Eat, Read, and Be Mommy

I finished listening to David McCullough’s The Johnstown Flood on the elliptical today, and I have to say–I was completely fascinated.  How did I not learn anything about this in school (at least, that I remember)?  Over 2,200 lives lost because of human negligence in one of the greatest catastrophes in U.S. history, and I knew next to nothing about it.  Thanks to McCullough, though, that is no longer the case.  He painstakingly sets the stage and takes us through the action in a scholarly but beautifully readable way, with both poignant and comic details used to good effect throughout.  (Yes, I’m a fan of McCullough.)  This is a piece of history worth reading for anyone.

Odd fact:  today is the 129th anniversary of the event.  Talk about timing!

Oh, and before I forget, this will be my last post until June 11th; I’m taking some time off for family (yay, family!).  Happy start of summer!

Okay, I missed Sunday, but we had quite a sudden change of plans and packed up to go to my in-laws’ in a considerable hurry; we got home after 9 last night, and oh, the tired children!  The littles were up far later–as far as bedtimes go–than my big girls, but then, my big girls’ alarm was still set at their regular school time, so guess who woke up at 6:50 this morning?  Given that they had a cousin sleepover on Sunday night and a past-bedtime night the next day, this was truly a domestic tragedy.  All four of my kiddos were grouchy today, then, although the older ones managed better.  Moreover, my hubby and I stayed up too late playing games on Sunday, so we’re more tired than usual as well.  Not the ideal combination!

Anyway.  I’m actually officially tired enough to leave you without a review tonight, which means that it’s time to say goodbye and take myself off to the shower and to bed.  Sleep well, folks!

You know that meme that talks about feeling like you’re in your 20s until you’re AROUND people in their 20s–and then, well, just NO?  That’s how I feel nowadays when I read contemporary YA.  I used to be a lot closer to the target audience, but that was a few children ago, and when I do pick up a YA title, I’m often left with an awareness of my own lack of the Y part, so to speak.  On the other hand, it’s hardly the book’s fault that I sometimes forget I’m almost 40, right?  In one of those moments of forgetfulness, I entered to win a copy of Judy Sheehan’s I Woke Up Dead at the Mall, and while it sat on my shelf for a while (because doesn’t everything?), its number finally came up.

To begin with, I think we can all agree that the idea of murdered New York teens starting their afterlives at the Mall of America is a bit of a bizarre premise.  (Can’t we?!)  That bizarreness is what attracted me to the book in the first place, however, and I have to say, it didn’t disappoint.  Bizarre the book might be, but it’s bizarre in an awfully entertaining way.  The different teens are sharply individual, and while the romance aspect developed quickly but intensely, I imagine I would have been perfectly happy with it if I were actually a YA.  The mystery is not hard to figure out, but I don’t think it’s supposed to be; it’s really just the basis for Sarah’s chosen mission in her afterlife, and the execution of that mission is a good portion of the heart of the book.  The figure(s) in charge of the afterlife were most definitely the bizarre-est (I’m declaring that a word) part of the entire story, as well as my least favorite, but I don’t know that it would have bothered me so much 15-20 years ago.  With the loss of the Y comes a heightened awareness of mortality–yours and that of those you love–which gives death and the afterlife a reality it often doesn’t have when you’re younger.  That reality gives me less patience for books that stretch so very far from my own beliefs about what happens when you die–it’s just too serious a thing to me now–but again, not the book’s fault.  (There’s still an irreverent quality that might have annoyed me even as a YA, but you get what you get when you sign on for this sort of a ride.)

Overall, then, I’d say that I Woke Up Dead at the Mall is a quirky, entertaining, highly original YA novel.  YAs, take note!  I’ll just take my pills and drag my aching bones off to bed now…

Okay, I apologize for false advertising, because this is not a deep post; it’s just an entertaining observation.  You see, my hubby and I have acquired a couple of bigger puzzles this week, and he broke out the 1,500-piece of Salzburg yesterday.  Today I hit up my always-incredibly-helpful-no-matter-what-I-need neighbor to see if he had a big enough piece of scrap material to use for a puzzle board–our old one broke when one of my children tried to use it as a ramp to slide down from the couch–and he (of course!) had just the thing.

Now we’re in business.

The entertaining part is that when I finished up the dishes and came in to work on it with my hubby, one of the more popular songs from “Pippin” kept running through my head.  I’d been singing snatches of it on and off for quite a while before it hit me–I was working, LITERALLY, on a corner of the sky.

Click to listen to a song that takes me solidly back to 8th grade:  Corner of the Sky

My county library’s Goodreads Challenge for May is to listen to an audio book; that coupled with the death of my treadmill and the impossibility of reading on the elliptical pushed me to explore the possibility of listening to a book while exercising.  My hubby very sweetly put several apps on my phone to make the process easier for me, and a week or two ago I went looking for an audio book that fit my inaugural requirements.  I wanted something a) non-fiction (listening to fiction has been a struggle for me in the past), b) immediately available to borrow (so many of the books I was considering had a holds list!), and c) relatively short, since that seemed wise for a first try.  After a great deal of searching and one false start, I ended up with Stephen Rebello’s Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho.

I have to say, it was generally fascinating.  I’ve always been a sucker for ‘making of’s, and while my interests lie in the history rather than the intricacies of film making, Rebello’s story and tone were well done enough that I never got bogged down in the details.  I’m not usually a fan of horror movies, thrillers, shockers–you name it–but I do enjoy Hitchcock enough that I checked “Psycho” out of the library once upon a time and watched it.*  It’s been a while, but I remembered enough not to be lost.

As for the audio part of the audio book, well, I still prefer reading when I can, but listening when I can’t read worked well enough for me to try it again.  (I’ll keep you posted.)  In the meantime, if the topic or Hitchcock in general interest you, this is definitely a worthwhile read–I learned all kinds of interesting things.  (Did you know that a toilet had never been seen onscreen before?  Not even someone using the toilet–just the thing itself?)  You should try it–and let me know what you think.

*I have a memory of doing it the first night my sister was home from the hospital with her oldest girl, which meant she would have been on a mattress in the same room as the TV for the night; I feel worse about this now that I’ve had babies and been through postpartum myself.

I’ve been more susceptible to click bait lately–maybe it’s end-of-the-school-year brain fog?  Tonight’s last unfortunate click was about some woman’s “birthing story.”  Apparently–supposedly?–some American woman delivered her baby in a Turkish hotel.  I can’t tell you all of the details because I came to my senses and bailed partway through, but only because said woman kept using the B-word in reference to herself.

I am not okay with that.

I am an English major–I LOVE words.  If a word has a derogatory connotation–if it’s perceived as an insult when uttered by a significant portion of the population–than the word is derogatory.  Using it on yourself or people who fit the same general description as you do doesn’t make it okay, because the word has become a cruel, ugly, slur.  I have never used either the N-word OR the B-word to refer to a human being, and I never will.  I don’t care whether you are black or white, male or female.  If the best we can do for a word to refer to ourselves is appropriating a word that another group uses to show contempt for us, we have problems.

My older girlies’ dance recital is tomorrow, which means that their dress rehearsal for it was tonight.

Which means that we were at West Jordan Middle School from 4-ish to almost 7:30.

Yeah, we survived.  Thank goodness for a close Subway, and for my fabulous mother-in-law who kept my 3-year-old.  Wish us luck for tomorrow!

I checked The Van Gogh Deception out of the library for my oldest, because she loves both art and mysteries.  (AND because a friend of mine from college who is now a middle school librarian in Texas reviewed it on her blog.)  I skimmed it this past weekend before passing it on to her, and I have to say–it did not disappoint.  It was suspenseful, it was interesting, and it held me from the beginning, and I want to say more about it but I’m apparently too tired to give a brief synopsis (that requires focus) OR a detailed one (that requires staying awake long enough to do it).  Just go read it, folks–it’s got heroic kids, dastardly professional criminals, a weasel or two, and some good people adults to balance them out.  (Not to mention QR codes throughout, so that you can view the paintings being referenced.)  You can’t ask for much more in a good art mystery!

There are amazing women in my life, amazing women that have mothered me in countless different ways.  I am grateful for them–grateful beyond words.

I am also, however, a mother of children who were up in the night, and I honestly haven’t the mental focus to say more than that.

Happy Mothers Day!

I was looking for breakfast bread options the other day and came across these Oatmeal Blueberry Applesauce Muffins.  I rather think I’ve made them once before and we were on the fence about them, so I opted to change up the recipe a bit and see what happened.

My major change?  Well, a) most of my family doesn’t love blueberries, and b) guess what we didn’t actually have, anyway?  Frozen strawberries we had, however, and so I diced up about the right amount of those and then threw in a mashed banana to balance out the sweetness, add some more fruit, and make a small inroad on the mountain of bananas currently residing in my freezer.  I used regular yogurt instead of Greek, since it’s what I keep on hand, and then I loaded them into a muffin tin and got the surprise of my life–well, at least my day.  I’d already groused on the phone to my sister about recipes that lie and say they’ll make 12 muffins when the amount of flour/oats clearly indicates more; I owe that blogger an apology, however, because the batter filled 12 muffin cups nicely, and it baked just as nicely into 12 average-sized muffins.  (I did fill each cup about to the top, because it wasn’t the sort of batter that was going to rise all that much.)  I quite liked them, as did several of my children, which means they’ll likely be happening again.  (Freezing them for summer breakfast or lunch options seriously appeals.)  Next time you’re wanting to aim for something a bit healthier, give them a try!