Weekly recap 6/25/18

Hooooooooooooooooooo boy, has it been a week, amiright???

I'm going to start this new feature on the blog, tracking my week and accounting for my time. I'm hoping it'll keep me accountable for all the things I do, need to do, and want to do, and it'll give you a glimpse into my days.

This week has been unusual, for so many reasons, least of all, it was my son's birthday week (16!!! I'm not sure how that's possible because I just graduated high school myself like ten seconds ago, so there must be some timewarp nonsense going on around here), so a lot of my normal activities were subverted by that. But let's start, shall we?

MONDAY
I started out the day with errands and birthday shopping, only to receive a text from my mother, inviting us over after my son finished with his summer school class. RECORD SCRATCH. So off we went to spend the rest of the day with her. We had a wonderful time, and while my daughter splashed in my mom's blow-up pool, I spent three hours working on my grandmother's cross-stitch table runner. :)

TUESDAY
Birthday shopping. I'm usually much more ahead of the game than I was this year, but we've had a lot going on, so it fell to the wayside. I did go to the town to the south of us to visit a gaming store for my son, who has gotten into Dungeons and Dragons with his friends, so that was an adventure! By the time we got home, it was time to start dinner. Long day there!

WEDNESDAY
I spent the day emailing my Congresscritter (twice!) and arguing with people online that it's not difficult to treat human beings with dignity and kindness (apparently, this is very, very difficult and treating others like garbage is exactly what Jesus taught? I must have missed that one in the years upon years of religious education I had growing up). I don't usually spend as much time online as I did this day, but there was so much going on that I felt the responsibility to pay attention. I did finish by memorizing the last bits of French vocabulary from Chapter 16 of the first Harry Potter with my Anki app, so there's that.

THURSDAY
We went for groceries (three stores! Two or three is normal for me. They're all within about five miles of each other, so the savings we get from visiting so many stores is worth it). When we got to store #2, an employee said, "Oh, you're here too early! Curious George won't be here until 10!" Say what now??? Turns out people from our local PBS station, along with Curious George, were making an appearance at that store; I'd had no idea. So we hit up store #3, then came back to #2 for...

this guy! My daughter wasn't hugely excited by it, to be honest. When she saw him, she shrieked (loudly), "That thing is REAL!!!" She begrudgingly agreed to the photo op, but just barely. She was a lot happier with the wife-and-husband musical duo that performed prior to George. I emailed my Congresscritter again, made dinner, and spent the evening finishing a book from my Goodreads list.

FRIDAY
My daughter and I started off the day with a trip to Target, from which we almost didn't return home due to nearly every street leading to our house was flooded due to a massive downpour and the sewers that just couldn't keep up. What should have taken 10 minutes ended up taking about 40, and then I had to put towels down in the basement where we get water every time it rains like that. UGH. I wrapped all my son's birthday gifts and then spent most of the rest of the day with him and got a little writing done that night.

SATURDAY
Daughter's gymnastics class meets on Saturday mornings, so in between watching her, I read a book from my shelves (I'm not loving it, but I'm almost done, so I'll finish). I got more writing done- between Friday and Saturday, I hit nearly a thousand words, which is a pretty great re-entry into writing after not being able to (due to my computer having died back in the winter) for so long. I cleaned for the party, which included washing those waterlogged towels in the basement, baked two cakes, and practice the piano for a bit (FINALLY!).

SUNDAY
This was a DAY. I ran to two stores picking up things for the party (seriously, sending a vegetarian to pick out burgers and hot dogs for a barbecue is a terrible idea! Where is this stuff? What do I buy? I was laughing hysterically at my incompetence in this area and had the cashier laughing with/at me as well), then came home and frosted the cakes.

I mean...not well. Pinterest-worthy, they are not, but they were eaten all the same!

After that, I mowed our lawn. It was HOT, and I had to stop twice to rest and cool off, because I was starting to feel like passing out. 

But look what I discovered when I was mowing! TOMATO BABIES!!!

After showering and eating a small lunch, I finished cleaning and doing party prep, and then it was time for my son's birthday party. We had a house full of family and teenage friends, and it was a great day. :)

So here's to hoping that next week will be more productive! How did your week go?

Book review: A Night Divided by Jennifer A. Nielsen

"Have you read A Night Divided by Jennifer A. Nielsen?" a friend said recently in an online book discussion group. "It's this really great middle grade novel about life behind the Berlin Wall." Well. That's something I didn't know much about, and so onto my Goodreads list it went. Turns out my local library had it, and thus I grabbed it to read while I wait for my interlibrary loans to come in.

Gerta is a young German girl whose family is becoming more and more wary of the tense political atmosphere around them. After much discussion, her mother finally agrees with her politically active father that it's time to move, and he and Gerta's brother Dominic head out on a two day trip into Western Germany to secure an apartment and a job. In an amazing stroke of bad luck, the border is closed overnight, leaving Papa and Dominic trapped in the West, and Gerta, her brother Fritz, and Mama trapped in the East, the side controlled by the Soviets.

As Gerta grows, life becomes as gray as the wall. Food shortages are common, books are censored or banned, music from the West (like the Beatles) is forbidden. The Stasi (the brutal East German police force; for more info, check out Wikipedia's article) keep their guns trained on the citizens, and neighbors and friends are quick to inform on each other in order to keep the heat off their own backs. Teachers instruct students on how lucky they are to live in such a wonderful Communist country and how dastardly the West is, how immoral and full of misery. But if East Germany is so wonderful, Gerta ponders, why must they force their citizens to stay there upon pain of death?

Having spotted her father and brother at an observation point on the Western side of the wall, Gerta interprets his dance movements, which used to accompany a song about farming that he sang to her as a child, as him asking her to dig. But where? It takes a secret note passed on by a friend she's no longer sure she can trust to help her locate the site, and with a borrowed shovel, Gerta begins digging her way to freedom.

The best kind of books leave you unaware of the physical act of reading, and Nielsen's novel is one of those, easily forming pictures of gray skies, state-sponsored fear, and the dirt-streaked yet hopeful face of a young girl in the reader's mind. Gerta is a wonderfully strong character, never losing her drive or resolve despite her country's determination to quash all indications of individuality. Her fear of losing her brother to the Stasi, her sadness over the end of a lifelong friendship with Anna, her longing to be reunited with her father and brother, every emotion leaps off the page and turns Gerta's plight into one that could easily be our own today, if we're not more careful.

This is a superb book, one I hope will be on the reading lists of middle schools and junior highs around the country. I knew very, very little about the divide between Western and Eastern Germany before this; I learned a little in grade school, and I vaguely (very vaguely) remember the Berlin Wall coming down, but past that, my history education pretty much stopped once World War II ended. Modern history is definitely something I need to focus on more, and this was a fantastic introduction, both in that it was a fabulously well-written story, and that it drove me to want to learn more.

Are there historical time periods you've realized you don't know much about?

Book review: A 1000 Mile Walk on the Beach by Loreen Niewenhuis

Imagine a walk on the beach. The sand under your feet, the sun shining ahead, the call of birds in the distance, a power plant to your right, the strong smell of...is that some sort of solvent? And is that a half-stripped deer carcass over there? And what's all this trash doing here???

Equipped with a deep love of Lake Michigan (pictured above), author Loreen Niewenhuis decided to undertake a walk on its beaches- a long walk, all the way around. Clocking 1,019 miles at journey's end, Niewenhuis began at Chicago's Navy Pier, touring the lake counterclockwise, through towns, industrial areas, tourist havens, and deep forests with no signs of human life. She walked through various types of weather; occasionally she walked with friends and family, but mostly, she walked alone, allowing for deep contemplation of the lake, humanity and its relationship to nature, and herself.

This story is beautifully written, one of goal setting and determination, a love letter to the lake and a plea to the people who live on it and make the laws controlling it. Niewenhuis wonders over the natural beauty of the lake and the diversity of the wildlife that flock to it, but laments the way it's been not just changed, but devastated over the years. Industry has polluted Lake Michigan in shocking, terrifying ways, and invasive species such as zebra mussels and round goby have severely damaged the biodiversity of the fish population (and many of the remaining fish found in the lake are unsafe to eat). Time and again, she mourns what the lake could be, should be, if only humans would learn to live with it, instead of demanding that the lake serve us.

I'd been aware of some of the problems of the lake, but not to this extent. I live close enough to Lake Michigan that my drinking water comes from there (the water in the middle of the Lake is known to be potable; Niewenhuis drank filtered lake water on her journey, which, after reading her tales of all the chemical spills, and chemical and waste dumping that has taken place in the lake, I consider that pretty brave!), and I was extremely dismayed to read about how carelessly the lake has been treated practically since the beginning of white settlement (the native population lived more in harmony with the world around them). "I began to formulate the idea that the most invasive species of all is probably man," Niewenhuis says, and she's not wrong.

There's a lot to admire about Niewenhuis's journey, her love of the lake, and her persistence (she was back out there just days after being hospitalized for gallbladder issues so severe, her pancreas was affected). Loreen Niewenhuis is an amazing example of not only finishing what one starts, but also delving deeply into a personal passion. She's continued her walks, strolling the shores of all five Great Lakes and exploring the Great Lakes islands. I'm inspired by her drive, her follow-through, and her passion for the natural world, and I'm definitely looking forward to reading more about her 1,000 mile walks.

And I'll be keeping a closer eye on the news regarding the health of Lake Michigan, and demanding that my representatives act as better stewards of this amazing resource. You should too.

Because this little girl, and all the other girls and boys out there deserve a clean, healthy lake.


(All photos come from our trip last summer to Traverse City and the surrounding areas.) 

Learning to play piano...again.

My love of music really started when I was 7. My mother had an organ and would play it occasionally, and she allowed me to tinker around on it. In one of her monthly organ music magazines (I swear this was a thing!), she had received what I remember her calling a 'skeleton,' a heavy paper...thing...that you place over the piano keys, which tells you the name of the note and what it looks like on the music staff. Although she didn't need this, as she'd taken music lessons as a kid, I used the crap out of that thing and taught myself how to play a one-handed version of Silent Night. (This also came in handy in plunking out the same song on my cousin's set of bells that he played for band, after he had bet me that I couldn't play a song on them. Ha!)

I continued plunking around on her organ until my parents got me a smaller sized keyboard of my own when I was twelve, which was about the same time I discovered my aunt's old piano lesson books at my grandmother's house. I really wanted lessons, but this was the early 90's and it was a little harder to find people who taught back then, so I just started teaching myself. Finally, after I'd whipped through all the books, my parents found a teacher and I began to learn just how much I didn't know.

I was 13 when I started, 16 when I stopped due to parental divorce and difficulty in getting to the lessons. I wasn't the best piano player in the world, but I've been the pianist at a family member's wedding and I've accompanied several people for public performances. But as an adult, playing the piano really fell by the wayside. My eighty-eight key keyboard never really had its own space, so it lived in the closet and became a hassle to pull out, and once my daughter arrived, forget trying to play. When my mother bought a new piano, I inherited the old one, and we have video of my daughter yanking my hands off the keys over and over again so she can smash them with her own tiny hands! Adorable and hilarious, but what it meant was that even though I had access to a piano, I still couldn't play.

Now that she's a little bit older, I started wondering if maybe it was time to get back into it. "What if I practiced a little every day?" I wondered. "Nothing crazy, just maybe at least fifteen minutes... How far could that get me?" I used to have quite a few songs memorized, so that when I came across a piano, I could sit down and whip one out, but that was all years ago, and those memories have all been wiped out and replaced by things like what hours the local pharmacy is open, and what my daughter's current shoe size is, and what time my son needs to be picked up from his late choir practice. You know, life stuff. ;)

So I decided that if I were to get back into playing, I would need some goals in mind. One piece at a time. Practice it daily, play it until I can play it through with minimal mistakes. Learn a few pieces by heart. Improve my playing; improve my sight-reading if possible (I've always been garbage at sight-reading.) And then I'd go from there.

My first piece was one I'd picked up from a book sale a few months back, Beyond the Sea. I remember hearing my grandparents play music like this when I was young, and Kevin Kline sang the French version of it on the soundtrack to the movie French Kiss (I listened to this obsessively in the last two years of high school). I took it slowly; it's been a long time since I really played seriously, and I need to get used to the feel of the keys all over again, relearn what the distance between the notes feels like. My hands aren't as familiar with them anymore, but they're finding their way back.

It took about a month (with some days of zero practice, because, well, life), but I've got the song down now! I played it straight through this morning, and my daughter, who was playing on the floor behind me, sighed and said, "That was nice." I consider that a definite success. :)

I'm still going to play Beyond the Sea daily for practice, but I'm going to move on. Yesterday, I started working on Angel Eyes by Jim Brickman. My hometown radio station used to play this song all the time, and since that was the station we usually listened to where I worked in high school, I heard it constantly, and it reminds me of those times, so I figured that would be a nice one to move on to. I got to a tricky part this morning, where my hands and brain don't seem to want to work together, but I'll get there, with plenty of practice (and plenty of sour notes and groans of frustration). I'm really enjoying playing again, and I'm excited to see how much I'll have improved in a year or two.

Is playing music part of your daily life? Have you gotten away from it? Are you planning to get back at any point?

"Harry...Tu es un sorcier": studying French with Harry Potter.

Both books are pretty well used!

It's Harry Potter, en français!

My fascination with foreign languages started during a Girl Scout field trip to the local library in second grade. The children's librarian was giving us a tour of the library, pointing out where the fiction was shelved (something I already knew, since I was already an avid reader and frequent library patron), where the music was kept, etc... And then we headed for the nonfiction. "This is where we keep the foreign language books," she said, gesturing toward the north wall. "These are books you can use to learn another language." Wait a minute, you can learn another language???

Growing up in a culturally homogeneous Midwestern town, this was absolutely news to my seven year-old ears. I picked up a French book and was completely tickled to learn my very first sentence: Où sont les toilettes? (Seven year-old me thought this was hilarious, of course.) And from there, my fascination grew.

French didn't quite stick at first. The first language I ever really got into was Japanese, which happened solely because the library got a new "Learn Japanese for your trip!" book that summer. I must've checked that thing out upwards of thirty times. While I've long since forgotten everything other than how to count to ten, my love of languages remained. In high school, I started out with Spanish, and thanks to a change in scheduling systems, I was able to take all four years of Spanish, all four years of French, and a year's worth of German in those four years. Yeah, I was a little obsessed, but at that point, French was the one that stuck. During a brief foray at college, I lived on the foreign language residence floor (which is where I met my husband) and I was beyond thrilled to attend our nightly you-must-only-speak-in-the-language-you're-learning dinners. Which is where a very good-looking young man taught me that the French word for 'seal' sounds eerily like the king of all swear words in English.

Reader, I married him.

I've always tried to keep my French up to a decent level, and it's come in handy. Husband is a native speaker and we're raising our daughter with both French and English, so it's something I use every day. I listen to French radio, we watch French cartoons and videos (Frozen? Does NOT sound right to me in English, to the point where I cringe when I hear it!), I enjoy hearing my husband's family chat in French, and recently, I began reading again in French. This happened, again, when I moved that little bookshelf into my living room. With all those French books staring at me, I realized they weren't doing me any good if I wasn't using them. And so I grabbed my copy of Harry Potter à l'école des sorciers and dove right in.

Since I'd already read a few chapters before my daughter was born (she's, uh, four now), I started where I'd left off, Chapter 6, and I'm happy to say that I've got one chapter left! As I'm reading, I write down the vocabulary I don't know and then enter it all into Anki, an online/app-based spaced repetition flashcard program. And then I study the cards until I get to a certain grade, and that's when I move on to the next chapter. It's proved enormously helpful in learning new vocab; I've already used some of what I learned. But I already knew how helpful it was, because I also used Anki when I learned some...

Norwegian!

Told you I was language obsessed.

Why Norwegian? Family history, for starters. My great-great grandparents came to the US from an area north of Bergen somewhere around 1890, so I've always been a big fan of all things Norwegian. And when my daughter was young and not letting me sleep for more than 3-4 hours a night (and those were not even continuous hours, sigh), I coped with my near mental breakdown (I wish I were exaggerating here) by learning Norwegian. There are worse coping skills, I suppose. 

I learned enough to be able to watch three seasons of the Norwegian TV show Skam (I never did get to that fourth season, although I wanted to), along with plenty of episodes of Karl Johan (this show is seriously pee-your-pants funny. I'd wager that it's worth learning the language solely to watch it). I'm pretty proud that my language abilities progressed that quickly, especially during a time of my life that was pretty difficult.

But for now, even though I utterly adore Norwegian, I'm focusing on French. My daughter is going through a phase, completely normal for kids raised in bilingual households, where she doesn't want anything to do with the minority language. When we speak to her in French, she answers in English; she prefers watching TV in English; she wrinkles her nose when prompted to use a French word instead of an English one. She understands it perfectly well; she's just incredibly stubborn, and this is something a lot of families like ours encounter. So we're trying to incorporate as much French into our days as possible, because we're not letting her get out of this family as a monolingual. ;) 

And what that means is that Mama needs to be continually working on her French, because she didn't grow up speaking it. So that means reading, listening, and studying...here with the help of Harry Potter. We own all but the last book, and I'll search that out when the time comes. After I finish with this book, I'm going to work with a grammar book until that's completed, and then move back to fiction, followed by another grammar book. I'm actually looking forward to doing more grammar work; maybe it's weird, but I've always found grammar enjoyable. 

This book has been a good lesson in follow-through. One sentence, one page, one chapter at a time, it's been fun learning new words and phrases, and re-reading the story. There were parts I'd forgotten, since it's been like 16 years since I read the first Harry Potter book (in English). I'm so glad I've gotten back into studying French, and I'm really looking forward to continuing on with my studies.

Are you a language learner? I'd love to hear about your experiences, what's been successful for you, what materials you use. We language lovers have to stick together!

Ooh, I want to read that!: or, reading down your to-read list.

Across from where I blog sits this lovely bookshelf, stacked with books I'm going to get to!

Do you Goodreads? You should. If you're any kind of a reader, it's a fantastic way to keep track of the books you've read and the books you want to read. I've been a faithful user for years now.

In many ways, the genesis of this blog began in December of 2016. I was sitting on the couch one day, sorting through all the books I'd added to my To Read list on Goodreads. (If you're not familiar, you can mark a book as 'Want to Read' on Goodreads, and those will go on a particular list called 'To Read'. After you read and review the book, you can switch it from Want to Read, to Read, and it will no longer be on that To Read list.) And in scrolling through the pages of books I'd decided looked interesting enough to spend my time reading (one day), I started feeling something I don't often feel when I'm checking out books...dismay. Frustration. Displeasure.

Why? Because the number of books on my To Read list had crept up to 332 books.

That's a LOT. And I say that as someone who regularly reads over one hundred books per year.

How did I get to this place? How had I decided that 332 books looked fascinating enough to read and yet done nothing about them other than let them sit around in a computer database? Why hadn't I put some of those books in my head? The worst part of this was that I knew that some of those books had been on some form of my want-to-read list since...gulp...the early 2000's.

Egads. I'll take my literary spanking for that.

And that was that. I sat there on my couch and went, "Okay, this is ridiculous. This has got to stop." I pulled out some paper and began making a list of all the books from my list that could be found at my local library, along with the Dewey decimal numbers. (I adore my library and their collection, as you'll see, is fantastic.) With my small handwriting, the list stretched over four pages and contained over a hundred books! I clipped it together, and on my next library trip, I took it with to start reading down the list.

And I did! It took quite some time, and I took pauses to read from my kindle, but I eventually read every single book my library had from my To Read list, and then I moved on to the libraries with which my library had reciprocal borrowing privileges. I got *most* of those done (some of the books were either no longer part of those libraries' collections, or were checked out or lost, dangit), and at that point, I moved on to books available via interlibrary loan.

As my library has a policy of only allowing four interlibrary loan requests per week, sometimes there's a bit of lag between when I finish one book and when my next book arrives, so that's where that lovely little shelf above comes in. That's not my only bookshelf, oh no. That's just my upstairs bookshelf, and the contents will change (and have already) as I read through the books I own. Most of the top shelf, I'll read and pass on (we have several Little Free Libraries within walking distance of my house, and I've already read and donated three books this spring!).

What I'm currently reading. Choosing Simplicity is a library book; the others are mine.

(And yes, that's the French version of Harry Potter! More on that in another post.)

As of today, my Goodreads To Read list is down to 177 books, which means that in a year and a half, I've read 155 books from that list! Not too shabby, and I think that definitely counts as getting it done (or at least, lodging myself firmly on the path to completing the task!).

It's interesting- before starting to read down my list, I never realized how much I enjoy reading about food. As I mentioned before, food waste is a huge issue for me, and I tackled several books about that, but food politics, history, what constitutes healthy food, and the processes of learning to cook all appeared multiple times on my list. I wouldn't have necessarily named most of those as subjects of interest, but they've been firmly cemented there now. Another fringe benefit of tackling a major project and sticking with it!

Do you have a To Read list? How many books are on it? What's stopping you from getting that number down? I'm much more selective these days about adding new books to that list; I really want to get that number close to zero before I start filling it back up again (and I'll never let it get so out of control again! 332? What was I thinking???). I'd love to hear your experiences with managing your To Read list.

An inheritance and an inspiration, or how this blog began.

This is Edith. She was a wife, a mother, and for almost 38 years, she was my grandmother. After 87 years on this earth, we said goodbye to her last month as she headed for her next destination. 87 years is an amazing lifespan, and we were incredibly lucky to have her around that long.

Some of my fondest memories are of sitting next to her on the couch while she worked on a cross-stitch or embroidery project. She'd poke the needle through the fabric, then let me pull it through. I developed a love of the calmness of crafting, of the rhythm of a needle passing through fabric, and of the joy of a design appearing where none had been before. Through her, I learned that handmade items make beautiful, heartfelt gifts.

Let me backtrack a little bit, because the story of this blog really starts a few months before Grandma passed.

Earlier this year, via the magic that is Facebook, I came across an article that a friend shared and it really got me thinking. Go Deeper, Not Wider (seriously, stop everything and go read this article right now, I'll wait. It's worth it, I promise) made me consider everything I have in my house- the books (fiction and non), the instruments, the craft supplies, an entire home full of things that I was planning on getting to someday...but when exactly was that someday? The author was right. Going deeper was exactly what I needed to do. I started by reading a few of the books I already had on my shelves, interspersed with the library books I've been getting through interlibrary loan (more on that in another post), and started working on a piano piece I'd bought from a book sale earlier in the year.

And then my grandma died.

For years, Grandma's Christmas gifts to me were these beautiful hand-embroidered dishtowels, which I used (and am still using) until they went to tatters. The cheerful designs and sunshiny colors she had chosen never failed to make me smile. Years ago, after Grandma's health had declined, my mother had mentioned those towels in passing and said, "Enjoy them, because there's not going to be any more." That phrase always stayed with me, and I thought of it often when I used one of those towels, or hung one out to dry.

After Grandma passed, I started thinking about her embroidery and what my mother had said, and I thought, "It doesn't have to be like that." Sure, maybe there won't be any more towels that Grandma made...but there can still be towels. I can still carry on that tradition, carry on the things she taught me, and in a way, it's like having part of her still here. While I'm proficient at cross-stitch, embroidery is a little beyond the skill set I'd developed, so I pulled out a book I'd bought years ago on embroidery, and I started to read. Two days later, my phone chimed with a text.

MOM: Hey, honey, do you do embroidery?

I sat on the floor of the library where I'd been picking out books for my daughter, staring at my phone, laughing at the ridiculousness of the Universe. My mom and aunt had discovered my grandmother's stash of embroidery and cross-stitch supplies, and Mom wondered if I'd want them. 'Of course!' I texted back. I hadn't even considered that Grandma had a stash. Four days later, this is what she brought:

There's a LOT of stuff crammed into that little box. Four stamped cross stitch aprons (not started), at least two sets of stamped pillowcases, plain white towels, stamped towels, scissors, at least one embroidery hoop, and floss- DMC, Coates and Clark, J&P, marked and unmarked. And then there was this:

A table runner, specifically Bucilla's Festive Fruit pattern, partially completed by my grandmother. With it came four napkins, also with a little bit done.

Most likely, my grandmother stopped doing her needlework due to her health. In her later years, she developed a problem with one of her hands; it kind of froze in one position and she could no longer open it (I believe they offered surgery, but she refused). But I'm sure Grandma didn't expect that the last time she put this project down, she would never pick it up again, and it would be passed on to me to finish it as a joint project.

That's really been on my mind lately. What will I be leaving unfinished? How many projects will my family and friends look at and go, "Huh, guess she never got to that"? And the answer is, a lot. I have two boxes of yarn downstairs, shelves of fabric, enough books to start my own bookstore...It's time. Time to go deeper, not wider. Time to finish what I start...or in this case, help Grandma finish what she started. Thanks for the inspiration, Grandma.