Live and Let Di

Thursday Thirteen (Vol. 44)

Thirteen things I have used as bookmarks:

1)    Emery board

2)    Dollar bill

3)    Check for $.38 from my insurance company (which cracked me up because surely the check cost a dollar or so to process and the postage was $.39 or whatever crazy amount we are paying for stamps these days)

4)    Those infernal inserts from magazines which I tear out and toss before reading the magazine (a habit I believe I picked up from my Dad who did that when his Sport magazine came each month)

5)    Unopened Band-aid

6)    Band-aid cover after the Band-aid has been used for some non-injury to one of my children (whose idea was it to make Band-aids bright colors and feature cartoon characters….I mean, it’s not like we had trouble getting our kids to needlessly wear Band-aids before….and if one had a REAL wound, that was even better)

7)    My son’s “Emerald Society” ribbon from Del Prado Elementary. I have no idea what the Emerald Society is…probably a gang or a cult…but it makes a nice bookmark.

8)    One of the thousands of “Participant” ribbons my kids have won over the years at swim meets because our swim league is of the opinion that EVERYONE should get a ribbon…even though the kids realize at around age 6 that there is a big difference between the “Participant” ribbon one is handed as one gets out of the pool and the 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th place ribbons that are handed out at the next practice.

9)    Golf tee…although I do believe the reverse would be impossible. I can’t imagine being able to tee up a golf ball on any of my bookmarks.

10)     Golf scorecard…usually with a reasonably good score on it. The good score scorecards somehow wind up deposited in my purse and tossed on my nightstand while the bad score scorecards wind up in the trash in the pro shop immediately after the score is posted.

11)    Post-it Notes – yet another use for the previously ingenious and now ubiquitous desk accessories.

12)   "Loyalty" cards...if it's something I use regularly like Lowe's Foods, Kroger or the Library, I use the keychain version and the credit card sized versions go in my nightstand for future bookmark use.

13)    Thank you cards - I am a HUGE believer in thank-you cards and when I get one, I save it. Having it as a bookmark reminds me that someone thanked me for something!

Di

Some days other people just do it better...

One of my favorite blogs to read is Rockstar Mommy. Her blog today made me laugh and cry and shake my fist at the rampant disregard for literacy and literature in our world!!! Since I know my readers so well, and I know that asking you to actually click on the above link is way too much to ask, I am going to quote Rockstar Mommy herein asking her indulgence since I am not plagiarizing, but giving credit (bibliography to follow tomorrow...yeah, no one should have to write a bibliography on this side of 40). And I am going to ask YOU to add her to your favorites if you like this because you won't be disappointed. And if you can't bear to click on the above for some reason, do it just because she has the coolest header: 

"And hey, while I'm in here on a weekend, which never happens, I might as well tell you what happened today since maybe one or two of you might find it as funny as I did, unlike the rest of the people in my life who I tried to tell but apparently never passed the ninth grade.

So, I'm at Target and the cashier is ringing me up and I look up at his name tag to see that it reads: Radley with a B handwritten in front of it in black Sharpie. And I'm all, "Wow! Boo? Is your name really Boo? Please tell me that your name is Boo because that might just be the single coolest thing I ever heard."

He looked up at me in amazement, like I was magic, like I was here to give him all the answers to all the questions he would ever have in this world. In that moment I knew what Biff felt like on Back To The Future when he goes back to the past with the almanac from the future and he's all, "Now you're gonna best on some horses in the 80's when that kid in the life preserver suddenly becomes the Nixon-loving republican son of a couple of creepy hippies and his older sister goes off to do some movie called Satisfaction and is never heard from again, probably swallowed whole by Julia Roberts's lips... Make sense? Good. Now make like a tree and get outta here." Remember that part? Minus that tiny bit of improving? Right, well, I felt like that because this guy was looking at me as if there was no way I could have possibly known his name was Boo, which surely meant I was back from the future to tell him hot to bet on horses.

"It's my nickname... How'd... How'd you know that?" he asked.

"Well, ummm, I, you know, read."

"Read?"

"You know, read. Books. Boo Radley? To Kill A Mockingbird? Boo. Radley."

"There's a guy in a book named Boo Radley?"

I asked him "No one's ever told you that?" instead of the real question I wanted to be asking him which was, "Please tell me you're not allowed to register to vote...?"

And I swear to you, on every guitar I've ever owned, he responded by saying, "No, I just thought it was a nickname my baby's mama gave to me."

 

The Pact

It is so exciting when one's child becomes of the age where she can enjoy the same books, want to see the same movies and be left alone without a babysitter (especially since she IS a babysitter). The following is a guest blog by my daughter Haley who is 14:

I just recently began reading Jodi Picoult’s books, at the recommendation of my mom. The first book I read was Vanishing Acts and it was one of the rare books where I could almost literally not put it down and I didn’t want it to end. The second one was The Tenth Circle, which was kind of disappointing after Vanishing Acts, but still, when we went to the bookstore at the airport on Wednesday, I kept my faith in her and went straight to the P’s. My mom highly recommended The Pact, a title I had seen before but hadn’t necessarily caught my attention. So, because in the past I’d been impressed with the books my mom had recommended to me, I picked it up to take as some reading that would last me the weekend. I am writing this on Friday night of the same week and I am already finished.

Well, here it is, mom. You have proof of me saying this, right here on your blog. YOU WERE RIGHT. This book is, as of now, definitely my favorite book of hers (keep in mind, I have not yet started My Sister’s Keeper, of which she has raved about) and probably of all time as well.

Told in flashbacks alternating with present-day storytelling, this book tells the story of two teenagers, Chris and Emily, who had been friends since they were babies. Over time they had grown closer and inevitably formed a romantic relationship. On November 7, 1997, when the two were both seventeen, an apparently botched double suicide was attempted. Emily wound up dead while Chris remained alive, eventually becoming the prime suspect in a murder investigation. As the novel unfolds, the flashbacks take the reader through their lives together, while the present-day sections take you through the drama of all four parents’ grief as the whole picture of what actually happened is brought to light.

The fun thing about this book is that it makes the reader draw their own conclusions, and that, depending how one looks at it, everyone might have different viewpoints on what happened, how, and why. I, for one, had it somewhat on target from the beginning (seriously!), but it kept me reading to find out if I was right and also piecing together the evidence.

What I’ve grown to love about Jodi Picoult’s writing is that she is never one-sided. She doesn’t make it obvious who the protagonist is, and she shows the story from all sorts of different viewpoints, including Chris, all of the different parents, the opposing attorneys, and others. It’s not in the first person, but it tells what the characters are thinking. There is a name for that, and my 8th grade language arts teacherr will kill me for forgetting this, but I don’t remember it at all, so I apologize. (Mom's insert...I think it is the "omniscient" perspective.)
   

I really loved this book, and I already have one person (Casey) who has taken my recommendation and started reading it before I was done. I watched her devour it today, and she is already done. She was really upset when it was time for dinner because it meant having to put the book down.

Although I’m 14 and Casey is 11, I don’t recommend this book especially for children or teens. This is definitely a book for adults. I can’t really say much more about this book without giving everything away, because I will start giving you all the play-by-play of the entire book, and that’s not the point of a book review!

Okay, now for the afterthought. I wrote this in July when we were just about to leave New York. So, how did you guys like my first book blog? Feedback would be awesome! And don’t hold it against my mom for letting me guest blog!

Thursday Thirteen (Vol. 43)

Thirteen Billy Joel Songs That Refer to a Place



I was about to steal this idea from someone and find 13 songs from my song library that share a word or a theme or something and then I realized that just in Billy Joel songs alone I could find 13 that refer to a specific place. And since "The Stranger" was the only 8-track my first boyfriend with a car had, Billy Joel always holds special memories for me!

1.    Stop in Nevada - kinda like my husband who can't travel west of the Mississippi without the trip somehow routing through Las Vegas.

2.   Vienna - international!

3.    Leningrad - even more international!

4.    Say Goodbye to Hollywood - after my few hours spent there earlier this summer, doesn't seem like a difficult thing to do

5.    New York State of Mind - I don't think Billy Joel was thinking of the 22 years I spent growing up near Utica, NY

6.    Miami 2017 (Seen the Lights Go Out on Broadway) - I don't know what the Miami reference is, but love the song.

7.    Zanzibar - international AND exotic!

8.    Allentown - I've been told by someone who travels there for business that the people there are kind of over the whole Billy Joel song thing.

9.    The Great Wall of China - Billy Joel goes Asian.

10.    Goodnight Saigon - and more Asian still.

11.    Summer, Highland Falls - wherever it is, I think we were all there in our teen years.

12.   Big Man on Mulberry Street - getting to the end of the list...stretching for place names.

13.    The River of Dreams - another big stretch, but a place nonetheless.

Di

The Demon in the Freezer

The Demon in the Freezer by Richard Preston was on my daughter's required reading list for her freshman year of high school. (I cannot believe my daughter is going to be in high school!) I thought this looked like a great book to read since I loved The Demon Under the Microscope by Thomas Hager. The latter dealt with the discovery, testing and use of sulfa drugs and how they changed the world...making strep an inconvenience instead of a deadly illness, allowing soldiers who survive their wounds to survive their treatment and providing the basis for the variety of antibiotics that we take for granted today.

The Demon in the Freezer deals with smallpox and its eradication from the world through the difficult and compelling work of scientists and medical professionals all over the world. Yes, in 1979, smallpox was completely eliminated as a health threat throughout the entire world. It only existed in controlled environments as a vaccine. However, and this is not a spoiler, smallpox is now a very real threat and a possible source of biological warfare. The book is touted as a "thriller" and while the early parts of the book dealing with the identification and eradication of smallpox was compelling, the latter part which dealt with the potential threat of smallpox in the future paled in comparison.

The book on the whole did not deliver what I was hoping for in comparison with The Demon Under the Microscope. So, I sit here patiently waiting for Thomas Hager's next work the topic of which he leaked to me, but which I will keep a secret! Suffice to say, it's about a scientific discovery that you probably don't know about but is "directly responsible for keeping alive 2 billion people today." Pretty cool, huh?

Di

The Universality of Dialogue

It never ceases to amaze me how we can communicate with others of our generation via music and movie dialogue. No matter where we are from and where we are now, if we were born sometime between 1959 and 1971 (I only include that because of Sharis who is an appalling 36...I believe the youngest of my friends) we can immediately sing the next line of a song, identify the movie a line is from and give the next line of dialogue.

Our children think this is really bizarre.

Last week my friend's daughter Casey was missing us because we were still in North Carolina for the summer. She sent me an e-mail and at the end she said, "Here come those tears again"...I told her to go to her mother and say that and I guaranteed her mother could come up with the next line. Casey asked if it was from sappy love song and I said no. Anyone got the next line, artist and album?

Yesterday, my friend Stacy was standing in front of the refrigerator with the door open and my daughter said, "What are you doing?" She replied, "You know, that's the problem with these things. You have to watch them every minute." She assured Haley that I would know the line, the next line and the movie. Anyone?

Di

Blogiversary of a (now) Blogoveteran

I thought it appropriate that on my first blogiversary (which passed without fanfare...or a post) I would return to the roots and original intent of my blog...and see if I could even remember what it was...I think it had something to do with reviewing books given my clever choice of "Di's Book Blog" for the title. The "etc." came after when I realized that I couldn't limit my writing to reviewing books...I just had to share the humor, heartache and hellaciousness of my daily life.

I honestly can't remember what inspired me to start a blog...but I do know that Tracy Thompson's Maternally Challenged was a huge part of that inspiration. On August 14, 2006, in my blog-o-virginal naivete, I raved about Kathleen Gilles Seidel's A Most Uncommon Degree of Popularity. Her incisive capturing of the land-mine-filled world of female adolescence and the mirror world that exists among the mothers of those females still slays me to this day...and is a book I recommend whenever the conversation turns to the "mean girl" reality of middle/high school.

In the year since the birth of my blog, I have reviewed 50 books. For many, that would be a huge year of book-reading. But for me, having read 100 books one year when I was working full-time and my kids were small and much more needy, it's rather mediocre. That's about a book a week (you won't believe this, but I did that on a calculator before I remembered that there are 52 weeks in a year and it was fairly obvious what the average number per week was). It could have been more...but damn that Karen and her Sudoku-pushing...she shouldn't be allowed within 50 yards of any location where obsessive, puzzle-minded middle aged women might congregate.

HOWEVER, (and glass-half-full kinda gal that I am, you know there had to be a "however") I have found that writing this blog has made me more selective in my reading. I tend to be more judicious about what books I finish and what books I toss aside as a waste of time. I figure that if I don't want to waste my time finishing a book, you certainly don't want to waste your time reading a review of it.

In this blog-o-licious year, I have corresponded with at least a half dozen authors whose books I reviewed and even became e-friends with a couple. I corresponded with and subsequently met Kitty Dukakis after reviewing her book Shock and sharing our experiences with depression and ECT (electroconvulsive therapy).

During this year I have shared my experiences traveling to new places...Scotland, Ireland, Savannah, Long Island and Hollywood. I have made new friends, introduced them to you and made them a part of the "etc." world that is so much more important than the book-reading world. I've shared my birthday celebration, the milestone of my 15th wedding anniversary (the 16th is this Thursday), a sudden death and a friend's hole-in-one. I have been Googled...yes, Googled! L'il ole me...Googled!

Blogging has proven to be a cathartic experience for me. It has helped me sort out things just by writing about them. It has introduced me to new perspectives from my readers' comments. There are some things I don't blog about because they are too personal, too painful or they would hurt someone who might read my blog. But even my process of deciding whether or not to blog about something has helped me to understand why some things roll off of me and make me see the tragicomic nature of a situation and some things pierce me to the core and continue to rise up and cause me pain despite the passage of time.

I have had my grammar corrected via comment by my daughter. I have had my mother and sister tell me that they read my blog to find out what's going on in my life when I'm too busy to have a phone conversation of more than three minutes. I have even gotten my husband to read my blog on occasion. I feel like Ali, Karen, Nicholas, Haley-O and Tracy are true friends, despite the fact that if I ran into them, I wouldn't recognize them unless they happened to have the very expression on their faces that they are wearing in their blog photos. For a while there, I thought I would only recognize Karen if somehow the world was all in black & white! And if Haley-O ever has that baby, I won't recognize her without her well-documented belly!

So to all my readers, commenters and lurkers...thanks for a great year...I've been having fun with it and it makes me feel great when I find out that you have enjoyed it too!

Love, Di

We've Come a Long Way, Baby!

In the past couple of weeks, I have had two confrontations involving business situations in which I was treated in a very intimidating and condescending way. My normal reaction in these situations (well, perhaps with the exception of with my children) is to keep my voice so calm as to almost be a monotone and not to let the other person's escalating tone of voice affect me. In later discussions with my husband, both of these people acted very differently. And here's the clincher...they were both women!!!

I really felt like they thought they were dealing with a woman, so I was less likely to know what I was talking about and more likely to submit to intimidation. I think in the years of fighting for equality for women in the workplace and in other areas of life, the men may finally get it! And sometimes it's our own gender who subject us to discrimination due to our gender!!!

Anyway...in praise of the male of the species, I would like to share the following things that were said to me this week that were very unexpected:

From my husband: "I'm a moron" (He is not particularly comfortable with admitting that he might just possibly be wrong, so this was huge!)

From my friend Billy after a discussion of the maximum strokes a golfer can take when entering one's score for the purposes of handicap: "Diane, you're right! I stand corrected!"

I often quote someone (I have no idea who) who said, "It is better to be kind than to be right." But I REALLY like being right!

Thursday Thirteen (Vol. 42)

We went on a quick trip to New York City and the Hamptons (Quogue) in July and I am finally getting around to:

Thirteen Things that We Did While Visiting New York

1. Visited my niece Ashley at her ultra-hip place of work, RepNation, in Chelsea. The office is above Chelsea Market which is a hubbub of gourmet shops, eateries, etc. She shares an elevator with The Food Network, so we were star-gazing, hoping to bump into Rachel Ray. At Ashley's office their conference room has a ping-pong table in it, there is a basketball net near the reception area and some people ride around the office on skooters. Definitely a cool place. We went out to lunch and Ashley packed up our leftovers and restrained herself from asking for leftovers from other tables...because everyone knows that when you are 23 and living and working in New York, buying food falls way down on the list of priorities...so leftovers are like gold!

2. Went to the Top of the Rock where we finally got through to Rory that he would be seeing the EMPIRE STATE BUILDING not the EIFFEL TOWER!!!

3. Took a ride in a bicycle-drawn carriage from Rockefeller Center to Times Square. Our rider was quite strong, pulling all three of us...and fearless, negotiating New York traffic despite his hefty load.

4. Expressed our liberal Democrat leanings. (Apologies to JH III)

5. Talked golf with Arnold Palmer and thanked him for all those shirts that he came up with that my Dad liked so much.

6. Haley, Rory and Casey helped Simon evaluate some really lame American Idol performances.

7. Haley, Casey and Rory did an American Idol performance of their own!

8. Confused Rory who thought we were going to temple when we told him where we were going.

Get it? Shinnecock? Synagogue?

9. Haley insisted she could eat a whole lobster...and gave it a very good try.

10. Judi got freaky in the kitchen and Arnie consulted his personal chef about the grilling plans.

11. While the adults were consumed with food (pun intended), the kids too chilling out to a whole new level.

12. Lindsay made and decorated a cake!

13. Friends were together, hydrangeas were blooming, silly faces were made,  fresh herbs were cut from the garden, trips to town for ice cream were the highlights of the day, crazy amounts of food were prepared and consumed, life, love and futures were discussed and for a few beautiful days, all was right with the world!

Hellular Cellular

Can someone please explain how the children who insisted that not having a cell phone was going to ruin their lives and now have them, never seem to have them charged, have them on or have them with them when I actually need to get in touch with them?