Bibliomama

I'm drowning in stupid school assignments, and the puppy gets up at five or six and then she goes back to sleep but I usually don't, and Angus is on pitching rest because his elbow hurts and physio should help but he's worried and frustrated so I'm sad and frustrated. And he has an infected ingrown toenail and we had to get his kidneys checked because of the bloodwork because of his acne medication, and I had to take my dad for cataract surgery, so I've visited a goodly proportion of the hospitals and doctors' offices in this area recently. So I'm taking it a little bit easy right now, which I'm almost okay with. I got a fair bit done in the basement in January and anything major there is on hold, although sometimes I go down and do ten minutes of Swistle's little bit of something . Tonight I cleaned out a bag of Christmas gift bags, packaged them together and put all the wrapping paper in the now-empty long bag. Every few days I walk fairly slowly o...

Contrary to what the post title seems to indicate, this is not actually a letter to the person in question. This exchange happened a few weeks ago so I'm enjoying blowing on the cooled embers of my righteous fury. So someone had posted a recipe for something that called for almond milk. I had just bought my very first carton of almond milk to make banana-applesauce cookies, so it piqued my interest that someone posted on her recipe: "But almond milk is bad, don't use it." I replied "almond milk is bad?" to her comment, hoping she would elaborate. Instead she replied "Yep." Uh, thanks, very illuminating. I said that I was asking for clarification. SHE said "best you look it up yourself. Google saves time and lives, I always say." This was followed by a smiley emoticon. Hold up, sister. Did you just go all "Let me Google that for you" on my ass? I tend to think the "Let Me Google That For You" response is appropr...

So, regarding this: I only cancelled one appointment before I actually made myself go, which is a bit of a victory. Matt was away and I was freaking out a little about driving there and parking because of when this happened . Three separate people offered to drive me, and I accepted one offer, but in the end decided to just gird my loins and go for it. The main parking lot was full, but unlike the last time, I saw a sign pointing to parking just before the hospital entrance, so I turned around and went back and there were quite a few spaces. First hurdle over. I got a bit lost looking for the place I needed, but I didn't start freaking out again until I was in the waiting room wondering what kind of person I would be dealing with. I had agreed to see a fifth-year psychiatry resident for the first part of the appointment and then be joined by her supervising psychiatrist. I'm all for teaching hospitals and helping medical students learn, but as soon as I'd agreed, I ...

The first story in Jeanette Winterson's collection The World and Other Places is called The 24-Hour Dog. I used to be uniformly smitten with everything I read by Jeanette Winterson, and the first time I read this collection I still thought she was one of the most original and imaginative writers ever. I still think a lot of her writing is inspired, but I've also come around to acknowledging that critics who call her pompous and overblown are not always entirely wrong. I don't know if the unnamed, ungendered narrator in the 24-Hour Dog is supposed to be Winterson - it certainly seems like it could. The narrator captures a lot of the broad strokes of dogness beautifully: "I made him walk on a lead and he jumped for joy, the way creatures do, and children do and adults don't do, and spend their lives wondering where the leap went"; "This was a little bit of evolution that endlessly repeats itself in the young and new-born thing. In this moment there are n...

I once read a review on Goodreads that started with the reviewer's 'personal system' for rating books. The first thing she said was something like "I never give five stars because no book is perfect." Now, I don't know this woman anywhere near well enough to be getting unreasonably snotty about her personal book-rating system, but all I could think was that if she's never finished a book, closed her eyes with the strains of the last words floating in the air and thought "that was perfect", well, that's really quite sad. It also made me think (again, with no real justification) that she's probably like those teachers that will go out of their way to find tiny imperfections in any assignment to avoid giving out a perfect score, as if granting an A plus would scald their parsimonious little souls. In any case, the Goodreads rating system considers a five-star rating to denote "it was amazing", not "it was perfect". So, ...