Stray Dogs, Ticks, and Drinking Bleach

Living in the country is a curious thing.  For the suburban born and raised, it is an eye opening experience.  I'll give you three examples.

In the country, especially on our road, stray dogs are a fact of life. The dog catcher doesn't even exist out here.  If you are able, and a softie, you adopt the ones you can.  If not, you call the sheriff and the dog will be taken to the shelter where the life expectancy is very short.  The humane animal organization only accepts puppies, and those are shipped to the Northeast, where there is a market.  It is a tough choice.  We are softies, so we now have three dogs.  Sadie is learning some manners, and we learned a country lesson.

Pest control out here only goes so far.  I knew, intellectually, that there would be more bugs that in the 'burbs, and I generally have a Live and Let Live attitude where bugs are concerned.  Well, as long as they are outside.  In my house, though all bets are off.  The kids often alert me when, "there is a bug in your house, mom!"  But it isn't working so well.  There are flies everywhere!  I remember that from my grandmother's farm, but hadn't really thought about it for my home.  I hate flies.

More than flies, though, I hate ticks!  I have a thing about creatures that suck blood.  I don't like them.  And ticks are small, perfidious, and look like moles.  I have moles; so ticks look like normal parts of me and it freaks me out!  The ticks are like secret, blood-sucking, disease-carrying ninjas.  I hate them.  (I scream like a little girl when I find a tick and then flail around and it gets lost in the house.  Which guarantees another episode within the hour.  So embarrassing.)

The third example unfortunately is going on right now.  We are on a well.  I like well water.  I like knowing where are water comes from, and where it is going.  I like that connection with our environment, and the life lesson it gives the kids towards water conservation.  What I don't like is when part of our well pump suddenly cracks in half and the entire pump is left dangling from the electrical wires.  Even more, I don't like when this happens 30 minutes before old friends arrive for lunch.

That happened on Saturday.  Luckily, the husband and our dear friend were about to secure the well parts, and replace the broken piece.  Unluckily, it isn't a permanent fix.  And perhaps worst, we know that some ground water got into the well.  Couple that with the fact that whenever there is work done on a well you need to sterilize the water, and we have been left boiling our drinking water for 5 days.

We haven't been able to get in touch with the local well service company, so we are taking matters into our own hands.  Since the husband has the well functioning again, we have done our research and found that the way to sterilize a well is, like most things, with bleach.  Yup, we have to pour a lot of bleach into our well and then let it sit for about 12 hours.

So, for the next 12-24 hours we will be washing our hands with bottled water, drinking boiled water, and making certain not to water any plants.  Fun times.

I love it here.  Most of the time.

Book Review - Here Home Hope

Kelly Johnson is married to a wonderful man and has two amazing teenage sons.  Yet she feels unfulfilled.  After a breast cancer scare and the emotional uncertainty that entails, Kelly decides to change her life.  Written on Post-It notes and stuck where ever she might need the inspiration, Kelly starts her list of "Things 2 Change," and thereby begins a personal journey that takes her from depression to life affirmation, deepens her friendships, enriches her marriage, and enables Kelly to find her passion and turn it into a viable business.  Fans of Nicholas Sparks will enjoy this positive, pro-women novel about turning a mid-life crisis into a life-affirming celebration.

Fans of Nicholas Sparks and his writing/storytelling style should probably stop reading now.

Did that clear the room?  Perhaps I wasn't being fair to Nicholas Sparks.

When I agreed to provide an honest review for Here Home Hope, I did not anticipate that I would feel such guilt over it!  I wanted to like this book, I really did.  I even contemplated sugar-coating my review to save feelings.  But I cannot do that.  This is my blog, and honesty is important to me.

When I was in college, one of our writing professors gave this sage advice: to effectively share a story, you must show the action, not tell it.  Kaira Rouda does not do that.  In fact she tells the story to the point that all of the action takes place off-scene.  The protagonist just tells you about it later.

This book is emotionally distancing, which is a surprise, given plot lines that could have come straight from Desperate Houswives!  Breast cancer fears, anorexia, extra-marital affairs, catty-neighbors, mid-life crises, depression; it is all there.  And all strangely boring.

The main character, Kelly Johnson, realizes her life has to change.  Up until the start of the book, her life has focused solely on her perfect, lawyer husband, her million-dollar home, and her two, idealized, teenage sons.  But Kelly is unfulfilled. So she starts to take a good, hard look at her life, and then goes to see a psychologist.  Who immediately puts her on antidepressants.

Apparently she also put the book on antidepressants because from that point forward, Kelly rarely emotes.  In fact a few little pills and she just floats through the rest of her personal conflicts until the book closes.  Further, whenever Kelly has a personal need, like when she starts her business, or when she has to quickly care for her friend's anorexic teen, she already has an expert on speed dial.  It is too convenient.  It may be that life is actually like that for the oh-so-very rich and connected; I remain unconvinced.  In real life your formerly anorexic BFF who you dumped in her time of need would not take your call, let alone drop everything and provide constant, perfect, free therapy to the aforementioned anorexic teen.  All while nursing a baby.  She might even tell you to stuff it; possibly with a referral to a licensed professional.

But the real problem with this book is its lack of focus.  Is this a book about mid-life crisis?  Is it a grown-up version of those teen issues novels?  Is this a book about how hateful or supportive women can be towards each other?  Or is it a book on what steps women should take to start their own businesses?

I wish it could be all of the above, but I think it is the latter.  Why?  Because that is when the book seems easiest to read; boring, but easy.  And that is when the book provides advice you could follow.  Not surprisingly, this is where Kaira Rouda shows her expertise.  As the author of Real You Incorporated: 8 Essentials for Women Entrepreneurs, Rouda clearly has a passion for female businesses.  (I think she even sites her own book as a source that the fictional Kelly uses on her path to entrepreneurship.  Classy!)  And while that is wonderful for a non-fiction, self-help book, it doesn't fly for fiction.

Here Home Hope has a massive publicity machine behind it, with a blog tour (of which this review was supposed to be part), a Facebook page, and even a reader's guide in the back.  I will not be surprised to hear buzz about the book.  But for me, I could never discuss this book in a book club.  It lacks depth and cohesion, climax, and even good dialog.  It is a soft-touch.  Here Home Hope tells, it doesn't show.

Book Review - A Courtesan's Guide to Getting Your Man

I had a very lucky streak a few months ago and won a bunch of books in various giveaways.  I am slowly making my way through them and plan to provide reviews here.

A Courtesan's Guide to Getting Your Man was won through Free Book Fridays (thanks!).  Cowritten by Celeste Bradley and Susan Donovan, this is really two novels, a modern romance and a historical romance, skillfully interwoven by two talented writers.

Piper Chase-Pierpont, a Boston museum curator, brings new meaning to the word "repressed."  With the bluest of blue Yankee blood, Piper has devoted her life so totally to her work that her sense of self, and certainly her femininity, have almost disappeared.  As she prepares for yet another stilted, conservative museum installation, Piper's life takes a sudden left turn as she literally trips over the secret diaries of one of Boston's most beloved and respected historical women.

Is it possible that Ophelia Harrington, acclaimed abolitionist and suffragette was actually The Blackbird, one of London's most notorious courtesans?  And what does that mean for Piper, repressed, lost Piper?  Should she keep her secret and preserve her job, or should she take a professional leap and tell the complete, complicated story of a woman whose secrets might be more culturally significant than her celebrity?

The novel is split between Piper's discovery of the diaries and the immediate upheaval they create in both her work and love life, and the diaries themselves, told in first person voice by Ophelia Harrington herself.  As the plots deepen and twist the novel begins to race, jumping from past to present just at the moment when the reader needs to know what is happening.  The pacing is wonderful and the resolutions deeply satisfying.

I am just going to come right out and say it, I loved this book!  I like romance novels, but they are often a bit predictable.  I get a little bored, and sometimes the perfect storylines make me a little sad and cynical.  I honestly cannot say that about this book.  I suspected one major plot mystery, but I was so engrossed in the intricacies, and let's be honest, the sex scenes, that the pages practically turned themselves.

I don't think steamy quite covers this book.  Erotic is closer to the truth!  But don't prejudge it, yet, this isn't soft pornography.  It is the plot that keeps this book going.

Face paced, layered, certainly erotic, with excellent characters - I loved it!

Bradley, Celeste and Susan Donovan. A Courtesan's Guide to Getting Your Man. St. Martin's Paperbacks. ISBN: 978-0-213-53256-7 June 2011. 384 p. Romance

Raptors or Raptures, and a Review

Some say tomorrow is the end of the world and a few of us will be left alone on the Earth with the other Heathens for a few months of not-so-fun-times.  And looting.

Others, with a greater sense of humor, claim that tomorrow will be some magnificent return to Jurassic Park.  I am OK with that; I am pretty sure I can hide in my fridge.  I just wish I owned a Jeep.

Or, perhaps, tomorrow will just be Saturday, where I have a work meeting and the start of the kids' soccer tournament.  Whatever it is, I am reminded of a wonderful book.  What?!?   You haven't read The Taking?!?  You must!

The Taking, A Review

Koontz,  Dean  The Taking.  Bantam.  2004.  $27.00 ISBN-10: 055380250X  

ISBN-13: 978-0553802504

  

With the sudden deluge of an ominous, luminescent rain, Molly Sloan and her husband awake to a world inexplicably altered and undeniably horrific.  Isolated by the systematic failure of all outside communication, and faced with an oppressive and relentless apprehension, the Sloans leave their mountain home to seek out the fellowship and relative safety of their neighbors in town.  But safety is no longer part their new reality.  The Sloans quickly discover that they are more isolated than ever before as their neighbors disappear and monsters begin to roam the night.

Molly and Neil, deeply in love but barren of children of their own, soon find one purpose in this long night of unrelenting flood, animated corpses, and unimaginable monsters: to save the children.  Through that mission, they find that their hope for the future and their faith that they can keep the children safe are the only things that can keep them sane.  As the story progresses into nightmare, the reader must ask herself, would we make the same choices?  Would we survive the night?  And what will the new day bring?

Dean Koontz’s apocalyptic thriller is a wild, yet thought provoking exploration of humanity and faith.  Surprisingly theological and laced throughout with enigmatic T.S. Eliot quotations, this is more than your average bestselling suspense novel.  Koontz offers beauty amid grotesquery, pity through fear, and hope throughout the bleakest of nightmares.  Always in high demand, Koontz’s books are an easy choice for a tight budget; and with writing this compelling and reflective, The Taking is an excellent investment.  Highly recommended.  

Project 18 - Baby Hat(s)

I realize that I have made lots and lots of hats, but this project is giving me fits!  One of my absolute best friends is about to have a baby and asked me to knit a hat for the little lima bean.  I was happy to comply.  She wants a newborn hat for pictures in the style of those old sleep hats.  Think a 'Twas The Night Before Christmas stocking cap, but in miniature.  Seems easy, all I have to do is decrease, right?

(Just nod along if you are not a knitter.  Thanks.)

I tore out most of the first iteration (think of it as v1.0) after it got a strange, uneven seam.  No pictures of that, it was gone too quickly.

v1.2 is more like a standard baby hat with a tail.

That one is pretty cute.  Kind of an elf hat.  But I still wasn't satisfied, and since I have 6 skeins of yarn, I cast on v2.0.

Again, this has a very defined seam, but at least it is straight.  In fact, I think tiny little babies could ski down it, if they so desired.  However, it folds over nicely and may look great.  Hard to tell.  I don't have an infant to test it on.

I was talking to a friend today, and she may be able to get the pattern I need.  So there is a possibility that v3.0 will be coming down the line quickly.  Perhaps a newborn lima bean needs 3 hats.

Now you may be wondering at the strange pictures with the post, but I don't want to give it all away.  I haven't sent these off yet!  Completed pictures to follow once the hats finally arrive at their new home, in Illinois.

Project 17 - Arrow Quiver

This week my kids had a special request - they wanted arrow quivers to go with their new bow and arrow sets.  The bows are made of PVC and the arrows have suction cups on the end.  Since the quivers sold at the fair cost as much as the bow and arrow sets, a homemade quiver seemed perfect.  And since the 7-year-old even said it could be my weekly project, how could I refuse?  (I love the family encouragement!)

I made a basic bag design with a diagonal strap. 

Actually, I made two!

The strap is reinforced to hold up to the rigors of marauding through the wilds of Virginia.

The sizing seems perfect, but the bags tend to slide once the kids get moving.  The kiddos helped me with a redesign, and after some very interesting web searching, I added another cross strap for the other shoulder (not pictured.)  Problem solved.

The kids are excited and I am proud of my quick, home-designed arrow quivers.  Robin Hood, I will be expecting your call!

First Harvest

Some strawberries from the plugs my aunt gave me in the fall, and 2 red onions, picked early for a salad.

Delicious!