My Thanksgiving

Nah...just kidding. That was my Thanksgiving Eve dinner.

My Thanksgiving would have been better without all the family and the cooking and the loading and unloading of dishes.

How was yours?

Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving to those of you who celebrate.

No Country For Old Men

This had been on my reading list for some time but when the trailers for the movie came out, I bumped it up.

I started it two days ago and couldn't put it down. I had to get use to Cormac McCarthy's unusual way of writing. He's not a fan of punctuation and doesn't put quotations around the dialogue so I'd have to go back sometimes and reread something not realizing for a moment that a character was actually speaking.

He spelled things the way they were pronounced by his characters, all obviously huge Texas hicks.
Except. I live in Texas. And while it was cute and quaint at first, I noticed that all his Texas characters spoke that way. The problem is that I know many Texas characters (I'm related to a lot of them) and the majority of them can say "knew" instead of "knowed".
At first, I thought maybe it was a West Texas thing since it takes place out there but then a girl showed up from Port Arthur and she spoke the same way.

Ok...vernacular aside....

I loved this book in the beginning. I raced from page to page wondering how our main character was going to stay one step ahead of the bad guys.

Then...well I don't want to give anything away but I was disappointed.

Suddenly, the excitement ended without fanfare and without much explanation. Then the character of the Sheriff took over the end of the book and rambled on for pages and pages. Suddenly, I was uninterested and I felt cheated.

Maybe there is some symbolism or some shit that I'm not getting but No Country For Old Men was like one good book and one boring book bound together.

Midnight Serenade

Last night, I was looking forward to spending a little time out on my patio because the weather was wonderful. There was a light, cool breeze and virtually no humidity. Perfect patio weather.
I'll have to tell you my Patio Stalking story some other time....

Anyway, so I take my book out there, light some candles and kick back.
A few sentences in, I hear my neighbor's door open. I don't bother turning around or acknowledging her, I'm here to read, not socialize and besides...it's awkward because if I'm quiet and don't move around, it's hard to notice I'm on the patio through the 6 foot fence.
I continue to read as I hear the person close the door and shuffle their feet down the landing to the top of the stairs. Then a moment later, they shuffle back, open the door, but I don't hear the door close. Then I hear the sound of an acoustic guitar. It's a little loud but I am on the patio...it's not like I'm in my bed trying to sleep. Also, it's nice; a little reading music.

After a few minutes, I hear a man's voice speaking in my direction, "Is that too loud?" It wasn't my neighbor but someone apparently staying with her.

I said, "No. Actually it's kind of nice."

"Oh! Well let me get my pick, it'll sound better!"

Crap.

So he comes out and sits on the rail just on the other side of my patio fence and asks if I have any requests.

"You going inside," was my first thought but I'm mostly a nice girl so I kind of giggled and said "Oh I don't know."

"Well, I can play anything."

So, I told him I loved the Foo Fighters and he said "They are actually one of my favorite bands. Hold on..."
He looked down at the strings for a moment, then started playing Everlong.
It wasn't great but it was very cool.
After Everlong, he played a little Metallica Fade to Black. He then segued into something he wrote and it was VERY good.
But the whole thing was surreal. First I was sitting quietly on my patio and the next thing I know, I'm being serenaded through the fence by this complete stranger.

I worried about the noise. We're a very quiet apartment complex and I felt like I needed to tell him to be quiet.
I feel like that at work a lot. People never learned that you have to be quiet in a library and they walk in talking at the top of their lungs and I literally cringe, thinking about all those people being disturbed.

While he was playing, I kept thinking about this and then got mad at myself. It's one thing to expect people to be quiet at work but I'm not responsible for this guy. If the other tenants want to complain, let them. I actually had to give myself permission to enjoy the serenade and not worry about the other apartment dwellers.

I think I might be wound tighter than this guy's guitar strings!

Shock

and so much sadness.

Just a few minutes ago, I found out my blog friend Jim at Snooze Button Dreams, lost his wife.

My heart breaks for Jim and his three young sons who lost their mother.

It's just not right.

Because Skippy said so

and I will do anything Skippy tells me to.

An excerpt from a recent email:

"Oh, and you should write something already."

So...here I am.

I told Skippy I was dead inside. I log in, write for a few minutes then stop and close it, losing everything I typed because it sucks.
I mean...pretty much everything I write sucks but this sucks worse. Like...uber sucking.

Anyway, Skippy is awesome and sent me some songs this morning.
One of them was an acoustic cover of Blackbird by Dave Grohl.
It reminded of me of way back in 2000, Dave Grohl appeared on Rockline.
Musicians get interviewed, take calls and play a little music. I actually called in and got to talk to Dave, which looking back seems a little teeny bopper-ish but whatever. I was also taping the whole thing....on a cassette.
It was reminiscent of those days of sitting by the radio waiting for a particularly good song to come on so you could hurry and push the record button on your cassette player. Did any of you do that?
When you played it back you usually missed the first 10 seconds of the song and the first 2 seconds of the recording was your fingers fumbling to push down both the record and play buttons.

Forget high quality digital music files. Back then, the height of musical technology was an incomplete song with the sound of dogs barking, your parents calling you to dinner and the accidental cough or giggle coming from a friend in the background.
Now you can understand why I love my iPod more than life.

Anyway...so now, thanks to the Genius Skippy, I have Dave Grohl singing Blackbird, sans cassette.

See? This post sucked!

A book meme

Because I have nothing else better to do...
Here is another meme:

Bold the titles you’ve read. Italicize the titles you have on your bookshelf but haven’t read.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi
The Name of the Rose (TBR list)
Don Quixote
Moby Dick (didn't everyone have to read this in school?)
Ulysses
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace (TBR list)
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books (TBR list)
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales (I think I read this in high school)
The Historian
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo (TBR list)
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse (TBR list)
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes
The God of Small Things (TBR list)
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-Five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Collapse : How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion (TBR list)
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an Inquiry into Values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

Gosh....I've only read 15 on the list. What a loser!