So. In the interests of having a happier, healthier rest of the year, I'm banning myself from a few places on the interwebs until after the New Year. Then we'll see if I really miss them or if visiting them was just a bad habit.
In other news, does anyone want a very naughty Persian cat? She broke one of my Moroccan tea glasses! I deliberately put them on a higher shelf than I thought she could jump to, and yet at 3 in the morning I heard THUDCRASHSMASH and when I turned on the light she was sitting on the dresser looking innocent and a bunch of stuff from the top bookshelf was rolling around crazily. She's lucky only one thing got broken...
- Music:'O Priya Priya' from Geethanjali
For example, the book I'm currently reading, A Brief History of Montmaray by Michelle Cooper, is being marketed as a new I Capture the Castle, mostly because it's written in diary form and is about a family of impoverished aristocrats living in a crumbling old castle. There are two reviews on Amazon, both middling-to-negative, but one says something to the effect that it's not a very good book but it isn't Twilight and so it's worth reading.
Really? I know Twilight has become sort of an easy target lately, and when you think that it's at least partly to blame for the deluge of mediocre vampires-and-other-supernatural-creature
- Music:Florence & the Machine -- Blinding
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Or what if you add someone as a friend on Facebook (in both cases, I should say, these were friend requests I approved) and you leave your desk for ten minutes and come back to find that he's been sending you chat messages every few minutes saying, "where u at?" "are u there?" "why won't u talk 2 me?", what is the appropriate response?
Oh good grief, he's just sent three more. How do you respond to:
"heyyyyyyyyyyyy
huhhhhhhhh
emily
siddarth
mahesh babu"
or
"hellloooooooooo
bollywood"
???
But no sooner did the girl from the office walk in than it was all, "That needs to be cleaned...scratches here...faucets need to be wiped down...dirty dirty dirty." I'm trying not to take it personally, since I couldn't tell if she was talking to me or just making comments for the video she was taking, but it was depressing, since I was proud of how clean everything looked.
Whatever. I'm sure it wasn't meant to be a judgment on my housekeeping skills and just a catalogue of things that will need to be looked at before the next tenant moves in, but I didn't like it.
I'm moving tomorrow morning.
I have exactly one box packed.
Yep.
And here's a good procrastination song from Chukkallo Chandrudu. I don't remember what Siddharth is supposed to be doing in the movie, but he chooses to dance around playing with puppies and flirting with babies instead.
One of these days I'll do a big "why Siddharth is my favorite South Indian actor" post. Then you will all love him as much as I do. But not today. Because today I have to pack.
I have two angel food cake pans. Why? And why did I think I needed four regular cake pans and a frosting spatula? I couldn't bake a layer cake to save my life! Okay, I could, but it wouldn't be pretty.
Grease-spatter screens...I haven't fried anything in hot oil for years. Well, I did deep-fry samosas last weekend (don't be impressed, they came from a bag in the freezer section at the Indian store) but I didn't even remember that I had them, which is why the kitchen floor is now covered with a thin layer of grease. Two roasting pans. What was I planning to do with them? I think I used one of them once, to make some sort of vaguely Indian spinach-and-potato thing from The River Cottage Family Cookbook. That was really good, actually. I should make it again some time. Three loaf pans, two pie pans...
At least I'm not as bad as my sister. She has six sets of measuring spoons.
Because my 10-digit electric company account number was lurking in the back of my brain.
Seriously, I have no idea where it came from. I guess writing it on checks every month stuck it in there somewhere, because as I was walking back from lunch mentally cursing electric companies and their complicated websites to the fires of Mount Doom, suddenly it came to me. And I pretty much ran back to my desk and created an account and requested the service transfer and now I don't have to worry about anything else with this moving thing except boxes because apparently someone just took all the empty boxes that had been piling up downstairs for their own move, so I'll have to find another source. Any ideas?
I will now stop boring you with this nonsense, and leave you with a recommendation: Sylvester by Georgette Heyer. It's very funny (the hero is cold-bloodedly looking for a wife who suits his requirements, his mother despairs because he isn't including love in his calculations, and he's about to meet the woman who wrote him into her popular novel as the villain!) and I wish I had enough free time to just sit and read it, and didn't have to work.
ETA: And also, hadippa because Netflix just emailed me that they're sending me Dil Bole Hadippa tomorrow! Yippee!
Why is there always one random little thing that seems so easy and stress-free that turns out to be complicated and difficult?
The electric company used to just have a form you could fill out online to start, stop, or move service. It was quick and easy. Now you have to create an account using your account number, which I don't have on hand, since I haven't saved any of my electric bill stubs. So Carrie said, Here's mine, you can set up an account for me and do it that way. Only I can't because "we cannot process your request to stop or move service for the following reason: Frozen Rate". What the fish is that supposed to mean? So we're going to have to call them (which should be a whole lot of fun, since they'll probably want my account number anyway to prove that it's me) and ugh, this was supposed to be a five-minute easy thing.
I just want to go back to reading Sylvester and let someone else deal with all this responsible adult stressful stuff.
My sister and I have been living in the same building (her downstairs and to the left, me upstairs and to the right) for over a year now, and since we spend most of our time together anyway we decided it was stupid to keep paying almost $1200 rent a month when we could move in together and pay more like $700. So we went to the office yesterday thinking we'd just get put on a waiting list or something and they'd let us know when a 2BR was available.
Turns out there's one that'll be ready next weekend. They're putting in new carpet on Thursday, and we can move in on Saturday. And it's so cute! There's a little patio in the front, and a fireplace, and a back door that leads out to a courtyard and one of the pools.
It's a good thing I have Wednesday off this week since I'll be spending every spare minute packing and cleaning. Hopefully I can get some boxes from work, otherwise I'll be carrying lots of armloads of books across the parking lot!
Current favorite pictures of Prabhas:
Okay, that might have made me smile a little.
Adorable song from Yamadonga:
NTR Jr has such pretty eyes, and I love his roguish smile.
But I'm still grumpy. Because I can be. So there. :-P
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ladygoatIncidentally, how do you pronounce "meme"? Is it meem or meh-meh or mee-mee or what? Does anyone even know?
1. If you inherited a million dollars, what would you do specifically with it?
Okay, let's see here... $1000 to pay off my credit card once and for all, $20,000 for a Mini Cooper, invest half so I'll have a decent amount to fall back on when I'm an old maid, and the other $479,000 I'd use for travel, maybe buy a house, buying things I can't afford right now, whatever.
2. If you could live the story of a book, which book?
Why couldn't you have said movie? I have plenty of answers for that, but books are much harder.
I guess I'll have to go with Northanger Abbey, since it's the only book that ends with marriage to Mr. Tilney. :-D
3. How do you see your life in 10 years?
I'll either be married or living with 14 cats. I would kind of prefer the first option.
4. What's the worst injury you've had?
When I was 4 I fell off a step-stool while brushing my teeth and hit my head on the corner of the toilet paper holder. I had to get several stitches in the back of my head. It was my brother's fault. He was 2 and couldn't leave the toilet paper alone (he liked to walk through the house unrolling it behind him), so my mom started hiding it in a cabinet instead of keeping it on the holder where it would have cushioned my poor head when I fell.
5. What are your thoughts on guns?
I think they're stupid and scary, but I suppose I'd be grateful for someone who had one if I was in danger from a wild animal or ax murderer or something.
"In the deli section."
"The deli?"
"Yeah, up with the fancy cheeses and stuff."
"Okay. Because I'm in the ethnic food aisle and they have cans of it for $5."
Hummus...in a can? That's just wrong!
Also apparently she and my dad have some extra money they're splitting between my brother and sister and I, and she was surprised to hear that I have a savings account (she wanted to know how early I would get to their house tonight, because if the bank was still open we could go open one for me with this money they're giving me). When will my parents get it through their heads that I am no longer 18 years old, living with them and spending all my money on dvds and books and clothes? I've been a relatively responsible adult for four or five years now! I save money on a regular basis! The only reason I never have a lot of spending money is because my apartment is more expensive than I can technically afford.
Oh, parents. I love that even at 27 I still don't qualify as an adult in their eyes. I mentioned going to cooking school in Oregon a couple of months ago and my dad got all, "Oh no you don't, you're not moving halfway across the country by yourself." Never mind that my mom moved from Pennsylvania to Kansas when she was 18 to go to school!
I thought it was the youngest children who were supposed to be the baby forever in their parents' eyes, not the oldest?
I'd read so many reviews calling Luck By Chance things like, "truthful and cynical" and "a scathing look at the film industry" that I was almost scared to watch it. What if it left me feeling like a moron for liking the products of a hypocritical filmi underworld? I was expecting something dreary and depressing, full of snide digs at movie stars and people who admire them.
Instead I found a surprisingly enjoyable movie. Not as satisfying as a good Bollywood movie, but definitely not something to put me off Bollywood.
Vikram (Farhan Akhtar) and Sona (Konkona Sen Sharma), both struggling actors, meet through mutual friends. Sona has been sleeping with a married director for three years because he has promised her a role in his next movie, and Vikram can't seem to break into movies because he has no real connections.
Meanwhile veteran director Romy Rolly, played to hilarious perfection by Rishi Kapoor, is about to launch star daughter Nikki Walia in his brother's new film Dil Ki Aag. But at the last minute superstar Zaffar Khan (Hrithik Roshan) gets a role in Karan Johar's new movie and backs out. By chance Vikram's picture comes across the casting director's table, and he gets the role.
Up to this point Vikram has seemed mainly likeable, and his romance with Sona sweet. But it's when he starts to taste success that he shows his true colors. What I liked was that he was never portrayed as admirable, or the choices he made as being what everyone has to face. There was no dreary feeling that to be a star you have to become a jerk. It's just that Vikram was a jerk. In a filmier movie, Romy or Neena would have sat him down and said, "Look Vikram, you can't have a girlfriend if you're going to be a star, we're going to market you as everyone's dream boy (or, we want you to date Nikki so everyone will think you're a couple)," and he would have had to choose between stardom and Sona. Instead it's clearly shown that Vikram does everything of his own free will.
I'm not an analytical film viewer, I pretty much take things at face value, so I'm sure I missed a deeper message somewhere along the line. I know I didn't see the cynical, scathing look at the Hindi film industry that a lot of other people claim to have seen. I did think a few times near the beginning they were too hard on "commercial cinema", and the picturization of Baaware was over the top even for a spoof on wacky song picturizations. But for the most part I took it as a story about Vikram and Sona, not as a revealing look at the inner workings of the film world, and as such I liked it.
Speaking of Baaware, I suspect it's going to be stuck in my head for the rest of the week, and I'd like to share that joy with all of you now. :-D
One of my favorite books of all time, so I jumped at the chance to re-read it for our book club this month. I love all of Mary Stewart's books, but NCW is something special, even from the opening lines.
I was thankful that nobody was there to meet me at the airport.
We reached Paris just as the light was fading. It had been a soft, gray March day, with the smell of spring in the air. The wet tarmac glistened underfoot; over the airfield the sky looked very high, rinsed by the afternoon's rain to a pale clear blue. Little trails of soft cloud drifted in the wet wind, and a late sunbeam touched them with a fleeting underglow. Away beyond the airport buildings the telegraph wires swooped gleaming above the road where passing vehicles showed lights already.
Linda Martin is hired as a governess for the 9-year-old Philippe, Comte de Valmy, and it quickly becomes apparent that the luxurious Chateau Valmy is a dangerous place for Philippe to be growing up. She falls hard for his dashing cousin Raoul, but can any of the Valmys be trusted when it becomes a matter of life and death?
Winter's Child by Cameron Dokey
I read this mostly for the cover, though I've also enjoyed several of the Once Upon a Time series (fairy tales re-told as young adult romances) in the past.
Winter's Child is a re-telling of The Snow Queen, and though it's not wonderful -- it would have benefitted from being twice as long so that the two romances could have been developed and not thrown in at the last minute -- some of Cameron Dokey's writing is beautiful. Not a book I want to recommend to everyone I see, but perfect for a snowy afternoon with a cup of hot cocoa to sip as you read.
84 Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff
I've been hearing about this book and the movie inspired by it for years, and always assumed it was a love story. Instead it's a charming little book, easily read in an hour or two, made up of the letters between Hanff, a writer in New York, and the employees of a bookstore in London. At first polite and businesslike, the letters quickly become casual, and though they never meet the writers all come to regard each other as friends. No romance, and a slightly bittersweet ending, but very cozy nonetheless.
Dangerous by Charlotte Lamb
One of my book sale finds from September, I picked up this ancient Harlequin novel because the cover reminded me of the ones I used to read in junior high -- no sex, just cheesy romance. And it was dreadful, just as I'd suspected.
A nurse recovering from pneumonia takes a job as companion to the spoiled and willful granddaughter of a wealthy woman about to go to Paris. The girl's father is terribly, terribly alpha male and Greek, and doesn't trust women at all. The reasons for this are explained later, but unfortunately the romance never is -- on one page the heroine still hates him, and two pages later she's melting into his arms agreeing to marry him, even though nothing has changed. Very silly indeed.
The Little Lady Agency by Hester Browne
I don't normally read "chick lit", as I can't relate to their whole Sex and the City vibe. But having enjoyed Hester Browne's fourth book, I thought I'd give her first series a chance.
Melissa Romney-Jones has just been fired for the umpteenth time from a job she didn't like. Desperate to earn some money and stop sponging off her flatmate Nelson, she comes up with the idea of starting The Little Lady Agency, where she'll use her knowledge of society and good manners to straighten out hapless bachelors. Wearing a blond wig and Marilyn Monroe-esque wardrobe she transforms every morning into Honey Blennerhesket, bossy bombshell.
One of her first clients is American businessman Jonathan Riley, who doesn't need his life straightened out so much as he needs a pretend girlfriend to ward off unpleasant questions about his messy divorce back in New York. As both Honey and herself Melissa falls for him, but doubts that someone suave and sophisticated could be interested in what's underneath the "Honey" facade.
Little Lady, Big Apple by Hester Browne
The second in the series finds Melissa about to lose her happy home -- Nelson is leaving for a few months and is using the time to have the flat renovated. At about the same time Jonathan's company sends him back to New York, and he asks her to come with him.
At first it seems like a dream come true, all the glitz and glamour of New York City, romantic dinners out, meeting Jonathan's American friends...but Melissa's friend and sister are running her Little Lady Agency into the ground, Jonathan wants her to give it up and start a party-planning agency instead, and his ex-wife remains a constant unpleasantness in the background. Add in a former schoolmate turned budding Hollywood star whose agent wants "Honey" to give him an image makeover, and poor Melissa spends most of the book feeling miserable.
The Little Lady Agency and the Prince by Hester Browne
Somehow Hester Browne never gets back the charm of the first Little Lady book in either of the sequels. In this one Melissa is trying to plan her wedding to Jonathan, her move to Paris, where he's now been transferred, and the end of her agency, and also do a favor for her grandmother who wants her to make over the playboy prince of a tiny Mediterranean kingdom. A twist near the middle only confirms what had been obvious since book 2, and Melissa gets her happy ending, only not quite the way she'd planned. I liked it but it wasn't as interesting as the first book.
Death at Wentwater Court by Carola Dunn
The Honourable Miss Daisy Dalrymple is an independent young woman with a job writing about fancy old houses for Town and Country magazine. Her first assignment is Wentwater Court, chosen because she knows the family slightly, and it only takes a day for Daisy to notice all the underlying tension between the family and their guests. The slimy Lord Stephen Astwick seems to be at the root of it all...and then he turns up dead in the frozen skating pond. The police are all ready to call it an accidental death until Daisy's photographs show something mysterious about the way the ice was broken.
The real appeal of the book, and probably of the whole series, lies in Daisy's introduction to Scotland Yard detective Alec Fletcher, and their immediate rapport. Obviously there will be romance later, but in this first book they just become friends and solve the mystery together. It pretty much fits the definition of "cozy mystery", and I will most likely read more of the series in the future.
Legend in Green Velvet by Elizabeth Peters
Not as funny as I remembered, but still a good zany mystery-romance-comedy the way Elizabeth Peters does best. Young American Susan, whose passion for all things Scottish knows no bounds, finally gets the chance of a lifetime: a week to work on an architectural dig in the Highlands. Before she can even get there, though, she meets a crazy old man called Tammas who gives her a message in code, a muscular American named Ed Jackson whose bruising embrace distracts her while he searches her purse, and finally reluctant young laird Jamie Erskine in whose company she flees the scene of a murder. A wild chase across Scotland ensues as Susan and Jamie stay one step ahead of the police and try to not only solve the mystery, but to figure out what the mystery is in the first place.
Airs Above the Ground by Mary Stewart
Another of my favorites. Vanessa March is mad at her husband for cancelling their Italian getaway to spend a week in Sweden on business instead, but when she finds out he's not even in Sweden -- someone saw him on a newsreel story about a circus fire in Austria -- she's even madder. She agrees to escort a friend's son to Vienna so that she can find Lewis, but of course it's not as simple as it first appears. Instead of the harmless chemist she thought she'd married, Vanessa finds that her husband is actually a secret agent on the trail of someone in the circus who will stop at nothing to keep their crime undiscovered.
Journey to the River Sea by Eva Ibbotson
Orphaned Maia is sent to Brazil to live with her only relatives, the unpleasant Carters. Being a typical Ibbotson heroine she's bright and passionate and deeply interested in things like music and art and nature, and having to live shut up in a frantically sanitized home eating only food that was shipped from England in cans and boxes, is a fate worse than death. Her friend and fellow orphan, the half-Indian boy Finn, asks her to help him escape from the detectives who want to drag him kicking and screaming back to England, and along with a young actor who has had to stop performing in shame after his voice broke while he was playing a 7-year-old, they come up with what seems like a foolproof plan. But poor Maia will still be stuck with the annoying Carters...or will she?
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer
I've put off reading this forever because it seemed like one of those icky Nicholas Sparks-type books: overly sappy; with some Mitford thrown in for good measure: small-town people nosing around in each other's business and dispensing pearls of rural wisdom. But on our last Discard Day I read the first few pages and thought it seemed interesting, so I read it and it was really very good.
Writer Juliet Ashford isn't sure what to do with herself now that World War II is over and she can't make a living writing humorous columns of the "keep calm and carry on" type. She can't get excited about any ideas for books, especially since her biography of Ann Bronte wasn't well-received.
Then a letter from a man in Guernsey arrives, telling her that he had come across a book that used to belong to her and had her name and address written in the front. As they correspond Juliet is introduced to his friends, a group who call themselves The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and who used their literary discussions to keep up their morale during the German occupation of the island. Juliet becomes more and more enamored of this group (in some ways it's similar to 84 Charing Cross, with the letters and the deepening friendships between strangers) and eventually goes to Guernsey with the idea of writing a book about them.
It's a very simple story, and the depth lies in the letters and their writers, and the stories they have to tell. I was particularly fond of Isola Pribby, whose passion for gothic novels comes to a screeching halt when she discovers Jane Austen, and then demands to know why no one ever told her about Pride and Prejudice before???
2) Is November 1 too early to decorate for Christmas? Why or why not?
3) Never mind.
4) To end on a happy note...Nigella Lawson is going to be signing books in Kansas City in December!
The happy couple.( Read more )
I wouldn't. I haven't even bothered to replace my CDs with an ipod.
Happy to stay behind the times,
Someone who won't be buying your product so please leave me alone.
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