Random Update

Kind of like a bullet post. With photos.

Christmas was good. If somewhat blurry.

The boy got a weight bench, among other things. Here are my menfolk, assembling it on Christmas morning.

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Yesterday, I went to the zoo. We didn’t have any school tours coming in, but I wanted to walk about and check things out. I took my camera. But not to take pictures of the animals. No, I took pictures of signs:

I’m thinking of adding some animals to my tour and wanted to remember which ones in which order so that I’d have something to say when we got there.

Of course, some of the animals were irresistible and insisted on being photographed.

Sun-bathing ocelots.

OK, so the serval wasn’t that interested in holding still to pose for a photo. But it is so rarely right at the front of its exhibit, that I had to try to get a shot.

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I’m baking bread today.

I’m not the only person who keeps a flashlight next to the bread machine, right? How else are you going to see what’s going on in there through that little window?

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Today’s footwear:

They look much less dorky without the socks.

Walk Don’t Run

Check out that groovy choreography! And the unplugged guitars!

I just walked up and down a big damned hill on Mulholland Highway. I could no more run up and down that hill than I could fly up and down it.

It’s a bit chilly/windy to be walking with a light windbreaker and bare hands. I mean, it’s 50 out but not on the shady route I walk and not with the wind blowing. So I kept switching iPod hands and tucking my frozen thumb inside my fist.

Maybe I am not too macho for gloves.

Better Spanish-speakers than I: Can a woman even be macho? “Macha?”

2009 Book Report

I finished 51 books this year. I thought it was 50, but when I went to make my list of 5 favorites, I realized I had forgotten to write one down. I don’t know if it’s a hormonal thing or an age thing, but my memory is shot full of holes lately.

Anyhoo, by popular demand (OK, two people on Facebook asked me), here’s my list of my 5 favorite reads from 2009, in the order I read them:

1. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell: Wow. I imagine that people who don’t like this book think it is gimmicky, obnoxious, show-offish. And maybe it is. It is awfully clever. But I loved it. Loved it.
2. Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope: I finished all of Trollope’s Barset books this year and am halfway done with the Pallisers. I’m thoroughly enjoying all of them. This one is the tour de force. If you haven’t read any Trollope, read the sweet The Warden first and then this one. You’ll be hooked.
3. Gilead by Marilynne Robinson: A gem. Simple and beautiful and deep.
4. Howards End by E. M. Forster: A re-read, but it blows away nearly everything else. I re-read this in anticipation of reading Zadie Smith’s On Beauty (which I liked well enough, but it didn’t make this list and it is the one I forgot to record on the big list of books I read this year). You always find something new in re-reading. This time I became quite fond of Tibby.
5. The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker: Oh, how I enjoyed this little book. An anthem to poets and procrastinators.

And now, 5 books I tossed aside in disgust or boredom or frustration:

1. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
2. Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy by Rumer Godden
3. American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House by Jon Meacham
4. House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III
5. My Name is Red by Orhan Pahmuk

Want to defend any of them? I’m willing to hear arguments. The only one that I think I ought to try again is the last one. I could have been more patient with it. One of the difficulties I had was trying to read it on my Kindle. I so often felt the need to flip back in the book in search of clarification or explanation or “huh?” That’s just not that easily done with an e-reader.

Only one of my favorites was a book published this year. Mostly because I’m still in a big hole with respect to the stacks of unread books around here. I didn’t even buy that one, at least not directly. I got it in the mail from KCRW for supporting the Bookworm show.

So, what were your favorite reads in 2009?

Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas

Here’s my dining room this year, shot from the living room. We’re all light blue & silver & white in the dining room. This is a pretty terrible picture. Oh, well.

Look. You can see me in that blue ornament, top right.

That’s probably the fourth refill on this bowl of kisses since last Sunday when I put these things out.

There are little jingle bells in this one.

Then there’s the tree in the living room. We put it up & decorated it yesterday. Hard to get a shot with the bright windows behind it.

Nothing fancy here. Just a hodgepodge of ornaments, old & new.

Don’t forget my grandmother’s Santa:

Or Santa’s boots:

And, finally:

We have two Santa hats on chairs in the living room. This one’s my favorite.

Ho! Ho! Go Bruins!

“Healthy Makeover” Blueberry Muffins

I made muffins yesterday. “Healthy Makeover” Blueberry Muffins.

Yes, it was just yesterday that I posted that I didn’t do diet-y recipe makeovers with fake ingredients. This one doesn’t have any fake ingredients. OK, sure, you can get picky and argumentative about all-purpose flour and refined sugars, but in my view fake = something with multiple multisyllabic not-recognizable-as-food ingredients. Realistic is what I’m shooting for here, not crazy hardcore dogmatic.

So-called healthy muffins tend to be either terribly dry or weirdly sticky. These are neither. They’re also not the richest, most finely-crumbed muffins you’ll ever eat. But they’re definitely pretty good.

“Healthy Makevoer” Blueberry Muffins

Makes 12

1 C oats
1 1/2 C all-purpose flour
1/2 C packed brown sugar
2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
1 lg. egg
1 C plus 2 T low-fat buttermilk
3 T canola oil
1 tsp. vanilla extract
2 C blueberries (I used thawed-out frozen ones)
1 tsp. granulated sugar (I used a packet of Sugar in the Raw)

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Spray a 12-cup muffin pan with nonstick cooking spray (I used paper liners. And I don’t much like cooking spray on my baking pans. It gets sticky. Clearly, I have a problem with sticky.)

2. Place oats in blender and blend until finely ground.

3. In large bowl, combine oats, flour, brown sugar, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. In small bowl, blend egg, buttermilk, oil and vanilla. Stir into flour mixture until flour is moistened. Fold in berries.

4. Spoon batter into muffin pan cups. Sprinkle with granulated sugar. Bake 23 to 25 minutes or until toothpick inserted in center of muffins comes out clean.

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When I clip out a recipe I want to try, I tape it or gluestick it on a piece of notebook paper and put it in a ring binder along with recipes I print out from online sources. I can’t remember or figure out from the formatting where I got this recipe. Anybody able to I.D. the magazine?

Feathering My Nest

We’ve had this conversation before. The one about how I am NEVER, EVER going on a diet of any sort ever ever ever again.

Because diets (and I have tried nearly all of them) really don’t work. I think dieting has made things a bit worse for me than they might have been had I never been on one. More about that maybe some other time.

For a while, I went wholly into anti-diet mode. Which is not to say that I lived on bacon, butter and sugar. Mmm, bacon, butter and sugar. I rejected diet-y foods and diet-y recipe makeovers, especially those that used processed fake stuff in them to make the diet food resemble the real food. I ate what I wanted without regard to calories or fat or points or any of that. I felt good, for the most part. I’m lucky to be pretty healthy despite my tendency toward apple-shapedness. I do come from large people with large appetites.

Ah, but I am not a hard-working farmer like those big blocky ancestors were. And the number on the scale goes up. And my age goes up. And my recovery from any sort of physical stress or injury takes longer. Or worse, I don’t  recover at all. And I breathe hard at the beginning of my zoo tour (I walk fast, sometimes backwards, while talking). And I have a physical exam in a couple of weeks. And there’s a lot of heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure and cancer in my rotten family tree. And in a short fifteen months, I will turn 50 at almost exactly the same time that we find out which distant college my one and only child will attend.

Yeah, the Big 5-0 will correspond with the Empty Nest.

Oof.

But this bird is not going to be moping around in her roomy nest with a box of tissues on one side and a box of chocolates on the other. (Well, maybe a little at first. I mean, come on, I’m FIFTY and ALOOOOOONE.) Nor am I going to give in to the very tempting points-counting or calorie-counting or meal-planning programs that promise what they cannot deliver.

So, what am I going to do? I don’t know for sure. Here’s what I’m thinking:

1. Walk more. There is a Hill from Hell right outside my neighborhood. I walked it a couple of Sundays ago. It’s tough, but do-able. Ok, honestly, the hill on the way back nearly killed me. I considered sitting down or lying down right there in the road.  Putting my hands out in front of me and easing myself onto the pavement. Then a 50-something woman JOGGED past. Shame is a powerful motivator.
2. Make an effort to make/buy/eat mostly real food. Nothing crazy or hardcore. I’m not giving up martinis or dessert. Or bacon. Just a genuine effort to avoid unpronounceable ingredients in packaged food. (Be quiet, Yoda. There is too a “try.”)
3. Don’t do anything I don’t love doing. If I HAVE to do something unlovable, I’ll have to find some way to love it. This will absolutely require a personality and/or attitude transplant. It’s a goal, anyway.
4. DO the things I love doing. Minimal vegging allowed. Get up, get out, get on with it.

You can hold me to it.

“Let there be some uncertainty about your departure”

1. Book I Put Down and Don’t Plan to Pick Back Up: The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. Seriously. After about the 50th “for reasons I cannot reveal now” or “I’ll tell you later,” I decided I didn’t care enough to be told. What a boring slog.
2. Book I Am Enjoying Right Now: Serena by Ron Rash. I’m about halfway through it. She is spooky bad, that woman.
3. Book I Loved So Much I Want to Marry It And Have Little Booklets: The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker. I know. Nicholson Baker. Read it anyway. It’s funny. It’s sweet. If you are a poet or like poetry or ever studied poetry, you’ll like it. Also listen to this Bookworm podcast. Maybe wait till after you read the book. There are a couple of spoilers. But it is such a lovely, quiet little interview. And Baker sings a couple of the little poems-as-songs from the book. If you haven’t read any poetry for a while, it will make you want to read poetry. If you never read any poems by Louise Bogan before (I hadn’t), it will make you curious. The title of this post is the last line of her poem “Words For Departure.”
4. Book I Am Slowly Picking My Way Through a Chapter at a Time: Don Quixote, the Edith Grossman translation. I’ve never read it. I know a couple of the songs from Man of La Mancha. Does that count?

I have finished 47 books so far in 2009. That’s one book more than a book a week. I started quite a few more books, but I don’t wait around for them to get better any more. Time’s a-wastin’ and there are piles of unread books to get through!