Many years ago, I took several Microsoft Office classes. The job I held at that time required that I assist medical students with Word and Powerpoint, so my boss sent me to Word, Powerpoint, and Excel (so I could help her with budgets) classes through a company called Catapult. Before that time, I had only used WordPerfect in college. This was back in the days when Macs were easy to use, and PCs were big, green-type monstrosities that required you to know DOS. I wasn’t too incompetent with computers because I used them for writing papers and emailing, but the World Wide Web barely existed then. Can you imagine such a time? (Young people everywhere exclaim, “Well, what did you DO all day at work, then?”)
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by Stefan Fatsis
ONE LINE SUMMARY: The author sets out to become an expert-level Scrabble player, and takes us behind the scenes at various Scrabble tournaments.
Who knew that Scrabble could be so complicated and fascinating? I admit that the last time I played Scrabble, Chris and I probably had a total of ten words on the board before we ran out of space. The tournament players described in Fatsis’s book would probably fall off their chairs laughing if they saw our board. Fatsis presents a nice mix of his personal struggle to improve at Scrabble (involving memorizing a vast selection of words), the big players in Scrabble tournaments, and the history behind Scrabble.
Some of the Scrabble techniques and explanations get a little too mathematical and involved, and I had to skim those sections. But overall, the book was fascinating.
- When you begin to feel cold in your house, do you:
- Turn up the heat
- Put on your thickest sweatshirt
- Cover yourself in chihuahuas
- Vacuum the house to warm yourself up
- When you realize that you’ve exceeded your flexible medical spending account for the year, you:
- Write it off as a loss and resolve to estimate better next year
- Submit your excess medicals anyway and hope for accidental reimbursement
- Reschedule your appointments for next year — if it’s going to kill you, it will probably take a few months
- “Accidentally” forget to take some of the pills to make them last longer
- You have invited all your in-laws to Thanksgiving at your house, and suddenly notice you only have 7 or 8 pieces of silverware, when you have a total attendence of 10. You:
- Buy more sets of matching silverware
- Borrow old silverware from your parents’ house — hey, they’re in California and won’t notice
- Consider asking the in-laws to BYOS (bring your own…)
- Suggest using some of the plastic spoons from your giant Costco pack
- You notice that your keyboard is covered in bread crumbs, dog hair, and dust. The best way to clean it is to:
- Use one of those cans of compressed air to blow the stuff out
- Ask your husband to use one of those cans of compressed air so you don’t have to see the expensive air being “wasted”
- Use a chihuahua to lick out any edible bits
- Get a paper clip and laboriously pick out all the crumbs, hair, and dust
If you have answered anything other than A, then congratulations! You are a cheap bastard!
If you have answered mostly A, then please call me. I need to borrow some silverware.
by P.J. Tracy
ONE LINE SUMMARY: When two policeman are found dead in snowmen, Detectives Magozzi and Rolseth must investigate.
This is the third “Monkeewrench” book from the mother-daughter writing team of P.J. Tracy, and the weakest yet. Though this book only peripherally involves the Monkeewrench team, the plot is involved and engrossing. However, where it falls flat is in the conclusion. Admittedly, in real life, not every mystery gets wrapped up neatly. But in this particular case, I feel like the authors hesitated from making a clear-cut ending because they didn’t want to choose a side about wrong and right, and that, I felt, was wussing out.
You can still demonstrate the gray areas of a choice, while still making a choice, and I would have enjoyed this book as much as the previous two had it had a stronger conclusion. As it is, the book feels like it just stopped, rather than ended.
by Andrew Vachss
ONE LINE SUMMARY: Burke tracks down a woman whom he rescued years earlier and returned to her parents.
I’ve been a fan of the Burke books for some time now, but I was a bit disappointed in this book. I didn’t have a hard time finishing it, but once I was done, I realized that nothing much really happened. The plot is kind of lame, and all of the regular characters seem one-dimensional. Yes, Burke is still upset over the loss of his dog. Michelle used to be a man. Clarence is a young guy in need of instruction from the Prof. Blah, blah, blah. It’s about time for them all to move forward and develop more nuanced personalities.
by Diane Duane
ONE LINE SUMMARY (Wizard’s Holiday): Nita and Kit go on an exchange program that requires them to help a planet’s civilization choose between their current way of life and a more uncertain one, while Dairine hosts three aliens and saves Earth.
ONE LINE SUMMARY (Wizards At War): Nita, Kit, Dairine, the three visiting aliens, and Kit’s sister help defeat the Lone One and discover a new Power, the bright side of the Lone one, while all older wizards lose their power.
I am reviewing these two books together because Wizards At War follows so closely after Wizard’s Holiday and seems more like a continuation of the same story, than a new chapter in the Young Wizards series. These, the 7th and 8th books of the series, are the best ones so far, and I’m glad to see that it sounds like Duane will be continuing the series.
The more I see pictures of Tom Cruise’s daughter, the more I believe she is the human equivalent of Mr. Winkle. There’s just something creepily fixed about her face.
Two guys are here installing the new carpet on the stairs, which Stanley has requested that we spend $2,000 on because he runs up the stairs so fast that he slips on them all the time. Horror, you might say, is the feeling you experience when you hear the paws thundering up the stairs, a skittering as he slips, and then the slap-slap of a little dog chest slamming into a step on his way down.
Now I’m in the dog bedroom with the dogs. The door is closed, but before I went in here, I told the carpet guys that they could just knock on the door if they needed anything, because I had to stay here to keep the dogs quiet.
Well, one of them knocked on the door a while ago, and said someone was at the door to see me. I went downstairs and found my realtor, who was removing the supra lock from our door that they used to let other realtors in to see our house. She’d been meaning to pick it up for a while, ever since we took the house off the market a month ago, but hadn’t had time until today.
While I was chatting with her, I suddenly heard our microwave go off. I glanced at it, wondering if I’d somehow turned on a timer or something, and then went back to talking to our realtor. Gradually, a smell of clam chowder wafted over me, and now I knew one of the carpet guys had used the microwave, because even though I might not remember setting a timer, I would certainly have remembered having food that I could reheat.
When I said goodbye to the realtor, and started back toward the stairs, the younger carpet guy (who looked like a high schooler) turned to me and mumbled something. He either asked if it was okay to use the microwave or asked if it was okay that he had used the microwave. I said, “Sure, that’s fine,” because what else could I say? I mean, he had already used it!
Back in the dog prison, I heard the nailing outside stop. There was silence for a few minutes. As of now, the carpet people had been in my house all of 15 minutes. I began to suspect that the carpet people were having their lunch in my house.
I walked out of the dog room and downstairs, where I picked up a book I didn’t need and went back upstairs. What I saw on this trip was the young doofus, drinking and apparently just finishing his lunch, while he sat in the front entrance of our house. The other carpet guy was sitting on the front steps eating.
Now, I understand that people who are out all day on this kind of work don’t have access to kitchens and bathrooms. But the carpet guy who came a week ago to install the lower stair carpets had asked Chris, very politely, to use the bathroom — and before he used it.
I probably would have said it was fine to use my microwave, had they asked, but now that they’ve used it without asking, I feel like my personal space has been violated. Which of course means that now I have to go downstairs and sit in the living room and pretend I’m not keeping an eye on them, which is what I’m actually doing.
Maybe this kind of behavior is normal and I’m just being picky. But my feeling is, if you need to have lunch, let me know you’re going to be taking a break. And if you’ll need a break fifteen minutes after arriving at my house, then take the break first. Eat your lunches, then start the work. And ask me before using any of my personal stuff, including the bathrooms.
While I typed on the computer, Chris was sitting on the couch watching football with Paco and Stanley buried under a blanket on his lap.
Mina trotted over and looked at me.
“You want to come up?” I asked her. She didn’t decline, so I picked her up and put her on my lap. Soon, however, she began to squirm, so I put her back on the ground. I assumed she had joined Chris on the couch.
A few minutes later, Chris said, “Ugh!! One of the dogs is farting!”
This is a relatively common occurrence, so I let what he’d said pass without comment.
But then Chris said, “I can still smell it! Who’s farting? Is it you, Stanley?”
This was odd. Chris’s nose is much worse than mine, and often he cannot smell odors that I complain about.
I finished what I was doing on the computer and started walking over to Chris to get my book. Then I saw it.
Squarely in the middle of the carpet, about a foot away from the edge of Chris’s chair, was a giant pile of dog poo.
“ARGH!” I screamed. “Someone pooped on the carpet! Didn’t you see it?”
“No!” Chris said. “I was sitting here the whole time and I can’t see the carpet from here. And none of the dogs have moved from my lap.”
I knew what that meant. Slowly, I turned my head until I saw her — Daddy’s precious little girl, the baby we’d just been doting on a short fifteen minutes ago, commenting on how well-behaved and cute she was — there she was, Miss de Mina, sitting on her puff ball and carefully looking away from my gaze.
“BEAN!” I yelled. “You bad girl!”
She steadfastly ignored me.
“I thought she was on your lap,” Chris cried.
“No, she wanted to get down.”
“I guess we know why.”
“Open the window,” I directed Chris, while I ran for toilet paper. I scooped up the poo, flushed it, and came back with carpet cleaner.
“Oh, OH, OH!” I screamed, as the poo fumes hit me, even as I furiously sprayed the carpet. “It stinks! How does she have so much poo in her? It’s ENORMOUS.”
“She must have been saving it,” Chris said grimly. “They don’t like to go outside when it rains.”
I finished spraying the carpet, and opened the door to the garage. “Let’s go outside,” I commanded the dogs.
I picked up Mina and Paco and deposited both of them outside. When I ran back to drive Stanley outside, Mina walked into the garage without doing anything outside.
I carried her out again. “Hurry up,” I exhorted them.
The boys were confused. One minute they’d been comfortably sleeping on Chris’s lap, and the next they were being accused of vile farts and getting tossed outside in the cold. Oh well, since they were there, they might as well use the facilities.
“Both boys peed,” I reported to Chris when we came back inside. “Mina did nothing.”
Inside, the poo smell was still strong, despite the cold air coming in from the window.
“I think we have to get rid of the carpet,” I said to Chris, holding my nose.
“All right,” he said. “Let me change first.”
While he changed his clothes, I moved everything off the carpet and to the side of the room. The dog stairs that led to the couch, the coffee table in the middle of the carpet, the water dish. By now, Mina knew she had done something wrong.
Chris and I rolled up the carpet and put it in the garage to wait until trash day. When we came back into the family room, Mina was sitting quietly on her dog stairs to nowhere, perched on the top step. She seemed to be hoping that if she just waited long enough, she’d be able to climb to another, better place; a place where she’d be allowed to make enormous poos and immediately disown them.
Twenty minutes later, the poo smell began to clear, but the memory still lingered.
“I can’t believe,” Chris said, “that Mina let out that huge, stinking, slimy poo. It was ENORMOUS! It had incredible linger! Can you still smell it?”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“Well, can you close the window when you get up? Mina’s still shaking. I think she was traumatized by the poo.”
by Jancee Dunn
ONE LINE SUMMARY: This memoir accounts Dunn’s journey from New Jersey to becoming a writer for Rolling Stone Magazine.
If you took out all of Dunn’s anecdotes about her celebrity interviews, this would still be a hilarious, enjoyable book similar to Haven Kimmel’s A Girl Named Zippy. Surprisingly, Dunn’s life is equally as entertaining as the celebrity sections, and I’d be interested in reading more about her, with or without the famous people.