This really happened.

I sang in a large choir this morning at the Richard Nixon presidential library's 9/11 commemoration ceremony.  As we sat waiting for the hoopla to begin, the elderly woman next to me turned to me and remarked, appropos of nothing, "I hope you're not going to vote for Obama."  I said "I am planning to vote for Obama.  I'm a big fan."

With a straight face and total seriousness she said "Well, he's a Muslim, and he's been secretly sending all of the funds in America's treasury to Islamic nations.  If he gets back in the White House, America will collapse."

No lies.  That happened.  Dear sweet lord....

You should listen to these two little angels.  It will make your day.

Beautiful

attacked by a killer trash can

I have had a truly bizarre day. Fridays are trash pickup day around here, and I swear that EVERY SINGLE FREAKING FRIDAY, we have Santa Ana winds. And because I live atop one of the foothills overlooking the Santa Ana River and the canyon that winds through the mountains, the winds are particularly insane here. This is exactly where the big winds from the desert get channeled into the wind tunnels and amplified into freak status. I have seriously seen my lawn furniture lifted into the air. I have had other people's lawn furniture fly into my back yard and land in my pool. I've seen full grown trees completely uprooted and deposited into the street. So every Friday I end up spending hours going outside and picking up the large plastic trash, lawn clippings and recylables bins as they get blown over, and picking up the contents that have blown out of them before they all wind up in the next county somewhere...only to do it again ten minutes later, over and over until the trucks come by. The bins are really big, about chest high on me, and I'm tall, and have heavy, hinged lids. This morning, as I was trying to upright one of the blown-over bins in the middle of a huge gust of wind, the wind caught the open lid, flipped it closed, and caught me smack on the middle of the bridge of my nose and very nearly knocked me cold. I heard a crunch, saw stars for a minute, then felt warmth and wetness headed down my face. I ran inside and looked in the mirror, and saw a big purple contusion with a deep jagged cut in the middle of it. I couldn't really see how deep the cut was because it was really gushing blood, as head wounds tend to do. When I finally got it to stop bleeding and took a better look at the cut, I decided I might need a stitch or two, so I drove myself to the emergency clinic, icing the contusion every time I stopped at a traffic light. Long story short--they said stitches would probably create more trauma and scarring than the cut itself, so they super-glued it shut. Amazing, huh? I'm not very presentable at the moment, so I think I'll be staying in this weekend. Sheesh....

Hello!

Just checking in from the Left Coast. Nothing is really new here. I got Christmas stowed away for another year. I made some New Year's resolutions, which I haven't really started on, but I will--I REALLY will.

I got some books for Christmas. I've only read half of one of them so far--The Magician King, by Lev Grossman. It's good, a sequel to The Magicians.

I also read the third book of the Hunger Games series. Yes, it's teen lit. Still a very entertaining read. I wanted to finish the series before the movie comes out, which I think will be any day now.

Speaking of movies, I saw Dragon Tattoo and loved it, and it made me wonder exactly why I was unable to get going on the book. I'm going to give it another try, now that I know that the plot will be engaging once I get past all the Swedish names...

That's all I've got.

Dear sweet heavens...

but I am being violently beset by hot flashes all the sudden.

Sux.

I am alive.

Just in case there was any doubt.

Books

I just came back from a week at a resort, which I thought I might spend reading books by the dozen. I didn't--still feeling a bit distracted and jumpy, but I did read one very lovely book: The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, by Aimee Bender. In a nutshell, it tells the story of Rose, a precocious little girl who, the week of her ninth birthday, develops a horrifying gift. When she eats, she tastes every emotion of the person who prepared the food. In that terrible week, Rose learns that her adored mother is empty, lonely and miserable. And she begins to to shoulder the terrible burden of being forced to cope with other people's unhappiness.

I was enchanted by this book--by the dreamy quality of Rose's world (I was reminded of Ann Patchett, The Magician's Assistant in particular), by her tragic and mysterious brother, and by her precocious (think Holden Caulfield) ability to perceive the most hidden nuances of the adult world around her.

I checked out a few online reviews and discovered that many people don't like this book. They found it vague, unfinished. They hated the lack of quotation marks. Is it odd that I never noticed, for one moment, the punctuation in this work?

It was repeatedly described as being about how hard it is to love our families when we know them too well. I didn't perceive that as the theme at all! I thought Bender was exploring the mysteries of talent, of how our gifts are both blessings and terrible burdens--how they can frighten us into paralysis (Rose's father), separate us from each other (her brother, Joe), but ultimately lead us to our own particular destinies. I also felt it looked into the struggles of those who don't know how to find or use their gifts, and the havoc they can wreak as they struggle for direction--Rose's mother being the case in point.

Anyway, I didn't have a week of reading, but I did enjoy one lovely, haunting book! The rest of the time, I gazed off into the distance and thought about nothing. Which of course, is what I do most of the time.