by Tamora Pierce
ONE LINE SUMMARY: This series of four books covers Keladry’s progress from female page to lady knight.
I admit that when I read the first Tortall series by Pierce, the Song of the Lioness series, I couldn’t understand how in the world Pierce was so popular and had so many books published. The writing, frankly, was quite terrible.
I heard from someone that the writing got better, though, so I pushed my way through all four of the books in that series. I moved on from there to the Immortals quartet, and was pleasantly surprised to find myself engrossed in the plot. The only issue I had was with the last book in that series, which was boring.
Now I’ve just finished the Protector of the Small series, and I quite enjoyed them (other than the animal death..ugh). I couldn’t put the books down, and as soon as I finished one of the books, I moved right on to the next one. Pierce’s writing is so much improved that although I like to read books in order and like my series to be complete, I would still suggest that anyone picking up a book by this author skip the entire Song of the Lioness series.
Merry Two-Days-After-Christmas and Happy Day-After-Birthday to Chris!
Poor Chris always gets gypped when it comes to his birthday, because it just disappears into all the holiday hoopla. Both my sister and Chris’s sister had babies in December, and frankly, if I were planning to get pregnant, I’d count out the weeks and make damned sure that the birth fell nowhere near the overwhelming quicksand of anxiety and stress that is Christmas.
Christmas has become less and less important to me as I get older. I wasn’t raised to be religious, so the birth of Christ is less important to me than the birth of Christopher. And I’ve never been particularly thoughtful or skilled at selecting nice gifts for people — to me, food is everything, and it’s inconceivable to me that there can be a better present for anyone than something scrumptiously edible. Contrary to my belief, however, the average person simply does not want a potato product as a tiding of comfort and joy.
Read More »
Because I’m very sensitive to medication, I’ve resigned myself to knowing that if there’s a weird side effect that can happen from a drug, I’ll probably have it. In the past, I’ve had side effects that ranged from allergic rashes, increased thirst, and nasty tastes in my mouth for an hour after taking each pill, to a very strange urinary tract infection and fever that lasted exactly one day until the medicine had gone out of my system.
Recently, though, I’ve started taking a new drug which has a side effect I hadn’t previously experienced. This medicine makes me stupid.
Read More »
I am now properly an aunt.
I became an aunt-in-law on December 8th when Chris’s sister had little baby Ryan, and now I am a blood aunt. Can I call myself a blood aunt, or does it sound too much like Chris is a crip uncle? I wonder how many of you will get that joke.
My younger sister gave birth to a boy earlier tonight. I won’t get to see him for a while because they’re in California, but according to my mother, he is “very quiet with opened eyes.”
At the time of the birth, my mother and my sister’s husband were in the delivery room with my sister. My father was in the waiting area outside where he called my other sister and left a message for her about the birth.
His message on her answering machine, in its entirety, was, “Baby out.”
When I talked to my father, he said he didn’t know much because he hadn’t seen the baby or gotten to talk to anyone in the delivery room yet. He said he just heard a baby crying at some point. I asked him if he was sure the crying baby belonged to my sister or if it might be some random baby crying from elsewhere in the hospital, because by then the word had gotten out to the extended family that my sister’s baby had been born, and I became worried that my father was accidentally announcing someone else’s birth; a person who I’m sure is very nice but nevertheless, one we don’t particularly care about just now.
Before my father could elaborate on the crying baby, a flurry of noise occurred and he said “hold on.” He then proceeded to hang up on me.
Thankfully, my mother called later with more information, and the baby does indeed belong to my sister. Yippee!
by David A. Karp
ONE LINE SUMMARY: Karp, a professor at Boston College, compiles quotes from people about taking anti-depressants.
As someone who has often wondered, “is it me or my meds?,” I thought this book would be pretty interesting. And it is, but not in the way I expected. I was expecting, well, some kind of answer. A method, if you will, of determining whether it is indeed you or your medicine. That was obviously too much to expect.
If you go into this book without expectations about the title, you will get more out of it. The book is useful in that it lets you know that other people feel the way you do about medication. It probably should have just been called, “Living With Anti-Depressants.”
I’m listening to “Missing You” by John Waite, and if I remember correctly, the video had some asian woman running around. What the hell was that all about, anyway?
A successful library outing was made today!
Not only do I have three of the 80s CDs I requested, but I also picked up a Go-Go’s compilation, the next quartet of Tortall books by Tamora Pierce (Protector of the Small series), an Anthony Bourdain book, the most recent John Scalzi (also requested, as my library is loath to purchase science fiction books for reasons that are yet unknown), and Murderball.
Normally I would not check out a movie with the holidays coming up, and especially since we just whipped through all of Season 2 of Entourage in the last two days, but this is Murderball! A movie I really want to see, and only 88 minutes long! Score!
Also, the one guy who works at the circulation desk, who I had already pegged as being the lowest on my list of Staff Members Rated In Order of Being Most Likely To Take My Books From the Return Bin And Place Them Directly Onto The Reshelving Cart Without Checking Them In (I’m talking to you, Little Old White-Haired Lady, who has done this TWICE now), remembered me. I don’t see him that often, but he said, “I think we have at least one item on hold for you” before he even saw my library card, and went to look on the shelf without asking my name. I have friends I have known for twenty years who still cannot spell my last name.
And in other news, I still hate my hair. Even wearing a headband and training the bangs to stand straight up on their own is not making me like the hair more.
My hair was getting too long in back, so I decided that instead of trimming my bangs myself, I would just pay for a haircut and get the bangs taken care of at the same time. As my father would have noted, why cut my bangs myself if I can get it included for free with a regular haircut? This is a good example of how I often make decisions based on my cheap nature, and why I often end up regretting my decisions.
Typically I look forward to getting my hair cut with all the enthusiasm I have for picking up dog poo. Now that I think about it, maybe even with a little less enthusiasm. Dog poo, after all, does not result in your in-laws running up to you and exclaiming, “Oh, don’t you just look like a little Chinese girl!”
Today I decided to go to a hair salon in Waltham that I had visited once before during the pre-bangs months, which will soon prove to be an important point in this story. The hair salon was cheap and quick, and I figured that an adequate haircut was all I was looking for, anyway.
As soon as I arrived, I was seated at a stylist’s station. I attempted to make small talk (”Wow, is it always so crowded in the parking lot?” and “How many stylists work here?”). These attempts were not well received (”Yes” and “Four”), so I shut up except to point out how short I wanted the back of my hair.
The stylist decreed that the length I had chosen would “look stupid,” so she cut the length she wanted in back. That was fine with me. Even though the name of the salon was Stylecuts, I knew that for $13.95, I shouldn’t expect style. A cut was good enough, and at least the back of my hair was shorter and not visibly crooked. Also, she had only taken 10 minutes out of my life so far.
When it came time for the bangs, she opted to allow me an opinion.
“How short do you want the bangs?” she said.
“No shorter than the bottom of my eyebrows,” I said.
“So not very short,” she said. “How much do you want taken off?”
I gestured with my fingers, indicating a tiny amount no greater than 1/4 of an inch. “Not much,” I said.
She cut. I winced. Without looking, I could tell she had cut it a bit shorter than I wanted. Maybe it would look okay when she finished, though.
She snipped rapidly away, and then stood back to admire her work.
In the mirror, I saw that the right side of my bangs were at least 3/4 of an inch higher than the left side, and both sides were above my eyebrows.
“Um,” I said. “They seem crooked.” Having been raised to not criticize strangers in public, I added politely, “Or maybe my eyebrows are crooked.”
The hair stylist seemed offended by this. “No, the bangs aren’t crooked,” she said. “Look — ” and here she flattened the right side of my bangs with her hand — “this is the same length as the other side. But you have a cowlick here.”
“So that makes it crooked?” I said.
She nodded. “Yes, I cut it straight. There’s nothing you can do about that.”
She looked in the mirror. I looked in the mirror. I was willing to accept that I had a cowlick. But if I understood her correctly, she meant that I had to go around for the rest of my life with bangs that looked crooked, because there was “nothing” I could do about that.
I wanted to scream at her and explain a few things. Had she not been holding a sharp pair of scissors, this is what I would have said:
“There IS something you can do. You know what? When people want their hair cut straight, they usually don’t care if the actual, individual pieces of hair are the same length. They just want it to look straight. So there IS something you can do, you can cut my hair CROOKED next time so it looks STRAIGHT!!!”
This would most likely have been followed by some curse words.
But she was still wielding the scissors, and I was afraid of what further damage she might inflict if I asked her to correct the mistake by, say, gluing on some scrap pieces of hair onto my head. So I just got up, paid, even tipped, and drove home.
As I drove, I glanced into my rearview mirror. I couldn’t understand how “no shorter than the bottom of my eyebrows” had translated into being high above my eyebrows, or how I had ended up with bangs that sloped awkwardly from one side up to the other, making me look permanently drunk and confused.
Maybe I just didn’t know how to talk to people. Maybe, at the next haircut, I would bring my laptop. And type out all the instructions, as well as any comments I had for the hair stylists post-cut. I could diagram where they’d gone wrong, how they might have saved the play even then, and at what juncture they had hit the point of no return.
In the meantime, I suppose I have to wear a sweatband over my bangs. Then everyone can see that the bangs are really cut straight, and it’s just my hair that refuses to cooperate.
Usually when Chris talks in his sleep, he’s unnaturally coherent. I can hear every word he says, clear as a bell, even if they don’t actually make sense the way he’s put them together. And when I try to figure out what he means by asking him follow-up questions, he becomes very critical of my apparent lack of intelligence.
So I’ve learned to just talk to him during those times as though everything he says is perfectly logical. “Yes, dear, I think it must be the Russians, too.”
On occasion, however, Chris will mumble and make noises that sound like he’s panicking and having an awful nightmare. Last night was one of those times, and after hearing him moan and whisper, I shook him awake.
Some of the more regular readers of this blog may suspect that I did so only for my own amusement, but the truth is that sometimes I have terrible dreams; the kind of dreams that make me hope someone will wake me up soon. So I wanted to get him out of whatever was bothering him.
“Are you having a bad dream?” I said.
He turned over slowly. “Yeah, I was a ghost chasing my murderers.”
Before I could think, I said, “Again?”
Not, “It’s okay, it was just a bad dream.” Not, “Tell me more about it.” And not even, “I think you have unresolved feelings about your parents.”
Instead, my first instinct as a wife and partner was to be disgruntled because he had already been a ghost and chased his murderers for revenge on previous nights. Frankly, I’m surprised I didn’t just ask him to add a soundtrack and some clowns next time.
« Previous Entries