Three Dead Relative Stories

Yesterday, I went to my Uncle Mike's funeral. I didn't take any pictures, mainly because I hadn't seen anyone on my mom's side of the family since I was in grade school and felt super awkward asking grieving practical strangers to pose for a shot with me. The one relative I actually had seen on occasion as an adult, oddly enough, was Uncle Mike. He had just moved to my corner of the state a few months ago, and I was eagerly looking forward to reconnecting with him. Last month, I was at a wrestling meet in his town and briefly thought about seeing if he was available to visit over a cup of coffee, but I was already in the middle of a super long day and just didn't have the energy for a visit. Boy, do I wish now that I'd made the time anyway.

Another missed connection that has always haunted me is that of my great-aunt Marietta. Unlike Uncle Mike, I got to see Aunt Marietta a lot through high school and college, as she lived in my hometown and frequented my parents' restaurant often. Once, early in our marriage, Adam and I paid her a visit at her house, and what ensued was a wonderful hour or two of her pulling out all sorts of ancient family memorabilia and expounding on the family history all the way back to the early 1800's. WHOA! I thought. Here is someone who knows all our family details! Whoever knew? I determined to return next time with a recording device to preserve all this info for posterity. Well, as you may have guessed, that recording session never happened. Aunt Marietta, and a huge swath of the family history, died a couple years later.

The third story is happier. In 2018, when Adam was in training over in Seattle, I went over with the kids to visit him. My great-uncle Al, the last survivor of my grandfather's siblings, lived in the area. I don't know if I'd ever really met him before, but he and my dad enjoyed visiting together whenever they could, and I thought maybe he'd like to see me, too. I arranged to meet him at a McDonald's. It was a challenging meetup, as I was wrangling three small children fresh off a six-hour car ride, but he was gracious and had lots of funny stories about growing up with my granddad. We laughed a lot, ate some cheeseburgers, and went our separate ways. A year or two later, he passed away, leaving behind at least one great-niece with no regrets.

I didn't know where I was going with this when I sat down to type, but I guess the moral of the story is to make time for the people you care about, especially the older ones. Uncle Mike's funeral was unlike any I've been to before, full of people who hadn't seen each other in decades saying, "Let's not wait until the next funeral to get together!" He was the first relative in my parents' generation to die, and one could just see all the siblings working through the horrible realization that everyone's getting older and life is unpredictable. Uncle Mike was 61, and I took for granted that he would be around for a while. Aunt Marietta was in her nineties, so I REEEEEEALLY should have known better than to put that meeting off. The future is not guaranteed, the past is gone; we only ever really have the present moment. 

Wait But Why has a thought-provoking blog post that I think about all the time; it visually lays out all the weeks you can reasonably expect in your life and what percentage of time you have left for things, such as how many days you will spend with your parents. Pretty sobering stuff. 

Well, I certainly have restarted the blog with a bunch of heavy subjects! Maybe now that I'm getting the big stuff out of the way, the more trivial will follow soon.

Whoops, I blinked and it was five years later

 Well, well, well, look who's back at the blog (it's me). There has been a lot going on in my life lately, but I feel really uncomfortable sharing things on Facebook. I always feel like I'm howling into the void of That Freshman Who Was In Music Theory 101 With Me, That Mom I Scheduled One Playdate With In 2011, and The New Acquaintance That I'm Hoping May Turn Into a Friend; and they have to listen to me howl on their feeds whether they like it or not, whether I have actually spoken directly to them in fifteen years or not. Despite being open for all to read, blogging feels a little more intimate because if someone is reading this, it's because they cared enough to navigate over here. So anyway, hi! It's been awhile!

Adam has gotten grayer, the kids have gotten taller, and I have gotten fatter. 

One thing that hasn't changed? My kids still don't know how to smile for the camera.

So what's been up with me? Probably the highlight up till this summer is that I got chickens, which should tell you how exciting life has been. We traveled a bit, the kids did sports, I made literally over a thousand pies, we hung out with my parents next door, I got involved in a lot of local groups like 4-H and the library board. Everything was swimming along for the past several years in our little remote corner of Washington. Enter this summer, when we up and moved to a different remote corner of Washington. So far, it has been fantastic for Adam and the kids-- Adam is really enjoying his job and the career possibilities that come with it, and the kids have made a ton of friends and have been experiencing amazing growth through the activities they're involved with here.

More sledding opportunities, for one.

 As for me, not going to lie, it has been ROUGH. Our new milieu is just fine, with gorgeous scenery and friendly locals; but I lost a lot in the move, and I'm not just talking about my cake pans. There's a lot to grieve about. I'd say the top three things I've had the hardest time with are 1) The loss of my ride-or-die people I could call upon for anything at anytime 2) the loss of identity. I'm not a homeschool group leader, pro pie baker, co-op facilitator, volunteer, or any of the other community pillar hats anymore. What am I now?? What purpose do I serve? Some days I just feel like a husk. 3) the loss of solitude. We are in a much smaller house and I can't send the kids next door to my parents anymore when I need a moment of peace. It is ironic to be in a place where I'm simultaneously lonely and surrounded by people ALL. THE. TIME. Literally 24/7. Psychologically, these past six or so months have been brutal.

This move has broken me in a lot of ways I wasn't expecting, but I think with time things will be better. In the meantime, I'm just kind of chugging along. In an attempt to plug into our new community, I abandoned my cardinal rule of One Activity Per Child (And It Will Probably Be the Same Activity Your Sibling Is Doing) and signed them up for all the things. I have made loads of acquaintances and become best friends with my minivan if no one else. We bought a house (first-time homeowners!!) and there is plenty in our fixer-upper to demand my attention. That is all probably worth several future posts, so I'll leave you on that cliffhanger there and hopefully write something else before another five years passes by.

The Cheapest Bedroom Art You'll Ever See

One of my goals for this year is to spruce up our master bedroom. In ten years of marriage, I don't think Adam and I have ever had a decently put-together bedroom once. So when we came into possession of a very sturdy 4'x2' piece of cardboard this week, I couldn't resist the low-risk opportunity to make a huge statement piece to go over our bed. It took about an hour and about two small bottle's worth of acrylic paint to make. I'm not the best judge of home decor, so it may just look like hot garbage, but I'm getting a lot of joy from it!

It's a Wrap-- the Best Books of 2018!

Oh, my gosh! A whole other year gone by with no blog posts... how embarrassing. Well, I'm still alive, and apparently the only thing that gets me fired up to blog anymore is books, because guess what! I'm dusting off the old blog to write about books again!

I have been tracking my book consumption via Pinterest boards for a number of years now. If you read last year's post, you know 2017 was a great reading year for me. I usually read between 15-27 books; in 2017, I read thirty-one books, including a few hefty classics. Not too shabby.

So it is with immense pride and astonishment that I can say that in 2018... I read... wait for it...

67 BOOKS!!!

See the full Pinterest record here.

Considering I started the year with a list of about fifteen titles to read, I'd say I met the goal quite well. So, if your 2019 resolutions involve more reading, here are my tips to take your reading to the next level!

1. Read the classics.
Reading classics is like weight lifting for the brain. After grappling with archaic words, complex sentence structures, translation idiosyncrasies, and just more pages in general in a classic, you will be amazed how blazingly fast you can rip through a modern novel. Also, the classics are classics for a reason: they are GOOD. They are rewarding to read, which in turn makes you want to read more: a great self-reinforcing loop. While there is plenty of modern fiction I love, there is also plenty that just leaves me feeling "meh" about it. That rarely happens to me with a classic book.

2. Have a reading routine.
My morning routing is to get up, make a cup of coffee, and sit with my book until my coffee is gone (or even longer, depending on how hungry the kids are for breakfast ;-) ). At night, reading is part of that last hour before bed when I'm winding down for the night (the actual amount of winding down may vary, depending on the book!) Tying a new habit to other events in the day is a great way to get established.

3. Always have the next title ready
I have a little stockpile of "Emergency Reading" books: things I'm interested in reading, but don't feel very urgent about. This is great if you finish a book and can't get to the library or bookstore right away. Don't be left stranded without a book! Nowadays, I borrow around three titles at a time when I go to the library, so I haven't had to crack into the Emergency Reading pile for several months.

4. Spend some time figuring out what you want to read.
Make the most of your trips to the library-- do a little research first! While some of my favorite books were discovered by accident, many more were ones that I deliberately searched for based off recommendations. I keep a running list of titles I want to read and revisit it every so often to keep it fresh in my mind, so that I can snag the books if I see them in the 50-cent book pile- that has happened several times!- and avoid aimlessly wandering the library stacks in a fit of decision paralysis. Lists such as BBC's 100 Books You Need to Read Before You Die (I've read 43 :-D) or blogs like Modern Mrs. Darcy are great places to get ideas.

5. Choose what you DON'T DO
As a homeschooling mom of three young children who teaches music four days a week and takes care of about 95% of the household chores, I see everything as an opportunity cost. It is physically impossible for me to do everything. When I choose to engage in one activity, I am saying "no" to another. So if you are serious about getting more reading in your life, you will have to decrease in other areas. I do not play games on my phone. I don't use social media, except for a quick visit to facebook every day. I don't clean my floors as often as I should. And all this carves out time for reading. On the other hand, I could have probably read well over a hundred books this year, but I usually chose to spend about an hour playing video games most nights after the kids were in bed. Choices, choices!


******
Now for my top books of 2018!

There were a ton of great reads on my list this year (somewhere in June, I decided to make this the year of the Great American Novel), but my top 3 are as follows:

1. The Sound and the Fury
This is a book unlike any other I've ever read. Seen through the eyes four different characters (the first being a mentally handicapped man-- hoo boy, that is fun), it chronicles the decline of a once-great Southern family over the course of twenty years or so. There is SO MUCH to this book. This may be the only book that upon finishing I immediately flipped back to the beginning to read it through again. There's so much you miss the first time around, it's mind-blowing. I loved this book so much, I can't wait to try more Faulkner.

2. World War Z
There is something my brain just loves about stories told from multiple narrators, because this is another one! Told as a set of survivor interviews from the world-wide zombie apocalypse in the near future. I actually read this a couple years ago and liked it so much that I gave it another read this year. Still just as fun!-- as long as I don't think too hard about how impossible zombies are to begin with. ;-)

3. The Odyssey
Who knew a 2-800-year-old story could be so much fun? Totes worth the read. The Fagles version is so vibrant and energetic, and I might have fallen in love a little with Odysseus, Telemachus, Nestor, and Eumaeus. The annotations left me really itching to read The Iliad and catch up on all the epic events that happened before we find Odysseus on the island of Calypso (2019 reading list, here we come!).

Honorable mention goes to The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, The Catcher in the Rye, and Jane Eyre.

BONUS!
Favorite audio books: A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Bachman and A Great Reckoning by Louise Penny.


Now, of course, when you read sixty-seven books, you're bound to run into a few stinkers. Here are my least favorite reads of 2018:

1. The Power
I had high hopes for this one. A world where the balance of power is suddenly flipped, with women now in advantage? What a great way to explore gender, politics, fairness, and power dynamics in work and family life! Sadly, this story has all the nuance of a bowling ball, with zero character development. Ironically, the only likable character in this story is a man.

2. Good As Gone
A real icky-feeling thriller that would be three times as thrilling if the "surprise" conclusion wasn't made super obvious about a third of the way into the book. If you are into cults, pedophilia, multiple personality disorders, and wondering where Clark Kent goes every time Superman appears, this is the book for you.

3. I Am Legend
This is one of those rare times when the movie is way, way better than the book. I did not know that I Am Legend is a novella, about ninety pages long, until I got to a very confusing page 105 and realized that it was stuck into an anthology of the author's short stories. What I thought was a mind-blowing halfway point of the story was actually... the end. I actually liked a lot of elements in the book, but the movie takes it in a completely different direction, so it feels a lot like two different stories. And the movie story, while less philosophically deep, is simply better. Not to mention, the rest of the book's short stories are weird and unenjoyable.

4. Moby Dick
Stay with me here. Moby Dick is a classic, with brilliant essay chapters here and there. However, there is a whole lot of NOTHING happening in the book, and everything you never wanted to know about the 1850's whaling industry. Maybe it's because I read a lot of this during lunch breaks at an out-of-town conference, and the gratuitous descriptions of dying, bleeding, thrashing whales and stripping and rendering the oily, rancid blubber left me throwing up in my mouth a little. Maybe it's because in a 555-page book, you don't encounter the actual White Whale until page 535. Maybe I'm just an ignorant, uncultured swine. Whatever the reason, this book falls squarely into the Not Worth It category for me. For the time it took me to slog through this one behemoth book, I could have read two or three that I actually enjoyed. Watch the movie.

*******

So what's on the horizon for me in 2019? I have no expectation of matching 2018's numbers, but I am doing the MMD 2019 book challenge, so I'm planning on reading at least a dozen. :-D So far, here is what I want to read:

The Iliad
Les Miserables
Gulp by Mary Roach (one of my favorite authors!)
Middlemarch
A Confederacy of Dunces
Night by Elie Wiesel
The Art of the Pie

Not a terribly long list, but I am excited about every single one of them! Good luck to you and your reading goals this year!

A Year of Classic Books

The past several years, I've been keeping track of what I read via Pinterest boards, but this year, I thought I'd also write a little blog recap for the year. I tend to read a lot of modern nonfiction, but in 2016, when two classic books ended up being my favorites for the entire year (Watership Down and Dracula, in case you were wondering), I decided to make 2017 a year of reading classics. I informally participated in this challenge, which had a great variety to stretch my reading horizons. It was a BIG adjustment reading loads of meatier stuff, and by March, when I had only finished two classics, I was starting to despair of actually making it through a dozen books by year's end. So I'm glad to say that not only did I finish the entire challenge, I ended up reading the most books in one year (31!) since I started tracking my reading in 2013.

My Books I've Read 2017 Pinterest Board

So, did I enjoy this year's classics as much as the two that started me this direction? Here's the breakdown:

1. The Count of Monte Cristo: I knew the basic plot going in, so it was VERY hard to read the first hundred pages. Like, if I procrastinate reading this, Edmund Dantes won't have to go to prison, right? It took me a month and a half to read the first hundred pages... and about ten days to read the other 1100. I may have pretended I had the flu worse than I did at one point so I could shirk all my responsibilities and finish the story. It's that good.

2. Doctor Zhivago. I struggled a lot with this one. I didn't know where most of the locations were, I didn't know enough of Russian Revolution history to understand the flow of events... it was rough. I was reading with an incomplete mental picture, like driving while wearing filthy sunglasses. This book could have used some good annotation, like...

3. Anna Karenina. Later in the year, I took another crack at the Russian Novel category. The version I read was very well-annotated (excessively so, even), so there was no confusion on anything happening in the novel. I really enjoyed Tolstoy's character depictions-- the philosophical chapters, not so much.

4. Little Women. I read this back in grade school and didn't care for it too much; I played the part of Marmee in a college production of the Little Women musical and thought it was okay; I read the book this year and was like, "YES!!!" Seriously a perfect read for this very family-oriented season in my life. I was so sorry to get to the last page of this one. 

5. The Epic of Gilgamesh. The category for this one was "Book Written Before 1800", and I decided to take that to the extreme and go to the very oldest story! The version I chose is definitely not for the purists, but I wanted something introductory for my first read-through. A raucous, rollicking bromance novel that really pares down a great story with timeless themes to the bare bones.

6. Wuthering Heights. Is it possible to hate every single character in a single book? Yes, yes, it is, and I got first-hand experience with this in Wuthering Heights. Probably my least favorite read of the year.

7. Cheaper By the Dozen. Hilarious yet loving true story of a family of twelve and its often-ridiculous patriarch. I guffawed all the way through this one.

8. Northanger Abbey. One problem with reading classics is that so often you go in already knowing the plot. There aren't many surprises. So I chose the one Jane Austen novel I had zero familiarity with-- which was pretty fun, but I will say that it's easy to see why this is her least famous novel.

9. Of Mice and Men. Short read, and I already knew the entire plot, so the ending lacked the emotional punch it should have had. The limited cast of characters was really refreshing after reading a bunch of sprawling novels filled with dozens of characters.

10. Gone With the Wind. I started this one kind of rolling my eyes, because I thought it was "just a romance novel", but it is so, SO much more. It ended up being my favorite book of the year! This book has EXCELLENT pacing- never a slow or confusing part, which is quite a feat for a 600+ page book.

11. Rebecca. I like to read creepy books in October, and Rebecca fit the bill. Not my favorite, but a good read for someone who would like something spooky but not terrifying. (the terror came when I read The Shining next, at night... right before bed... on a weekend that Adam was out of town. Never making that mistake again.)

12. How to Win Friends and Influence People. The one non-fiction book on the list! Having had source-citing drilled into my bones through high school and college, I had a really hard time believing all the anecdotes in the book (and that is like 50% of the book!), but it is a classic because it had lots of good advice. Have I won friends and influenced people as a result of reading this book? The jury is out on that one, but I think I'm getting results with my five-year-old. :-P


BONUS!!!!!!!!!!


It occurred to me near the end of the year that most of these books have been made into movies. So I fired up our free trial month of Netflix DVD and watched all the ones I could get my hands on in the month of December. How do the movies compare to the books?

Count of Monte Cristo: THUMBS DOWN. The whole point of the book is about moving on and getting closure, but this movie completely trashes a beautiful monster-to-mercy arc for the cheap Hollywood satisfaction of ensuring the hero ends up with the old girl, wins old scenarios, and even finds out he has a son (!!!!) from the old days. Very disappointing.

Doctor Zhivago: THUMBS UP! I still wasn't too thrilled with the story by the end, but the cinematography is FANTASTIC-- really portrays the vastness of Russia and the contrasts between Imperial and Communist life in Russia very well.

Anna Karenina: THUMBS UP! Very unusual presentation, but I respect it. They did an excellent job of distilling all the characters and events of an 800-page book into a two-hour movie. Was really iffy at first on the casting choice of Keira Knightley as Anna, but she made it work!

Little Women: THUMBS UP! Really sweet, Winona Ryder is a great Jo; not a huge Claire Danes fan, so I'm not too fond of Beth. Sad to say, but after reading the novel, I have to give a huge THUMBS DOWN to the Broadway musical version of Little Women, because it strips away everything charming about the story and leaves us with a bunch of obnoxious, anachronistic charaters.

Wuthering Heights: THUMBS. Just thumbs. I still hate this story, but the screen version was a bit more enjoyable and livelier than the book. There are a whole bunch of film versions of Wuthering Heights, and supposedly every version is untrue to the book one way or the other, so I just picked the Fiennes/Binoche version and called it a day. Really liked the "I am Heathcliff" monologue.

Cheaper By the Dozen: The old 1950 version gets a big THUMBS UP. The 2005 atrocity, produced by Hollywood producers that have no idea how large families actually function and who probably never even cracked open the book, get a big THUMBS ALL THE WAY DOWN TO CHINA. I couldn't actually get a copy of the (good) movie this month, but I saw it in high school and really enjoyed it. Reading the book made me recall many movie scenes vividly, so I'm guessing the film version stays pretty true to the book.

Northanger Abbey: An okay version of an okay novel. THUMBS UP. 

Gone With the Wind: THUMBS UP! The film sticks surprisingly closely to the book. I didn't remember the movie having the Frank Kennedy arc and thought that was cut out, but surprise! It's in there, too! The book is still better, but the movie is a-mazing.

Rebecca (Hitchcock version): THUMBS UP. I remember really hating the heroine when I saw this movie in high school, but on a rewatch after reading the book, I thought she was really quite true to the text. The problem, I think, is casting: Joan Fontaine is just too mature and beautiful to be believable as a very young (19 or 21, I think?), insecure, nervous girl, so the incongruence between her persona and her actions doesn't make sense to someone unfamiliar with the book. Actually, the same could be said for Mrs. Danvers. These leading ladies are just too glamorous for the story!

******************
So what's next? After a lot of hemming and hawing (because I really should work on trimming down my TBR pile), I've decided to do the same blog's 2018 classics challenge. I also have a few more modern books on the docket. So far (and this is always subject to change), the books I want to read in 2018 include:

Dune
Persuasion
I Am Legend
The Old Man and the Sea
168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think and/or Deep Work
The Odyssey or Innocents Abroad
The Handmaid's Tale
A Stephen King novel (probably the first Dark Tower book. The movie previews looked pretty cool, and when that happens, I read the book to see if I then want to watch the movie, haha)
Gulp by Mary Roach, one of my favorite authors
The Koran
Some Edgar Allan Poe

I'm pretty stoked to flex those reading muscles in 2018!