17 March 2004

Ah yes, St. Patrick's Day in Minneapolis. Time for the wearin' of the green and the shovelin' of the snow. When we were at Bigdale on Saturday, Mark said, "I don't think there's any pink in that store." I looked. It was a store called Irish Indeed! As I had no pressing need for T-shirts requesting kisses for a heritage I do not possess (what, it gets to be mid-March and all of a sudden you're too good to kiss Norsky girls?), I passed by.

Question, though: do any of you know of a good place to order clothes online? I know of J. Jill and Land's End and Victoria's Secret, but none of them is really what I'm looking for. Land's End is great for my custom jeans, but they have a kind of shapeless quality to their dresses, and as I am not shapeless, I would prefer to avoid that. J. Jill is not coming through for me: everything interesting is pink. And Victoria's Secret's dresses start out shaped and tend to lose their shape, and that frustrates me a lot. (Though I may have to buy one of their sale dresses and just cope, if nothing else shows up.) It would be very useful if this online clothes sort of place had waist sizes under 25", too, and I don't care what sizes they call them any more, as long as they have them, and not just in petites, either. And if the clothes didn't cost a bazillion dollars or fall apart on the first washing. Yeah. So if you know of anywhere like that...you know where I am.

Yesterday was one of those days when I decided every dish in the house needed to be dirty. I was just in that mood. Instead of just throwing a lettuce salad and some risotto at Pam and David and Lydia, I made a cucumber salad, a roasted red pepper soup with a cilantro-jalapeño garnish sauce, the mixed mushroom risotto, and a fresh pan of Heathah's chocolate caramel bars. The soup was tasty, but I don't know that I'll be making it except for vegan or approximately vegan company. It was a lot more work than the soups I usually make for approximately the same amount of tastiness. Also I didn't wear kitchen gloves when I was making the garnish sauce, and my fingers hurt for hours. Stupid jalapeños. Harumph. But it was still a good time, and we did manage to polish off the entire bottle of wine with six people drinking it. (This has gotten to be a thing with me now: are we doomed to yet another unfinished bottle of wine because of our pathetic wine-drinking skillz? Happily, not this time.)

I read The Seeing Stone, which is another Holly Black/Tony DiTerlizzi collab in the Spiderwick Chronicles. It's well-done, but I'm concerned about a trend towards serials, more money for less book. These two first Spiderwick Chronicles books have felt like the first two sections of one book, not like two books at all. I don't blame Holly Black or Tony DiTerlizzi for it -- that's a publishers' decision -- but I can't help but hope that there's some other reason for doing more serials lately. Do they think kids who have a tough time reading will feel less intimidated by a bunch of slim volumes than by one "normal" one? Or...something? (Keep in mind that I do read a fair amount of children's/YA, so it's not that I'm comparing the length of a children's book to an adult book and coming back feeling unsatisfied. I'm comparing apples to apples here.)

So let's see...Bear wansa know what happened on my birthday. (Not just mine. Everybody's.) Portuguese independence from Castile, the Axis gets involved in the Spanish Civil War, the Potsdam Declaration is signed, the U.S. military is desegregated, the first geosynchronous satellite is launched and so is Apollo 15 (but not in the same year). Births: George Bernard Shaw, Carl Gustav Jung, Aldous Huxley, Robert Graves, Stanley Kubrick, Mick Jagger. Deaths: Sam Houston, William Jennings Bryan, Eva Perón. There ya go.

Three years ago today, I said, "Humility came somewhat late to me. When I was a very small girl, I knew that writers were just people like me, only sadly rather less competent." I still am interested in hearing about when people knew they, too, could be a writer, or in people who are not sure they can, because my life is not like that and hasn't been.

Two years ago today I was home, and I wasn't usually.

And a year ago today -- ack! -- we didn't finish the wine! Also, the apartment smelled like rotting wombat corpse.

Not sure why I felt the need to check that, but there ya go for the second time today.

Okay. The wearin' of the green, the shovelin' of the snow, the writin' of the novel. Aaaaand onwards.