I just finished reading Origin by Diana Abu-Jaber. What a great mystery and thriller! I read her book Crescent (enjoyed it very much), which had a completely different feel to it. Abu-Jaber is a wonderful writer. I love her descriptions.
Did you know there’s a Little House on the Prairie Cookbook? It’s called The Little House Cookbook: Frontier Foods from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Classic Stories by Barbara M. Walker and illustrated by Garth Williams. This would be a great addition to our Little House library.
Anne-Marie Nichols wrote about it at her blog, This Mama Cooks! She has lots of great information, recipes and lists of other books and activities to celebrate reading in March.
We watched Elling last night. I’m trying to remember who recommended it, but it was someone on Twitter. Anyway. Great recommendation. It’s a Norwegian film directed by Petter Næss and based on Ingvar Ambjørnsen’s novel from 1996, Brødre i blodet (Blood Brothers). We enjoyed the movie. It was very funny at times, a bit sad at times but sweet and touching the whole time.
My son will be studying money at school again, and he’s supposed to bring four quarters, 10 dimes, 10 nickels and 25 pennies Monday. Wouldn’t you know it? I just took in a huge bag of coins to the bank the other day. The kids bought me a Wii remote for Valentine’s Day (totally their idea, I swear) and paid for it themselves. Only thing is, we bought it online, so I took their change and deposited it into their savings accounts.
So here I am fishing around the house and in the cars for all the change I can find, and I ran across this new penny. At first I thought it was Canadian or something. But, no. It’s ours. And I wondered when the heck they started doing weird stuff with pennies.
Turns out: last year, after almost 50 years of the same thing on the back of a penny. The back of the penny was redesigned to celebrate the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth. This one is known as the “Indiana Penny” because it shows him “reading while taking a break from rail splitting” in Indiana.
Ah well. Learn something new every day.
Anyone have nickels? I’m still four short.
So I’m on page 13 of Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, thoroughly enjoying myself and the way she writes, thinking, “Hey, I really like this author.” Can anyone tell me why I’ve never read her before? Ah well. At least now I know what I was missing.
And … let the spring fever begin!
I just finished reading Salt Dancers by Ursula Hegi. It’s the story of Julia, who revisits dark family issues when she travels from one coast to the other to return home after more than 20 years away. She wants to understand what went wrong with her family so she can avoid that with the child she’s expecting. It’s haunting and painful, yet it’s also hopeful. And, oh, so familiar.
We have a critter living in our barn. I tweeted about it on Sunday, wondering what kind of critter it could be. I got lots of ideas from Twitter and Facebook: ermine, weasel, mink, opossum, Edgar Winter, cat. I’ve got some pictures. It was dark, and the critter was fast, but it looks like it’s all white with a black tip on its tail. Anyway … it’s not easy to see much in the pictures … just look for the green demon eyes. Any ideas?
