10.31 Activity - Scribe It

Bestest Friend and I are doing a blog project. Each day we will write a blog post on a pre-determined theme chosen by a random noun generator. The theme for the thirty-first day of the month is "Activity."

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After reading Kaelyn's post about the Kindle Scribe, I talked to my husband about it and expressed some interest in going to Best Buy or the equivalent to check one out. I was interested in the idea of replacing my paper and pencil journal for goal tracking and have everything in one location. Well, then he surprised me by buying one for me for my birthday!

It's an interesting tablet that you can use as a Kindle for reading, but you can also create documents (what they call notebooks) where you can write notes. Those notes can be accessed as PDFs via your online Kindle storage or you can share them via email. Unfortunately, PDF is really the only export version of your notes, so if you wanted to add to your digital file after you've moved it off the Kindle, there's no real way to do that. 

And that's basically all that functionality that the Kindle Scribe has. It's a combo of a Kindle Paperwhite plus some built-in templates for notebooks. 

Here you can see what it looks like if you're using it to read books. Just like a regular Kindle, you can adjust font size and the backlight. You can also add handwritten sticky notes to your books (as well as typing notes like you would in a regular Kindle). I think the handwritten notes is the only functionality for reading that the Scribe has that  Paperwhite does not.

Unfortunately, the templates for the notebooks are pretty limited. There were eighteen available and most of them were just variants of grids (see above). I didn't see a template that could replace the bullet-type journal I use to track my goals, so I would basically have had to create it from scratch like I do in my paper and pencil version. I imagine in another two or three generations, Amazon will have added many more templates because there's real room for improvement here.

Also, oddly enough, despite the fact that I thought the Scribe was pretty big out of the box (Amazon says 10.2" display as compared to the 6.8" of the Paperwhite), I also thought that some of the templates weren't large enough. For example, the calendar (pictured above) would have been a lot better if it had used the space in a landscape-orientation and taken out the lines below it. As it stands, the boxes aren't large enough for my handwriting to be particularly useful. 

I will also say that it was heavier than I expected and using it to read was unwieldy. I'm definitely used to the smaller size of my Paperwhite and holding this in my hand was as cumbersome as reading a big hardcover novel. 

So I played around with it for a bit, but in the end I decided it wasn't worth the hefty price ($339 for a basic model, plus an upgrade for a nicer pen and a case) and sent it back. Maybe in another few years I'll reevaluate to see if they have made changes to make more suitable for my needs, but for now I think I'm going to be sticking with with my paper journal and my Paperwhite.

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Have you seen the Scribe? Do you think it would be useful for you?

The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker

The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker is the coming of age story of a girl named Julia, who is living in a California suburb when the news comes that the rotation of the Earth is slowing. No one knows why, but the days and nights are getting longer very quickly. 

When I first heard the premise of this book, I thought this was going to be a Big Story, like The Martian, where there's a person who is the focus on the book, but we also see people at NASA and the UN working on a problem. That is NOT this book. This is a book about a girl growing up while the world is changing in crazy ways around her. We only hear from experts in occasional newspaper clippings and on television news. This is about a girl and her singular experience.

The earth's rotation is truly slowing by 47-thousandths seconds of a day, so scientists have been adding leap seconds here and there, so this isn't as silly a premise at it may seem, although the idea that the rotation would slow by hours in a single day is pretty farfetched. I think some of the science in this book is a bit precarious but to quote Glen Wheldon, I'm here for science fiction, not science fact. For instance, I think the electrical grid would fail long before it did in this book, but I didn't write the book, so who cares what I think?

Look, this book is pretty dire. If you're not in a place to read a dystopian sci-fi novel with focus on a decimated planet, don't read it. But I honestly thought it was a lovely bit of writing and the pages were easy to turn and it was exactly my kind of thing. 

4/5 stars

Lines of note:

But I guess it never is what you worry over that comes to pass in the end. The real catastrophes are always different - unimagined, unprepared for, unknown. (page 29)

I have found this to be absolutely true. I'm worrying about X, but Y is the thing that comes out of left field and becomes the focus. 

My grandfather was eighty-six years old. All his old friends were dead. His wife was dead. he had grown bitter about his own longevity. (page 60)

My maternal grandmother, who lived to be almost 100, once told me that there was nothing worth living for once she turned eighty. I mean, I felt a little hurt by this statement, but I also understood what she meant. 

Ours was a sudden bond, the kind possible only for the young or the imperiled. (page 223)

I know that some of you have developed wonderful friendships in adulthood, but I honestly believe that I'll never have a friendship as great and genuine as those that I developed when I was young and had all the time in the world to devote to building friendships. 

We were beach kids, sunshine kids. We did not know the properties of snow. I had never seen it fall, never knew how soft it felt at first, how easily it collapsed beneath feet, or the particular sound of that crunch. I never knew until then that snow made everything quiet, somehow silencing all the world's noise. (page 230)

Snow does make the world so muffled. I loved everything about this description. 

Hat mentions:

Sylvia would spend the next few afternoons pruning roses in a sun hat and casually pulling up weeds. (page 23, this same sun hat comes up on page 130 and 160)

She rested for a moment, hands on hips, looking around from beneath the wide brim of a straw hat... (page 115)

Inside were albums of black-and-white photographs of my grandparents in stylish hats and fur-lined coats...(page 141)

It was a man in a beach hat, an empty white bucket swinging from one hand. (page 194)

A man in a faded blue T-shirt and a wide-brimmed hat...(page 210, same hat referenced on 211)

10.30 Depression - Doggy Playdate, Part II

Bestest Friend and I are doing a blog project. Every day we will write a blog post on a pre-determined theme chosen by a random noun generator. The theme for the thirtieth day of the month is "Depression."

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As an antidote to the dread I feel as September rolls around, Hannah and I went on another playdate with Humphrey and his human. Things went just as badly well as they had last week at the start, with Hannah bullying poor Humps for the first 5-10 minutes. But then something magical happened and Humphrey started puppy bowing towards Hannah and initiating play and then they wandered around together as Humphrey tried to copy everything Hannah did. 

Progress. I think?

There was a Great Dane at the park named George. I don't know why I think it's so funny when dogs are named people names. My own dog has a person name! But George? It just tickled me.

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All right, back to the guessing game. Humphrey is about eight months old and weighs about what Hannah does (maybe a tad bit under 50 pounds).  How big do you think he's going to get? (Look at those paws!)

The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer

The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer was sold to me as a story about adult friendships. This description is nearly always going to be something that draws me in (consider the Elena Ferrante books), so let's see how it worked out this time.

First of all, I really like the cover of this book. Second of all, I don't understand how the cover of the book relates to anything in the text of the book. Third of all, the reason I'm talking about the cover of the book is because I'm procrastinating on articulating my thoughts on this book.

We start this book by meeting a group of six teens at an art-based summer camp. They dub themselves The Interestings. We follow their lives from there. That's the plot. 

There are a number of things to be admired about this book. Wolitzer does manage to make all of the characters distinctive. You are not confusing the dorky cartoon-drawing guy with the rich gadabout. There are a large number of characters throughout the novel and each is drawn in an admirable manner. The long timeline, from the 1970s through until the 2010s, is served with exactly the right amount of historical fiction interjections that make it seem like these are things that happened in the past that would impact lives of everyday people without seeming like a history textbook. The writing itself is straightforward and easy to read and while I like that style a lot, if you want interesting sentence structure or immersive descriptions, you will not like this style.

But. 

Early on in the narrative, the author tells you what will happen in the end. There's no suspense. 

And that would be fine if I could convince myself that this was a character-driven story instead of a plot-driven story, but if it were character-driven, shouldn't I know more about the internal life of these characters beyond their number one feature?  The structure of this book was all wrong and I wanted to tear my hair out as I was reading it. Why order it like this, Wolitizer, why?  

(There's also a character named Robert Takahashi who is always referred to by both of his names, sometimes multiple times in the same scene. This doesn't happen with any other character, which seems vaguely racist and/or homophobic to me. It made me incredibly uncomfortable to read scenes with him in it because I wasn't sure why this character was being singled out for this writing treatment.)

It's rare that I say this, but I sort of wish I'd DNFed this one at about halfway through because nothing really interesting happened after that point.  

3/5 stars

Lines of note:

"Anaïs Nin and Günter Grass both have umlauts," remarked Ethan. "Maybe that's the key to their success. I'm going to get one for myself." (page 10)

I always thought I was smart, but I did not know what an umlaut was when I was a teenager. 

She'd lost grasp of what the number might possibly be, the way she'd lost track, some years ago, of the current population of the earth. (page 46)

The human population of the planet is just over 8 billion. 

Some dreams in life were attainable, and others weren't, no matter how much they were desired. It was all unfair, having more to do with luck than anything else. (page 314-315)

Such a preachy tone. 

Some people had no Town Car. What was a Town Car, and why did they call it that? What town did it refer to? (page 335)

I did like this little bit of internal monologue. Isn't that how we all think?

Things I looked up:

plangent (voice) (page 131) - (of a sound) loud, reverberating, and often melancholy

won a few Obies (page 320) - Off-Broadway theater awards. What I'm learning when I read books latey is that I should have maybe gone to a play once or twice in my life. 

one playing a scherzo (page 404) - a vigorous, light, or playful composition, typically comprising a movement in a symphany or sonata

chapbook (page 408) - a small book or pamphlet containing poems, ballads, stories, or religious tracts

Hat mentions:

He had been wearing a floppy denim hat then...(page 5) - There's an entire passage about this hat on page 87, as well.

This time he'd drawn the Three Wise Men, each one plump and eccentric in a robe and tall hat...(page 44)

People in that kiss are. . . wearing stovepipe hats. . . and children are rolling hoops down the street..." (page 121)

...in a thing coat with the collar turned up and a hat that looked Cossack...(page 129)

...Edie in her big straw summer hat...(page 437)

10.29 Song - Of Summer

Bestest Friend and I are doing a blog project. Each day we will write a blog post on a pre-determined theme chosen by a random noun generator. The theme for the twenty-ninth day of the month is "Song."

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This year, there has been a lot of discussion in my corner of the internet about the song of the summer and how there really isn't one. I mean, there IS one, but critics don't like it. The song is "Last Night" by Morgan Wallen. It was number one on the Billboard Hot 100 for sixteen weeks. And critics are all up in arms saying there isn't one dominant song this summer? Please. I get it, I really do. I think Wallen should be cancelled, too, and I don't think I've actually heard this song, but I think we need to grapple with what what's going on in the charts right now. 

Let me back up for a minute and explain who Morgan Wallen is in case you don't know. He's a country music artist who got his start on the television show The Voice. The first song of his I ever heard was a ditty called "More Than My Hometown" in which he breaks up with a girl he supposedly loves because she wants to leave their shared hometown and he "can't love you more than my hometown." This is the kind of guy we're dealing with here. 

In 2021, a video of him casually using a racial slur came to light. He issued a non-apology apology and he has continued to see somewhat meteoric success.  

But what else has been at the top of the Billboard Hot 100, you ask. Well, that horrid Jason Aldean "Try That in a Small Town" hate crime topped it and currently it's "Rich Men North of Richmond" by Oliver Anthony which has the subtle lyrics "I wish politicians would look out for miners/And not just minors on an island somewhere/Lord, we got folks in the street, ain't got nothin' to eat/And the obese milkin' welfare." 

The normalization of hatred in the music we listen to is terrifying.  The fact that these are number one songs by people with a message of hate and oppression is worrying for our future. Sure, country music has historically been conservative and I might not be worrying over this if it weren't for the fact that these aren't just songs topping country charts, but they're topping the Hot 100, right next to Taylor Swift and Olivia Rodrigo.  

For me, the song I'm hearing everywhere is "Flowers" by Miley Cyrus and I think I might be a stealth Miley fan.  

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What's your song of the summer? Do you have a favorite Miley Cyrus song?

Thank You For Listening by Julia Whelan

 

Thank You for Listening by Julia Whelan is the story of an award-winning audiobook narrator who, after a one-night stand with a hot guy in Las Vegas, gets home to find her life very much askew. Her grandmother's mental acuity is decline, her father doesn't want to pay to keep her at the swanky nursing home where she's being cared for, her best friend is overworked and breaking at the seams, her industry seems to be in some jeopardy because of AI, and she's working on a romance project because she needs money, even though she's been out of the romance game for years. But, on the bright side, the guy she's working with on the romance project is very funny and they start to develop a thing.  

So many people told me this was a good book. I heard on Pop Culture Happy Hour, then Sarah recommended it, and finally Kim's sheer enthusiasm for it as an audiobook made me very excited for it. I was able to get it immediately from Hoopla and let me tell you, if you are a person who likes romance novels and audiobooks, you need to read this. 

This is what Spoiler Alert wanted to be, with a story within in a story, but this story isn't cringe. Whelan is an audiobook narrator herself and she did the narration and it was amazing and wonderful and I'm not sure why anyone would read this over listening to it if they had a choice. I mean, I guess if you're one of those heathens who listens to books at 2x speed, a lot of the performance of this will be lost on you, so don't be one of those heathens. 

I have a few beefs with the book's plot, but they're minor (not exchanging contact info in 2022 is silly, there were some preachy moments, etc.). I think Whelan does a fantastic job of playing with the tropes (there's even a scene where the two leads talk about the tropes they've been through - closed door, epistolary, etc.). I think she does a fabulous job of making it clear that our heroine has more going on in her life than a crush on a guy and I loved the entire cast of secondary characters. The only real thing missing from this book was a dog. 

Lend my voice to the chorus of people who think this is wonderful.  Well done, Julia Whelan. You're the best. 

4.5/5 stars

Lines of note:

Sewanee hadn't known then how quickly a dream could become a thing that mocked you. (22:52)

Ah, yes. This has happened to me too many times to talk about.

A charged kind of silence fell, like the expectant moment right after the power goes out, waiting for it to come back on. (05:51:09)

I just loved this analogy so much. There is ALWAYS a moment of utter silence when the power blinks out - all conversations stop, the small noises of the fridge/HVAC/fan all stop, and you wait, knowing that most of the time it will only be a second or two before it comes back on.

Hat mentions:

In the middle, a lone cellist sat on a stool, hat at her feet, brimming with coins, playing a sonata. (09:59:00)

Week 8: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn Book Club, Chapters 42-45

Welcome to our book club for A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.  Today we'll be discussing Chapters 42-45. Let's dive in!

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Week 1 discussion
Week 2 discussion
Week 3 discussion
Week 4 discussion

Week 5 discussion

Week 6 discussion

Week 7 discussion

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Synopsis:

Francie and Neely graduate and Johnny had arranged with Sissy for Francie to get flowers. Francie gets a factory job and Neely gets work as an errand boy and they are proud to give Katie money from their first paychecks. Francie gets laid off from the factory and starts working at a job where she clips newspaper articles. She wants to go back to school, but Katie wants Francie to keep working and Neely to go to school "Because if I don't make him, he'll never go back, where you, Francie, will fight and manage to get back somehow." (page 385) This is a rift that will never heal between Katie and Francie, I fear.  But since Francie and Katie are both working, they have a lovely Christmas with presents for everyone and they go to church where they say a mass in Johnny's honor. 

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Things I looked up:

Gethsemane (page 350): I always miss religious references. Gethsemane is a garden at the foot of the Mount of the Olives in Jerusalem where, according to the New Testament, Jesus Christ underwent the agony in the garden and was arrested before his crucifixion. Feel free to correct me, but I guess Jesus  knew he would be betrayed and was filled with anguish over the coming torture he was going to experience, but he prays and accepts God's will. (As a non-Christian, this is DARK.) 

Automat (page 368): Look, I knew what the automat was already, but I wanted to use this time to point you to the very delightful 99% Invisible podcast episode called "The Automat" for more details on it. 

More cool photos here. 

spats (page 392): Spats, a shortening of spatterdashes, or spatter guards, are a type of footwear accessory for outdoor wear, covering the instep and the ankle. Spats are distinct from gaiters, which are garments worn over the lower trouser leg as well as the shoe. 

All you ever wanted to know about spats here. 

chasuble (page 397): a sleeveless outer vestment worn by a Catholic or High Anglican priest when celebrating Mass, typically ornate and having a simple hole for the head

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Select quotes (I'm limiting myself to no more than one a chapter!):

Chapter 42: 

"They're nice," Francie thought. "I could have been friends with them all the time. I thought they didn't want to be friends. It must have been me that was wrong." (page 352-353)

Oh, Francie. You're missing out if female friendships aren't part of your life. 

Chapter 43:

"Remember, Neeley, when we used to go out selling junk?"
"That was a long time ago."
"Yeah," agreed Francie. It was, in fact, two weeks since they had dragged their last haul to Carney's. (page 370)

So reminiscent of the "olden days" conversation. They seem to be aware that they're in the middle of big transitions. I don't think I was that aware of anything when I was their age. 

Chapter 44:

"What's the matter with me, anyhow? Here I stand criticizing Sissy - Sissy who's been so darn good to me. I'm dissatisfied with my job when I should feel lucky having such interesting work. Imagine getting paid to read when I like to read so much anyhow. And everyone thinks New York is the most wonderful city in the world and I can't even get to like New York. Seems like I'm the most dissatisfied person in the whole world. Oh, I wish I was young again when everything seemed so wonderful!" (page 381)

To come to Francie's defense here, NYC is pretty gross. LOL. (Sorry, sorry, New Yorkers. Your fine city is wonderful for many things. It also smells like trash.)

Chapter 45:

Several times that day, the name or thought of Papa had come up. And each time, Francie had felt a flash of tenderness instead of the old stab of pain. (page 393)

I do like how this book deals with grief. It's not a linear process.

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Mentions of the word hat (I can't help myself):

"I'm putting my hat on," Katie said. (page 355)

Chockful in Chapter 45 because they buy Katie a new hat for Christmas. 

First they want to buy Mama a new hat. (page 389) - Did everyone notice that Katie gets a new green hat? So many green hats for Katie!

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Questions for you:

1) When Francie sees Johnny's handwriting on the card with the flowers, she thinks for a second that it was all a dream and Johnny was alive. We have a couple of recipes my late MIL wrote out and those recipes bring us great joy. This is a two part question. In this day and age when we type things on computers, I see less and less handwriting. Do you think they'll come a day when we stop teaching children to handwrite, like how some kids don't learn cursive?  As always, feel free to not answer, but do you have anything handwritten that is super special to you?

2) Go with me on a journey of imagination. What was Francie's date with Albie like? What did they do? How did it go?

3) Katie! She has Neely go to school instead of Francie. What do you think of her reasoning? What would have done in her shoes? (Also, why so many green hats, Katie? Why?)

4) Neely asks for spats and Francie for fancy lingerie. Discuss. 

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More book-related ephemera:

Friends, we have a stealth book club participant. D in Texas wrote to me the following email:

My mother recently passed way (at 96!) and as my siblings and I started clearing the house, I came across this yellowed, torn, and ancient clipping. Apparently ATGIB was printed in the paper as a serial, in this case, the Chicago Herald-American. The second photo has the date, February 28, 1944. 

I had no idea it was printed as a serial! And there are pictures!

That is so cool, D in Texas! Thanks for sharing this wonderful find with us. 

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Were there any quotations or lines that particularly stood out to you? Did you have to look anything up?

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Upcoming schedule:

September 4 (Chapters 46 – 51)
September 11 (Chapters 52 – 56)
September 18 (entire book wrap up)

10.28 Meaning - Ice Cream

Bestest Friend and I are doing a blog project. Each day we will write a blog post on a pre-determined theme chosen by a random noun generator. The theme for the twenty-eighth day of the month is "Meaning."

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Turtle sundae. This was a SMALL.

Last Friday, I had a bad day. I was on the phone with people who were raising their voices at me for a good portion of the afternoon and, if I'm perfectly honest with you, even though these people were upset with the situation, not necessarily at me, I took it a bit personally. I rallied from moping on the couch, made dinner, and after we ate it, I just broke.

I think I need some ice cream to eat my feelings.

So we went. I don't go often. But sometimes, the real meaning of living a life is to eat the ice cream.

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What's your favorite ice cream sundae?

10.27 Priority - Voice Cast Your Pets

Bestest Friend and I are doing a blog project. Each day we will write about a pre-determined theme chosen by a random noun generator. The theme for the twenty-seventh day of the month is "Priority."

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There's currently a movie out called Strays (I only know about it because of a PCHH episode) in which four talking dogs have an adventure together. I have no opinion on this movie (the description "raunchy" gets used a lot which makes me think it's maybe not my jam), but the existence of this film led to my husband and I spending a lot of time talking about who would voice our pets.

Hannah is originally a Texas dog, so we originally posited some southern voices, like Julia Roberts or Beyoncé. But that didn't really address her silliness, so we had a moment where someone like Lisa Kudrow came into play. But what of her German shepherd roots? Marlene Dietrich or Zazie Beetz? Tough call on this one.

For Zelda, we were much more interested in someone who has an aristocratic voice, so we're thinking Mid Atlantic accent here. Katharine Hepburn, maybe. I think, however, Catherine O'Hara would be a really good choice because Zelda is frequently NOT aristocratic in bearing, but goes off the rails. In the way that good kitties should.

Yes, we did spend a lot of time on this. Our Saturday priority was clearly to not think about anything important. 

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Who do you think should voice Hannah and Zelda? Who should voice your pets?

10.26 Moment - Our Park, Once Again

Bestest Friend and I are doing a blog project. Each day we will write a blog post on pre-determined theme chosen by a random noun generator. The theme for the twenty-sixth day of the month is "Moment." 

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Yesterday was stressful for me, but I knew that what would help would be if I took Hannah out on a long walk at lunchtime. I took her to the park near our house, but as usual, there was no one else there, so I let her off leash and she meandered around, smelling everything and rolling around in what I can only imagine is the excrement of larger animals.  

They say that nature is good for the soul. It sure did me good.

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Do you have a nature spot where you go after a hard day?

10.25 Relationship - Dogs on Parade

Bestest Friend and I are doing a blog project. Each day we write a blog post on a pre-determined theme chosen by a random noun generator. The theme for the twenty-fifth day of the month is "Relationship."

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We had planned a doggy playdate at the dog park on Wednesday morning, knowing that the temperature was going to be HOT and the humidity was going to be UNBEARABLE. It was supposed to be Jack the Hound, Henry the Naughty, Humphrey the Puppy, and Hannah the Dog, but Jack and Henry's owner backed out because even walking the dogs on Tuesday night was like wading through mud. But Hannah and Humphrey persevered and to the dog park we went. 

(We got to the park about five minutes before Humphrey and his person. Meanwhile, there was a guy walking around and Hannah DID NOT like the look of him. She growled at him, full hackles up, and I was worried we were going to have to leave because I did NOT want her approaching him. So we spent those five minutes with me avoiding that guy at all costs. He left and I breathed a huge sigh of relief. But now I'm worried that she's territorial about the DOG PARK and not just our house and the entire block where we live and that's going to be a PROBLEM.)

Last we left the two of them, Hannah was a big bully to Humphrey. Turns out that this was still the case. Poor Humps was just constantly herded whenever he tried to come near me or near his own person, who Hannah also sees as part of her pack. But after about ten minutes or so, they settled into calm and just walked next to each other. 

Isn't it crazy how big Humphrey is? He's very nearly the size of Hannah already!

And look at what a good-natured, happy guy he is. Even though he was probably boiling in the sun, he was just looking for people to give him pets.

And this one? She'd be okay if no other dog or man ever approached me again, thankyouverymuch.

We did one loop (about a mile) and then headed out because the humans had sweat a gallon and the dogs definitely needed water.  Hopefully we'll make these dog park playdates a more regular occurrence and these two will become the best doggy friends they have to be. (I feel like parents who say their five-year-olds will get married someday. It would be so convenient for me if they became friends because I'm already friends with Humphrey's owner.)

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Who does "sun's out, tongue's out" better here?  

Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson

Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson came onto my radar in a circuitous way, but here it is. Lillian's friend from boarding school, Madison, calls her and says she has a job for her. Since Lillian's at a dead-end job and living in her mother's attic, she decides to go see what's the what. Madison's husband is a politician and his ex-wife has died leaving him in charge of their two children. Madison needs someone to take care of those children. The catch? The children sometimes catch on fire.  They're not hurt, but they can hurt others and their fire can be destructive to property.

What a weird book. That's basically my entire take on the situation. Original premise, but I can't say much beyond that.

I'm not suggesting that male authors can't write female characters or vice versa, but Lillian's voice always felt like a dude to me. Her inner thoughts were a sort of straightforward, in the way that men are frequently written. There were no digressions about her anxiety, body image, or performance of womanhood. Instead there were digressions about basketball and feeling sorrow at a lack of career ambition. At some point, I just stopped thinking about gender expressions in this book because it was too confusing. Maybe that's good for me and I should stop reading such gender normative books all the time.  

The last two things I'll say to you is that this book has a lot of unnecessary profanity. I am not a person who generally gets on my soapbox about expletives, but the word fuck appears 2/3 as many times as the number of pages and it started to feel like a sign of bad writing. The other thing I'd like to say is that this book had so much promise in terms of plot, but instead it involved lots of preparing foods and talking about sleeping arrangements. The father was a major political figure, so I'm not sure why we couldn't have had at least a few scenes where things were less...mundane.  

Big swing. Fell short for me. 3/5 stars

Lines of note:

Mint Julep Boys, like they would drink a mint julep on a regular day and they wouldn’t think it was weird. (page 51)

I think this is what's interesting about people in general. We all do things on a regular day that other people would think is strange. I fully admit that when I hear someone ate out at a restaurant more than once a month, I am SHOOK to my core. How can you afford that? How do you not weigh a hundred pounds? How do you control the food situation?  But for other people, hearing that the bagel I had at Panera last week was the first restaurant food I'd had since May would be shocking. And it's interesting how we make judgments about people based on these differences.

“I’m scared to meet him,” I admitted. 

“I’m a little scared for you to meet him,” she said. “I hope you don’t hate him.” I didn’t say anything because I was pretty sure that, just on principle, I was going to hate him. I didn’t like men all that much, found them tiring. (page 52)

This is an example of how it didn't seem like Lillian was a real woman. Generally, I don't find men tiring. I find them scary, insufferable, full of themselves, and occasionally pleasant to be around, but rarely have I described them as tiring.

Maybe raising children was just giving them the things you loved most in the world and hoping that they loved them, too. (page 139)

But what do you do if they don't love the same things you do?

Things I looked up:

Penny Nichols' novels (page 218) - Four book series published in the 1930s written by Joan Clark that follows Penny Nichols, the daughter of a detective who soon brings her along to help his investigations. 

Hat mentions:

She’d started at the lowest rung, brought on because the normally untouchable senator had recently left his wife and two kids and started dating one of his biggest donors, some heiress who was obsessed with horses and wore crazy hats. (page 21)

Just then, as if conjured by my curiosity, a man wearing suspenders and a big floppy hat walked across the backyard; he was holding a rake like a soldier marching with a rifle. (page 39)

I got some underwear and bras, a bathing suit like Olympic athletes wore, and a cool bucket hat to keep the sun out of my eyes. (page 49)

10.24 Family - A Bevy of Postcards

Bestest Friend and I are doing a blog project. Every day we will write a blog post on a pre-determined topic chosen by a random noun generator. The theme for the twenty-fourth day of the month is "Family."

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We didn't quite get the postcards out in the mail while we were in Minnesota because we were there for such a short time, but I did get cards for my niblings and my regular snail mail correspondents. I found myself trying to look up fun facts about Minneapolis/Minnesota for my nieces and nephews, so I wrote things like "The Stone Arch Bridge is the largest arched bridge that crosses the Mississippi. It was made with locally sourced stones, including some from Iowa" or "a group of loons is called an asylum" and, in retrospect, realize that those kids must think I'm a real dweeb. Oh, well, I'm the dweeb who loves them and will inevitably bail them out of jail, so hopefully it's the thought that counts.

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What's the last fun mail you sent or received? 

The Mimicking of Known Successes (Mossa & Pleiti #1) by Malka Older

CCR sold me on The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka Older by describing it as a mash of genres: science fiction and mystery. There's also a touch of sapphic romance, if that's your jam, and let's be honest, it very much is my jam. All three of those things appeal, so I was down for this book.

Basically, people have screwed up Earth, so they live on Jupiter. That's the sci-fi part. A dude goes missing on a remote colony and Mossa, an Investigator, has to figure out what happened to him. That's the mystery. Mossa goes to Pleiti, a former flame, to help her out. That's the romance. 

It's good. It's short (less than 200 pages!). It's an interesting world and an interesting relationship. This is a completely satisfying standalone novel, although I heard there's a sequel that's pretty good. My library doesn't have the sequel, so I guess I'll have to remain in the dark on that one.  If this sounds like something you'd enjoy, you'll like this book. 4/5 stars

Lines of note:

...within the cluster dedicated to experimental agriculture and animal husbandry. (page 35)

Not a line of note to anyone else, but I refer to "animal husbandry" whenever we're doing something to the cat or dog that they don't want us to do (cut their nails, brush their teeth, etc.), but that must be done for health or safety reasons. Sometimes I also use it as an excuse to do something they don't want to do, but I do, even if it's just for my own personal pleasure, particularly picking the cat up. She doesn't LOVE to be picked up, but I'll say I'm doing it to train her to be used to me picking her up in case there's an emergency and I need to. This is partly true, but mostly I just want to cuddle with her.

...dressed in a fire-blue coat I instantly coveted. (page 36)

Haven't we all been there?

...being of utility was more than I had expected, and yet one still does not want to be used. Of use, but not used. (page 93)

Lovely distinction.

Minor mystery:

"Ah yes. I study the British Isles, in the mid-twentieth century. At the moment I'm working on a very useful book about rabbits and their adventures. There's a wealth of descriptions of the flora and fauna in a highly circumscribed, clearly identified area. Truly amazing stuff, most astoundingly useful for us. And most incredibly, this book - a storybook, note, perhaps even intended for children - has pages and pages of writing mentioning, oh, different flowers, and tiny beasts, and the author assumes that every organism he mentions is familiar to the readers. He barely describes any of it, because everyone he can imagine reading it already knows." (page 72-73)

I immediately thought of Watership Down. It was written by a man named Richard Adams, published in 1972 and it's set in Hampshire in southern England. My husband suggested The Tale of Peter Rabbit, but it was written by a woman (note the pronoun 'he' in the above passage) named Beatrix Potter and was first published in 1902, which is not mid-twentieth century at all. Any thoughts on this minor mystery?

Things I looked up:

"its details of salvage and bricolage" (page 12): (in art or literature) construction or creation from a diverse range of available things

"tiny cubical qibla astrolabe" (page 12): from Arabic 'qiblah,' the direction towards the Kaaba in the Sacred Mosque in Mecca, which is used by Muslims in various religious contexts, particularly the direction of prayer

"I was only an unimportant myrmidon among thousands..." (page 153): a follower or subordinate of a powerful person, typically one who is unscrupulous or carries out orders unquestioningly

Hat mentions:

None, although one of the characters is wearing a hat on the cover. 

10.23 Atmosphere - Late August

Bestest Friend and I are doing a blog project. Every day we will write a blog post on a pre-determined topic chosen by a random noun generator. The theme for the twenty-third day of the month is "Atmosphere."

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My birthday fortnight is officially over, so there's no more excitement or excuse to eat dessert every night.

Students are trickling back to school. My husband's calendar is filling up with up meetings and he spent most of the first part of the week training a new employee. 

The sun is setting earlier and earlier and I can feel myself dreading when the day comes in September when I know I'll need my SAD lamp.

The director at the community center turned in her letter of resignation, so just when I thought I could get through the end of the calendar year with relatively little stress from that front (when my own resignation will become effective), I've been up tossing and turning about this.

But still. It's the dog days of summer. These are the days we look back on in March and wish for when there's still snow on the ground. Kids are running through sprinklers. The boys on bikes are fishing on the river. There's sidewalk art everywhere I walk Hannah. The construction barrels are still out in all their orange glory.

(You don't care, but as an update to this post: The intersection still has not had the sidewalks replaced. The intersection that was 'fixed" by having a graduated curb and then a sidewalk square and then another curb actually has been graduated all the way. The Main Street construction is ongoing. I am quite upset annoyed about the sidewalk situation.)

It's a complicated time of year, isn't it? I love summer and I love the freedom. But I also love autumn and the cooler temps and the cider and the leaves and the corn mazes. 

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Does back to school time make you a little melancholy, too? Or are you pumped to get those kids back in the classroom?

The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka

I read The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka to fulfill the Pop Sugar Reading Challenge prompt to read a book about an athlete/sport prompt. 

This book is beautiful. It starts with a story about a pool - people who swim there, what the routines are, and how important it is to the athletes who use it. It's an interesting first-person POV using "we" and "us" as the pronouns, as if the group was writing. For example:

It is an illusion, of course, that the pool is ours and ours alone. We know that there are other users whose attachment to our waters is equally fierce. (page 26). 

There are parts of it where Otsuka just lists things in a way that's reminiscent of The Things They Carried. The lists were detailed and riveting and I just wanted it to go on and on.

In our real lives, on dry land, we are more preoccupied than usual. We misplace our keys. We forget to pay our bills. We can't remember our passwords. We neglect to comb our hair. We are late to the office. We can't concentrate on our work. In the middle of conversation, we sometimes stand up and wander off. I have to check my stocks. Our performance reviews suffer. Our likeability ratings decline. Our friends begin to avoid us. (61-62)

But the pool has to close and then we follow Alice, one of the swimmers, as she is moved to a memory care residence. The end of the book is a moving meditation about end of life, a relationship between a mother and a daughter, memory and sorrow, written in lyrical, beautiful prose. 

It's not a perfect book. There's far too much emphasis on swimming (LOL). But it's definitely a book worth reading and at a slim 176 pages, it won't be a huge time investment to read something so powerful. 4/5 stars

Line of note:

August begins like a slow, shattering dream. Heat rises up from the dusty sidewalks. Lawns bake. Trees droop. The flowers have all lost their smell. A lone Good Humor truck, illegally double-parked near the entrance to the school playground, drones its slow mechanical song. (page 66)

I read this in the beginning of August and it just felt so right. 

Things I looked up:

PSEN4b gene (page 108) - There are genes associated with early onset Alzheimer disease, like PSEN1 and PSEN 2, but this one seems to be fictional. 

Ivalo mutation (page 123) - Also fictional. I was really confused until I read this interview with the author where she admits she just made up a lot of the science. 

Hat mentions:

If you find yourself lying wide awake at three in the morning, staring up at the thing strip of light on the ceiling (What did I do wrong?), you may want to "order in" from our "sleep menu," which offers a broad array of products designed to usher in a state of optimal rest (all items can be billed "a la caret" to your monthly invoice): vibrating eye masks, slow-wave headbands, thermo-sensitive "cool" hats, weighted fleece blankets guaranteed to create a swaddling sensation reminiscent of being in your first and very best bed, the womb. (page 118)

10.22 Safety - In the Morning

Bestest Friend and I are doing a blog project. Every day we will write a blog post on a pre-determined theme chosen by a random noun generator. The theme for the twenty-first day of the month is "Safety."

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Last week, Elisabeth posted about how her morning routine wasn't very routine and I mentioned that the first hour and a half I was awake was probably the most predictable part of my entire day. Here's how it shakes out.

The alarm goes off at either 6 or 6:30am. This depends mostly on if it's a weekend or weekday. When the alarm goes off, I get out of bed to turn it off because my alarm is on my phone and we live in a 100-year-old house, so the only two outlets in our bedroom are far from our bed. This is key. I get up when the alarm goes off. (This will change in a couple of weeks, I suspect. The SAD lamp usually makes an appearance in September and then I'll set the alarm for half an hour earlier so I can bask in the glow of the SAD lamp.)

Anyway, Dr. BB and I tag team morning chores. Here's how we do it. 

Time	Dr. BB	Me
First five minutes	Takes medicine, checks the house for cat puke	Brush the cat
	If it’s applicable, we will both go around opening and closing windows as necessary.
Next half hour	Feeds Zelda/cleans her bowl, empties the dishwasher, makes tea, gets Zelda’s medicines ready (he also does some boring stuff like regularly walking through the basement and attic at this time, but heaven help me, I have no idea what it really is)	Walk Hannah
Back from walk	We both clean Zelda’s chin. This is a two-person job.
After chin cleaning	Gets dressed	Brush Zelda’s teeth, feed Hannah, brush Hannah’s teeth, make breakfast for myself
Last half hour	Makes breakfast for himself, eats breakfast, makes teafills	Eat breakfast, shower and get dressed, drink teafill while doing Duolingo

After this, the rails come off and our days might go in a million different directions, but this first hour and a half is like clockwork.

Why did I write this for the safety prompt? Because if we don't feed Zelda right away, all of our lives are at risk. 

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Is your morning routine predictable or are you all over the place?

Week 7: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn Book Club, Chapters 38-41

Welcome to our book club for A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.  Today we'll be discussing Chapters 38-41. Let's dive in!

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Week 1 discussion
Week 2 discussion
Week 3 discussion
Week 4 discussion

Week 5 discussion

Week 6 discussion

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Synopsis:

Now that Johnny isn't bringing in his sporadic income, there are money woes in the Nolan household. McGarrity the saloon keeper gives Francie and Neely jobs. Francie and Neely are confirmed, a teacher tells Francie that writing about Johnny is sordid, Katie has a baby girl they call Laurie. Katie's still working hard and Francie overhears people at the saloon talking about the news when she's working in the saloon.

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Things I looked up:

rummy (page 305) - Hmmm...McGarrity says Johnny wasn't a rummy, but every definition I can find of this term make it seem like a synonym for a drunk or boozehound. Do you suppose McGarrity means Johnny wasn't a sloppy drunk? This seems wrong, too, based on some of Francie's diary entries.

bands in the baby's layette (page 339) - Hilariously, my husband didn't even know what a layette was. I don't know what these "bands" are and when I google it, it just gives me Nirvana and Metallica onesies.  Hey, moms, what does this mean? Laurie's got four of them. 

Surely this is not what Katie was having Laurie wear. Note to self: buy this for the next baby you meet.

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Select quotes (I'm limiting myself to no more than one a chapter!):

Chapter 38: 

McGarrity was a man with a great sin on his soul. He hated his children. His daughter, Irene, was Francie's age. Irene was a pink-eyed girl and her hair was of such a pale red that it, too, could be called pink. She was mean and stupid. She had been left back so many times that at fourteen she was still in the sixth grade. His son, Jim, ten years old, had no outstanding characteristics excepting that his buttocks were always too fat for his breeches. (page 306)

I have been defensive of people who have criticized Smith's writing because I generally think it's sparkling, but this paragraph has just not aged well. Focusing on how children LOOK as a way to summarize their character is just not okay with me. Ugh. Hey, not all of us are born beautiful, you know?

Chapter 39:

Francie began to understand that her life might seem revolting to some educated people. She wondered, when she got educated, whether she'd be ashamed of her background. Would she be ashamed of her people; ashamed of her handsome papa who had been so lighthearted, kind and understanding; ashamed of brave and truthful Mama was so proud of her own mother, even though Granma couldn't read or write; ashamed of Neely who was such a good honest boy? No! No! If being educated would make her ashamed of what she was, then she wanted none of it. (page 325)

The scene with the teacher criticizing Francie's work absolutely infuriated my husband. 

(In grad school, before we were dating, Dr. BB and I went to be trained to do scoring for standardized tests for K-12 students. There was a real great response about "where do you want to live when you grow up?" that was all about how the student wanted to be someplace safe, where his mom would not be hurt, they would not have to worry about money or drug dealers, and there wouldn't be bars on the windows. It was very evocative and when asked what it should be scored from 0-6, Dr. BB and I gave it 4s or 5s or something like that. We were told it was a 2. It focused too much on what wouldn't be in the house and not what would be. Meanwhile, the essay about the ski chalet in Vale Vail was a 6. I have rarely  thought Dr. BB was going to punch someone as I did that day. If anyone asks what it means that standardized tests are classist, here's your example.)

Chapter 40:

They worked a while in silence before Floss spoke again. "I wonder are they worth it? The children, I mean."
Mrs. Gaddis thought of her dead son and her daughter's withered arm. She said nothing. She bent her head over her kitting. She had come around to the place where she dropped a stitch. She concentrated on picking it up. (page 341)

Oh. Mrs. Gaddis is over here breaking my heart. 

Chapter 41:

Yes, the world was changing rapidly and this time she knew it was the world and not herself. She heard the world changing as she listened to the voices. (page 346)

Have you ever felt this way? Like you know that history is happening right this second? 

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Things I noticed, but don't have anywhere else to put them:

Johnny died on Christmas Day!  I don't know why this seems so significant to me, but I'm going to keep an eye out for how Christmas is treated throughout the rest of the book.

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Mentions of the word hat (I can't help myself):

NONE!

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Questions for you:

1) There are pages devoted to McGarrity, the saloon keeper. Why?  (Also, is anyone else vaguely worried about what's going to happen him when Prohibition is passed in just a few short years?)

Saloon, 1910, Ridgewood (Queens, not Brooklyn, but I did my best)

2) In the beginning of Chapter 39, Smith introduces three wishes that children being confirmed would make on their confirmation day - one is an impossible wish, another a wish that you could make come true for yourself, and the third to be a wish for when you grew up. What are your three wishes? 

3) What's going on with Sissy? Is she pregnant?  I find this character very perplexing and feel like "what's going on with Sissy?" could/should be a question every week.

4) Francie overhears people talking about so many things in the saloon - Prohibition (1920), women's suffrage (1920), World War I (the US gets involved in April 1917 and Laurie was born in May 1916!), automobiles (Ford's assembly line started rolling at the end of 1913), moving pitchers (!) - I like the alternate spelling. Do you feel like it WAS an unusual time of change? Do you think we're in one of those times now?  

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Were there any quotations or lines that particularly stood out to you? Did you have to look anything up?

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Upcoming schedule:

August 28 (Chapters 42 – 45)
September 4 (Chapters 46 – 51)
September 11 (Chapters 52 – 56)
September 18 (entire book wrap up)

10.21 Decision - Goodbye Beloved Sweatshirt

Bestest Friend and I are doing a blog project. Every day we will write a blog post on a pre-determined topic chosen by a random noun generator. The theme for the twenty-first day of the month is "Decision."

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As many of you know, I am somewhat frugal, particularly when it comes to clothing. This isn't to suggest I buy cheap clothing, but the opposite. I spend money on clothes, but then I baby them and they last for years and years. I have a dress I bought in high school that I still wear on a regular basis, although I don't look as good in it as I once did. I have a relatively small wardrobe (I mean, larger than Elisabeth's, but my nephew once asked me if I owned a different sweatshirt than the one I talk about in this post and I was able to tell him that I did in fact, own ONE other hoodie. He was astounded because he owns probably a dozen), but it is mighty and I love all of the pieces I own. 

Today I made the difficult decision to get rid of this beloved University of Minnesota sweatshirt that I have had for many, many years. This sweatshirt had it all - full zip, piping everywhere, quality embroidery, and a fabulous maroon color (the school colors are maroon and gold). It has stains on it I can't get out, the sleeves are frayed beyond repair, and because I have had to replace the zipper multiple times, the piping is more of a handwave than an actuality in many places. 

I have replaced it with an inferior sweatshirt (no mascot, no piping, no sleeve embroidery), but I hope to someday grow to love this one was much as I did this one. You served me well, Maroon Full-Zip. 

Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness by Meghan O'Rourke

Lisa gave me a lukewarm recommendation on this book and I can see why she was hesitant about it, but I still want to let her know I appreciate the rec. 

Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness by Meghan O'Rourke is O'Rourke's examination of the rise of chronic illnesses, particularly autoimmune diseases. 

The Good: There have been an increasing number of people diagnosed with autoimmune disorders in the recent past. Most of those diagnoses have been for women and as we know from a million other books, women's health has been widely understudied and women's pain has been widely ignored. I thought this book did a decent job of exploring that dynamic. I thought the book did a pretty good job of talking about the complexity of discovering autoimmune diseases in the first place and how very challenging it is for someone to even get a diagnosis and not be brushed off. 

The Bad: O'Rourke's tone in this book is like one of those porch signs that says GO AWAY.  If her audience is just people who have an autoimmune disease, maybe this book is just fine. But presumably there are people reading the book who don't have an autoimmune disease (like me!) who just want to understand more because they know someone who does, they are a caretaker, or they just want to know what's going on. But she slides a lot of "if you don't have a chronic illness, you can never understand" instead of you know, doing her job, and writing to make sure we do understand it. 

It IS a hard thing to talk about because autoimmune diseases range the gamut from Type I diabetes to rheumatoid arthritis to IBD to celiac to Hashimoto's to dozens of others. Each of these will have different symptoms for each person suffering from it. But I feel like this book could have benefited from a chapter or two about the most common. As the book is now, if I didn't already have a firm grounding on a couple of these diseases, I might be a bit confused and lost. 

The Ugly: There are legitimate criticisms of western medicine, particularly of the sort in the United States. But when O'Rourke started giving credence to the power of positive thinking "scholars" (as in "you can will cancer away if you surround yourself by only positive thoughts/people and don't get treatment"), I wanted to throw this book against the wall.

I think the information in this book is important, but I think it could have been done better in the hands of someone with a little more distance from their own experience. 

Lines of note:

I spent at least half of each day shopping for food, cooking, and cleaning up. (page 29)

Add in thinking about what to make and you've pretty much got my life. 

Worrying that your symptoms are psychosomatic - or even imagined - is part of life for many people with poorly understood illnesses. (page 47)

My husband recently had an appointment with a new GI doctor and he worked himself up into knots about it. What if the new doctor doesn't believe me? Are my new symptoms all in my head? It was heartbreaking to see and heartbreaking to hear him beat himself up after the appointment with how it had gone. 

The recommendations that my husband seek a therapist are so pervasive. Is he part of the "worried well"? Or is there something really wrong and he's being ignored?  

...in my fatigue and pain I couldn't find the words to make myself legible to others. (And I still have not found them. This text is full of silences and vagueness and lacunae: when I write "brain fog," I imagine that your mind slides over the idea, unless you, too, have suffered from it.) (page 53)

This is an example of O'Rourke just throwing up her hands and saying you'll never understand. Isn't the purpose of writing the book to help us understand?

The central issue is that physicians tend not to see women's self-reports of illness symptoms as valid. When a female patient complains of pain or discomfort, her testimony is viewed as a gendered expression of a subjective emotional issue rather than a reflection of a "hard" objective physiological reality. Even when it comes to a disease as grave as cancer, a woman's testimony about what she is experiencing is seen as an exaggeration. (page 107)

Ugh. 

"genetics are the gun, a virus pulls the trigger" (page 123)

This is super interesting, I think. My husband and all four of his siblings have an autoimmune disorder (to be honest, this one of the major reasons we never considered having children - it seemed like a cruel thing to do to bring a child into the world with the genetic odds stacked against them). They tend to cluster in families. But they don't all have the same diagnoses, which is interesting. Their genetics may be similar, but their environments differed radically (even in childhood), so there must be some other "trigger" and the research does indicate it's usually a virus that unlocks the chronic illness.  

Things I looked up:

Semmelweis reflex (page 41) - the instinctive tendency to reject new ideas because it contradicts established beliefs; a form of confirmation bias

10.20 Message - MPLS

Bestest Friend and I are doing a blog project. Every day we will write a blog post on a pre-determined theme chosen by a random noun generator. The theme for the twentieth day of the month is "Message." I have decided that I'm going to write about the last photo message I sent and/or received via text.

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So we did end up going to Minneapolis. We were there for less than 24 hours, and we did lots of things that were important to us, but let's just start with some very basic things.

The first thing we did was go to the Walker Sculpture Garden because the entire time I lived in Minneapolis, I never took my photo by the Spoonbridge and Cherry, so I had to rectify that since I am officially a tourist now and not a resident. Obviously my husband took this photo and then sent it to me. I apologize for the dumb hat, but I'm old and prone to bad reactions to everything in the world, including sunlight.

The sculpture garden has definitely increased in size since we lived there and we spent far too much time wondering about the financial state of the Walker and its acquisitions team, but you can't tell me that you don't do the same exact thing when you're at a modern art museum. The sculpture garden is open daily and is free and should be a mandatory Minneapolis stop. 

I have been utterly influenced by the world of Harry Potter and since the suits of armor animated to fight in the Battle of Hogwarts, I wonder a lot about what if some of these sculptures came to life, see especially the above Hephaestus or the below Hahn/Cock. Imagine if they suddenly started moving around!

We wandered around going to local shops we missed from our time there before going on a stroll around Lake of the Isles. Minneapolis has a lot of public parks and green spaces, but its crown jewel is the Chain of Lakes. Lake of the Isles is one of those lakes and when we were first dating, Dr. BB lived a block off of it and we used to walk around it for hours and hours. We just did one lap this time (just over 2.5 miles).

I absolutely love our town and our house, but if I had lottery money, I would buy a house on Lake of the Isles and live there year round. 

From there, we ordered pizza from Pizza Luce and took it back to our hotel (a random Hampton Inn by the airport - nothing special) to eat. Pizza Luce is the only place that claims to have gluten-free food that we have eaten at and Dr. BB has not been sick. Plus, their pizzas are delicious. We ordered a GF Pizza Athena (minus red onions) and a GF Baked Potato Pizza (minus bacon) and they were so good. We ate some of it for dinner and I had cold pizza for breakfast the next day. This was our only meal out - the rest we packed in a cooler. 

I did have a cupcake!

The next day we did something that might make you roll your eyes, but I was very excited about. We went to the Mall of America where I replaced a bunch of my University of Minnesota gear. I have one Minnesota hoodie and I've been babying it for years. I've replaced the zipper on it multiple times, but the sleeves are legitimately frayed in an irreparable way. I wanted a full zip and while I wasn't able to find one in maroon (I got black), I had to settle because my current one is no longer an option. I also got a couple of long-sleeve t-shirts, some postcards (natch), and some popcorn. 

I had somehow forgotten the scope of MoA. It's just enormous.

Then we went back to the Chain of Lakes to walk around Lake Harriet because this was our lake when we first got married. We lived a few blocks away from it and even got our engagement pictures taken there. (No one asked, but I prefer our engagement photos to our wedding photos. The wedding photos are WONDERFUL, but the engagement photos show our true selves a lot more.) The lake is the same, but the rose garden has expanded quite a bit and it was BUSY there. Like, we were there on a Thursday in the late morning/early afternoon and there were so many people there!

We tried to recreate some of those engagement photos, but it turns out neither of us is a professional photog. Hey, if you're getting married in the Twin Cities, Barclay Horner is still around!

This trip around Lake Harriet meant I could cross "go to the beach" off my summer to-do list. Woot woot!

We ate lunch by the bandshell and the sailboats and then headed home to go get the dog from the sitter. All in all, a delightful tiny getaway.

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If you could blink your eyes and instantly be transported somewhere for 24 hours, where would it be?