Third Quarter One Star Reviews

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Sigh, it’s always so sad when a book disappoints. I mean it has to really fall flat for me to not even finish it. But over the last three months…

The 39 Clues, Maze of Bones by Rick Riordan

I was so excited to read this. When I volunteered at my son’s elementary school library (for the three months he went public school), the kids were constantly checking this series out and telling me how cool it was. And I looked longingly at the books every time I was re-shelving them but I didn’t want to check them out from the school because they only had a few. So I started trying to get them from the local public library and it took me a while. I guess they’re super popular.

sigh. I just couldn’t get into the book. Boring. The kids just didn’t make me feel anything for them. Orphans. Raised by nannies. Should make me all maternal but no emotions surfaced. And the fact that everyone they come in contact with are evil was just over done. I gave up 80 pages in.

Karma’s A Killer by Tracy Weber

I feel super guilty about this one star review because I am sure it has nothing to do with the quality of the book. A murder mystery about yoga and dogs was just begging to be read. And I have to say I felt myself just about to get into it when it happened. The mother -daughter reunited after the mother was heinously bad moment. And I closed the book. I can’t, I just can’t.

A Dark and Stormy Murder by Julia Buckley

This proudly proclaims itself the first in a new series by the author who has another popular series. shrug. I found the plot contrived and totally unrealistic. The dialogue was flat and desperate to be witty but failing. And 82 pages in I found I was making excuses not to read it even though I needed to finish a book to review it for my blog by Monday. It goes back to the library unfinished and I don’t even care who done it.

Sunday Sup: Red Beans

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For quite some time now various friends have been after me to write a cook book. I always reply I’d have to call it Other People’s Recipes I Play Around With. LOL. So not happening. So instead I’ll give you this, the Sunday Sup. Once a week I will post a recipe, explanation, and pics of something I made recently. Maybe it will entertain you. Maybe it might even feed you.

Red Beans

This is a bastardization of my mom’s creole red beans and rice recipe. I rarely talk about my mom on here but it has nothing to do with her cooking.

If you have the time, throw a pound of dried kidney beans into a pot of water and let them soak over night. The next day before you start the actual cooking, scoop out the floaters (they’re bad) and dump the water. If your husband demands this recipe at the last minute, you can substitute four cans of kidney beans, rinsed instead.

TO the beans add: img_20160918_140951

-3 large onions (2 giant or 4 medium work just as well) diced. What do I mean by diced. Cut it in half, make 6 slices per half, then 6 slices the other way.

-one green bell pepper, diced

-3 celery stalks, diced

-1 lb andouille sausage, chopped

-2 fat meaty ham hocks (depending on where you live they might be called pork hocks.)

-2 quarts of water.

Bring the mess to a boil, then cover and simmer for 3 hours, stir every 30 minutes. Two hours if you used canned beans.

Mash 1/4-1/3 of the beans against the side of the pot. Cook 45 more minutes.

Add hot sauce to taste. Traditionally this should be Tabasco. Use what you have on hand and to your family’s taste preference. Cook 30 minutes more. img_20160918_170752

When it’s all thick and gooey try to pull the ham hock bones. Mine is less thick because canned beans don’t go starchy enough, still tastes good. Oh, and warn your family it’s impossible to get all the bones so chew carefully.

Serve over rice, traditionally.

But since I ain’t in Lu-si-anna, I serve mine over corn bread.

 

Fiendish Friday: NCIS – Season 13

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I don’t have cable TV. Or satellite. Or whatever other cool stuff that has been invented. I have the internet and netflix. It serves me well. No commercials. I don’t have to wait a week between episodes. Of course I do have to wait until the entire season comes out. But once it does, I can binge watch it to my little heart’s content.

In late August, NCIS season 13 made it to netflix. I’ve watched NCIS forever. I adore Mark Harmon and he’s the reason I started watching it but over the years, of course, I got interested in other characters. Ducky, for example, is blooming amazing. And I would love to be friends with Abby. I always really liked Kate. And her death, so early on, was a shock.

So I should have known what was coming. I should have. But I thought maybe, just maybe, they’d give Tony a happy ending. I thought Ziva would show up with their child, I predicted a son though. And she and Tony would ride off into the sunset together. I mean come on. Like enough bad stuff hasn’t happened to Tony? He got the plague. He fell for a mark and then had to break her heart and his own.

Did they really have to kill her?  I don’t think we can be friends anymore NCIS. I think I might need to break up with you.

Book Review: Hearse and Gardens

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I’ve been super busy lately, which I hate to  say. It just sounds like some self aggrandizing defense bs. But I say it now to explain why when I was at the library with the kiddo and had exactly 12 minutes, he got 11 minutes to get books and movies and I got 45 seconds to grab every cozy mystery on the popular reads shelf. LOL.

Hearse and Gardens by Kathleen Bridge is the second book in the Hamptons Home and Garden Mystery series. I haven’t read the first. I did not find that a problem.

It was amusing in a calm sort of way. I found myself neither excited nor bored. Just contently reading a long. The main character is interesting, partly because her life is very removed from mine and I love a window into a world I don’t know.

Meg and her best friend Elle stumble across a dead body while clearing out an old bungalow of the pieces they can rehab for their businesses. Hence the mystery begins. But the murder is old and that sapped some of the adrenalin from the mystery in my opinion.  It’s also a mystery in the style of Christie, in that, you get small glimpses and bits of clues but Bridge holds back critical facts so Meg can do a big reveal at the end to all the players.

℘℘℘ 1/2 – I give it 3.5 pages. It was good. I enjoyed it. I would probably read another one in the series if it came across my path but I wouldn’t go looking for it.

Zing, I felt that

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Every Sunday one of the bloggers I follow posts the blogs she has read for the week and recommends to others. I check them out. Pass them on sometimes. But today something I  read over at WriterUnboxed just resonated so much with me I needed to post about it, now.

we writers have thinner skins because we need them to absorb the world at large, not just to accurately portray its events and its people, but to convey them authentically on the page to others.

Wow. I was feeling my thinner skin this week. Someone at the co-op my kiddo goes to sent an email explaining they hadn’t done the work they said they would because they don’t like me, I’m unpleasant. I walked around feeling physically ill about that for days. Partly because I don’t like to be told I’m unpleasant, but largely because I couldn’t wrap my head around the kind of thinking that goes on in someone’s mind, where “I don’t like you” is reasonable justification for letting 150 other people down.

The kiddo has inherited my thinner skin. He acutely feels other people’s pain. Often when we talk about it I tell him to embrace his feelings. Those warning bells are great indicators that something is wrong. They are an opportunity to stand up for those who can’t, help someone who needs it, or change the environment he’s in. Maybe he’ll use that thinner skin to be a writer, or maybe a musician, since that seems to be his leaning right now.

But maybe, just maybe, he’ll use it to change the world.

 

Fiendish Friday: The Doctor is in

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I’m not sure what it is about me that makes people share their deepest darkest secrets. Maybe I just seem safe. Or maybe they read the total lack of judgement in my eyes. Maybe  I’m just really good at the gentle eyes and mild head nod thing. But2016-09-01 12.30.11.jpg I hear stuff.

From the CFO who shouldn’t have told me things that could have got us in trouble for insider trading to my FIL who asked me to tell my husband he had a new girlfriend, LOL.

My husband is convinced I missed my calling as a therapist. I think if I’d become a shrink I would have ended up hearing too much of the wrong things from people who shouldn’t talk and the next thing you know I’m on the run from the CIA or wearing cement boots in the ocean. LOL

But the other day I took the kiddo to MOHAI and I couldn’t help but pose for this….

The Doctor is in, tell me all your deep dark secrets….

Wednesday Writer’s Update

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I’m off to spend the day in Portland with the kiddo, a friend, and her kiddo. The friend and I are both foodies and Portland is a mecca of amazing food. To quote Hercule Poirot, the great sadness of my life (on days like these) is that you can eat but three times a day. LOL

We’re also going to Washington Park. maybe the zoo, maybe the children’s museum, maybe the arboretum. Maybe the forestry center. That’s the cool thing about Washington Park.

We’ll definitely hit Powells. Some day they’ll carry my books. LOL

So a quick update on my world:

My first 6 week session curriculum is 70% done. Haven’t started any other sessions yet.

I just realized I owe my script for Bard and Starlett by tomorrow.

I am struggling to find programming teachers for classes we have students for because our previous teacher, cough cough Microsoft, backed out over the summer.

I’ve mulling over my  beta feedback on my spy novel. There is a lot of dichotomy that needs to be resolved. People seem to want different kinds of novels. I need to sort out what kind of novel I want and look at the changes people who are shaping in that direction want to see, if that makes sense. My brain is working on it.

I owe Beta to my nephew. By the weekend. sigh.

I have to send nasty grams on behalf of the pool board to the members who still haven’t paid their second half dues, which were due July 1. Seriously people?

But a lot of that work, actually makes me happy. It’s what matters to me. I care about the coop, I want to be writing again, and god knows I wanted someone to encourage and help me when I was my nephew’s age.

Just that last item can go away. LOL

Book Review: Come, Tell Me How You Live

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I’ve talked before about my early and lifelong love of Agatha Christie. She is just the cat’s meow in my opinion. I think half the reason I bagged my murder mystery was because it wasn’t up to snuff with hers. LOL.

Come, Tell Me How You Live is not a mystery. Anyone who dies, does so from natural causes. In fact, it isn’t even a fiction work. Come is the memoir of her time digging in Syria with her second husband Max  Mallowan. He was an archaeologist. Agatha accompanied him on several of his digs. She began making notes in the years just before World War II as a way to answer the questions people frequently asked her. But after the four years of war, she ended up penning the book as a love letter to a simpler time and an amazingly happy period in her life.

I’ve read this book a dozen times by now and each time it makes me laugh and then makes me cry. Agatha is completely unvarnished when she describes everything. She pokes more fun at herself than anyone else. She’s raw and unedited in her emotions. It’s a delightful window into a different way of life. The people she encounters and the work that is done – it’s all an amusing social commentary by someone who knows people and made her living on that knowledge.

℘℘℘℘ – Four Pages. I’m always happy to read this book. To escape for just a bit.

Fiendish Friday: Esoteric

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I don’t talk about religion. My views on religion and God and personal responsibility tend to confuse people and someone ends up with hurt feelings. But I noticed something lately that made me willing to post this.

I was in a very depressed, stressed out, creatively empty place for the last four months. It was not good. I was not me. I was a shell that used to be me but the inner beauty that is me had moved out. I can’t really blame that inner me, my life had become a very inhospitable place.

I stopped writing. I lost the desire to write as well. The two are different and the lack of desire is by far the sadder one. I had to really work at it to even be funny in my blogs anymore. Oh the horror…

But slowly over the last few weeks, I’ve come back. And my muse has returned. I penned some new words on a new novel. I’m happy again. I feel whole. If a bit pressed for time. But several times recently, God, yes I said the G word, has demonstrated he’s clearing the decks for me to focus on what really matters.

A new treasurer for the board popped up out of the blue and I am going to be able to resign at the end of the year. Little happy dance!

A writing teacher I have been filling in for, emailed to say she is ready to take back over the SnoValley Writes classes at the library, allowing me the choice to continue Nano to Publish or not as I WANT. Choices are so awesome.

Things keep popping up for the coop, which I am devoting more time to, and each time they do, people step up to help. I almost need to say it twice. People step up to help out and make it work. And that leaves me feeling energized and like I am spending my time for that board wisely and on a population that appreciates it.

And I found myself giving advice that I needed to hear. And I could actually process that I needed to hear that advice and take it myself.

To me, these are gifts from a power higher than myself. They are things I could not have produced on my own, no matter how hard I tried.

Let’s not have a discussion of religion. Please. But I would love to hear any gifts you’ve gotten recently.

 

Book Review: Down the Rabbit Hole

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I’d love to say this is the kind of thing I don’t usually read but the truth is I like a bit of salacious tell all. I first started reading Playboy back in high school. Yes, I actually read the articles. But I still remember the horrified look on the face of the guy in the row next to me when he realized there was a semi naked shot of Erika Eleniak on the front cover of the magazine I was surreptitiously reading during a boring lecture.

Anyway, needless to say when I saw Down the Rabbit Hole, Curious Adventures and Cautionary Tales of a Former Playboy Bunny by Holly Madison, I compelled to pick it up. Why not? If it sucked I would just stop reading, I can do that now, and return the book to the library. Side note, isn’t it fabulous that we live in a country where such racy material can be picked up at the public library for free.

Anyway, Holly covers her life in fast forward, from the paper doll book an aunt gave her at age 9 that inspired her to want to be like Marilyn Monroe to her arrival in LA. Then she slows way down to give a blow by blow (te-he) of her experience being kept at the playboy mansion as Hef’s girlfriend. I know all first hand accounts are anecdotal but I can see how the things she described would effect someone in the negative ways in effected her. I could related to her battles with body dismorphia, depression, and feeling lost without knowing who she really was.

It wasn’t a “fun” read. But it was mesmerizing. Perhaps because I have a mild obsession with taking a glimpse into people’s private lives. But still I was compelled to finish it.

℘℘℘℘ – Four Pages. I enjoyed it. If you like a little true life drama, you might enjoy it as well.