muppinstuff

why we go on holidays

At the beginning of our trip away I felt a little like when working full time ... the omigod it's Friday night which means in two more days it'll be Monday again feeling. But as it was, time stretched out in front of me, there were beach trips and outings in the car, various photo sessions with three different cameras. Nights spent chatting, handstitching a little felt horse and a new pincushion. Afternoons devouring books found at the beach house; Irish novels by Marian Keyes, one after the other. I read the one about the lass who goes to rehab (rachel's holiday), the one whose husband leaves her with a newborn (watermelon), one about a girl with an alcoholic dad (lucy sullivan is getting married) and another about a woman finding love at the same time her gay friend is sick (last chance saloon). All page turners, with messages.  While the pile of worthy fiction I'd bought with me sat ignored. Although I did start The Sound of One Hand Clapping by Richard Flanagan on the second last day. And kept reading in spare moments once we got home. Even though it's a heartwrenching read. So my reading mojo is back. Which is good because it's been long gone.

There were lots of moments with family, with Mum and Betty and Ruby. During which Grace almost smothered her little cousin with kindness a couple of times and learnt about sharing. Or not. Watching them play in the shallow water at the inlet and then racing to pack up and drive our cars out before high tide. Lots and lots of aunty cuddles, not really ever enough. Lance and Gerard arriving at the weekend. More visitors, a house full of people, easy dinner and lots of wine and talk (mind you half a glass of red knocks me nearly senseless these days). A visit from Dad and Nina and an unexpectedly good boogie board day at the beach. Followed by a visit to my aunty and (step)uncle who live nearby where Grace stayed up until eleven o'clock and was well behaved! 

What else? Playing with Grace in the water. That girl must have veins of ice. There weren't that many days really hot enough for extended swimming. But every time we went to the beach she insisted. I tried to convince her to paddle in her shorts but learnt quickly the best thing was to put her bathers on, let her run around and splish and splosh, pulling her out and wrapping her in a towel once she started to shiver. Sometimes a biscuit in the back of the car was in order. She also loved going out in the surf with me, jumping up to meet the waves with me holding her hands and being tossed about a bit in the shallows (very well supervised of course). Sand castles were a big hit, as was visiting nearby Magic Beach which was easily recognisable from the book by Alison Lester. I bought this book while Christmas shopping and put it away, sneakily packing it in unseen with the other books and toys at the last moment and gosh, what a thrill. It'd be fair to say, I think, that Grace will inherit my love of the water.  She also seems to have grown half a foot and tripled her vocabulary.

I feel like I could have stayed away another week, cocooned in a precious little web of holiday. Not that it was perfect, because we're not, but it's nice to be cooking dinner and looking at ti-tree and going for walks along big open beaches with a changing vista every day. It's good for your head, good for your soul. We're starting to slide back into everyday life again. Although I'm going away for a craft retreat this weekend which I feel absolutely and absurdly excited about. You mean I get to sit around with other women, sew without feeling rude, chat, drink and talk about blogging and craft and heaps of other things?!? And eat yummy food. Oh yes, very excited.

Meanwhile my computer is still having surgery. And G deleted the photo editor I like to use from his which means I feel all at sea photowise. Still, I'm very lucky to be able to go online at all (yes, but you know this time I din't really miss it after the first couple of days, not like last time, but I wanted it as soon as I got home, hmm). And I have just discovered that the flickr editor is pretty easy to use. Still I haven't downloaded or organised most of my photos. Which means that when I get back from the aforesaid weekend of excitement, not only will I have to rouse myself and get back to work but there'll be three weeks of photos to do. Blogging may therefore be a little thin on the ground for a while.  Or not. We'll see.

Once upon a time I used to read books

Whew, I've just finished my list of houses to inspect tomorrow, eight in total, but I think we'll only make it to three or four. Which is more than enough. I've been thinking and talking about the stinky house quite a lot this week and I'm planning to go to the auction as well, just to see what happens. We're not afraid of grot, and there's part of me that thinks that if we got that house (or one like it) for the right price, it'd be worth doing up and we'd end up with a nice house to live in, in a good location. But not this one, we haven't done enough homework and it's not something you'd want to go into unprepared.  Enough about houses.

Anyway as it's Friday night, I did the unread book meme, which I nicked from only books all the time . Not that I really read novels at the moment. When I thought about it, I realised that I'm still reading, but it's books about photography, or websites about house design. And blogs of course. There just isn't space in my head right now for more. Not until the holidays, when I'll trawl the internet for the hot books of the year...   

These are the top 106 books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users. So, the books I've read are in bold, the ones I started but couldn't finish in italics, what I couldn’t stand has a strike through.  Those I've read more than once have an asterisk*. I'm meant to underline any on my to read list, but that seems a little futile at this point. It comforts me that I've read more on this list than I would have thought. Although some of them were school reads.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and punishment
Catch-22
One hundred years of solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi: a novel
The name of the rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice*
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveller’s Wife (I read about it on the internet and it ended up being my favourite read of the year)
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin*
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A heartbreaking work of staggering genius
Atlas shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran: a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury tales
The historian : a novel
A portrait of the artist as a young man
Love in the time of cholera
Brave new world
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A clockwork orange
Anansi boys
The once and future king
The grapes of wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984**
Angels & demons
The inferno
The satanic verses
Sense and sensibility**
The picture of Dorian Gray**
Mansfield Park
One flew over the cuckoo’s nest
To the lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s travels
Les misérables
The corrections
The amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The curious incident of the dog in the night-time
Dune
The prince
The sound and the fury
Angela’s ashes : a memoir
The god of small things
A people’s history of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A confederacy of dunces
A short history of nearly everything
Dubliners
The unbearable lightness of being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon** (I love this book)
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an Inquiry into Values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit, but I quite liked the movies
In cold blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White teeth (this was great, on my re-read list once it comes back from Mum)
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The three musketeers

So there you go. Reading. Once upon a time.

In other news, my camera has finally died. Sob. I took it into the city this afternoon to see whether it was the recharging lead or the battery but the repair man seemed to think it was something in the camera. We tried new leads, new batteries and the old brick just wouldn't fire up. He seemed to think it would be very expensive to fix. It's not all bad news though, new camera plans are in the offing but it may be a week or two. So no pictures of houses, or wallpaper... for a while.

how I like my breakfast

This is how I like my breakfast on non-working days to go; bircher like muesli (grated apple, slightly swelled oats, sultanas, water, yoghurt, walnuts) with Mole Creek honey on top, orange juice with soda water and strong stovetop espresso with milk. In a big mug which I don't drink until it's nearly cold. I also like the table to be clear of newspapers I'm not reading, although I don't mind the odd little toy to fidget with or to amuse Grace. But what I really, really love is twenty minutes of peace. No talking, no yelling, no having to change a nappy or answer the phone or negotiate what's happening today. Lately G has been taking Grace for a little walk down the lane at about half past nine. The perfect time to have breakfast after doing some folding or putting on a load of washing or faffing on the internet. And the best thing? Twenty minutes to sit in front of the heater and read. Bliss.

At the moment I'm reading Drift, by Penni Russon of Eglantine's Cake. I've just finished Breathe, which is the sequel to Undine. I read Undine just after Christmas. I told G that was what I wanted for Christmas and he traipsed all over town until he found a copy. I loved it. I'd take a picture of the beautiful greeny cover but it's doing the rounds at the moment. At Betty's I think. Anyway, I bought Drift at Angus and Robertson and they were most happy to order in Breathe and I'm pleased to report that I've seen all three at Reader's Feast and Dymocks in the city, several other Angus and Robertsons, including the one at Box Hill. They'll be in the young adult section, but don't let that fool you. These books might be about a girl becoming a woman, but they're layered and read at different levels. I think my 11 year old reading mad stepsister will enjoy them (for Christmas I think), as did my mum.  There's a magic running through them that's very believable, but still very special and well, magic.

They trilogy is set in a Hobart that seems strangely familiar to me, just from visits and holidays. Or maybe it's the contemporary Australian voice that's making me feel that. Anyway, when I get the whole set together again, they'll go in the special bookshelf of authors we have known or met (Penni's very nice, we met at Ceres for babychinos and chat a while back). There have been some good reviews around (including a feminist academic reading that Penni linked to on her blog a while back but I've lost), but apparently there's also a bitter, mean one on Amazon that spoils the plot. The thought of which kind of upsets me. I feel like I'm on this journey with Undine, the kind that you make with really good characters. So I'm not going to read it until I've finished the series, which I'm really not wanting to end. Why spoil my twenty minutes of peace?

Breakfast meme(?) courtesy of Shula, who's set up a Flickr group, Breakfast Sunday , although I think all breakfasts are welcome.

Reading

As I started to type, Grace was sitting on the footstool under my desk, bumping her head, pushing my feet away, babbling in a conversational way and reading one of her many Little Golden Books. The one about visiting Grandma and Grandpa Smith which features catching a bus to in the country, lots of homely activites and a night at the drive in. All in 1985 style drawings. This book seems to be on high rotation at the moment along with Barbie in the Spotlight, which I bought at the oppy because it's illustrated with scenes made with photos of real barbie dolls, as opposed to drawings, giving it a surreal look I find rather apealing. It crosses my mind that maybe this isn't the best sort of book for a nearly two year old girl. Still, it is only one among many. At least Barbie does stuff. Even if she wears impossible shoes and ends up modelling rather than reporting.

I know I probably shouldn't buy any more books for Gracer because she probably has too many as it is. Which I pick up from the floor several times a day. Or not. Another of her favourites is Mr Rabbit and the Lovely Present by Charlotte Zolotow, illustrated by Maurice Sendak, Puffin 1962. I didn't realise that this book had won awards until I looked it up, but I can see why it's been so popular. I wish Grace would let me read it aloud to her. You see she won't let either of us read to her (her nana sometimes gets to). Any attempt to do so, either sitting on your lap or sitting next to her meets with wriggles, superfast page turning and Noo, Nooo. This is the closest I've been in a long time. Grace let me sit next to her and look over her shoulder for ooh, maybe five minutes. And it's not as if taking the photo ruined the moment, I had the camera in my hand for something else and just snuck one in.

It's not that Grace doesn't love books. Book is one of her 20 or so words, used as she moves them from room to room, or when she hands me one to read, or snatches it again from my hands. She has piles of books in various locations around the house. In the study, in her room, in the lounge, the back room and the kitchen, in our room. It's like a little pitstop to spend time between rombling and jumping to sit on the floor and turn the pages. Right way up, even. But I wish she'd let me read to her. We just have to keep offering I suppose.

My own reading has ground to a halt. I started reading Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard after Christmas but I've found it hard to get past the first few pages. It looks like the sort of book I should like, nature and living in the country being favourite themes of mine. It could be the sort of book I can't read with the radio going and people talking all around. Some books allow me to shut all that out, but other books seem to demand quiet. Something that is in very short supply around here. Unless I read at night after everyone else has gone to bed. But that would cut into my blogging time. Sigh. I need another hour or two in the day, but not at the expense of sleep. Because I just don't have enough time to do everything and to do nothing. I did quite a bit of nothing today, falling asleep on the couch under the plum tree, a gentle breeze above and a spot of warm sunlight on my cheek. It was lovely. Eventhough I should have been taking advantage of the civilised weather to knock off some sewing or gardening tasks. Still, I have to get back into reading books too. I think I'll have to find something easy and page turning to get me back to the habit or I could end up not reading for months. Which would be terrible. I hate it when that happens.

This morning I spent a couple of hours learning about bloglines. I've been a click on my favourites sort of blog reader but I think it's time I got a bit more organised. I still don't feel really comfortable (as in familiar) with it but I think it'll be better. Once I started playing with it, I realised that I could manage how my own blogs look in bloglines if I claimed my blogs in bloglines. However I couldn't get past the verifiction process because I haven't managed to insert the code into my typepad template. I'm on the middle typepad plan, and although you can fiddle with the html for individual posts, you can't insert code into your template. Has anyone done this, or knows whether it can be done? Is it worth bothering with? The other thing I'm not sure about is what causes a blog to update in bloglines. Do they update when someone comments on a post? Or just when a new post is published? So much to learn. Next week, Flickr.