementor's Kiss. (I'll be honest here: the moment that the Patronus stag returns to Harry and he realizes its significance always makes me cry. No less so on this reread.)

When I first read Prisoner of Azkaban, I remember that the climax in the Shrieking Shack, when Harry discovers the truth about Sirius Black, took me by surprise, but in the reread, I see how perfectly Rowling sets it up (even from the beginning of The Sorcerer's Stone, when Hagrid mentions seeing Sirius Black at the ruins of the Potter house). I especially like how a number of plot points from the two previous books return here: the origin of the Whomping Willow and the longevity of Scabbers, among others.

I also love Buckbeak, of course, and how Hagrid's efforts to save him intersect with Hermione's Time-Turner and Sirius's eventual escape. Every plot point, in fact, seems to dovetail at the end, which, for me, makes this the most satisfying book of the Harry Potter series.

Ultimately, so much is introduced in Prisoner of Azkaban that it could feel more like exposition than plot. But the story -- of the hunt for Sirius Black, of Harry's struggle with the Dementors and what he experiences when he's around them, of the continually developing friendship between Harry, Ron, and Hermione (which is tested and reaffirmed yet again) -- is both gripping and affecting.

It is, in essence, the perfect lead-up to Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, which begins the descent into the darker half of the Harry Potter series. Oh, yes, now the death count truly begins, and I have to keep tissues nearby for cry-worthy moments, of which there are many.

Is that your tail in the water, or are you just happy to see me?, or, Sea Change by Aimee Friedman

2009-07-30T09:22:00.005-04:00

You know, Jess has lent me a lot of books over the last few years, some of which I have loved (The Hunger Games, The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks), some of which I have not-so-loved (The Forest of Hands and Teeth), and some of which I couldn't drag myself through (er, perhaps better not named, yes?). Usually, though, Jess is right on, so when she raved about Sea Change by Aimee Friedman, I was definitely willing to give it a try.

And I'm so glad I did.

Sea Change begins as Miranda, the protagonist, takes the ferry to Selkie Island, a small island off the coast of Georgia. Her grandmother, Isadora, has recently died and left the family summer house, the Mariner, to Miranda's mother, with whom Isadora had a falling out thirty years earlier. Miranda's mother, a successful New York surgeon, plans to clear out the house and sell it and has asked Miranda to help.

The story follows Miranda as she arrives on Selkie and learns about its mysterious history as well as her mother's. There are actually a number of mysteries within the story -- why did Miranda's mother have a falling out her own mother, Isadora? Why did Isadora leave the Selkie house to Miranda's mother? What happened between Miranda and her best friend in NY? -- and all are interesting and, ultimately, satisfyingly resolved.

The central mystery, of course, deals with the legend of Selkie island's original inhabitants -- are said legends based in reality? Friedman manages to keep Miranda (and the reader) guessing about this throughout, and I love that she leaves the answer to this question open-ended.

The most significant comment I can make about Sea Change is that it is beautifully written. This is a huge compliment, trust me -- a lot of YA these days ignores the style part in favor of plot-love-triangle-sparkly-vampire-love-shield, and so I really appreciate it when an author makes the effort to utilize evocative language and imagery. Friedman's writing style truly captures the mysterious atmosphere of Selkie Island while also developing it as a place steeped in Southern tradition, and this not only sets the stage for the story but also enriches it throughout the novel.

But atmosphere isn't everything. For example, Saundra Mitchell's Shadowed Summer (a novel similar to Sea Change in its style) is also brilliantly atmospheric, but the atmosphere takes center stage, at the expense of plot and character. In reading Sea Change, on the other hand, I enjoyed not only the language but also the development of the relationships Miranda, the protagonist, has with the other characters in the story, most prominently with her mother.

I'll admit to becoming annoyed with Miranda as the novel wore on; she is characterized as being scientific and logical, but this characterization is laid on slightly too thick at times and makes Miranda difficult to like. But by the end, I felt as though Miranda had grown and become less judgmental and more open-minded.

My biggest issue with the novel is Miranda's relationship with Leo. As Jess so eloquently put it last night over flourless chocolate waffle, we might be a little old for the typical romances depicted in YA, which go from zero-to-true-love far too quickly for my taste. I like to see a relationship truly develop, not magically pop into being, and I found Miranda's insta-love with Leo hard to believe. That said, Friedman writes some lovely scenes between Miranda and Leo, and I appreciate that she doesn't tie their storyline into a neat bow at the end.

Overall, Sea Change is one of the best YA novels I've read this year, and I'd highly recommend it. Of course, now I really, really want to go to Selkie Island (if it existed), but no more vacation for me this summer. Oh, well.

TGHPR-R 2009: The Chamber of Secrets

2009-07-28T10:22:00.005-04:00

It's so hard for me to criticize any Harry Potter book -- they all have such a special place in my heart and always will -- but Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets is the weakest of the series for me, both in my initial reading and the more recent reread. In fact, in the spirit of full disclosure, Chamber of Secrets is the book I either (a) skimmed through or (b) skipped when rereading the series each time a new book came out.

I actually liked Chamber of Secrets more on the reread, especially since I was rereading it on the heels of Sorcerer's Stone -- and reading it while on vacation with family friends in beautiful, peaceful Ohio, sitting outside and drinking a glass of my favorite pinot gris. Setting makes a serious difference in the reading experience, doesn't it?

I think my real problem with Chamber of Secrets is the beginning; though I love Ron and the twins' flying car rescue of Harry from his uncle-imposed exile (and Mrs. Weasley's reaction when the boys -- with Harry in tow -- return in the early morning after having been gone all night), I'm not a big fan of the flying car in general. That Ron and Harry would jump into the car when they can't get through the barrier to Platform 9 3/4 instead of, you know, waiting for Mr. and Mrs. Weasley to return, struck me as a device, and a forced one, at that. Rowling makes up for it by making Ron's wand (broken in the inevitable flying car crash) a major plot point as well as by bringing the flying car (now gone feral) back later in the book, but the illogical flight to Hogwarts and the trouble the boys get into is maybe my least favorite moment in the entire series.

There are some truly fantastic moments in Chamber of Secrets, though, like:

Harry's discovery of and subsequent dive into the diary of Tom Riddle -- Rereading all of the scenes in which Tom Riddle makes an appearance is fascinating, especially when you couple those scenes with Dumbledore's memories of Tom from Half-Blood Prince. Over the course of seven books -- and you really have to put all seven together to get this -- Rowling develops a complete, complex portrait of Voldemorte.
The introduction to Dumbledore's phoenix, Fawkes -- Harry first meets Fawkes when Fawkes is at the end of his phoenix cycle; he burns up before Harry's eyes and is reborn from his own ashes. It is a beautiful, beautiful moment.

Side story: I teach ninth graders, and every March we read Fahrenheit 451, which is my favorite book to teach, bar none. Anyway, if you've read Fahrenheit, you know that the phoenix plays an important role in the story, for its representation of both fire and rebirth. When the phoenix is first introduced at the beginning of the novel (as a symbolic patch on the firemen's uniforms), I always ask, "So what is a phoenix? What does it do? Why is it significant?" And the students always know the answers, because they've most of them read Harry Potter, and they remember Fawkes.

Hagrid's backstory -- I'm actually not a huge Hagrid fan, but Rowling teases a lot of Hagrid's past in Sorcerer's Stone, and I like that she follows up with it. His expulsion from Hogwarts (at Tom Riddle's hands, no less) is very in character, and while I think his bumbling gets old at times, I like how Rowling uses him to introduce many of the creature characters throughout the series (Aragog, Buckbeak, etc.).
Gilderoy Lockhart -- The first time I read Chamber of Secrets, I hated Gilderoy Lockhart so much, but on rereading -- well, I still think he's a jerk, but I absolutely love how Rowling characterizes him. I laughed through every one of his scenes, especially his wizard duel with Snape (Snape! *heart*), and when he gets his comeuppance at the end, well, no fate was more richly deserved.

But while I loved the parts, the whole is ultimately a little clunky and the climax a little too convenient. Too, though Ginny Weasley plays a huge role in the climax, she is barely a presence in the book. As usual, Rowling does an excellent job in foreshadowing not only the resolution of the mystery of The Chamber of Secrets but also future installments in the series, but I felt that I was picking up on clues because I've read the entire series already; a lot of the foreshadowing is either too subtle or too "pay attention! This is important!"

Still, The Chamber of Secrets is a solid second book and starts to move out of YYA (young young adult) into YA nicely -- just in time for Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, which is one of the strongest books in the series and which I am super-excited to reread, because Prisoner of Azkaban is when things really start getting good. And by good, I mean darker. Well, and good. I think Rowling hits her stride with PoA, but I'll save that for another post.

Best Reads of 2009 (So Far) Part II

2009-07-27T09:45:00.010-04:00

Again, thank goodness for Goodreads, without which I would never be able to keep track of what I've read. Sometimes I pick up a book that sounds interesting and, about halfway through it, I think, "Wow, the story is so familiar!" And it is familiar, because I've read it before.

Anyway, on to #s 6-10 in my favorite reads of 2009:

6. Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell (NF)
My brother gave me this book for Christmas, and I devoured it immediately. Gladwell explores success and where it comes from, and it truly makes you think about luck versus hard work versus innate talent. The chapters on Korean pilots and Japenese school culture were especially fascinating, and whether you agree with Gladwell's hypothesis -- that success is a lot about luck (where geographically, in what month, in what family, in what year you were born) -- or not, Outliers offers food for thought.

7. Shadow Kiss (Vampire Academy #3) by Richelle Mead (YA)
I read the first Vampire Academy book (titled, appropriately enough, Vampire Academy) a year ago February, and though I liked it, I wasn't wowed by it. I gobbled up the second in the series, Frostbite, but Shadow Kiss topped both. This is a series that (unlike some -- *cough* Twlight *cough*) only improves as it continues; I love Mead's characters, her world-building, and most importantly, her fearlessness -- she doesn't hesitate to force her characters, especially the protagonist, Rose, to face tragedy. The end of Shadow Kiss, for example, was heartbreaking, but necessary, and it offers intriguing possibilities for book four, Blood Promise, which comes out at the end of August. Huzzah!

8. Fade by Lisa McMann (YA)
I loved Wake, the first book in the Dream Catchers series, but while I feel Wake was mostly about character and concept development, Fade (book #2) adds real danger, both in Janie's work with the police department and in her dream-education, where she discovers that her power comes with a life-altering price. The scene at the end of the book, when Janie goes "undercover" at a party to discover whether a teacher has been inappropriately involved with his students, is a nail-biter, and I just adore Janie's relationship with Cabe. I just discovered that this is actually a trilogy (yay!) and that the last book (boo!) will be out in February 2010 (yay!).

9. The Chosen One by Carol Lynch Williams (YA)
I already expounded on The Chosen One in my beach reading post, but again -- this was an affecting, beautifully developed story that pulled no punches and had me speeding through to the conclusion, anxious about Kyra's fate. Seriously, this is a must-read.

10. The Boyfriend List by E. Lockhart (YA)
Can I take a moment to mention my deep and abiding love for E. Lockhart? I just adore her. I've read nearly all of her books, and I've never been disappointed by a single one. In fact, if I were making my list of top 10 YA books I've ever read, Lockhart's The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks would be in my top 5. Anyway, what I love about The Boyfriend List is Ruby Oliver, the protagonist and first-person narrator. Her voice is just so engaging that I would totally want to be friends with her (if she existed).

Oh, books are so awesome. Way awesomer than the work I'm currently avoiding...

Best Reads of 2009 (So Far)

2009-07-23T15:39:00.012-04:00

I'm inspired (as usual) by Jess, after a discussion on Tuesday night about the best books we've read so far this year. Jess detailed hers on her blog, and since I can never talk about/think about/read books too much, I've decided to follow suit (with some help from my Goodreads page, because I honestly can't remember all of the books I've read so far this year, and I don't want to leave out anything good).

10 Best '09 Reads (January - June)

1. World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks (NF)
The top spot definitely belongs to World War Z, however; besides the fact that zombies are my new disaster movie, Brooks does an incredible job in detailing the zombie war from many different perspectives and in easily distinguishable voices -- no mean feat. Plus, the chapter on the dogs who worked with the military to locate and destroy zombies? Totally made me cry.

2. Y: The Last Man series by Brian K. Vaughn (graphic novel)
Jess's husband, Steve, gave me the first book in this series for my birthday last year, and I loved it. So I asked for volumes 2-10 for Christmas, and my awesome parents gave me all of them. What I love about Y: The Last Man is, first and foremost, the last man himself, Yorick Brown, who is simultaneously hysterical and heartbreaking. Actually, that phrase could really sum up the series as a whole. And the last pane of the story -- what an iconic, and entirely appropriate, image to end on.

3. The Troy trilogy: Lord of the Silver Bow, Shield of Thunder, Fall of Kings by David Gemmell (historical fiction)
I've already talked about the Troy trilogy ad nauseum, but that's because it is awesome!

4. Life as We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer (YA)
Jess knows me so well -- she gave me this end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it YA book (and its companion novel) for Christmas, and wow. Just wow. Miranda's voice is amazingly written, and Pfeffer doesn't pull any punches: when the moon is knocked closer to Earth by a meteor, there really are no astronauts headed up to put it back on course. I love that Pfeffer is relatively unflinching about how people react to disaster on a global scale.

5. Pledged by Alexandra Robbins (NF)
I was simultaneously fascinated and horrified by Robbins' in-depth look at sorority life, and I truly could not put this book down. I especially like how Robbins turns what is, by itself, the engrossing story of a year in the life of four sorority girls into a call for Panhellenic reform.

Well, I've managed to cover my top five and expended all of my remaining energy. I'll do the other half of my top ten tomorrow!

The Great Harry Potter Reread -- Book #1: The Socerer's Stone

2009-07-18T20:00:00.011-04:00

At the end of the school year, I asked my AP students for summer reading recommendations, and they gave me a lot of good suggestions (erm, none of which I've actually read yet).

Right before the bell rang, one of them said, "Ms. Reeder, you should spend the summer rereading the Harry Potter books."

"Now that," I replied, "is a great idea."

It's taken me a few weeks to get around to it, though, as I've had a bit of a pile to get through first (as I've mentioned already on this blog, Jess tends to lend me must-reads), but last week I finally picked up Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone for what is probably the tenth time since it first came out.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J. K. Rowling is a really lovely introduction to the series proper, and it does all the things a good book one should do and does them particularly well. I remember, even in reading this book for the first time, how interested I was in the story and, perhaps more importantly, in the wizarding world that Rowling brings to life so well.

What I Liked:

We meet many (though not all) of the major characters in Sorcecer's Stone: Harry, of course, Ron Weasley, Hermione Granger, Profs. Dumbledore, McGonagall, and Snape, Hagrid, and the Dursleys. While the characterization of the Dursleys is a little over-the-top, it does help the reader understand the distance between Harry and his only remaining family immediately, and ultimately why Harry is so willing to essentially leave the Muggle world behind, despite spending his entire life in it.

I especially like how Hermione is developed, though; after having read the entire series (a few times), I forgot how annoying Hermione is at eleven, and it makes me appreciate even more how much she grows up in later books, thanks in large part to her friendship with Harry and Ron (who do some growing up of their own, of course). I also loved the characterization Snape, but then, I *heart* him in all his greasy git-ness.

I was surprised how quickly the plot moved, but then, I'm used to books 4-7, which are probably three times as long as Sorcerer's Stone. On rereading, I appreciate how much Rowling fits into a relatively short piece as well as how nicely she hints at the various revelations that come at the end (when I first read this, I was shocked when Harry came to the last room and was faced with Quirrell). It also seems clear that Rowling had a plan from the beginning, as there are a number of moments that foreshadow what is to come in later installments.

And then there are the myriad aphorisms that come out of Sorecer's Stone -- more, perhaps, than any of the other Harry Potter books. Two key examples:

"Fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself."
"To the well-ordered mind, death is simply the next great adventure."

Both from Dumbledore, natch. And speaking of...

What Needs Work:

I was disappointed in the small role that Dumbledore played, though this probably makes sense in the grand scheme of things, because it isn't until after the incident with the Sorcerer's Stone that it becomes clear that Harry is in constant danger.

I also think Ron isn't nearly as well-developed as some of the other major characters, and, as much as I come to love him later, I found myself shaking my head and wondering what, exactly, Harry sees in Ron to become such good friends with him.

Sorcerer's Stone is also geared more toward YYA (young young adult) whereas the later books tend to skew older. I don't know if it's fair to complain about this, though, as Harry is himself a tween, but the style of writing and storytelling, though compelling, doesn't stay with me the way the later books do.

But overall, Sorcerer's Stone is actually better than I remember and a truly wonderful beginning to the Harry Potter series. Now on to Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, which may be my least favorite of the series. We'll see how it holds up this time around.

She Likes... David Gemmell When He Lays Off the Fantasy

2009-07-13T14:18:00.005-04:00

I adored David Gemmell's Troy trilogy, which used fantasy elements sparingly and focused instead on character development, strong plotting, and historical detail, so when my father lent me Lion of Macedon, I was looking forward to another glimpse into Greek legend-turned-history. But Lion of Macedon tries to walk the line between historical fiction and fantasy, and in doing so, fails to fully embody either genre, leaving me a little confused and disappointed.

The story takes place a hundred years after the Battle of Thermopylae, at a time when the Greek city-states fought for power amongst themselves and Persia utilizes this rivarly to prevent the city-states from banding together as a unified Greece and potential rival. The protagonist, Parmenion, a half-Spartan, half-Macedonian, is raised in Sparta, but because he is only a "half-blood," he is shunned by his peers and underestimated by those who should be training him to be a Spartan soldier. The discrimination Parmenion faces kindles his desire for revenge against the people and ideals of Sparta, as he eventually travels to Thebes, among other places, to use his gift for strategy against the Spartans.

Like Gemmell's Troy trilogy, Lion of Macedon follows multiple characters, and I became attached to a number of them, like Mothac, Parmenion's manservant and friend, and Thetis, the priestess of Aphrodite who saves Parmenion's life at one point. Too, Gemmell has no compunction about killing characters off, but I don't really mind this; I think it adds an urgency and realism to the story that fits well with the bloodthirsty time period in which the book is set.

I also enjoyed the fact that, though Parmenion is clearly the protagonist, the narrative point of view shifts frequently, and other interesting characters become more prominent than they might have otherwise. One example of this is Phillip of Macedon, around whom the last third of the book truly revolves -- we learn a great deal about how Phillip, at age fourteen, saves not only himself but his older brother from possible assassination, but also how he eventually rises to power and, with Parmenion's help, establishes Macedonia as a city-state to be reckoned with.

(I think Gemmell uses this technique more successfully in the Troy trilogy, either because he has three books in which to extend various characters' arcs or because he had simply matured as a writer -- I think Lion of Macedon was written ten or so years before Lord of the Silver Bow, the first Troy book.)

Ultimately, however, Lion of Macedon loses its power because it is more fantasy than historical fiction (or maybe it's both -- historical fantafiction?), and for me, this robs the historical plot -- which is engrossing in and of itself -- of its intensity.

Despite the truly interesting story of Parmenion and his travels, the true premise of the story is this: a seeress named Tamis has foreseen the "dark birth," the birth of a child who will grow to be a merciless man and, with his maurading armies, bring darkness to Greece. Tamis believes that Parmenion plays a key role in preventing the dark birth (or protecting Greece, should the child be born), and she shapes his life toward exactly that by using her powers to make people hate him, deprive him of his one true love, and so on.

Lion of Macedon is well-written with strong plot and characters as well as a concrete connextion to history, but the conclusion, which relies on a prophecy, the Lord of Chaos (I think?), Aristotle the philosopher-turned-magus, and fantastical journey through Hades to rescue the spirit of an unborn child, falls flat.

The final chapter does set up the sequel nicely (ten points if you know who the dark child of the prophecy -- Philip of Macedon's son -- is!), and I'll definitely read it, though perhaps with a little less enthusiasm than I began Lion of Macedon.

Lazy! Lazy! Lazy!

2009-07-10T13:18:00.008-04:00

Even though alphabetizing and organizing these evaluations is boring, I am fascinated by how many managers/administrators simply copy and paste comments, just replacing the employee's name from evaluation to evaluation. Seriously, it's ridiculous and embarassing and totally unprofessional.

Okay, I wasn't going to comment further on this, but come on. It's lazy. I get that most managers/administrators have a number of evaluations to complete. I get that it's time consuming and not a lot of fun, especially if you have to find a diplomatic way to offer criticism. (Trust me, I know. I struggle with this every time I grade student papers.) But the whole copy/paste/find/replace thing cheapens the evaluation process and shows a lack of respect for the employees who are being evaluated.

I mean, I write college recommendations for up to twenty-five students a year, and it takes weeks to complete, but every single recommendation is original and focused specifically on the student in question. Because I care about the kids and I want colleges to know how individually amazing each of them are. Evaluations should be the same way and should show a familiarity with each employee's specific strengths and areas for growth.

Two summers of working with evaluations coupled with my experiences (some positive, the majority negative) with various administrators over the years has -- ye gods -- gotten me to this point: I might want to go into administration some day. Because teachers need administrations that will stand up for them and in whom they trust. And I kind of think I could be that.

(Wow, I can't believe I just wrote that. This is a major personal policy change. We'll have to see if this spark is a fire by the time I finish my master's in who-knows-how-many years.)

The other (less personally revealing) thing I have discovered is how many parents out there don't care about the laughability of their kids' names and and possible (likely) (assured) teasing that said kids must have received on the elementary school playgrounds.

Here is a sampling:

Last name: Reeks. This is just sad, and probably not the parents' fault. But can you imagine if your last name was "Reeks"? Your name is, without revision, a tool for people like WS, whose favorite insult is "You stink."
Last name: Williams. First name: William. Did his parents have absolutely no imagination?
Last name: Racey. What don't you name your child if your last name is Racey? Especially because your last name is Racey? That would be Tracy.

Isn't that sad? And, at the same time, really funny? Don't judge me: I have to entertain myself somehow.

It's the End of the World as We Know It (Except Not Really)

2009-07-09T12:31:00.006-04:00

Love me, love my vices: I am an unabashed disaster movie fanatic. All I ask for is a good, old-fashioned natural disaster -- be it a new Ice Age, a dying Earth's core, a no-longer-dormant volcano awakening under the streets of L.A. -- some decent special effects, and possibly a tidal wave, and I am one happy camper.

So imagine my delight when, three weeks ago, I saw a preview for Impact, a (good, old-fashioned) TV miniseries about an asteroid that hits the moon and sends it not only out of its orbit but headed towards Earth! Appointment TV! I curled up with Q on the Sunday of Impact's premiere and watched a fairly expendable cast of characters deal with the possible end of humanity!

(Except not really, because does the world ever really end in movies like this? I mean, someone always comes up with a brilliant plan that involves sending people into space and ends with a room full of cheering scientists and civilians, brought together by circumstances but now forever bonded -- like a microcosm of the world! -- by the close call.)

But Impact was fantastic. By which I mean fantastically bad. I'm really not sure what I liked best about it:

The "romance" between Alex and Maddie, which never went further than a kind of forced hug.
The crotchety old grandfather, as played by James Cromwell, who hits a guy (who is, admittedly, threatening Cromwell's grandchildren) with a cane and then promptly drops from a heart attack brought on by the exertion of -- smacking a guy with a cane?
That once Crotchety Grandpa dies from said heart attack, his grandkids catch a ride to D.C. with the guy who was previously menacing them. They get into a car with a stranger who then gives them candy.
The fact that, in part two of the miniseries, Natasha Henstridge's role is reduced to reaction shots in which she basically stands with her mouth open. Seriously. That's what she does for two hours.

But I think my favorite part was this dialogue at the end of part one:

President of the United States: So... what
happens if the moon hits Earth?
Maddie: Um, there won't be an
Earth?

Oh, Mr. President. Obviously you will not be the one developing the magical electromagnetic plan to get the brown drawf out of the moon's core and set the moon back in its regular orbit (or send it out into space? In two pieces? Or put its two pieces in a new, not-dangerous orbit around Earth? I don't know; there were a number of plot points I was not clear about at the end).

Anyway, the other day I discovered that NBC is doing a miniseries starting this Sunday called Meteor, which is about -- wait for it -- a meteor! Which is three times the size of Mount Everest and heading straight for Earth! I can't imagine what the characters will do to stop it, but I'm thinking it might involve astronauts...

Oh, Work

2009-07-07T08:21:00.004-04:00

Before I left for the beach, I worked so hard to finish everything so my desk would be clear when I returned from my super-fantastic vacation.

This is what my desk looked like when I came in yesterday morning:

What did I do before I had hundeds of evaluations to sort and alphabetize?

(I turned these haphazard piles into three organized stacks within two hours, but seriously! Two hours! I'm so earning my paycheck this summer.)

How I Spent My Summer (Beach) Vacation, Part I

2009-07-06T11:19:00.002-04:00

In December, my parents rented a condo on Ocean City's boardwalk for the first week of July, and I have been looking forward to it ever since. And now I have been and gone! My summer vacation is over! :(

I'd like to say that I did some amazing things, like parasailing or risking my life on the Slingshot (um, hell and no), but instead, I just read. I read a lot -- on the beach, at the pool, on the balcony, in the car. I think it works out to a book a day -- I actually had to go to the used bookstore, which was luckily just a block away, on Wednesday to buy a few more books because I had almost finished the ones I brought with me.

Here's how it breaks down:

Monday: The Chosen One (Carol Lynch Williams) -- Jess lent me this one. I've gotten super into sci-fi YA, but The Chosen One is realistic contemporary YA. It was difficult to read at times because I was so anxious for Kyra, the main character, but ultimately I loved it.

Tuesday: Troy: Fall of Kings (David Gemmell) -- I had really been looking forward to Fall of Kings because it's the last in Gemmell's Troy trilogy; my dad read it first and lent it to me a week before we left for the beach, and I managed to save it, which is kind of amazing for me, as I'm a "read it if you have it" kind of person. Anyway, the conclusion of the trilogy definitely did not disappoint, and I wish Gemmell were still alive, because there were characters who definitely deserved books of their own.

Wednesday: The Hunger Games (Suzanne Collins) -- This was a reread, because The Hunger Games is our freshmen summer reading this year. I first read this right after it came out (Jess lent it to me), and it became perhaps my favorite sci-fi YA of all time. I bought my own copy before vacation and, when I had finished it on Wednesday, I lent it to my brother, WS, because he had run out of books to read, too.

(I'll be honest: my motives in lending WS The Hunger Games were not entirely altruistic. I wanted to find out if the book appealed to guys as well as girls; in the spring, when the ninth grade team talked about making The Hunger Games the summer reading book, I predicted that, though it has a female protagonist, the guys would gravitate to the action of the plot. And, yays! WS loves it. He was about two thirds of the way through it when we left on Sunday, and on the way home, he apparently recapped the story for his girlfriend, Dee, and asked her to read him the read as he drove.)

Thursday: Eight Cousins (Louisa May Alcott)
Friday: Rose in Bloom (Louisa May Alcott) -- These books were both Mason's purchases, I read Eight Cousins and its sequel, Rose in Bloom, when I was younger and really liked both. Upon rereading, I still enjoyed the novels, though I found them a bit preachy at times (I was about to say outdated, but as they were written in the 19th century, that seems unfair). Still, Alcott's various characterizations of the cousins are fun and distinctive, and Rose definitely picks the right guy at the end of Rose in Bloom.

Saturday: The Demon's Lexicon (Sarah Rees Brennan) -- Another Jess-lend! I enjoyed Rees Brennan's world-building, though I was not particularly fond of Nick, the protagonist (there are actually deliberate, author-intended reasons why, I think, but it made the reading hard going at times). The story is great, though, and other characters -- Alan and Jamie especially -- make up for Nick's stand-offishness.

Sunday: Lion of Macedon (David Gemmell) -- I started this on Saturday night, when I realized that I had read everything else and my father kindly let me borrow it. It takes place in Greece about one hundred years after the Battle of Thermopylae and follows Parmenion, a half-Spartan, half-Macedonian boy who comes of age as the various Greek city-states battle for control. I wasn't sold on the book, but once I started reading, I couldn't put it down, and I spent most of yesterday (after picking up Q from the kennel and unpacking) engrossed in reading it on the couch.

So once more, my vacation can be summed up by what I read! I did other things, too, but I've been shirking the alphabetizing and probably ought to try to earn some of my paycheck this week.

Z is for Zzzzzz

2009-06-26T10:54:00.001-04:00

So my summer job.

It has so many good points, like the flexibility -- I work hourly, so if I need to take off (like I am next week for the beach), I can just... take off. I don't have to make sub plans, I don't have to fill out a leave slip. Also, as I mentioned before (but can't mention enough, apparently, because it's such a huge thing for me), I can leave the office if I want to. Go to lunch at the deli, grab coffee from Starbucks, go to the bathroom -- whenever I want. Oh, my God, it is such a delight. Also? The people are soooo nice and friendly, and I can play music at my desk while I work.

But it is so boring. I have spent the last 4 days alphabetizing. That's it. Sort files alphabetically by school, sort files alphabetically by teacher within each school, check off every file received, take files to the file room.

I mean, I love letters as much as the next English teacher, but I'm getting to the point where I am losing my sense of the alphabet. You know, like when you say a word too many times and it starts to sound completely foreign.

Today, I realized about twenty schools in that I had totally forgotten that Q comes after P, and I had to go back and re-alphabetize.

I'm trying to finish as much as I can before the weekend, because on Sunday I head to THE BEACH for a week (yays!), and I'd love to leave a clear desk, but every time I think I'm close to finishing, the mails comes and I suddenly have hundreds more to do.

And I hate to think what my desk will look like when I come back from the beach...

Ooooh, I need a quick Moment of Zen:

>sigh< I love you, new turquoise sandals.

A Good, Old-Fashioned Shoe Swap

2009-06-24T13:32:00.005-04:00

My mom is five million different kinds of awesome, but let me prove it with the following example:

Back in February, I bought a pair of red patent leather peep-toes with a slight wedge heel. I wore them approximately twice before I realized that they were giving me blisters because they are too small (they felt so right when I tried them on in the store! I have learned the virtues of walking around in shoes a bit before purchase, trust me).

Then last month, my mom and I went shopping at Macy's, where my mom bought a pair of flat turquoise thong sandals with this cool multi-colored ring detail and the same slight wedge heel. She wore them to work and realized that they didn't have enough support for her (she broke her ankle last fall, and she has to be super careful about the shoes she wears).

I realized, last night as I was trying to decide what to wear to work today: my mom wears a size slightly smaller than mine, she wants a pair of red flats, and her turquoise sandals would go amazingly with the dress I wanted to wear today.

So I called her last night and said, "Why don't you bring your sandals in tomorrow, and I'll bring my flats, and we'll trade!"

And that is exactly what we did. She loves the flats (and says that they're comfortable enough to wear all day), and the sandals do indeed look great with my dress.

Mine are turquoise, not dark blue, but you can see how cute these sandals are:Again, how awesome is it that my mom has good style sense so we can do things like switch shoes at work?

She Likes... Libba Bray

2009-06-23T14:32:00.006-04:00

A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray is the first novel in what is truly my favorite YA trilogy. I picked it up on a whim at a Books-A-Million a few years ago, and I devoured it, then was so excited to find out that that sequel, Rebel Angels, had just been published.

Gemma Doyle spends the first sixteen years of her life in India, but when her mother dies mysteriously on Gemma's sixteenth birthday -- which happens to be the day Gemma has her first "vision" -- Gemma is shipped off to Spence, a finishing school for aristocratic young ladies. There, she is plagued by continuing visions of a young girl and a creeping shadow monster, as she navigates a brutal girl world and deals with culture shock.

Gemma soon discovers the diary of Mary Dowd, who attended Spence years before with her best friend Sarah and who, upon her sixteenth birthday, was initiated into the Sisterhood, a group of women with magical powers and access to the otherworldly Realms. But something happened -- something terrible -- and the Realms were closed, the Headmistress dead, and Mary gone from Spence.

Eventually Gemma, along with her frenemies Felicity, Ann, and Pippa, find their way into the Realms and discover that the past -- Gemma's mother's death, the burning of Spence's East Wing, the disappearance of Mary Dowd -- is not far behind.

A Great and Terrible Beauty takes place in the late 19th century, and Gemma is a fish out of water: she is spunky, sarcastic, and independent, and she doesn't want to conform to society's rules for women. I adore Gemma, and I love the supporting characters as well, warts and all.

The best part about A Great and Terrible Beauty is that it is the first in a trilogy, followed by Rebel Angels and The Sweet Far Thing. The worst part? The trilogy eventually ends. Its conclusion is faithful to the characters and the overall narrative, and it is both beautiful and heartbreaking.

I was so upset when I finished The Sweet Far Thing -- not because I didn't love it, but because it was over. However, I do appreciate it when an author doesn't drag out his or her series but instead has an endpoint that makes sense and makes it clear that the author has planned meticulously from the beginning. See also: J. K. Rowling.

So I'm excited for Bray's next book -- I read in Entertainment Weekly last week that her next book, Going Bovine, is coming out in September, and I can't wait! Now I have two September releases to look forward to (the first is, of course, Catching Fire, the sequel to The Hunger Games). In the meantime, I think I'll re-read A Great and Terrible Beauty...

Returned to Life (Again)

2009-06-23T11:09:00.003-04:00

Two and a half years have passed since my last post and... not much has changed.

Well, that's not entirely true. I

(1) moved: about a mile away from my previous apartment;

(2) transfered to a new school: after three years of dying a slow death in my previous school, I finally took a leap and did my research, revised my resume, sent it out to the (few) schools I was interested in, and -- lucky me! -- got a job at my first choice school (let's call it Foreston).

This was maybe the best decision I've ever made. Seriously. I had an absolutely fantastic year, the English department is wonderful and supportive, the staff morale is high and carefully tended to by the administration, and my students were totally awesome. At the end of the school year, a lot of people asked me whether I was glad I made the leap and came to Foreston, and my answer was always, "God, yes!"

And I have nothing if not impeccable timing. If I had waited another year, I'd be stuck at my old school (let's call it Unhappysville), because economic times being what they are, the school system is short on money, and thus short on jobs. A number of my former colleagues would love to escape Unhappysville, but there just aren't positions available.

Anyway, yay for good timing, and yay for returning to my much (much much much much) neglected blog.

The school year ended this past Friday, and now I'm at my summer job in Human Resources, which is kind of fabulous because it's not brain-heavy, I don't have to take it home with me, and I can leave the office for lunch and a midafternoon coffee at the Starbucks across the street (I wonder if only teachers can really understand what a treat this is).

Right now I'm in the midst of alphabetizing files, which is mindless but absolutely welcome at the moment. I'll get frustrated and bored within two weeks, but at the moment? Mindless = bliss!

How I Earn My Summer: Reason #52

2007-03-03T11:45:00.000-05:00

Let me preface this by saying: I love and adore my AP juniors this year. They are, as a whole, a sweet, funny, responsible group of kids. I actually look forward to seeing them in class; some mornings I am able to rouse myself out of bed (at five AM) for the sole purpose of teaching them.

However, they are perfectly awful readers, and after grading 100 timed essays over three days, my eyeballs are about to fall out of my head, and I am ready to leave both classes on a deserted island and never look back.

Maybe I'm being unreasonable. But the AP test is in two months, and my students are still making the same basic mistakes. I'm not just talking about their spelling and grammar (that is another post for another time). No, I'm talking about their general reading skills.

Take, for example, timed essay prompt #1. It is an argumentative prompt that notes the proliferation of public statements of opinion in this Information Age and asks the students to take a position on the value of these public statements of opinion and whether they foster democratic values.

Pretty simple, right? But over half of my students wrote essays about how the Democratic party uses the media to win voters/share its ideals/bash Bush.

Lesson the first, dear students: democratic (lower-case 'd') refers to general democracy (as in, America has a democratic government), whereas Democratic (capital 'D') refers to the more liberal political party that recently upset the Republican Congress. It's not a particularly subtle difference.

So what's a totally misread of the prompt going to get you on your essay? No higher than a 4 of 9.

Then there is timed essay prompt #2: an analysis of an excerpt from William Hazlitt's "On The Want Of Money." It asks the students to analyze the rhetorical devices Hazlitt uses to develop his position on money. (Not, by the way, how he persuades his audience, as two-thirds of my students aptly -- though incorrectly -- proved.)

Maybe not so simple, but still -- this is an essay on the want, or lack, of money. And yet, another misread; nearly everyone wrote essays about how Hazlitt believes our desire for money (that other "want") is bad/good/potentially life-destroying.

Bah! Misread! We want for money when we are poor and thus want to get some.

I get two months off in the summer (when I don't teach summer school). This is one of the many reasons why: so my head doesn't explode.

In Praise of Heroes

2007-03-01T22:46:00.001-05:00

Every once in a while, a television show comes along that I schedule my life around. A show that, if I absolutely cannot be on my couch for, I TiVo and ask three other people to TiVo on the off-chance mine doesn't work. A show that is truly appointment TV, as in I would skip any appointment (maybe even one with the hotness that is Matthew Macfadyen -- Liz says you're married, Matthew, but seriously -- call me!) to watch.

I am currently having this mad love affair with Heroes.

You know, I spent all summer seeing NBC's promos for Heroes -- ordinary people with extraordinary abilities, blah blah blah, whiny Jess from Gilmore Girls, blah blah blah -- and while the premise was intriguing, I certainly wasn't excited about its premiere. In fact, I think the only reason I watched the pilot was because it was on right before the show I was really looking forward to this season: Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.

Well, Studio 60? Big letdown. But Heroes? Loooooooove at first sight.

Not only is it clever and smart, it actually provides answers as the mysteries surrounding the plot and characters evolve. (You listening yet, Lost?) The characters are interesting, well-developed (well, with the exception of Simone, who was -- pretty shockingly, for me -- killed in last week's episode. Tim Kring, I salute you!), and layered with so many shades of grey that you don't really know who is good and who isn't (I mean, barring Sylar, who kills the other heroes and absorbs their powers by, um, eating their brains, it seems).

Even the character who has been set up as the villain since the pilot -- Horned Rim Glasses (HRG), played by the previously-so-far-off-my-radar Jack Coleman-- has shifted back and forth on the good-evil spectrum throughout, and this week brought me to tears when he had himself shot (not fatally, yay!) and had part of his memory erased to save his superpowered daughter from the mysterious company for which he works. Someone, please give Jack Coleman an Emmy for making HRG so lovable and sympathetic even he's when shooting tracking darts at scruffy, invisible Claude or erasing his wife's memory for the fifty billionth time.

And any show that has an appropriately "good or evil?" role for Adrian Pasdar -- did anyone else watch "Profit" when it was on way back in '96? 'Cause that was one twisted yet damn fine show -- wins major props from me.

That's probably enough Heroes love for tonight, although there are certainly many more reasons to worship at the altar of Kring and Co. Not the least of which? For making Mondays rock!

But What's With All the Dead Fish?

2007-02-21T20:13:00.000-05:00

As I mentioned previously, WS spent most of last week in San Diego at an education conference. Seriously, he has all the luck -- his principal takes him to warm, sunny, beachy California, while my principal took me and the other department chairs on a retreat in November to cold, dreary, rainy Harper's Ferry. His principal sets him up at a superfine spa where his room overlooks the seal and manatee pools; my principal takes us to Hill House, which is pretty cool, history-wise, but is unfortunately behind the times in many things, like heat. Yes, my room had no television, no phone, no heat. Neither did the conference room where we spent two days hashing out a critical reading plan for the school. When we asked the management to turn on the heat, the vents began to billow smoke, and the place had to be evacuated for ten minutes. Then -- they had to turn off the heat, leas the hotel burn down.

>sigh<

Anyway, WS enjoyed San Diego so much that he called a few times to crow about the gorgeous weather (we've just come off a week of snow, ice, and temperatures below twenty degrees) and texted a few pictures of the view from his room (blue skies and waters) and the beach (waves crashing on the rocks).

On Monday, he texts me a picture of what looks like several fish laying dead on the sand.

I text him back immediately: WS -- what's with all the dead fish?

WS: Not fish. Seals.

Me: But why are they DEAD?

WS: Not dead. LIVE seals.

I open the picture again. Honestly-- it still seems like a bunch of dead fish to me.

Anyway, WS got home safe and sound yesterday -- he took the redeye back and arrived at 6:30 in the morning. Then he went home, slept for two hours, and went into work for half a day. He's so very good. I wish I could be as eager to return to school when I'm out. As it is, the only reason I don't use more of my leave is because I really hate making sub plans.

Oh, and WS's principal? Totally taking WS to Orlando this summer for another conference! Bah!

Returned to Life

2007-02-19T22:40:00.000-05:00

Bah! I am horrifically embarassed about how long it has been since I last posted (er, four months, heavens!).

Would it make more sense if I said: my life is nothing noteworthy at this time?

I: go to work (or stay home with Q, curled on the couch watching entire seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, on snow days like... the last three workdays). I: plow through the pile of books now towering on my coffeetable. I: think about work and how my third quarter calendar is now irrevocably off-course. I: receive pictures on my cell from WS, who is enjoying San Diego and gorgeous 75-degree weather at the moment. I: think about work some more.

I: decide that, yes, I am an excellent teacher, but that I really hate being the department chair. And I think: maybe if I weren't chair, I would be happier. Or at least spend less time thinking about work and more time -- not thinking about work.

Oh, so melancholy! Only, I find it hard to put pen to page (fingers to keys?) when I feel emptied of all at the end of the day.

Blog, you have suffered. But no more! I am bound and determined to return to you to the bloglife you enjoyed before I settled in this winter haze.

And I'll start next time, because it's late and I have to be up at five-thirty.

A Suggested Reading List from WS

2006-11-14T15:58:00.000-05:00

Oh, blog, how I've missed and neglected you!

Excuse #1 for not writing -- Well, I've been busy. First quarter grades were due last week, so I spent, um, all of last week grading papers until my eyeballs were about to explode. I graded: at Starbuck's; at the library (their chairs are very comfortable. No, really!); on the metro; during the intermission of Martha, Josie, and the Chinese Elvis, the PWYC preview at Woolly that I went to see with Jess, Steve, and Liz; and in the car at red lights. I finished fifteen minutes before the last deadline. And now they are done. Yay!

Excuse #2 for not writing -- Well, I have been writing. Just not blogging. On Halloween, Jess told me about NaNoWriMo (that's short for National Novel Writing Month), and I thought, "Hey, motivation to start that novel I've been outlining over and over for the last three years!" And on November 1st... I totally did not start that novel. But I did continue work on several short stories that have been "in progress" for a while and are now "nearing completion" thanks to my 500-words-a-day minimum. (It doesn't seem like a lot, but when you only really get to write from 10:00 to 11:00 PM, it's enough.)

Excuse #3 for not writing -- I'm so freaking tired. Quit bugging me, me.

But now I'm back! Hopefully more consistantly!

So remember, way back, when I confessed my crush on LG? Yeah, I'm still working on that. Trust me: I've taken my kids to the library more this month than I did the entirety of last year. But since I'm apparently not working it fast enough, my brother, WS, is still calling me several times a week to make helpful "suggestions" from, as he puts it, "a guy's perspective."

Here is the e-mail he sent me today:

Ros -- Make sure to check out a bunch of books from the library. Make sure to
check out Did you do anything fun this weekend? by Ida t. ealot and the classic
Let's go get some coffee by Mr. Smoot - Hopperator. Man, those are can't misses!
-- WS

Heh. Are those even in the library catalogue?

Take My Blood-- Please!

2006-10-13T22:28:00.002-04:00

Every year, Students Against Destructive Decisions (SADD) holds a blood drive at school, and every year I swear I won't donate, as I hate needles-- especially needles intended to suck blood from my veins-- with a fiery passion. (I can't even watch the vet give Q his annual vaccinations; Q just looks at me like, "Seriously? They're petting my head and telling me what a good boy I am, and you can't even hold my paw?")

But every year, usually the day of the blood drive, the SADD sponsor, a fellow teacher I have great respect for, sends out an e-mail which basically says: "The students and community volunteers have signed up in droves; the faculty has not. You all suck. Get down here." And I feel guilty, and I end up in the gym during my planning period with a photo ID and a book, prepared to sacrifice time and fluid for the cause.

This year was no different. I meandered down to the gym, picked up a release form from a former student, who was running the sign-in ("You're donating, Ms. Ros?" she asked. "Awesome!"), and sat in an empty spot on the bleachers to answer the dozens of yes/no questions about any and all medication and trips out of the country I've been taking.

I finished quickly (it was a lot of "no"s) and glanced around the gym. And lo and behold, divine providence intervened, for who was standing at the mandatory refeshment table with a juice box? LG.

I waved, and he waved and made his way over to me. "Just getting started?" he asked.

"Yup," I said, and gestured at the blue gauze on his left arm. "You fnished."

"Yup," he said.

"I really hate doing this," I confessed. "Needles and me-- not friends. Last time I gave blood, it took them half-an-hour to find a vein, then once they stuck the needle in, it turned out they hadn't found the vein after all."

He seemed surprised (oh, God, I hope it was surprise and not "grossed out"), and I'm sure I would have come up with a wittier addendum to that little anecdote, but at that moment, one of the volunteers tapped me on the shoulder. "You ready?" she asked.

I sighed and steeled myself for what was to come. LG grinned at me. "Good luck," he said.

Sigh. I floated after the volunteer and barely noticed when she pricked my finger for-- what is it? Blood type anaylsis or whatever.

In the end, it wasn't so bad. I mean, the part where I had to sit with a former student to the left of me and the SGA president to the right of me, all of us answering questions that began with, "Have you ever had sex with...?" kind of sucked.

(I mean, what if I had had sex for money, or had sex with someone who had at some point had sex for money, or been in prison in the last ten years? Would I just have to lean in and whisper, "Um... yes. But don't let it get around"?)

Anyway, once we got to the blood-donating part, it was actually fine. They found the vein on the first try (yay!), and I totally freaked out a group of students who were watching my terrible grimace of pain when the needle first went in (hee!).

And when it was all said and done, I walked out of the gym with purple gauze around my right arm like a badge of honor. See, I can be a good citizen, too! Even if it's just once a year.

Just a Little Crush

2006-10-06T22:11:00.000-04:00

So I'll admit it: though I truly adore the school library in all its well-stocked glory, I have an ulterior motive for visiting it with the frequency with which I do. If anyone has a question about freshmen library orientation, I'll offer to take a stroll down the hall and ask it. If someone needs an overhead returned, I'm the first to raise my hand and volunteer to take it. If my students need to use the computers, to hell with the wireless lab-- I'll take them to the library lab!

Really, in the end, it's not about the library at all-- it's about Library Guy.

Library Guy (or LG) is, as you might expect, one of the school librarians. And I like him. I like him a lot. He started working at my school last fall, and I thought he was cute, but to be honest, I had a little too much going on at the time (like... taking over as head of my department, for example) to really make a go at pursuing him.

In the spring, we organized an overnight trip to the Big City, and LG and I were two of the chaperones. I thought, "Hey, this is my chance to get to know him better!"

My brother (the font of wisdom) suggested I try to sit next to him on the bus. "You know, make sure you're the last one on, and just ask if you can sit with him," he said.

Well, I didn't do that-- but I did make a concerted effort to spend some time with him. I sat next to him at dinner. We walked together (guarding the back of the pack of kids) on the way back to the hotel after seeing a show. At the rest stop on the way home, we waited in line at the Starbuck's for desperately necessary coffee.

This is what I learned about LG: he is an amazingly nice guy. One of the nicest I've ever met. He's got a sense of humor, and he can carry a conversation even when surrounded by forty shrieking sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds.

I also learned that he's about twelve years older than me. (Honestly, you'd never guess from looking at him. I had figured early thirties at the most. I was... wrong.) And that freaked me out a little.

Okay, that freaked me out a lot. I decided that no matter how nice LG was, he was too old for me.

Then I came back to school this fall, and I saw him at the faculty welcome-back breakfast, and I don't know what it was-- the way he smiled at me or touched my shoulder to say hello or held his plate of French toast-- but suddenly the age thing didn't matter.

And that is why my all of my students are doing research projects this quarter. And why I take my Xeroxing to the library machiens, even thought they're ten times slower.

My brother (I really regret telling him about this, by the way) is determined that I will ask LG out for coffee at some point in the near future-- preferably tomorrow. He has called every day this week to demand that I make my move immediately.

"I mean, come on," he says, "LG's just getting older."

"Eh," I reply, "I'm cool with it."

Another Message for My Freshmen

2006-09-28T16:29:00.000-04:00

Today we read "A Sound of Thunder" by Ray Bradbury and discussed genre. "What are some plot and setting elements we see in science fiction?" I ask.

Beck raises his hand. "Science," he says.

"Okay," I reply, slightly annoyed, "thank you, Captain Obvious. Anyone else?"

Reed raises his hand. "Fiction," he says.

Honestly-- shut up, you little smart-asses.

Dude, Where's My Hair?

2006-09-27T16:54:00.000-04:00

Jess' wedding is this weekend, and I decide that, as school has been kicking my butt recently and I really want to look good in the inevitable bevy of pictures that will be taken, this will be my week of grooming. On Sunday I get a pedicure. On Tuesday, Jess and I go shopping. And today, I go to get highlights.

I have actually gotten highlights before, albeit years ago, and I loved them but haven't had the energy to put the time and money into it since then. (Seriously, three hours in a barber chair is not my idea of a good time, especially after seven and a half hours of teaching.)

So I make an appointment with Linda, the stylist my mother has spent months raving about, skip out of school a wee bit early, and land at the salon around 1:30.

Linda is waiting for me, foil and combs on a little rolling cart. "What do you want done?" she asks.

I'm ready, too. "Highlights," I say, "subtle ones-- probably dark blonde."

"Okay. You want a trim, too?"

"Yep-- an inch, no more than an inch and a half."

"Okay," she says.

Look, I have complete and utter faith in people that I am paying to do me a service-- painting my toes, finding me a shirt in another size, whatever. I trust them to know what they're doing and not totally mess me up.

But after Linda takes the foil out of my hair and washes out the dye, she takes me back to the chair and starts cutting.

And cutting.

And cutting some more.

And I watch her in the mirror, my eyes widening with horror as my hair-- the hair that I have been deliberately growing out for the last year, the hair that is (was) the longest I've worn it since high school-- falls in tufts to the floor.

Linda takes a handful of hair, looks at it with a critical eye, and snip snip. Another inch.

Every so often, she puts the scissors down and picks up the comb, and I relax, thinking, "Okay, she's done." But no-- she puts down the comb and picks up another pair of scissors, and snip snip. Good-bye, long pretty hair.

It gets better. She finally puts down the scissors for good and says, "Okay, now I'm gonna put the color in."

Uh... what?

I meekly follow her to the washing station, and she grabs a bottle of chestnut-colored goo and begins slathering it all over my hair. "You want a deep conditioner?" she asks, her hands not-quite-so-full of my hair as they would have been fifteen minutes ago.

"Why not?" I sigh.

After she washes out the goo, we return to the chair, and she starts to blow dry my hair. Twice, she turns off the hair dryer and picks up the scissors. Snip snip snip.

Finally, it seems she's done. "You like?" she asks, holding up a mirror so I can see the back of my head as well as the front. "I took out all that old red and made it light brown instead. And I put in honey-colored highlights."

Okay, I'll be totally honest-- I do like it. It certainly looks more elegant than my previous, grown-out-dye, hasn't-been-cut-in-months look.

But oh! My hair doesn't swing across my back anymore! Instead, it sits sadly just below my shoulders.

As I drive home, I call my mother. "So, uh, about Linda?" I say.

"Yeah? How did it go?"

"Um, well, I told her to trim an inch, and... she did whatever the hell she wanted."

My mother is silent for a moment. "Yeah, that's kind of what she does," she finally says. "I guess I should have told you that before." She pauses. "But I bet it looks great!"

I look in the mirror again when I get home. Yeah, it totally does.

A Message to My Freshmen

2006-09-20T10:25:00.000-04:00

"Boring" is not a genre. It's an adjective, you little smart-asses.

Dance, Monkey, Dance!

2006-09-20T09:20:00.000-04:00

Last night was Back to School Night here at school, which is a big ball of stress and Xeroxing but is also (I hate to admit this) a lot of fun. I mean, think about it: a captive audience, enclosed in a classroom, wedged into hard plastic chairs, with no recourse but to listen to me talk about curriculum for ten whole minutes. It's the performance to end all performances, and I get to do it every year! Yay!

I left school around three, returned home, and walked Q, checked e-mail, finished the fourth book of Fables (another great reading suggestion from Jess), and primped like crazy. I have to be very careful at BTSN: because I still get mistaken for a student every once in a while (honestly, I've been working at this school for six years, and there isn't a year that goes by without someone asking me for my hall pass), I feel like I have to put special effort into looking older. So that means makeup and curlers and the most suit-like clothes I own.

I returned to school around six-- okay, so there are also not-so-fun parts to BTSN-- and joined my fellow department members in our department workroom. Um, you honestly think I'm going to sit in my room while parents wander the halls, skipping the PTA meeting to catch teachers one-on-one? Hell no. We English teachers sit in our workroom and get ourselves ready to face the masses by laughing hysterically at things we wouldn't normally find funny. (This is a result of a combination of exhaustion and nerves.)

Anyway, I've never had any problems with parents at BTSN; I get up in front of the room, do my trained monkey dance (or, as Christine likes to call it, our "dog and pony show"), and leave as soon as the last parent of the night disappears out the door. Parents tend to like me because, if nothing else, I am wildly enthusiastic about what I teach. And because I know their students' names already.

And because, honestly, I do a great monkey dance.

Fun with Puritanism

2006-09-15T21:57:00.000-04:00

This week in AP Lang, we dove right into the ever-fascinating (does sarcasm bleed through text without the accompanying tone of voice?) American literary periods. Not to be down on American lit-- honestly, the longer I teach it, the more I appreciate it-- but out of all the cultures in the world, America has the most boring literary periods. But sadly, junior year in NoVA means American lit, and for every brilliant dark Romantic and Modernist movement, American writers inevitably followed with a Rationalist or, heaven forbid, Realist movement to put it to sleep.

And don't get me started on the Transcendentalists. (Go to hell, Thoreau.)

Anyway, this year I decided to follow the literary periods chronologically, so my juniors spent this week with an intro to Puritanism and the Age of Reason, then moved on to Mary Rowlandson's "A Narrative of the Captivity" (wife and mother kidnapped by Indians, suffers cruelly, lives to tell the tale), Equiano's "The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Equiano" (African kidnapped and sold into slavery, travels the Middle Passage to America), and Jonathan Edward's "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" (sermon-- basically, God dangles us over the fires of hell and can drop us anytime he feels like it. Creepy!)

>snore<

(Okay, fine, I'll give you Edwards. His hellfire-and-brimstone is entertaining, if nightmarish.)

So on Wednesday, my first period class is discussing the Rowlandson and Equiano narratives, and... zzzzzz... Oh! Sorry, fell asleep just thinking about it!

Anyway, my first question is always, "What did you think of the reading?"

Overall, the class agreed with my own (silent) assessment: Yawn. "Rowlandson just lists events and talks about God," says one student dismissively.

Oo, there's a lesson here. "How does that reflect the time period in which she's writing?" I ask.

The kids who actually absorbed the intro materials jump in immediately: Puritan writing is by and large in diary form, and writers were constantly finding the presence of God in everyday life.

"Okay, good," I say. "What about Equiano? What did you think of him?"

Cut, a curly-haired boy sitting in the back, raises his hand. "I thought it was cool," he says. "You know, he talked about all the fun adventures. Like being on the slave ship."

The other students giggle.

"The slave ship? That's was a fun adventure?" I reply.

"Fun... yeah, you know, interesting and... fun," Cut backpedals lamely.

Seriously, you can't script this stuff.

Dream

2006-09-11T22:31:00.000-04:00

Okay, so I fell into bed last night at 12:00(ish), and I slept five heavy hours in which I had the following adventure:

For some reason, Fidel Castro had arranged a marriage for me to one of his advisors. So I, of course, went on the run, cross-country style. There was some guy helping me at first, but he disappeared at some point, and I was left to fend for myself. I ended up hiding in a youth hostel, and, more specifically, in someone's luggage. Literally, I zipped myself into someone's duffel bag, which somehow ended up in an abandoned house.

And that's when Steve McQueen rescued me.

The rest was a lot of running from a crazy, Castro-supporting bus driver (who ultimately turned out to be a good guy and led my pursuers away) and holding Steve McQueen's hand as he dragged me through cornfields and such.

Is it any wonder that when my alarm went off, I could hardly drag myself out of bed? Honestly, I spent the whole night running away from Castro's evil minions.

For the first time in my life, I hit the snooze button.

Er, fine. I hit the snooze button twice.

(The End of) My Summer Vacation by Rosaline

2006-09-09T22:21:00.000-04:00

The first week of classes is over. I'm ready to keel over and die. Join me in my week (in a nutshell)--

Monday: is Labor Day. I don't have to work. I do, however, have to worry about work. For the first time in my teaching career, I actually left on the Friday before Labor Day having completed everything for the first day of school. Syllabus? Check. Policies and procedures? Check. First quarter calendar? Done and done. Boxes unpacked? Surprisingly-- yes! My classroom looked clean, uncluttered, and organized when I locked the door.
But that doesn't mean I don't worry. There are many other things to worry about. Like-- what should I wear? In what order should I present all the information about the class? Will the kids give me the "year from hell" vibe? (This actually exists-- I got it on the first day of school three years ago. That was the year I came within inches of quitting. >shudder<) Will guidance add more students to my classes? Will I have enough desks if they do?

So, yeah. I worried. I tried to distract myself with Stephanie Meyer's New Moon, the sequel to Twilight. (Um, more on that in a later post. Much more. And flip to Jess' blog for her eloquent gushfest about Twilight. She says all the things I would say. We're so psychically connected it's scary.)

Anyway, I went to bed at 11:00. I was still awake at 2:00

Tuesday: My alarm went off at 5:30. It's set on 104.1, a classical station, and the music kind of filters into my unconscious before I opened my eyes and looked at the time. "That can' t be right," I thought blearily. "Didn't I just fall asleep five minutes ago?"

Sadly, no. So I picked up the school day routine where I left off in June: walk Q. Make lunch. Shower and dress. Double-check to make sure I haven't forgotten anything. Stop at Starbuck's. And finally... to school.

My first period was juniors, AP Lang and Comp. They were quiet.

Third period was freshmen. All my freshmen classes are team classes (which means that I have a team partner from the special ed department. Let's call her Christine. We've been working together for four years, and I love her. We have a lot of fun, which isn't always easy to have when you're talking about fourteen-year-olds). They were also quiet. Is this a trend? No, it's just the first day of school.

Fifth period was AP juniors again. They were... lively. I asked them how they liked the summer reading assignment and was met by a cacaphony of "It was awesome!" I immediately decided that they will be my favorite class.

I had seventh period off. I tried to work on several things at once, but gave up when everything started to look and sound like gibberish. So I went to the library to, um, "Xerox" (yeah, there' s more to my frequent library visits than that. Later, I promise).

Wednesday: I was in meetings all morning. I saw my third period freshmen again (I see them every day), and we talked about their summer reading assignment, Animal Farm. At first they were all a little reluctant to participate, but I finally said, "Look, you want me to learn your name ASAP, you'll contribute to the discussion," and that got them started.

Fourth period was another freshmen class. They were also quiet and significantly less eager for me to learn their names.

Sixth period I was off again. I Xeroxed (for real this time) and watched the clock. At 2:30, I booked it home and spent the rest of the day finishing New Moon.

Thursday: My AP kids had their test on The Crucible, one of their summer reading books. We talked about rhetorical devices. They actually seemed interested. We'll see how long it lasts.

Third period we discussed writing good paragraphs. When I asked, "What should a good concluding sentence do?", I received the following response (say it with me, people-- I'm sure you can guess what's coming):

"It concludes."

"Ah," I replied, shooting a frosty glare of death at Beck, the unfortunate smart-aleck boy who spoke first. "Okay. Thanks for that, Captain Obvious."

I spent my planning period grading Crucible tests. Oy. John Proctor totally did not rip his shirt at the end of Act Two when his wife is arrested for witchcraft. And "torture" is not spelled "tochure." There were truly points when I wanted to cry.

Friday: When I woke up, I was in the shower. It's a good thing my routine is so automatic, I guess-- I really can do it in my sleep.

It took me half an hour to decide what to wear. My principal decided that casual Fridays shouldn't really include jeans anymore, but he never really said we couldn't wear jeans. And my jeans are nice, new, Gap jeans. I put them on and passed on the shirt emblazoned with our school mascot. When I got to school, it seemed like that's all anyone is wearing. I felt like a rebel. Then I walked past my principal and felt guilty. Over a shirt.

Meetings all morning. Again. Freshmen the rest of the day. Pep rally in the afternoon (I locked myself in my room and made the reading quiz for my AP classes instead).

At 2:40, I was in my car. At 3:00, I was home, and the first week was over.

And you know? Despite the zombie fog I'm currently experiencing due to lack of sleep-- it was a really great week.

The Shape of Things

2006-08-31T21:03:00.000-04:00

I could very easily write an epic post about the my first week back at school, but instead, I'm going to show you some pictures from my late, lamented trip to England (oh, if I could only be back there instead of stuck in my classroom). Well, okay, to be honest, the only pictures I'm going to show you are pictures from Stonehenge and Avebury.

I took an inordinate amount of pictures of all those stones. I love stones, and I love symmetry, and I love the heady sense of history that permeates the air.

So, anyway, this is Avebury:

These stones run a broken ring around the town of Avebury and sit in pastures, as you can see from the wandering sheep.

This stone is actually called the "Devil's Chair" because it has a creepy-looking place to sit naturally occurring on the side not facing us. Silly sheep, grazing so close to the evil rocks!

And, look! It's Stonehenge! I expected it to be a letdown in person, but even though there must have been hundreds of people there that day, it was still awe-inspiring.

(You can really see what the outer ring should be in this one.)

I especially love the arches.

Okay, now I'm seriously ready to pack my bags and take the next flight back across the Atlantic. Anybody want to come? Or, better yet, anybody want to be my long-term sub while I go?

Move Along, Move Along

2006-08-28T21:59:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, I helped my brother move into his third apartment in three years. I don't think he has a yen for the transient lifestyle, but his roommate situation has shifted slightly enough each year that a move was required. First he lived in a two-bedroom with B., then he and B. moved into a three-bedroom with Sy, then B. got engaged and moved in with his girlfriend, so Sy and WS had to move to another two-bedroom.

I have moved three times myself in the five years I've been out of college, so I know the drill. Forage for as many boxes as humanly possible, pack smart (that means "don't put all the heavy stuff in one box"), recruit many friends by bribing them with cookies and/or pizza, and make sure you're at the moving truck rental place when it opens.

Oh, and clean the apartment you're leaving till it shines.

But, wait! I forgot! I'm talking about moving my brother.

This is how it went down:

I arrived at his apartment at eleven in the morning. WS had gathered a small crew: our parents, Sy, Teddy, and N., a friend of ours from summers past. When I entered the apartment, everyone was standing around looking vaguely shell-shocked. It might have been the piles and piles of unpacked stuff.

Or the massive amount of crumbs, Cheez-Its, change, dust, and various other unidentifiable particles on the living room carpet.

"Wow, when was the last time you guys vaccuumed?" I asked, wrinkling my nose in disgust.

WS looked at me blankly. "We don't have a vaccuum," he said.

"Ah," I said. "Um.... how are you gonna get all this crap off the floor?"

Grinning, Sy hold up a mop-- yes, really, one of those metal-handled, sponge at the head mops. I remember my mother using one of those to clean the kitchen floor every Saturday morning when I was growing up. She poured Mr. Clean in the sink and mixed it with water, stuck the mop in every so often to rinse it. It squeaked when she ran it over the linoleum, but it did a fine job.

Something tells me a mop like that wasn't meant for carpet. Especially a carpet as grossly maltreated as WS's.

"You're gonna... mop it up?"

WS grabbed the mop from Sy and began dragging it through the ungodly mess. "See?" he said. "I make piles and then sweep it onto the balcony."

"Don't you mean mop?"

The rest of their apartment was the same. I found enough change on WS's floor to pay his first month's rent. When he and Sy turned their air hockey table upside-down to carry it down the stairs, quarters rained out. (I, er, collected them and kept them for tolls.) None of us would go near either bathroom, especially after my mother enquired after their Scrubbing Bubbles, and WS's response was, "Oh, yeah, I've been meaning to buy some of those..."

See, the thing is, I'm no priss. I lived in a pretty run-down dorm in college. The shower stalls in the bathrooms were a special disaster all their own. I'm talking mildew, mold, and crazy amounts of rust. I took four years of showers there with my arms squeezed tightly to my sides-- so I wouldn't touch the stalls-- and my eyes closed-- so I couldn't see the stalls. Sometimes I dream about those shower stalls; I'm usually flailing wildly yet scared to death some tiny part of me will come into contact with the decades-old rust.

The showers in my dorm were the things of nightmares. But WS's old apartment? Way, way worse.

However, his new apartment is shiny and bright. Well, it was when I left yesterday afternoon. I'm a little afraid to think what WS and Sy could have done to it in 24 hours.

Ugh. I need a shower just thinking about it.

He's ALIVE!

2006-08-27T21:14:00.000-04:00

Okay, I am multi-tasking as I never have before-- five, count 'em, five tasks at once. Blogging. Baking cookies for my department meeting tomorrow. Doing laundry so I have something to wear tomorrow (heh, want to know what I'm currently wearing? A slip and a sports bra. Fashionable!). Paying attention to Q, 'cause I go back to work tomorrow and I feel guilty (ain't no love like guilty love). And watching the Emmys.

And while I'm watching the Emmys, Simon Cowell starts doing a tribute to Dick Clark, one of those "let's look back and show how influential and important he was and play super-sad music behind the clips so everyone is sad because he's dead."

Then Simon Cowell turns and says, "And here's Dick Clark." The spotlight turns... and there's Dick Clark!

I honestly thought he was dead! I mean, I knew he was alive at New Year's, but I could have sworn...

Damn, the cookie timer is buzzing and Q is freaking out. But, yay! Cookies!

And, er, a living Dick Clark.

Oh, Pathos

2006-08-25T23:12:00.000-04:00

So, yes, we've established that at this moment in time, I love my job. Probably because it's mostly theoretical right now, in that "Monday is days away" way. And I know, come Monday, I'll be smiles and sunshine (and yawns) because I really do enjoy

(1) the meet-and-greet, how-was-your-summer chatfest of the faculty breakfast;

(2) the inevitable "guess that TV theme song" that my principal puts together, usually with Starbucks cards (score, says the Starbucks-is-crack addict!) as prizes;

(3) the first few hours in my classroom, when I manage to do everything except unpack my five years worth of crap that I only packed up two months ago;

(4) the first department meeting (although I should strike this from my list, because although I usually enjoy this part, this year I actually have to lead the meeting, and that freaks me out);

(5) the aforementioned clean slate.

However, I do not enjoy

(1) the stress of learning all the kids' names in time for Back to School Night in September;

(2) the stress of interims in October, December, March, and May;

(3) the stress of report cards in November, January, April, and June;

(4) the long haul between February's President's Day and April's Spring Break;

(5) the stress;

(6) the stress;

(7) the stress.

And yet... I can't see myself doing anything else.

>waves Teacher Pride banner wildly in all directions and wishes summer were a week longer<

Five Minutes

2006-08-23T18:07:00.000-04:00

"... No...," one of the students says, "four and a half."

Four and a half minutes to convey the absolute horror I feel at being so totally at home in my classroom. Even though it is nearly six o'clock. (Four minutes.) Even though summer is truly winding down and I will have to forgo my two-in-the-morning bedtimes and eleven-in-the-morning awakenings. Even though I have yet to shed the lazy and get my act together on a number of different fronts.

Three minutes.

It's early yet-- students don't come back until September 5th-- but I'm already loving the new year. Clean slate! New students! New syllabus!

Oh, dear God! I love my job!

(Remind me of this in two months.)

Snakes in a Blogpost

2006-08-21T23:40:00.000-04:00

Teddy called on Sunday after I got back from Jess's shower. "So have you decided what movie you want to see?" he asked.

"Yeah," I replied. "I really want to see Snakes on a Plane."

"Wait... Seriously?"

"Yeah."

"Seriously?"

"Yeah!"

"Um, okay."

I'd been reading about this movie for months now, and I already loved everything about it: the title which was essentially a plot summary ("What's the movie about?" my mother asked me when I first mentioned it. "Uh... snakes on a plane?" I replied); the logo (snakes... wrapped around a plane!); and of course, Samuel L. Jackson, who reportedly signed on as Agent Neville Flynn based on the title of the script alone (and later demanded they change the title back to Snakes on a Plane when some dummy tried to rename it Pacific Air Something-or-Other).

Plus, I'm a real sucker for campy horror/action flicks. Hence my disaster movie collection: The Towering Inferno, The Poseidon Adventure (still way better than the remake), The Day After Tomorrow, Independence Day. You name it, I love it.

So Teddy picked me up in his hot car-of-the-moment (an RX-8? Is that a car? Whatever), we grabbed a beer or two, and we went to the 9:30 PM feature.

It was awesome! Gross in parts-- I'll reluctantly admit to closing my eyes during some of the gorier moments-- but otherwise hysterically funny. I mean, come on, what other movie can top pheremone-laced leis, crazed snakes of a hundred varieties, "snake-o-vision" (where you see from the snakes' point-of-view; apparently, they all see in green and blurry), the classic "oh-god-we've-lost-both-pilots-who-will-land-this-aircraft?" plot device, a true willingness to kill anyone, even the nice characters (someone involved in the production must have graduated from the Irwin Allen school of disaster movies), and Samuel L. Jackson's FBI agent finding love while combatting-- say it with me-- snakes on a plane.

Not to mention Samuel L.'s immortal lines: "I've had it with these motherf***ing snakes on this motherf***ing plane!" And my personal favorite: "Just what I need-- snakes on crack!"

Hee!

Anyway, Teddy hated it. But, as I reminded him several times, he forced me to go see Wing Commander with him years ago, and that was much, much worse. So as far as I'm concerned, we are so even.

Another Conversation with my Brother

2006-08-20T20:18:00.000-04:00

I'm at Jess' family shower when my cell phone rings. I run for my purse and dig frantically through it, thinking, "Everyone who calls me is either at this shower or knows I'm at this shower. It must be an emergency!"

No, it's WS. "HI!" he shouts into the phone. There is music playing at full blast behind him.

"Um, hi?"

"I was gonna leave you a funny message, but this is better! LISTEN!"

He turns the music up louder. Suddenly I recognize the song. It's "Flashdance (What a Feeling)." And it's right at the lyric...

Take your passion/And make it happen

I start to laugh. WS comes back on the phone. "Did you hear it?"

"Yeah! The greatest misheard refrain of all time!"

He laughs, too. And rightfully so. We used to listen to The Full Monty soundtrack in the car on the way to work when I was in college, and whenever "Flashdance" would come on, WS would sing right along: Take your PANTS OFF! And make it happen!

"That is so not what she's singing!" I said once.

"Uh, yeah, it so is," he replied with such confidence that I believed him. For a long, long time.

"Anyway, it came on the radio, and I wanted to share," he says now. "Gotta go, bye!"

God, I love my brother.

Teddy Returns

2006-08-18T22:04:00.000-04:00

My friend Teddy finally got in touch with me last week. He text-messaged me on my birthday to say:

"HAPPY BIRTHDAY!"

I text-messaged him on his birthday two days later to say:

"HAPPY BIRTHDAY!"

He called me twenty minutes later and left a message in my voicemail (it was almost two in the morning):

"Hey, why you not answering? OK, whatever, just gimme a call sometime so we can get together and catch up!"

Ah, yes, to catch up. We only see each other roughly every six months. Sometimes not even that. I think we've gone a year at least without speaking once--and yet we live only ten minutes apart. But it isn't because we have a particularly volatile relationship; we just have a... weird... relationship.

Teddy is my oldest friend. We met when we were fifteen, and the pattern we've found ourselves reliving over and over started at that moment in the theatre room. Teddy had a crush on me; I was madly in love with his friend Matt; and Matt liked my friend Jenny. (Ah, high school.) We had a big falling out when he asked me to homecoming and I went with someone else. And then we mended our friendship, and after we graduated, Teddy became my every-six-months friend.

This is what we do when we get together: drink. Teddy works for a big-time, fancy-dancy restaurant, and what he loves more than anything is to show off his connections with the various restauraunts and bars around town. So inevitably, he picks me up in whatever hot car he's happened to fall in love with, we hit a myriad of bars, he pays for everything (and I really, truly try to buy a round or several, but he tells the bartenders right off that they are not to take my credit card, under pain of death), we talk about our love lives (he, much like my brother, attracts the crazies, and I-- um, am boring) and about how we're just going to marry each other when we turn thirty, because it's not like we don't know and like each other.

Once we got so drunk that Teddy couldn't drive home, so he parked his car in the parking lot of the community pool, opened the sunroof, and turned on my favorite classical music... And I don't remember how it began or ended, but we had an intense, two-hour makeout session under the stars.

Afterward, it was cool. We laughed about it and went out drinking the next weekend, too, after which he tried to teach me to drive stick. (ETA: No, I mean that literally! His car has a stick shift. Much thanks to Jess and Steve for pointing out the double entendre and not laughing at me... too much.)

Then he disappeared until my birthday weekend.

See? Weird.

So anyway, I called him back on Wednesday night, and now we're supposed to get together for a movie on Sunday. I'm hoping I can convince him to go see Snakes on a Plane with me, because (1) no one else will and (2) there is nothing better than seeing a schlocky horror flick with Teddy. We're those terrible people who sit in the back and giggle throughout. Mostly because we drink copiously beforehand.

In the end, Teddy is a terrible influence and really not very dependable, but I do love him dearly. Even if it's only twice a year.

Inanimate Things I Love #101

2006-08-18T21:42:00.000-04:00

My parents got me an iPod nano for my birthday. I love, love, love it with all my heart and all my soul. Well, no, part of my heart belongs to my gold sandals, and part of my soul belongs to my books, but the rest is in the cold, slim hands of my iPod.

Ye gods! My materialism is at an all-time high. It's really time for me to go back to work...

Conversation with my (Drunken) Brother

2006-08-13T23:30:00.000-04:00

This weekend I turned 27. I could go on and on about how I hate the thought of being in my mid- to late-twenties, but that seems silly. I have no control over my age, so why should I rebel against it? It would just be whiny.

But I haven't felt this way about my birthday since I turned 23. That was the year I really freaked out. I remember driving with T2, the guy I had just started dating (not to be confused with T1, my college boyfriend of the same name), and having what can only be described as a meltdown in the passenger seat. (To T2's credit, he talked me off a ledge and continued dating me for many months more. I think he found the whole thing kind of charming. He was great that way.)

Anyway. This year I did not freak out in any discernible way, but I have felt tailed by a certain melancoly since August began.

And then my brother, WS, called on Saturday morning. He left this message: "Hello, birthday girl! Where are you? Why aren't you picking up? I can't believe you're 27... Man, you're getting old. Okay, I'll talk to you later!"

Compare this to the message he left me last year: "Hi, birthday girl! Happy 26th... Now you're in your late twenties. All right!"

He means well. He even made a cameo appearance at the birthday party which Jess was cool enough to host-- how fantastic is she? So WS brought me a bottle of Boone's Farm ("'Cause I know you like fruity!") and Glen Ellen ("For old time's sake!"-- we used to sell it at our old summer job). He said his round of hellos, then left to "drink a couple brewskis before I head out to the city."

It was a little after 11, and two V&Ts later, when my phone rang. It was WS. "Happy birthday, birthday girl!" he shouted.

"Um...," I said. "Didn't I just see you? Why are you calling me?" (This sounds harsh, but it isn't-- WS only calls me if he needs something or if we haven't talked for a while.

"Just to say 'hi'! And to see if you and your party posse want to come out to [insert bar name here] with us!"

"My party posse?"

(In the living room, my friends hear me and start laughing.)

"Yeah!"

"Have you been drinking?"

"Well, we did a power hour before we left... And now we're walking!"

"Okay," I said. "That's good. That's better than driving, I guess."

"Yeah! And you know, if we were like eighteen and under, we'd be like a gang!"

"Um," I said.

"And if your party posse would come out, you could be like the rival gang!"

"Um," I said. "I don't think my party posse would be too into that tonight, but thanks."

"Okay!" he replied. "See you later! Bye!"

And he hung up. And that is the first conversation I have ever had with my drunken brother. Even now it makes me giggle and forget that I am indeed 27 and almost-- but not quite-- in my late twenties.

The Perils of Trashcans

2006-08-07T15:32:00.000-04:00

So I bought a new trashcan on Thursday in preparation for hosting Jess's bridal shower this weekend; in fact, I whiled away a significant amount of time in Bed, Bath, and Beyond picking up new pillows for the couch and other householdy-type things. I only do this twice a year: clean my apartment to the bare bones of shiny newness and buy a round of appropriately seasonal tablecloths, etc. This time around, I started on Thursday and didn't finish until Saturday morning. This might be because the last time I really settled in to clean my apartment from top to bottom (or should I say front door to bedroom window?) was just after Thanksgiving, when I put up all my Christmas things.

I am never going to win Housekeeper of the Year.

But back to the trashcan. So I fell in love (as much as one can love an inanimate object-- which is a lot, I guess, considering the fierce devotion I show my books) with a stainless steel cylinder trashcan at B, B, and B. It's taller than my now-dumpstered plastic one, and very sleek. It fits in my very tiny kitchen and takes up the absolutely minimum amount of space. It is, in a word, fantastic.

Q hates it.

As soon as I took it out of the box, he started barking and didn't stop for forty minutes. And he only stopped because he was so worn out from all the barking. He just collapsed in front of the door and looked at me as if I had brought a dog-eating monster home.

I told him he would just have to get over it. I even tried to force him into a confrontation with it; waving a Greenie around that night, I said, "Do you fear the trashcan as much as you love the Greenie?"

He refused to come near the kitchen. I knew then that this was bad. Rejecting a Greenie? Seriously?

Q spent the weekend with my parents (there was no way he would be allowed back to the apartment until after the shower, what with all the copious amounts of dog hair he would no doubt shed on my vaccuumed and shampooed carpet), and when he returned, it was with renewed fear of the trashcan. He barked all night.

It finally occurred to me around nine that his food and water were in the kitchen, blocked by the scary, scary trashcan. So I moved them beside the front door, and Q fell on his food like he was starving (probably from all the barking, again), and since then, he seems to have made his peace with the trashcan.

By which I mean he won't go within ten feet of it. But the barking has blessedly stopped.

Melting...

2006-08-03T16:28:00.000-04:00

I say this every summer-- but c'mon already, fall, bring on the cooler weather!

When I left for London two weeks ago, it was 100 degrees here, and I remember saying to my father as he dropped me off at the airport, "Well, at least it'll be cooler over there."

Ha! So wrong! As soon as I was on the plane (sandwiched between two very nice but very space-invading guys), the pilot announced the current time at our destination-- midnight-- and the current temperature-- 100 degrees. I turned to the guy on my left and said, "That can't be right."

Oh, but it was. England was undergoing a heat wave no one seemed particularly prepared for. Every few hours I would buy (1) a bottle of water and (2) a iced juice thing from one of the many coffee chains dotting the country (my favorite was Costa Coffee's Summer Berries). I dreamt of swimming every night. When I got to Portsmouth after two days in London, I was so excited to discover that my B&B was about a five minutes walk from the seafront. The first thing I did after unpacking was put on as little clothing as I could get away with. Then I walked down to the seafront promenade, where I seriously considered stripping down and diving into the sea even though it never crossed my mind to bring a bathing suit.

(I didn't strip down, unfortunately, because there were families enjoying their vacations everywhere. Instead, I rolled up my jeans, sat on a set of wide stairs that led into the water, and read for about two hours while the sea washed up against my feet. Mmmm, not swimming, but close enough.)

Here is what was good about the sun: I got a simply fantastic tan. (And I was finally responsible about wearing sunscreen-- thank you, Glamor, for freaking me about about skin cancer!)

Here is what I learned while I was away: The Tourist Information Center doesn't always know even the basic stuff about their city. Case in point-- I had no clue where the Bath youth hostel was, so I dragged my bag all the way to the Bath TIC and asked.

The (admittedly very nice) woman explained and said, "It's about a twenty-five minute walk."

I looked at her and said, "Uphill?"

(If you've ever been to Bath, you know why that's an extremely important question, as the city almost spirals out and up around its center.)

She replied, yes, it was uphill.

"Okay," I said, "is there a bus I can take there?"

Well, no, apparently not, because it was up around the university and in a "bad area." Fabulously encouraging!

I couldn't face a twenty-five minute uphill walk with my bag into a "bad area," especially as I had forgotten the directions as soon as the TIC woman had said them, so I did a little detective work myself. I went to the bus station and looked at all the bus schedules until I found a bus that not only went up Bathwick Hill but also had a stop right outside the hostel.

After I showered and changed (into as little as humanly possible but still decent yet again), I went back to the TIC, and they were actually very helpful in other ways, so I try not to judge them too harshly.

From London

2006-07-20T01:50:00.000-04:00

Hello from London!

Just a quick post to say it is damn hot here and that I climbed to the tippy-top of St. Paul's yesterday afternoon. The brochure said it was 523 steps, but it felt like a million, all uneven and stony and curved around the core column. Still... the view was amazing!

Today I'm off to see Salisbury and Stonehenge (and some other things). Crossing my fingers that the temperature will finally go down, or else I need to buy the biggest bottle of water in the world!

Aaaand... We're Off!

2006-07-17T22:14:00.000-04:00

My flight to Heathrow leaves in less than twenty-four hours, and I'll admit: there are still a hundred things I need to do. But what's more important, really? Blogging... or packing?

Blogging, of course.

I am ever a last-minute packer. This time, I haven't even made a list to check off as I hurriedly smash clothes and books into a suitcase. I figure that as long as I have my passport and my credit card, I should be fine. Oh, and three pairs of shoes. (Jess and I had this discussion last summer before a group of us went to New Orleans. We decided that three pairs of shoes were the ideal number; more than that is obsessive, less than that is unreasonable. And even with three pairs of shoes each, we still managed to pack for carry-on. How's that for the modern woman?)

So tomorrow I'm on my way to England for ten days. I do this every year-- just pack up and travel around the U. K. for a week or two, staying at off-the-beaten-path youth hostels and living out of my suitcase. Riding the bus, counting the sheep, hitting every tea shop within a ten-mile radius. Pretty soon I'm going to run out of places to visit, but for the moment, as long as I keep reading my British history (I'm super into Alfred the Great right now), there will always be ruins and battlefields of note for me.

This is my best memory out of all my trips over all these years:

It was 2002, and my first trek by myself (I'd been when I was 16 with my parents and again when I was 20 with a group from college-- we read Wordsworth in the hills and valleys where he wrote). I was making a circuitous route around the country; I started in London, then traveled south to Dover, then north to Bakewell (still one of my favorite places), then even further north to Aysgarth, a little out-of-the-way town I chose because it had the closest hostel to Middleham, which had a ruined castle I wanted very badly to see because of its connextions to Richard III.

The hostel was formerly a tuberculosis hospital (lovely, right?) and stood right above what really made Aysgarth famous: the Aysgarth Falls. It was also a mile downhill from the town itself... and the bus stop. So each day I was there, I would make the uphill trek past the winking barn, past the cowfields, and into the town to wait for the very reliable bus.

Well, the day before I left Aysgarth, it started to rain-- and rain-- and rain. It rained all day and all night. And in the morning, when I walked with my suitcase and my carry-all up to the town, it was still raining. But by this time, there were huge rivers running alongside the sidewalks and where there was once a cowfield was... also a river, of sorts. As I walked, cars drove by and splashed huge amounts of muddy water on me like something out of slapstick.

I finally made it to the bus stop and onto the bus. But the adventure was just beginning...

For, as we began our journey to Leyburn (where I'd change for North Allerton, where I'd train to York-- honestly, I had a lot to learn about traveling around the U. K. in those days), I watched as the water on the roads grew higher and higher. The bus driver-- a younger man than I was used to seeing driving the buses in the north-- navigated his way through them the best he could, but finally, we came to a stop in a bank of water three feet high. He leaned out his window and shouted to the cars on the other side of the bank, "You can't make it through here!"

And we turned around and drove back to Aysgarth. I wasn't exactly sure what was going to happen-- I thought perhaps he would drop us off at the bus stop and... make us wait until the water dried up a bit? Instead, the driver made a sharp right onto the road past the hostel and over the Aysgarth Falls. It went up higher, he explained to those of us along for the ride, and would likely be less flooded.

As we rode over the Falls, the water was gushing with a strength it had lacked only the day before. Another few feet and it would be over the bridge. But the driver got us over quickly and soon, we were on our less-watery way to Leyburn.

It was amazing, too-- we were only a few minutes off the bus' normal schedule. As the driver parked the bus in the square, we passengers burst into cheers for him before dispersing to our next destinations.

I've seen a lot of the world, but sitting on that bus in the middle of nowhere as the rain poured down and the waters rose around us, scared at times that the bus would tip over or float away with everyone still aboard-- that was my favorite adventure of all time.

Take Me Out...

2006-07-14T22:10:00.000-04:00

My softball double-header scheduled for tonight was cancelled for... reasons unknown. I think the field was inspected and deemed unplayable. Honestly. A month ago we played in a thunderstorm, and tonight the grass is just a little too wet? Since I'm going to miss four games while I'm overseas, I was really looking forward to this weekend's set of double-headers (we play on Sunday, too-- rescheduled games from three weeks ago when the weatherman predicted "severe storms." We got... um, clear skies all night).

I played baseball and softball until I was ten; that was the season where my batting average dropped so drastically that my parents took me to get my eyes checked. Turns out I needed glasses. And that was the end of my team sports career. (I often wonder why I let it be the end; probably because my glasses were horrible, huge pink-rimmed things, and to add insult to injury, I would have been forced to wear horrible, huge chemistry-lab-esque googles over them to play. That was enough to kill my very real dreams of being a professional ball player.)

So it's been a couple years... or fifteen. But when my brother, WS, first mentioned the idea of putting together a co-ed league softball team, I was on board immediately. My father, who coached both of us in the early days, took it upon himself to mold me back into the softball player buried beneath the years of sedentary activity (um, reading on the couch). He took me to the batting cage and played catch with me-- wow, it's almost like a sports movie montage. And I improved significantly, and now all I want to do is play softball.

WS is the team's manager/coach, and the team itself is mostly made up of people with whom he works and their significant others. We have a continually rotating roster in which WS and I are the only people who have played in every game. This is both good and bad: good when the absolutely sweet but truly terrible players can't make it, and bad when the I-played-softball-for-my-state-champion-team-in-college players can't make it. Last Friday, so few of our players showed up that we had to recruit two-thirds of our team from our fans. Really. People came to cheer us on and ended up playing for us.

It's was actually my favorite game of the season so far. Ultimately, I am forced to let go of my super-competitiveness (blame WS, whose mantra is "life's a competition") and accept that we are a ragtag bunch. The Bad News Bears of the adult softball league. Only we don't win games. Ever.

But yay! There is still one team in the league with a worse record than ours.

Okay, I can let go of some of my super-competitiveness...

Cold Shower

2006-07-14T01:06:00.000-04:00

I love a long shower. When I lived with my parents, those eighteen years before college, no one in my family could take a shower for at least an hour after I had-- I used up all the hot water once or twice a day at least. Once, when we trekked to Nebraska and got snowed in (eight family members--rather, say death!) at my uncle's one-bedroom house for what became the Worst New Year's of All Time, I took at a minimum four showers a day because it was the only place in the house where I could get away from everyone.

During the school year, I have very strict shower times. First at five in the morning. Second at eleven o'clock at night. Since this is my summer vacation and I can stay up as late as I want (honestly, I'm almost shocked at how insignificant time seems right now-- it could be five in the afternoon for all I know or care), I've taken to showering in the wee hours.

But I'm quickly discovering that one- and two-in-the-morning showers yet surprisingly little hot water. And for some reason, half the water is coming out of the faucet instead of the showerhead, so the water pressure is terrible, and I can't get all the conditioner out of my haven't-worn-it-this-long-since-high-school hair.

I like my showers hot and my water pressure hard, dammit.

(Hm, it sound slighty dirty, but it's very true.)

In Praise of Project Runway

2006-07-13T17:03:00.001-04:00

Okay, so I'm totally lame, but here it is: the highlight of my yesterday was not the library or driving my car to the library or sitting outside Starbuck's in the sun (this was of course before the storm), drinking a raspberry black iced tea, and reading about Wales.

No, the highlight was curling up on the couch at ten o'clock and turning on the season premiere of Project Runway.

I love this show above all other reality shows (yes, even The Amazing Race, which, over the course of the last two seasons, is working it way to "dead to me"). This is what got me to fight through my often unfightable Wednesdays during the second half of the school year: the prospect of an hour of Heidi Klum, Tim Gunn, and fashion designer wannabes/fame whores who have to step up to whatever wacky challege they are given that week.

I love that designers aren't voted off the island or forced to make alliances that last all of two seconds or required to eat bugs in order to remain in the competition. They just have to... be good designers. And so little of the show is dedicated to what so many reality shows these days thrive on-- the personal drama. No, the focus here is on

(1) how the designers create and implement their respective visions, like when they go to Mood, the fabric store, and pick out their materials,
(2) the runway show (my favorite part!),
(3) the judging, which seems to me an excellent critique by people who know what they're talking about, and
(4) Tim Gunn, whom I love with the passion of a thousand fiery suns.

I'll also admit that I scoffed at Project Runway's premise when I first heard it (much in the same way that I was digusted by the idea of America's Next Top Model, which I, um, now love not quite as much as I love Tim Gunn but more than I love, say, coffee. I know-- sacrilege!). But I turned it on a couple of episodes into the first season and was hooked immediately. Now it's just starting its third season, and I am so there!

Project Runway's greatness is not only felt by me, however. This past March, I was chaperoning a trip to NYC for our publications students, and at one point, we were waiting in line for the theatre we where would be seeing Rent to open. Suddenly, a group of our girls started shrieking and running up the stairs of the building we were standing in front of. Of course, everyone in line immediately stiffens, looking around (and up) suspiciously.

"What is their problem?" asked one of the other chaperones a little nervously.

I looked over, and lo and behold, the girls are jumping up and down in front of Parson's New School of Design, where all the Project Runway designers do their work for the show (and where Tim Gunn teaches, or directs, or does whatever it is his kick-ass self does). "Oh, that's the Project Runway place," I replied casually, not quite willing to admit to my fellow teachers that my nightly programming involves "Where the hell is my chiffon?" and not interviews with scholars about Shakespeare's works.

But now I feel I can declare my love in the open. So, thank you, Project Runway, for returning early to Bravo and especially for including Tim Gunn in the credits.

And a quick note about those shrieking girls-- the security guard eventually let them into the lobby of Parson's... AND gave them Austin's button. If you watch the show, you know how absolutely, totally cool that is.

Grrr and Argh

2006-07-12T18:01:00.000-04:00

Bah! I got a call from one of the assistant principals at school today-- my AP is retiring (which I've known for a while now because I've got "insider sources," i.e. a very close relative who works at HR), and the admins wanted me to sit in on the panel interviews for his position on the 26th.

But I can't! I'll be overseas on that day, and while I'm super-excited about my trip (super-duper-uber-excited, in fact), I'm disappointed to miss this opportunity. I've never sat in on an interview panel before, and it's really important that my department have a representative who can contribute. I recommended a few teachers who could take my place and who will do a great job... but I still wish it could be me.

Beyond that, however, I am having a relaxing, if not particularly proactive, day. I went to Wegman's-- I worship at the altar of Wegman's, by the way-- for some fruits (black plums!) vegetables (mashed cauliflower!). After lunch and some reading, I went to the library to pick up some books for my trip. Most of which I will have finished before I leave, but it's worth a shot.

I was surprised how crazy-crowded the library was; I could hardly find a seat, let alone a computer on which to search the online catalogue. At one point, I was walking past a desk with two computers where a group of teenagers (I just can't get away from them, even in the summer) were all hovered around one but weren't using the other, so I asked one of the girls-- because I'm polite that way-- "Are you using this, because I need to do a catalogue search."

She glanced at the desk, where she had her sunglasses and wallet piles, then at the computer, then at me, and said, "Yeah, I'm using it."

I looked at the screen. It was still on the intro page-- do you want to search for title, author, keyword, subject? "Um, okay," I replied. So not worth getting into, even though the girl turned right back to the other computer and her friends.

When I left the library half an hour later, those kids were still "using" the two computers. Must have been one advanced search they were doing.

Well, it's been thunderstorming for the last two hours, and my poor Q is sitting at my feet and shaking so hard the desk is moving. He hates the thunder, and he's come to associate it with heavy rain and heavy wind, so any usual weather leads to tail-between-the-legs, hiding-in-the-bathroom, refusing-to-go-outside. I've learned in my two years with Q that the best thing to do when he gets like this is to sit on the couch with him and rub his head. Which is what I am off to do.

A Scholarly Night Out

2006-07-11T23:23:00.000-04:00

I went to my first book club meeting tonight, and it was brilliant. I've always wanted to be in a book club (with the amount of reading I do on a weekly basis, I could join five), but the opportunity never came about until now. Well, that's not completely true. A group of teachers at school started a book club two years ago, and I was excited about it... But I never attended a meeting. Why? Because they met after school at school-- and I spend enough time at school as it is.

It's also because I've come to the conclusion that I can't be friends with the people I work with (there are some notable exceptions to that rule, but sadly, very few). I wish I could, but I'm surrounded by the in-it-for-lifers (some of whom have been teaching at my school for twenty to thirty years), and all we have to talk about is work. I envy my friends who work with people their own age and grab a happy hour together and hang out, but for the moment, that is so not possible for me. Ah, well.

One of those very lucky friends, Liz, is the one who got me into this book club in the first place (it's made up of mostly people she worked with at her old job). As I mentioned in my last post, the book we were discussing was Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, a very poignant piece about what makes us human. The characters in the story grow up at a school where they are encouraged to be creative and appreciate each other-- like normal students-- but their ultimate purpose in life, what they are being raised for-- is much darker. (I'm not going to give it away in case you haven't read it, but trust me... It's upsetting but thought-provoking.)

We met at Elephant and Castle and enjoyed cider and English pub food while we discussed the book. I ate chips with massive amounts of vinegar in preparation for my U.K. trip next week and talked way more than I expected to-- sometimes I'm more shy in theory than in practice. The conversation went in fits and starts, but overall it was interesting to hear what other people thought about some of the issue Ishiguro brings up.

And then Jess and I rode home on the metro together and discussed her upcoming move... while two men took pictures of each other posing at the pole people use to keep themselves upright when the train stops suddenly. Yeah, I don't know, either.

A New Set of Wheels

2006-07-11T11:56:00.000-04:00

I woke up at 10:30 this morning-- unusually late for me, but then again, I was up until 1:30 rereading Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go for my book club tonight. I actually finished it for the first time two weeks ago-- nearly making me late for a friend's wedding-- but I thought I should revisit so I'm really ready for some adult conversation about literature. I mean, I get to talk about books all the time with my students, but it's somehow different when you're dragging the discussion out of them with threats about their grades.

Anyway-- I walked Q (who, quite adorably, has finally realized that smacking me with his paws when he's ready to get up is useless and now curls up next to me and waits patiently until I manage to drag myself out of bed) then hopped into my car and headed to Starbuck's for my morning grande almond skim latte.

My car. >sigh<>

See, I've driven my gold '95 Saturn since I was a senior in college-- it was my mother's car, and my parents gave it to me when I started my student teaching-- and I liked it, mostly because it was paid off when I got it and all I had to worry about was repairs and gas. But it had been giving me problems for a while now (most noticably, it vibrated wildly when I went over 50 mph and stalled out when I was stopped at lights), so when it failed its state inspecton, I took it to the dealership. I thought, "Well, service costs have to be cheaper than getting a new car. Right? Right?"

Apparently, not so much. Sean the Service Guy called me on July 3, and when I asked how much it would cost, he laughed at me. No, seriously, he laughed at me.

It seemed fairly obvious at that point that I had no choice. So I picked up my poor old Saturn, took it home, and tried not to drive it for several days while I figured out what to do. For the first time in my life, I was checking out cars as I walked Q and made one slightly perilous trip to Safeway. In the end, my best friend Jess suggested I looked at Hyundai (her fiance drives one), so I did a little research and realized (1) the cars were nice and came in cool colors and (2) they were in my price range.

Sold! I hit the dealership on Friday and left a shocking two hours later (I couldn't believe how quickly they managed to sell me a car, transfer my plates, work with my bank on my loan, etc.) with a 2006 Hyundai Elantra in Tidal Wave blue. I never thought I was the kind of person who would drive a blue car, but then again, I thought I'd be driving the Saturn till I died.

Well, I'm off to the library... not really because I need to go but because I need a reason to drive!

To Blog

2006-07-10T22:27:00.000-04:00

I have never been a diary-keeper or a journal-writer. I've tried over the years-- and valiantly-- to keep records of my life, but I'm inconsistent. And I tend to misplace the spiral notebooks in which I keep my confidences. And my hand gets tired easily.

But there are no excuses with a blog, so I'm making the-- yes, valiant-- attempt once again. Mostly because I can stay up late now that it's summer.

Ah, summer.

It's currently 10:30 PM, and I have no plans to head to bed soon. During the school year, this is the point in the evening at which I begin watching the clock. Thinking, "If I shower now, I'll still have fifteen minutes to read before I really should go to sleep." I try very hard to have lights out by 11 on weeknights because I get up at 5 AM to be at school by 6 AM and ready for classes to start at 7:20 AM. (I would really rather start early and end early, but on those winter mornings when the cars are coated in a thick layer of frost and the act of breathing is like dragging an ice cube down the throat, I can see the value of starting school at 9.)

But work is behind me (for another month and a half, at least), and I can forget time and date and even the day of the week right now.

I'll be honest, though-- I still check my work e-mail. I know that I shouldn't; I know that I don't have to; but I know there will be at least one e-mail daily that will annoy the hell out of me, and I would rather take care of it ASAP than have a huge pile of them waiting for me when school starts again in the fall. Practicality beats all.

Okay, so I'd like to write more, but my dog (Q) is sitting very patiently beside my chair, every so often glancing up at me with "If she doesn't get off the computer soon, I'm peeing on the curtains" in his eyes. So Q and I are off for an evening walk in which he will fertilize every bush in the neighborhood and I will try to avoid Post-It Guy, my across-the-hall neighbor and story for another time.