menu? what menu?

I am not so good at this menu-planning thing and hardly followed through on any of the last meals I planned. And I have been traveling and will be traveling soon again and need not to eat so much crap. Let's try again, shall we?

Friday: Out to dinner with C. and grocery shopping
Saturday: Lemony mushrooms and salmon
Sunday: Chicken gyros and brussels sprouts

Work breakfasts: Shannon's steel-cut oats with dried apples and cinnamon
Work lunches: Salad with leftover chicken, red onion, bell peppers, feta, and those crispy chickpeas I still haven't tried; yogurt; grapes; any Girl Scout cookies someone has been foolish enough to leave in the staff lounge

Monday: Vegetable moussaka with zucchini
Tuesday: Leftovers
Wednesday: White bean cassoulet from a cookbook

on the menu, late february edition

J is going to a conference today and isn't coming back for almost a whole week (sadness), and I tend to eat like a bachelor while he's away. So, in an effort NOT to do that this time...

Lunches: spinach salads with salmon patties, crispy chickpeas, bell peppers, cucumbers, carrots and feta

Breakfasts: peanut-butter banana muffins

Tonight: grocery shopping and work food prep, Wegmans sushi for dinner
Monday: pasta with sauteed brussels sprouts
Tuesday: out
Wednesday & Thursday: leftover pasta
Friday: breakfast for dinner, with banana chocolate chip pancakes and turkey bacon

freaky bloggy friday

God, this week felt long, didn't it? This week felt long. I started it out in Oklahoma, with the best trip ever and the most amazing friends ever, and I am tired.

Reading: I Think I Love You, by Allison Pearson.

Just finished reading: The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted, by Elizabeth Berg. I got it as an e-book from the library, so I wanted to write down my favorite quotes so they aren't lost to the ether...

"never sacrifice joy for fear if you can possibly help it, and you can probably help it more often than you think" (257)

"Do you know what drinking coffee with skim milk is like? It's like asking for a dress and being handed a slip." (100)

"nutmeg must always work undercover, where you taste it but you don't know what it is." (208)

"you are the best part" (238) -- that one needs context to make sense, so you should read the book.

Photographing: Lots of stuff, with my iPhone camera. I've mostly been using camera+, but I would be open to better apps if anyone has recommendations. Something that zooms well and easily without pixelating everything within in an inch of its life would be especially nice.

Knitting: A lot, for a good reason. :)

Playing: Supervillain or Newt, and it is way harder than it should be. I only got 5 out of 10 right. Terrifying.

on the menu

I periodically decide to do menu planning like my better-organized compatriots, and then promptly forget whatever I'd planned the moment I get to the grocery store. So, I will try it. Let's see.

Breakfasts: banana peanut-butter muffins or oatmeal; clementines

Lunches and snacks: salads (spinach, red onion, bell peppers, feta) with leftover salmon cakes or tofu and yogurt blue-cheese dressing; yogurt; clementines and apples; Special K protein bars

Dinners for the week:

• Sunday: salmon patties (oh look, Hefk already put these on the food blog; good to know they work), roasted brussels sprouts and sweet potato oven fries
• Monday: stirfry with baked tofu
• Tuesday: dinner out post-knitting, probably pho
• Wednesday: escarole and white bean soup (from Veg Times) and bread
• Thursday: wow, how do people think this far ahead... I have writing group so probably quick leftovers or a quick bite out...
• Friday: leftovers? oh wait, I think we are going to a potluck this night
• Saturday: hahaha

Well, better than nothing, right? Here's to a better-planned new year.

going places

I just realized I forgot to tell this blog that I have another blog!

My Wordpress blog, which I deliberately didn't connect with this one because it's supposed to be my somewhat lame attempt at a professional social-media presence, is getting lots of attention in November. I've deemed this month NaAgFiMo... go to gwenglazer.wordpress.com to find out what it means!

and on that farm, we had some pigs

Writing: This blog post about J's and my anniversary meal at Blue Hill Farm, which was more than kind of awesome. (We wrote it on our old wedding website, partly because I am too paranoid to point parental types to this blog and partly because it just seemed appropriate there.)

Expecting: More rejections from agents, to add to the four -- including one from the agency that solicited it -- I've already gotten. 57 more until I hit Katheryn Stockett territory.

Reading: Game of Thrones, the first science-fiction I've read in ages. Also listening to Bonk, which is sensationalist, entertaining and disturbing as hell.

Loving: My week of no-work, following our weekend of vacation. Seriously, you guys, not working is super-fun, and it would be even better if you could somehow make money from doing it permanently. We need to get on that.

friday night: natural disasters edition

Reflecting: That I only ever miss journalism when important and scary things are happening. I think I used to feel some (illusory) measure of control by simply being in a busy newsroom when something inherently UNcontrollable was going on, like a disaster or an election (what's the difference? ba dum bump). Now, with Hurricane Irene supposed to hit the East Coast this weekend, I feel all anxious and amped up with no place to go. I'm grateful that Ithaca is so far inland and a little worried about all of the coastal dwellers I know and love.

Reflecting II: On Wednesday's earthquake. I definitely heard it, a loud rattling of the wall behind me, which is lined with shelves. I thought the woman in the office next to mine was moving something heavy, but when I heard the loud rumbling/squeaking/rattling for the second time and saw everything on the shelves shaking, I went into her office to see what on earth she could be doing... and she wasn't even in there. Creepy.

Reading: Ten Thousand Saints, about straight-edge teenagers. It's making me scared for youth everywhere.

Waiting: To hear back from more agents. Two out of five rejections so far; only 58 more to go until I tie Kathryn Stockett.

Cooking: Tonight, fresh corn and green beans from the garden, blanched and salted and peppered and nothing more. Mm. Sunday, I'll be making a birthday dinner for J.... we have a tradition of always cooking for each other on our birthdays, and we were in Baltimore on his actual birthday last weekend, so we postponed a week. I'll be making Old Bay cod cakes, tomato salad, and blueberry sour cream pie.

Looking forward to: Going to the NY State Fair tomorrow. Zee and her partner's wedding celebration in October (YAY!); I opened the invitation five minutes ago. Sleep.

the lark and the heartbeat

I'm going to skip the "tap tap is this thing on" comments and start blogging again. Hi!

Inspired by some random something I saw somewhere, I am going to start doing this short little thing once a week or so. Sometimes, particularly when I feel like I have too much writing to do in too many different parts of my life, I crave something discrete and structured. Just like a sonnetteer! (That's not a word.)

Reading: 44 Scotland Street, recommended by my writing teacher. Not so into it yet. I just finished Spiral, which I was very into and scared me a lot.

Thinking about: Sending off the zoo book off to an agent next week. I had a little freak-out last night when I tried to sit down and read the end, feeling like I am the world's worst writer and I will never get anywhere and who-do-I-think-I-am-anyway etc. etc. Feeling better now, but that could be because I haven't actually tried to read my own fiction yet today.

Also thinking about: babies; oatmeal and its various health benefits; air-conditioning and energy and the environment; how it's possible that we still do have a crappy landlord and don't have a dog.

Looking forward to: Blueberry-picking tomorrow morning. This dress, which I just ordered on a major sale. Being finished with a particularly heinous project at work.

33 for 33.

Just realized I never published this when I went to participate in a Kiva groupon... oof, poor neglected little blog. I will put this in the sidebar and am also accepting suggestions, because somehow I could only come up with 27 this year.

1. Read one book from existing pile every month. (October: The Sparrow; November: Gold Boy, Emerald Girl)
2. Donate unwanted books to sale.
DONE: 3. Finish thank-you notes by 12/1. (October!)
4. Edit novel.
5. Clean out & organize spices.
6. Create a budget and stick to it.
7. Investigate mint.com.
DONE: 8. Try another yoga class. (Wednesday mornings)
9. See a live play in Ithaca.
10. Play my oboe.
11. Learn to knit cables.
12. Knit J's cowl.
13. Find a new dentist.
14. Read East of Eden.
DONE: 15. Visit a friend or relative I haven't visited before. (November; Florida trip)
16. Put snow tires on on time.
17. Go two weeks without buying coffee at work.
18. Find three new musicians to love. (#1: Josh Ritter)
19. See Girlyman live.
20. Light Shabbat candles more often.
21. Buy part of an old card catalog.
DONE: 22. Do a Kiva microloan. (11/29)
23. Visit one new state or country with J.
24. Clean out stupid closet again.
25. Pay off loans on time every month.
26. Send holiday cards/presents to five new people.
27. Visit K. on the west coast.

spring is sproinging

When I started our wedding Web site yesterday, I stumbled across this site, which has easy-to-use blogspot backgrounds, and I decided I wanted a new one for mine too. It takes five seconds to paste in the code (which actually works, which is more than I can say for a few of the other blogspot template sites I found) and there are some fun choices.

Also, I make it a point not to complain about Blogger's generally perfect, completely free software -- and I am not complaining now, in fact -- but it seems odd to me that the 10 templates on offer when you create a new blog are pretty much the exact same ones that have been there for the past 10 years or whatever. Trip down blogging memory lane.

good to goats

So, after four separate people called or texted me within about an hour of posting that last entry on the blog, I realized that I probably sounded just a wee bit overdramatic. Uh, sorry! I think I just needed to write it. I felt better afterward, and even better than that after I talked to the goat guy's son, who assured me we would have help if we needed it. And then, even better than that, when the power didn't go out. Whew. I took two days off of work, and the Subaru didn't get stuck in the foot and a half (!) of snow, and we had water the whole time. I read a novel about polygamy and did a lot of homework and cuddled with the dog and everything was fine.

Thank you for your concern, though, really -- I felt supported and cared for by all of you, and that made me feel better too.

And now, photos!

The girls in the barn. It was built in the Civil War and is a beautiful, slightly crumbly structure.

J. with the buck. One buck, 20+ does... that guy has a pretty good life. He knows he's in charge, too; he pushes everyone aside to get to the fresh hay first and he gets very skeptical of anyone who is messing with his girls.

He also makes this great "mup mup" noise and sort of bays with his teeth bared periodically. He drinks his own pee, too, but let's not dwell on that.

The three doelings. The goat farmer refers to them as the "little girls" and they act very much like little girls, very curious and cute and eager to see what's going on.

My favorite goat. I love her brown spots and her dappled ears. None of the goats have names, though -- it's a little bit like naming your dinner, to this farmer. He clearly is fond of the animals but he's very practical about them too.

Fresh hay brings all the girls to the yard. Woot.

Take giant buckets of water from the bathtub or outside spigot at the house, put them in the car, drive them to the barn, walk them down the stairs, give them to the goats. Rinse and repeat twice a day, three times on weekends.

Giant pile of hay bales on the first floor of the barn. You throw these through the hole in the floor that leads to the goats' floor.

And, for good measure, the adorable chocolate lab back at the house, who greets you at the door with unbridled enthusiasm when you return from goat duty.

it's all fun and goats until...

Some of you know that J and I are goat-sitting at a farm about 20 miles outside of Ithaca for two weeks. When I tell people who don't know, the conversation usually goes like this:

Me: "J and I are goat-sitting at a farm about 20 miles outside of Ithaca for two weeks."
Other person: "GOAT-SITTING?"
Me: "Yes. Meat goats. 25 of them. Plus four chickens and a chocolate lab."
Other person: "MEAT GOATS!? TWENTY-FIVE OF THEM?!?!"
Me: "Yes. They're almost all pregnant, too."
Other person: "THEY'RE ALL PREGNANT?!???!"
Me: "Yes. Their owners are going to Hawaii."
Other person: "HAWAII?!?!!?!?!????"

... and so on. Truthfully, though, I never really thought this was THAT crazy of an idea. It made sense, right? I've liked goats for years, learned a bit about them and read a bunch of books, been curious to see if I really wanted this lifestyle someday. The farmer who owns the goats has a very practical attitude toward them and he's always seemed very confident that J and I, despite our city-slicker (suburb-slicker?) pasts and total lack of experience, would be fine. He answered a ton of our dumb questions and left us a lot of emergency contact information that he assured us we'd never need. This would be the perfect way to try out this lifestyle.

And the first five days were fine. The chores are pretty time-consuming but we were definitely getting into a rhythm; there were a few lifestyle changes but nothing we couldn't handle. I didn't love it exactly, maybe didn't embrace it quite the way I thought I might, but we were doing A-OK.

All that changed last night, when I got to the barn late -- around 5:30, when it's already getting a little too dark for comfort -- and looked down the stairs (the goats are on the bottom floor of the barn, which is half-open to pasture in the back) and saw a white blob. Moving white blob. Moving white blob that was a goat, which was out, in the part of the barn where it most emphatically did not belong. I went down the stairs and my stomach dropped into my toes: The goats were out, almost all of them. The door to the doelings' pen was wide open, but I had no idea how the rest of the goats had gotten out of the main pen, where only about six were left.

The story of getting them back in, in a nutshell, involves them walking sort of on their own volition into the doelings' pen and me closing and latching the door to keep them there; very calmly getting back in the car and driving back to the house to get my cell phone; calling the neighbor (who does the noon chores while we're at work and is the one who probably left the doelings' latch open); the neighbor coming over quickly; us devising a sort of chute to lead them from the doelings' pen to the main pen; bribing them with grain to walk through; doing the rest of the chores as normal. The whole event took probably 45 minutes.

Everyone seems OK. You have to check below their tails to see if any of them miscarried in a few days, but even if they had, there's nothing we can do about it. The resident goat guru says it's unlikely, though, because they weren't traumatized and got out "on a lark," as she said on the phone last night, laughing, "troublemakers!" This morning, as J and I tried to throw the straw under the manger to the back of the barn so it would be harder for them to jump over, we discovered that they can actually squeeze through the bottom of the main gate to the pen if it isn't closed very very tightly. Three more goats escaped, but again, we got them back without much incident and we at least solved the mystery.

Now, there is a "snowicane" predicted. I have no idea if the weather people are overreacting just to give journalists an excuse to make up stupid new words for their headlines, but whatever it is, there is likely to be some snow and some wind. The power at the house goes out easily. The water comes from a well, operated by an electric pump. If there is no water and no heat, we will have to melt snow for goats, chickens, dog and humans on a wood stove in the basement. If we can't get the car out of the driveway because there's a foot of snow, we will have to carry the water to the barn.

I am panicking. I actually am really not OK, even though I should be -- as J. reminds me, we are not going to die because of a snowstorm. We might not love the contingency plans, but they're there. We have lots of emergency contacts and people who will help us; we have neighbors relatively close to us; no one wants to see us fail at this; this story is most likely (but only that; not definitely) not going to end with us killing any of the animals in our care. But I can't stop thinking about what happens if this, if that, if the other thing, if all of it at the same time plus a foot of snow and heavy winds and no car and no power and no water and no heat. I feel profoundly, unproductively, furious at the universe that it's barely snowed all winter here and we have to get a potentially massive storm during the two weeks we're doing this. I've been on edge since the first time I heard about the weather on Monday and on the verge of tears since I saw the real forecast last night.

Deep down, I was pretty sure I did want a lifestyle like this, although maybe with 3 or 4 goats instead of 25. I knew people romanticized it and that it isn't at all romantic, and I even liked that about it -- I still like that about it. The dirt and the heavy lifting and the strict schedule... none of that is really the problem, although it doesn't give me the sort of intangible sense of accomplishment or steadiness that I thought it would. I was looking forward to this chance.

I know that a huge measure of this anxiety is coming because they are not OUR animals. It would be infinitely worse if something happened to animals that we were caring for rather than ones we owned; the responsibility is just completely different. I know I wouldn't be worrying about the dog this much if she were my dog, and that goes 25 times more for the goats and chickens. But there is a new voice now that says, you are not cut out for this. This is too much responsibility and you are not this responsible. You aren't good at this. You aren't cut out for it. You're just another romanticizer.

I have no end to this, but we've taken a bunch of pictures and I promise there will be a "woo, look at all the goats" post sometime soon. After the goddamn "snowicane," though. Keep us in your thoughts if you do that sort of thing, OK?

by the book

One of my favorite librarian bloggers (no link because we are sort of kind of professionally connected, but email me if you want to read hers, which is great) did what is apparently an old-school meme that I've never seen before, and reading it was really fun. Basically, it's 15 things about you and books. Here goes:

1. Her last one will be my first one: When I realized that "collection development" meant buying books with other people's money and getting paid for it, I was very excited. When I realized that "readers' advisory" meant talking to people about what books they like and trying to help them find more and getting paid for it, I was very very excited, and I knew for sure I wanted to be a public librarian.

2. My parents like apocryphal stories about my reading proclivities as a very young child. I think the earliest one is about me hating to sleep at night and just wanting my dad to stay up and read to me in his brown fuzzy recliner (later nicknamed, creatively, "Brown Fuzzy"). Anything would do -- newspaper articles, his students' papers that he had to grade, etc. I was not discriminating.

3. Apparently, if an adult was finished reading me a book and didn't intend to read it again, I would pick up the book and smack them with it, demanding, "Weed. Weed. Weed."

4. When I was around three and a half, my parents left me alone for a weekend with my grandmother and my aunt. When they came back, my grandmother (a kindergarten teacher) insisted to my mother (a first-grade teacher) that I could read on my own. My mother disagreed and thought that I'd just memorized all the books, so I sat down and proved it with some book I'd never seen before.

5. My first memory of my public library is the Clifford-colored carpet in the children's room on the second floor. I remember going there for storytime, sitting crosslegged on the floor with the other kids, and watching the librarian turn the book about an elephant outward and read upside down so we could see the pictures. I remember the sound of the crinkly cover in her hands. (I am still obsessed with those crinkly covers and one of my secret goals as a librarian is to get a job in which I have an excuse to touch a lot of them every single day, germs be damned.)

6. That library had an interesting division in its children and young adult materials that, looking back, I don't fully understand. The kids' room on the second floor had three black wire racks of paperbacks, set in the far left corner under the windows, that were YA books (including one warning about the evils of drinking that I saw when I was way too young for it, maybe 7 or 8. it described kids "getting wasted" and "being loaded" and somehow winding up in a room alone, half-dead and covered in vomit. i think one or more of the kids wound up fully dead, and the whole thing terrified me so much that it's probably responsible for my completely non-alcoholic high school career. very effective propaganda, that book.) but the real YA section was downstairs, closer to the adult fiction. I felt like it was the best day of my life when I graduated to the downstairs section -- suggested by one of the librarians! -- and I think I may have actually read every book in it.

7. The D.C. public library was one of the first places I went when I moved there. It was 1999, and the tiny branch closest to my apartment had one (1) computer (nonfunctional). I wonder if I would like to work in an urban setting like that. I could do an entire list on public libraries. I will stop.

8. No, I totally won't. Until last year, I had four different public library cards in three different states/nonvoting areas: D.C.; Montgomery County, Maryland; Arlington, Virginia; and the Library of Congress. The reading room at the Library of Congress is 17 kinds of awesome, but you aren't allowed to check out books. I once accidentally returned a D.C. book to a Montgomery County Library and had to ask the librarian to fish it out of the bookdrop for me. She did not approve.

9. Last one, I swear: I love the public library here, and I am now on its board of trustees. I hope I do not screw it up. I plan to use my immense power for good and not evil.

10. I loved those SRAs in elementary school. What did SRA stand for? No idea, but they were these sort of individual mini-book pamphlet things, each with a different story and questions at the end. They were always kept in big boxes in the back of the classroom, color-coded to tell you which series to use. The reading-comprehension questions never interested me particularly, but I couldn't wait to get to the next story.

11. My parents both allowed and enabled me to read anything I wanted, whenever I wanted. (Eight-year-old Gwen was a little young for that BOOZE WILL KILL YOU AND THEN YOU WILL DIE brainwasher for sure, but look how many sleepless nights it probably saved them!) They seriously never censored a thing. I read 40000 fluffy teen series; Jackie Collins novels; The Great Gatsby; whatever. They never said a word and they plunked down cash and they drove to the library 80 zillion times without complaining. So awesome.

12. My family members give each other eight books each for the last night of Chanukah. I didn't do it this year and felt really lame, and this is my official reminder to do it next year.

13. In college, as part of a dictate from my very intense and somewhat psychotic thesis adviser, I read everything Virginia Woolf has ever written, in chronological order, over the course of 10 days. I basically majored in reading, and one week, we were supposed to read The Iliad for Tuesday's class and The Odyssey for Thursday's. The professors did not so much approve of skimming, either.

13. I am surprising myself by sort of wanting a Kindle or other e-reader and also sort of not wanting one, but in any case, I'm glad we live in a world where we don't have to limit ourselves to one format.

14. Literary fiction is my true love, but I am trying to read outside my genre. I've been reading more science fiction and magical realism, and I would love to love nonfiction, too.

15. Here are the books on my bedside table right now: Uglies, Pretties, All Other Nights, The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount, Digitizing Collections: Strategic Issues for the Information Manager, The Yarn Girls' Guide to Beyond the Basics.

This was long and crazy, but I would love to hear your things about books, on your own blog or in the comments or whatever. Tell me one or two or 15, yes?

2009, we hardly knew ye

Third Fourth Fifth time’s the charm! (wow, I've been doing this since 2003? geez.)

1. What did you do in 2009 that you'd never done before?

Wrote a novel in a month. Gave a presentation at a professional conference. Led a library workshop. Racked up an insane amount of school debt. Survived (and loved) an entire Ithaca winter. Took a class with the world's most famous librarian. Published a knitting pattern. Swore an oath to uphold my fellow citizens as a member of the public library's board of trustees.

2. Did you keep your new year's resolutions, and will you make more for next year?

I don't think I made any beyond 32 for 32. I didn't do particularly well on 31 for 31, and I think my percentage of completion was worse than 30 for 30; I hereby resolve to do better next year.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?

H. and an Ithaca friend of the same name, and former roommate T.

4. Did anyone close to you die?

Yes.

5. What countries did you visit?

Zero. How boring is that. I'm thinking about going to Texas in March -- will Texas count as a foreign country?

6. What would you like to have in 2010 that you lacked in 2009?

Self-discipline makes the list for a fifth year running! Ditto on "a Zen-like sense of calm and detachment," which is still amusing. This year, let's add a set schedule for editing and a permanent African dance class that I can go to every single week.

7. What dates from 2008 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?

I usually have an answer for this one, but not this year. Hm.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?

NaNoWriMo, baby. That experience really reminded me why writing was fun, and why I want to do it with my life.

9. What was your biggest failure?

Making a delicious lovely-looking casserole with multiple pounds of swiss chard that were full of crunchy, gritty, dirt-y DIRT. (J. ate it anyway; "I couldn't see that go to waste just because of a little bit of sand," he says.)

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?

Does a crippling fear of and lingering paranoia about the MAGGOTS (OK, they are flour moth larvae, but still) that invaded our kitchen count?

11. What was the best thing you bought?

New laptop. You and me forever, baby.

12. Whose behavior merited celebration?

Shout-out to Dr. J. for finishing his PhD!

13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?

I manage to give this to the Bush administration every year, but honestly, I'm still not over it. We just watched a great documentary about the Lost Boys of Sudan called God Grew Tired of Us, and there's this tiny part that talks about how the men who were relocated to the U.S. had to reimburse the aid organization that flew them here for their plane tickets. For their PLANE TICKETS. In 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 -- our government could spend billions upon billions of dollars to wage unspeakably destructive wars in multiple countries, but we couldn't pay for five refugees' plane fares? In the immortal words of that Facebook song, are you fucking kidding me?

14. Where did most of your money go?

At least I started paying off the interest on the loans...

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?

My neighbor's cat. I thought my heart belonged to dogs and I never really got the cat thing, but I'm in love with this guy in a serious way. I mean, look at him:

16. What song will always remind you of 2008?

I can't believe I'm going to say this, but Miley Cyrus' "Party in the USA." Blame it on all the whippersnappers at school.

17. Compared to this time last year, are you:

a) happier or sadder? about the same
b) thinner or fatter? bleh
c) richer or poorer? ha, oh so much poorer

18. What do you wish you'd done more of?

Traveling. Yoga. Walking up the hill to work. Getting to know the Jewish community in Ithaca. Volunteering. Harvesting nice produce from my garden. Seeing friends, and new babies, who live far away.

19. What do you wish you'd done less of?

Talking about getting laid off. Thinking and bickering with people about the future in general. And the terrible two: worrying and whining.

20. How will you be spending did you spend Christmas?

We continued our Christmas Eve tradition of going to the movies (saw "Men Who Stare at Goats"; it was OK; not enough goats) and then went to a Japanese restaurant on Christmas Day with a coworker and her family.

*(editing starts here)*

23. What was your favorite TV program?

Friday Night Lights, Mad Men, and my new (dumb) addiction, The Amazing Race. I am thankful every day for TV on the Internets.

25. What was the best book you read?

This was an amazing year for books for me... thanks to N. Pearl, I branched out into a lot of different genres and surprised myself with how much I liked. Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games and the sequel, Catching Fire, stand out, but there was SO much other good stuff. My five-star reviews on Goodreads were: Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, Marcus Zusak's The Book Thief, Kelly Link's Magic for Beginners, Tim O'Brien's In the Lake of the Woods, Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game, Carlos Ruiz Zafon's Shadow of the Wind, Pam's (yay!) Tillmon County Fire, Amity Gaige's The Folded World, Don Borchert's Free for All, and Junot Diaz's The Brief and Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao. Whew.

26. What was your greatest musical discovery?

Habib Koite, whom I saw live in the fall at the State Theater.

27. What did you want and get?

An idea of what my future career might look like. So many full days and nights with my favorite person. A whole lot of fun.

28. What did you want and not get?

One of those giant Le Creuset dutch ovens. I am having trouble admitting I want one, but there it is. And a puppy, damn it. And plane fare for refugees, and an end to some wars... Obama, we're ready now.

29. What was your favorite film of this year?

Probably The Big Lebowski, which I finally saw. The dude abides!

30. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?

I was 32, and I was at the Rhinebeck Sheep and Wool Festival. Fun.

31. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?

Oy, always the same with these! A published book with my name on the cover. A year with no cavities. Both seem equally impossible right now, still.

32. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2008?

I've gotten kind of into the tights-with-boots thing this winter. And I bought a pair of leggings, too, for which history may judge me harshly.

33. What kept you sane?

My people. And the existence of iced coffee, even in winter.

34. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?

Ugh, it's still Don Draper. What can I say, I'm a sucker for a good ol' distant, lying, cheating, cold misogynist.

38. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2008.

The maggots, they will not harm you. But lo, they will be disgusting, so you should always keep everything in airtight containers.

39. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year.

Not a song lyric, and I wouldn't say it sums up anything, but I love this quote from Kelly Link:

"I don't know about you, but I'm kind of fed up with realism. After all, there's enough reality already; why make more of it? Why not leave realism for the memoirs of drug addicts, the histories of salt, the biographies of porn stars? Why must we continue to read about the travails of divorced people or mildly depressed Canadians when we could be contemplating the shopping habits of zombies, or the difficulties that ensue when living and dead people marry each other? We should be demanding more stories about faery handbags and pyjamas inscribed with the diaries of strange women. We should not rest until someone writes about a television show that features the Free People's World-Tree Library, with its elaborate waterfalls and Forbidden Books and Pirate-Magicians. We should be pining for a house haunted by rabbits."

goals, goals, goals

(Oh god that was a horrible pun. Forgive me.)

I'm sure that all of you have been waiting with bated breath to learn about my NaNoWriMo progress, to which I say: 22,012 words. Which, although more fiction than I have written the past year or possibly two or three, is not even halfway to 50,000, which is where I need to be exactly 19 days from now.

I will allow, though, that I am a little ahead of schedule -- by necessity, since I know the end of the month will be tricky -- and I am a little proud of the 70+ pages of truly bad prose I have written. Most importantly, I am having a damn good time doing it (despite the whining after I come home from a long day in the coal mines to sit down at a different computer with a different blank screen and waiting cursor). This is really pretty great, actually.

In the meantime (what meantime?) I've been crafting my 32 for 32 goals and have hit a roadblock. I think the problem is that my real goals this year are mostly in the not-achievable range; they're things like "probably move and start looking for a job in a new place but maybe not so learn to live with the uncertainty." That makes me want even more to create a list of manageable goals for myself, ones I can have control over finishing or not. Here's what I have so far:

Finish NaNoWriMo.
Get NaNoWriMo manuscript copy from CreateSpace.
Edit the results of NaNoWriMo.
Volunteer at the public library.
Write & publish another LJ column.
Finish the damn sweater.
Learn to knit colorwork.
Learn to knit cables.
Go on a 15-mile bike ride.
Go to at least three yoga classes.
Take kayaking class.
Graduate with current GPA.
Pay off X amount of loans before graduation.
Liquidate CD for loan purposes.
Figure out what happened with final internship credit.
Join the ALA mentorship program (unless you discover it sucks).
Do something fun with library people before graduation.
Visit one new state or country with J.
Visit with S. in Ithaca or NYC.
Go without caffeine for a month.
Go completely vegetarian for two weeks during lent with H.
Read one significant work of nonfiction.
Read East of Eden.
Write in journal every day for a month.
Clean out office closet.
Bake three recipes from new bread cookbook.
Take lunch to work for two weeks straight.
Throw caution to the wind three times.
See a play in Ithaca.

That's only 29, and I am totally out of steam. Anyone else have any ideas? I'm open.

rules for self

My wonderful DC friends got in last night and we stayed up talked until 4 a.m., and they're still sleeping. I woke up thinking about NaNoWriMo. For someone who is not particularly adventurous and never much of a rule-breaker, I have a lot of trouble with self control, as evidenced by multiple 30-something for 30-something goals (next installment coming soon!), so I started to get a little bit worried that some weird part of me will rebel and not do it just to spite me.

But I do work better within some sort of framework, when I can feel the boundaries around me, so I am setting up some gentle rules. In fact, let us call them guidelines instead.

1. It's OK to let other stuff slide in November. I will probably not go to the gym very often, which is awesome because I'm always looking for an excuse for that. I will allow our apartment to get even less spic and span. I may not call people back in a timely fashion (but if you are on fire, please tell me and I will of course call you back immediately). It's just a month and things like that will be alright.

2. It's also OK to waste a little money in November. I am allowed to buy the good coffee at work and also not pack my lunch, guilt-free. J. gave me 10 coupons for my birthday that say "one free NaNoWriMo dinner" on them, which is kind of perfect -- I suspect I will not be cooking much in November either.

3. I will not, however, miss my knitting group or African dance or my week-long DC/NJ/PA Thanksigiving visit (how on earth am I going to write this thing when I'm traveling?) or the Dar concert for which I already have tickets.

4. I will not stop doing schoolwork entirely or be late with assignments, even if that means I fall behind with my word count.

5. If I get freaked out, I will read this (Wednesday Chef, inspiring) or this (Junot Diaz, also inspiring or this (McSweeney's, hilarious) or Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird.

6. I will update this blog periodically with annoying status updates and word counts.

Also, I don't want to be pushy, because this is, duh, a large time commitment and I wouldn't like to be forced or guilted into it myself. But if you're one of the people who's mentioned to me or written in the comments that you're sort of interested... please tell me if you're still sort of interested. I found out recently that one of my work friends has been planning to do it all on her own, and it made me feel instantly less alone in this crazy thing. As do all of you, just for reading this -- thank you in advance for the preliminary support.

NaNo... no way. (yes way?)

So, uh. I might do NaNoWriMo.

*scuffles feet on floor, stares at shoes, feels weird*

For those who don't read way too many blogs like I do and haven't seen multitudes of bloggers try this crazy thing, NaNoWriMo is a writing project. Specifically, it's a commitment to write a 50,000-word novel between Nov. 1 and Nov. 30. You're not supposed to bring in any previous half-finished work, because you already care about it too much to be able to write the utter junk that will come out of writing so much so fast; it's supposed to be quantity, not quality. In the organizers' words:

Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that's a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down.

I feel lame for even wanting to, because it's sort of targeted to people who haven't written novels, and I have, and it's sitting in a drawer being lonely and sad and I feel guilty whenever I even think about it -- and THAT, my friends, that is why I'm going to do this thing.

(Did I just say I AM going to do it and not I'm THINKING about doing it? Uh.)

But I don't want to feel bad and guilty about writing, I don't want all this weird baggage about agents and the economy and the feeling of looking at those thin pathetic rejection envelopes hanging around. The reason I started writing in the first place was because I wanted to, right? Because it was just what I wanted to do. And that hasn't changed, even though I bury it under all these layers of weirdness. I want to build without tearing down -- something that I, a relentlessly obsessive editor who actually enjoys the editing process, never even tried with the first novel.

November is even sort of a good time for me... my internship is over and I'm not going to start volunteering until after the holidays, which means I have one whole day a week when I don't have to be at school or at my job. (Things I am now ignoring: the entire week of Thanksgiving when I plan to be in three different states, the existence of end-of-semester papers and projects, a deadline for the longest and most in-depth article I've ever written for any publication, ever.) But hey, maybe I'll just write 20,000 words a day every Wednesday! Ha.

[T]he glow from making big, messy art, and watching others make big, messy art, lasts for a long, long time. The act of sustained creation does bizarre, wonderful things to you. It changes the way you read. And changes, a little bit, your sense of self. We like that.

It's insane.

I'm doing it.

I just registered.

(Who's with me? Someone? Maybe?)

prompt

Can I even begin to say how awesome it is that Elizabeth is doing this? Take chances, get messy, make mistakes...

---

Behind her the noise escalated.

Turning around didn't seem like a particularly appealing option, really, not when she knew the simian house hadn't been cleaned yet today. The second the capuchins saw you (as they'd seen her a minute ago), they started kicking up an incredible racket, like a bunch of tiny lunatics in a 19th-century mental institution. They would swing menacingly from the roof, smacking each other with those weirdly human hands and opening their weirdly human mouths. Sometimes they'd even fling things from their cage at you -- toys, food, their own shit. Needless to say, the whole cleaning crew at the zoo left the simian house until the end of the day, hoping that some emergency would come up (a barfing kid that needed the clean-up mop in front of the giraffes, an agitated panda that had topped over its bamboo stand, anything) and make it impossible for them to go back to the goddamn monkeys, leaving it for the next shift.

Instead, blissfully, Gloria walked toward the sea otter enclosure.

It was a new part of the zoo, built recently on the heels of some craze involving a children's book that told the story of a sea lion needing glasses and having to make a visit to the optometrist. Sea otters and sea lions weren't the same, of course, but sea otters had been a lot easier for the zoo to acquire and none of the visitors seemed to differentiate, particularly. Gloria slipped into the door of the back of the enclosure and pulled the special mop from the small supply closet, went into the humid main part of the enclosure, and began to work in the corner farthest from the glass pane separating her from the crowd. The people were dim and foggy behind the glass; the sea lions swam back and forth in their shallow pool, presumably. Gloria didn't take much notice.

Behind her, someone knocked on the door and she stood the mop against the wall. It wasn't unusual for another zoo employee to come in at the same time, either to share the cleaning or feed the animals. She hoped it was her supervisor, Big Joe, who sometimes brought her an elephant-shaped ice cream from the gift shop.

But it wasn't Big Joe. Instead, a little boy, probably about six, stared up at her mutely. He was unaccompanied by a parent or guardian -- against the zoo rules, of course -- and he looked scared.

Gloria, who didn't have kids yet and didn't know how to talked to them, just looked at him for a minute. She knelt down.

"Hi," she said. "Are you lost?"

The boy shook his head.

"Well, I bet you're not supposed to be here by yourself, right?"

The boy just stared past her, trying to see into the enclosure, when suddenly a woman rushed up behind him, loudly proclaiming her relief. The boy started to cry. Gloria noticed he had glasses, blue plastic frames now knocked a little crooked by the force of his mother's hug.

The woman began to apologize to Gloria, looking up at her and explaining they'd been at the monkey house and the boy had wandered away, and thanking Gloria for keeping him safe.

The boy, crying harder, spoke for the first time: "I hate the monkey house."

"Me too," Gloria said. The mother looked vaguely offended and Gloria suddenly resolved to do something she'd never done before. It was something strictly against the rules, and Gloria was not a rule-breaker.

She beckoned the two of them inside the sea otter enclosure. The mother looked doubtful, but still holding the boy, followed Gloria into the back and then the main part of the great, humid room, which blossomed with plants. Gloria put a finger to her lips even though silence was not really required.

Gloria led the two of them, the mother and the boy, toward the water and, still with her finger on her lips, peered down. Below the clear surface, the sea otters swam obliviously like Olympic champions, sleek and perfect, not noticing them at all. The boy looked up at Gloria, his mouth open and his eyes shining behind his steamy glasses.

writing: it's what's for lunch

My friend Elizabeth, whom I know from my writing group in DC, posted something today about how her blog is supposed to be a writing blog but more often winds up being about other things. I feel the same way, except about my life rather than my blog.

But let's forgo the boring introspection, shall we, and get right to her fun writing prompt? "Tell me about a school lunch you had once. ... Don't forget the details. Write for fifteen minutes."

OK, go.

Third or fourth grade, R*hrerst*wn Elementary, L*nc*ster, PA. The cafeteria is blue, with those tables that pull down from the wall. Round red stools are attached to the tables, and they magically spring to life as the tables become horizontal. When not serving as a cafeteria, the room is for assemblies, with a stage up front and a big American flag hanging on one wall. During assemblies, the little kids sit on the floor in the front, Indian-style, and chairs are set up in rows for the older kids in the back. (In my memory, the teachers stood at the ends of their classes' aisles for the entire assembly; could that possibly be true?) Also during assemblies, the kitchen part of the room where the food is served is shuttered up, clean and silent.

It's spaghetti day, a popular event, and the line snakes out the door. I don't remember waiting, exactly, or what else was on my tray, or giving my lunch ticket or money or whatever to the women who sat at the folding table with the cash registers at the end of the line. But I do remember taking the orange-ish red tray and walking to the condiment table set up in the middle of the room and putting spoonful after spoonful of cheese on my spaghetti. We didn't eat cheese on spaghetti in my house -- maybe it was a kosher thing -- and it was a thrilling concept. It's really good cheese, too: Not the powdery grated unidentifiable stuff, but big shreds, the kind you'd make with a medium-soft cheese on the largest holes of a box grater. Did some fairy-godmother lunch lady decide that a bunch of eight-year-olds needed freshly grated mozzarella?

Anyway, I heap my spaghetti with cheese, pick up my tray, and almost run into my principal, Mr. G**dman, a sweet man who lived up to his name.

"Hey, you gonna have some spaghetti with your cheese?"

I felt a mixture of amusement ("that was funny!") and shame ("he's making fun of how much cheese I took!") and specialness ("he talked to me!"). The memory ends there, but I so remember his face as he said it, his gray suit and red tie and white shirt, his longish black hair and his nice smile.

And that, my friends, is my most memorable school lunch. Tell me about one of yours? Thanks, Elizabeth, for making writing a little part of my evening.

sweet blog o' mine

Last updated: July 17? Where have I been all summer? Ah, the redundant question: a rhetorical staple I would probably not have to rely on if I'd actually been blogging more than once every six weeks. This has been the busiest summer of my life, I think, but also really fulfilling professionally. Internship #1 marked kind of a turning point: I started to stop feeling like a journalist pretending to be learning to be a librarian because I was writing a story about it, and now I just feel like a person who used to be a journalist and is currently learning to be a librarian. If that makes sense.

I'm looking back at photos of the garden from August of last year, and hoo boy are we behind. But, behold:
The very first ripe tomatoes, hooray. Those are the sungolds, and they're delicious -- I'm a little reluctant to eat them right off the vine when they're warm from the sun (all that fungicide I'm still spraying every week is not exactly appetizing) but they're amazingly sweet and wonderful after they've been washed.

Happy herbs:
J. is so into the dill, some of which is starting to flower, that I made him a birthday meal consisting of seared scallops with lemon and dill, roasted vegetables with dill, and dill, red onion and cheese drop biscuits. Three dill-icious dishes. Oh ha.

And here's a newcomer:
I had no idea that cucumbers looked like cacti when they first come in, but that thing is seriously spiky.

Another newcomer: I don't know, you guys. It's pretty and all, etc. etc., but you can't eat it. Cutting the little flowerbed feels wrong too, so it's not even like I take the nasturtiums and marigolds and wildflowers home with me. They're just being pretty and all in the middle of a weed-filled garden, in the middle of a field where no one sees them except for me and H. when we go to spend an hour weeding or gathering peas and cilantro for dinner. I have seen exactly none of the bug-deterring effects that were promised, although I somehow managed to plant the flower bed in just about the farthest spot from all of my producing plants. S-M-R-T!

Speaking of dinner:
It seems like the only unqualified successes this season are the new things -- the peas and the bush beans. The tri-color ones are especially awesome; those purple beans are bright green inside, and they all taste fantastic despite the fact that the Japanese beetles have turned their leaves to lace.