Ger's Christmas present...

Get wanted android on the HP TouchPad as a Christmas present. Loading it up I felt so bad ass (for about 10 seconds before I realized then we would have to learn Android).

Looks like something out of the matrix right?

It took about an hour and a half, but now it's a dual boot with WebOs and Android.

Book Review: The Hunger Games

Book Review: The Hunger Games by Suzane Collins.

The Hunger Games and I did not start off well and we did not finish well,but it was fun while it lasted.

My sister in law first told me about this book and while her description was intriguing, I didn’t think I had the wherewithal to dive into a book riddled with post-apocalyptic angst. Then Ger got a copy for Christmas, and summarily polished it off and the sequel in about two days. It was lying around when I picked it up, willing to give it a shot because I like girl power especially when it comes armed with a bow and arrow. Plus Ger and the dog were curled up on the couch. However, I almost gave up on page 2 when I read the following passage:

“I swing my legs off the side and slide into my hunting boots. […] …I pull on trousers…”

Who puts on shoes before pants? Is this some hack writer getting away with slopping writing because it’s for children and young adults? I HATE that. Matthew has a book using the Dr. Seuss brand called “Mr. Brown Can Moo Can You?” and there is a passage in it that reads, “Lightening goes ‘SPLAAAAAATTTTT’ and it’s very very hard to make a noise like that.” I always skip this page because in my head I’m screaming: “The sound lightening makes is THUNDER.” In short, I don’t think children’s literature is the place to get all lazy with your writing (that’s what blogs are for) and Ms. Collins had my panties all in a bunch by page two.

But somehow between page 3 and 4 her writing was like slipping me the equivalent of a tall green tea soy latte with extra foam and before I knew it I was curled up happily with husband and puppy racing along with Katniss and her bow. I even tried to imagine a post-apocalyptic world where putting shoes on before pants was some sort of survival necessity (maybe the pants were all snap away on the sides or something). I really wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt because I was enjoyingt he ride so much.

Like a latte, though the high eventually wears off and you wish maybe you had a more sensible lunch instead. This happened by the last 1/3 of the book. Suzanne Collins is no George Orwell. Granted Ms. Collins is writing for grades 7 and up, so that lets her a little bit off the hook on the deepness factor. Still that’s no excuse for passing of what is really a treatment for a movie as young adult novel. Actually what she wrote was a treatment for the first installment in a movie franchise, which somehow made me feel worse. I was so disappointed that I actually tossed the book across the room when I was done, something I’ve only done one other time in my reading history (Waiting, by Ha Jin). I felt had, because I fell for the ride and even though I was warned (shoes before pants, what did I expect?) and was ashamed of it. Still though, I started reading the second book in the series. Just because green tea soy lattes have no nutritional value, doesn’t mean they aren’t addicting.

Christmas Morning - Dec 2011

Santa Left Presents!





Ger and I enjoyed watching Matt open his Santa presents. He couldn't believe they were all for him! We had to encourage him to open them.


This look on his face was awesome.

Book Review: Reading Jackie by William Kuhn

Book Review: Reading Jackie by William Kuhn

On Christmas Day, I decided to make a leg of lamb. It had been a while since I turned on the broiler, and the bits of dinners past incinerating quickly filled the ground floor of the house with smoke. My plans for a special Christmas dinner were quickly going up in that smoke.

It was then that my husband decided to make the very sensible and practical suggestion that we should clean the oven. In this nugget, lies Jaqueline Kennedy Onassis’ appeal. It was all I could do not to burst into tears at the thought of having one more thing to do, as I was already exhausted from my job, being a mom, and all the chores and tasks of taking care of a house and family. The thought of having to clean the oven, when I was already mentally trying to factor in time to prepare our taxes for the coming year and finish Matt’s applications to preschool and a thousand other things was too much for me to handle. In that moment, I was neither “accomplishing a great deal” or “keeping it together.”

JKO, had built herself into a myth of perfection in doing both. One could counter the statement that she “accomplished a great deal” with the argument that she had access to staff and resources, but so do CEOs of companies and their accomplishments are no less theirs. I don’t know if I had staff if I would be able to persuade and arrange for an Egyptian temple about to be drowned by a dam moved to the Met in New York, save Grand Central Terminal or persuade a publishing house to publish ground breaking work on African-American centered subjects like the Sally Hemings story. In her 1,000 days in the White House, she completely renovated the house, persuaded congress to set up a trust to protect the building and got the French to loan us the Mona Lisa. Her White House projects take on an added dimension when you consider she also was a mother to young children at the time.

While some may argue she was a socialite who had other people accomplishing things for her, everyone would agree that she was a pro at “keeping it together”. JFK’s funeral, Onassis’s death, having the Kennedy’s as in-laws, there were lots of opportunities for JKO to put a foot wrong – yet she never did.

So whenever I get my hands on any Jackie material it is always a treat, because maybe I can learn something to be better in both categories. Sadly, we don’t learn anything too new in this book. Any JKO fan or casual reader with access to Wikipedia knows she had a thing for 18^th century France, for ballet, for Russian history, for photography. There are no real nuggets in the “accomplishing a great deal” category. Letitia Baldridge’s book “A Lady, First” gives more clues into Jackie’s multi-tasking formula. (When I told my boss that my folder system in my cubicle was modeled on Jackie’s folder system in the White House, he looked at me oddly).

In the “Keeping It Together” category, we get a slightly deeper appreciation of how far she went to preserve her own and the Kennedy’s myth through the books she helped support. In a way, it was probably good Jackie died when she did, because her formula of Svengali-like control of her image would break down the minute someone caught a tirade of hers on an iPhone camera. Jackie’s formula for “Keeping it Together” relied heavily on hiding and controlling what people wrote and published about her. This doesn’t really work when you have twitter, bloggers and thousands of television channels hungry for content.

In the end, if you like 18^th century France, ballet, Russian history, photography and you are also the type of person that stay’s for the credits at the end of movies you might enjoy “Reading Jackie”. If you are reading it to learn more about the woman behind the myth, there is not a lot of new information here. I shouldn’t have been surprised- Jackie wasn’t going to let her guard down even for a second. That’s what made her a pro at “keeping it together”.

Book Review

My new year’s resolution is to write book reviews of the stuff I read. Here’s the first one:

Review: The Dirty Life by Kristin Kimball

As a young girl growing up in Jersey City, I never had farm fantasies. I was never under any illusion whatsoever that farming was a tremendous amount of work; I was brought up to always use kitchen gloves when washing dishes so my hands wouldn’t get ruined. One year my mom let me have a pot and I put some seeds in it in an attempt to grow flowers (we didn’t have a back yard). I planted too many seeds and the little shoots quickly strangled each other. Then the boys playing in the street hit a ball and knocked the pot over on the sidewalk. That was pretty much the end of my exposure to nature until my husband decided to go to Dartmouth Medical School in New Hampshire (and by certain comparisons my exposure was circumscribed even then).

Kristin Kimball’s account of up and leaving a very city-focused life to start a farm came recommended and I like reading about people who have had interesting experiences – especially if they are ones I will never have. A Harvard-educated, lower east side urban hipster, Kristin is swept off her feet by:

“Mark strode down the hall…with purposeful grace…lively green eyes… perfect nose…mane of gold curls…large and callused…corded with muscles…beautiful teeth. I smelled warm skin, diesel, earth.”

This is page one, and I smell a trap. I thought this was a serious memoir written by someone from Harvard? Her description of her future husband continues:

“not jaded from looking at porn…never smoked or drank too much….gracious muscles that came from hard work… read ‘Mastering the Art of French Cooking’.”

At this point I stop and Google the author. Apparently she was a freelance writer and has since written for Oprah. Then it hits me. This is chick-lit. Nothing against chick-lit itself, but it’s a genre that does not teach, preach, analyze or inform. It primarily entertains. Once I understand this, I can relax and let her entertain me. Here, she does not disappoint. There is the lively Amish auction, the bonding with Delia the cow and the owning horses (talk about playing to a young girl’s dreams). There is profound deepness at new life when animals are born and heart tugging sadness when animals die. It’s all a little too predictable, but I don’t mind, it’s chick-lit. She’s entertaining us. Maybe because she is short like me, I feel a sense of kindred with her and don’t mind when she veers into cliché’ territory. It’s a kindred that is cemented when she describes running the maple sugar boiling operation like an inferno. That’s what I would do too, if I was ever tasked with boiling down maple sugar sap into syrup. I would run the whole thing at a heat level that is beyond most human’s level of tolerance.

But then, our heroine has her wedding. I read the following line and all pretense of understanding drops. I do not understand her and she is not me. The line reads as follows:

“[to aquire]….three hundred red bandanas for napkins”

Our heroine has now crossed over to the unfamiliar. I do not understand why someone would bother with bandanas for cloth napkins. I understand the farm theme but plain cloth napkins are cheaper. I no longer understand what these farm forces are doing to her.

All in all though, her descriptions of setting up the farm made me admire her work ethic. She works very hard, but in truth, not as hard as Amanda in the Sunfire series or even Laura of the Little House series. Still it is more work than most people with a television and internet connection manage to accomplish, and for that she should be commended. But she has a lot of help, something the Ingalls did not have being the sole family crossing out of Wyoming. Also, they are borrowing the land previously farmed, not clearing a homestead.

Also, she writes about how she had a misconception that abstract things were “hard” and physical things were for those people “not so smart”. I have to make a point here and say that most people, including most New Yorkers, don’t think that at all. I feel the need to correct this in her book lest she single-handedly give people from the tri-state area a bad name.

All in all it was a quick, entertaining read that cemented what I already knew from young adult books: farming is dirty, hard work and girls will do just about anything for love.

Early Birthday Present

Best present could ask for, Ger got up with me early to give me my birthday present before I went to work. An enclosed composter!

Of course I immediately threw in some scraps of lettuce. It's hard to be at work when all I want to do is play with it!

Rite of Passage

Matt at the exact moment he learns about the commercial aspect to Christmas.

A rare fall day....

On a rare weekend day about two weeks ago, the following things happened:

1) Ger, Matt and I were all in the house at the same time.
2) The weather was sunny.
3) It was daytime and not Matt's nap-time.
4) The last of the leaves had fallen.

We went to the diner to meet with our neighbor's for a quick brunch, then crunched through some leaves. Matt had a blast, as you can see...

Matt and The Muffin

This Muffin that Matt is eating has:

1) Flax
2) Bran
3) Carrots
4) Apples

I feel like such a good mom (and those moments are rare!)

Home Organization - The Dining Room Hutch

Well, we are finally getting truly settled in our house. Ger and I have been married for over 6 years and for most of that time our wedding china has been in boxes. Recently however, we were able to find some dining room furniture and I went about the task of opening up presents that I hadn't seen for over 6 years.



Emily opening the boxes! So fun! (except when I realized the price tags were on for 6 years and and I had to get them all off).




Of course now, Ger moved the hutch into the room, and his one request was that we display the star wars plates. Now how can a girl say no to that?

There is still a lot more to do before the dining room is set - but hey Rome wasn't built in a day. Baby steps!

Matt and the Hay Maze

I took Matt to the Children's Hay Maze at the Woodmere Art Musuem in Chestnut Hill. Now, I was really surprised that Matt figured out how to get to the center in about 10.5 seconds. At first I thought, well that was the most expensive 10 seconds ever (it was $8 to use the maze) but then I was like, well it was worth it to spend $8 to see Matt figure out the maze so quickly! Ha Ha!

These pics were taken with the brand new Iphone 4S - so hopefully I have no excuse not to take pictures - and video! There is a short test of this below. Also, I need to learn to post from the phone, as that will make all the difference.




Matt at the center of the Hay Maze.




The Woodmere is a lovely building. They have a children's gallery that is very inspiring.

Fall 2011- In the Kitchen

All this running around you wouldn't think I would neglect my time in the kitchen right? Well yes, kind of. But this is the season to get back into the swing of things...

First off, canning class. Thank you so much Marta, for hooking this up. (Marta used to help run a CSA serving CHOP and needless to say is totally hooked up).

Thank god for the Iphone camera, otherwise I'd have no pictures.

The class took place at the Long View Center for Agriculture. All the produce we used came from the farm. When we started roasting up the tomatoes for canning, I was really worried there would be none to can cause it smelled so freakin' good.

These beets were just so *alive*.

Here is the finished product. I think I feel ready now to tackle canning my chutney....

I've also been doing a vat of soup a week, making it as veggie packed as possible. This one is vegan! (Just for fun, really).

Finally, baking! I wasn't going to let Matt's Birthday go by without celebrating right? He turned 3 - so I made Elmo.

Matt, when he saw it said, " Where's Grover?". Go figure.