Elements of Style

Now if you are an English major, you might think I was referring to The Elements of Style by Strunk and White. But you would be wrong.

I am referring to Elements of Style by Wendy Wasserstein. The novel, by the playwright. I read it recently and found it to be a good use of a few hours. Not really chick lit, it is more like a comedy of manners. The upper crust of New York society. Now, I know this is fiction, but given that Wasserstein lived in New York, it is probably more of a roman a clef, so I figure it must pretty accurately describe these peoples' lives.

And what lives they are. The "right" people have four houses: summer, winter, vacation and beach, or something like that. New York, Aspen, the Caribbean, and somewhere else, Maine perhaps.

They have their pilates instructors come to their house, the wives don't have jobs, yet need personal assistants anyway. They are all rail thin and uber-fashion conscious. One woman's favorite snack is four soybeans and a chocolate chip.

But of course, they aren't any happier than we are. Or any different.

Would be a good read while you are taking the private jet from your home in Manhattan to your home in Miami.

P.S. did you know that White, of Strunk and White, was E.B. White, of Charlotte's Web fame? I didn't.

P.P.S. Shouldn't it be playwrite instead of playwright?

Waiting, waiting

Books I am waiting for, from Interweave Press:

Crochet Me

Bag Style

Folk Style

Harmony Guide: Knit and Purl

Harmony Guide: Lace and Eyelets

Harmony Guide: Cables and Arans

Knitting Little Luxuries

The library does not even have any of them on order yet..... sigh.

P.S. Click on the titles for link, for some reason it is not showing up correctly....

Late summer blahs

Where have I been lately? Well, I have been picking Japanese Beetles off my plants and watering them (the plants not the beetles) hoping to keep my garden alive in this drought. Then, Thursday pm we got about an inch and a half of rain. Wow. It reminds me of that commercial for some shampoo, from the 70's, where the woman is acting in a scene where she plays a farmer in a rainstorm.

Cue camera, and rolling, and it starts to rain. She takes off her bonnet, allowing her long blond hair to flow out, and cries "The crops are saved!!" as she is soaked by the rain. Cut and she is in the trailer, getting her hair dried for the next scene.

That is how I feel this week, even though I have no other crops that strawberries and tomatoes right now. They talk of the "billion dollar rain" where a whole region's crops are saved by a timely rain. I sure hope the farmers around here got the rain we did.

Bike path

Recently seen on the bike path:

1. A guy riding along on his bike, with a parrot perched on the handlebars and a cockatiel perched on the guy's shoulder.

2. A guy riding along on his bike, reading a book.

3. A guy riding along on his bike, with two rubber chickens slung on his handlebars.

Quilt art

Check out this post on Purlbee if you are interested in quilting. It is an article about Quilt Art, which is a group of quilters. There are a lot of beautiful quilts on the web site. I especially like Inge Heuber.

I enjoy all my crafts, mostly because I like pretty colors and shiny objects, but I think quilting is the one that is the most awe-inspiring to me. Some of the quilts I have seen are beyond incredible. I don't think I would ever feel that way about a piece of jewelry.

An open letter to the Celebrity World

OK, so I didn't watch any of Live Earth when it aired, but I really don't need any celebrities to tell me how to be an environmentalist. It is so insulting to listen to a bunch of really rich and wasteful people leture me about the things I can do to save the earth. What a bunch of hypocrites. And I am insulted that they think we are too starstruck to notice how hypocritical they are.

Now I am not against celebrities using their fame for whatever cause they want to publicize. I applaud them for getting our there for AIDS, cancer, orphans, of whatever is dear to their heart.

But I don't need someone with a mansion, or several houses in different places around the globe, telling me to conserve. I don't need Madonna telling me to conserve when I recently read that she purchased her fifth house in London.

I don't need Cameron Diaz to tell me to turn off the shower while I shave my legs (!!). Cameron, I shave my legs while sitting on the edge of the tub, not even while taking a shower at all. See that way, you can use water sparingly. And by the way, you are a terrible actress and I avoid any movie with you in it.

These are the people in one of the least eco-friendly occupations. Making a movie is tremendously wasteful, when things are blown up for a 3 second shot, when elaborate sets are constructed, when costumes are made that are used for only one scene, when 300 people jet off to some remote location to film a few scenes. The last thing they need to do is stem on a pedestal and tell the rest of us to use less toilet paper! Especially when the person telling us this (Sheryl Crow I believe) is using a three bus convoy to drive round the country delivering her message. Sheryl, if you really cared you would get in a car yourself and drive it around, sans entourage.

Not that celebrities are the first people to do this, given the abundance of idiomatic phrases to describe this behavior, like "Don't talk the talk if you can't walk the walk" or "Do like I say, not like I do" or "Put up or shut up".

I guess I should be glad that more attention is paid to the environment, but this is almost doing more harm than good. First of all, people get resentful when they are patronized like this. They might think why should they sacrifice when Celebrity X has three houses across the globe, or five jets, or their own private golf course. Secondly, it makes people think that if they do do these small things, it will be OK. People, we are going to need a lot more than using less toilet paper to prevent the oncoming ecological disaster. We might even need people to only own one house..... or one car.... or no car.

I read books

When it is 90 degrees out, I don't feel much responsibility to get things done. Usually summer weekends are filled with gardening, errands, fixing the house up and having fun. But when it is this hot, I feel pretty good about myself just for getting up and making my own meals. It is kind of nice in the sense that I don't even remotely feel compelled to be productive. This weekend I read.

I read Truth and Consequences, by Alison Lurie. A good summer read, not too heavy. It is the story of Jane and Alan Mackenzie, who are, respectively, administrator and professor at Corinth University, clearly a thinly disguised Cornell University, where Lurie works. They meet Delia Delany, a visitng scholar, and Henry Hull, her husband, when Delia comes to Corinth University. Of course, stuff happens. I thought it was nice in that all the people seemed real and to have real motives and emotions. Henry was a bit too little fleshed out, but the rest of them were believable. It makes you wonder what real life people the story was based one. It only took a few hours to read.

I also read The Prizewinner of Defiance, Ohio by Terry Ryan. This one had gotten a lot of press when it was published, it is the story of Evelyn Ryan, raising her ten (!!) kids under very poor circumstances, since her husband is rather an alcoholic, and thus not a real stellar breadwinner. Evelyn enters a LOT of contests and wins many of them, enough to push her family up over the edge of dire poverty. The book was little too long, but pretty entertaining. I think at the time the main action of the book takes place, Evelyn would have been about my age (39), and already the mother of ten. One kid every two years for twenty years. Unimaginable. I saw that there was a movie, with Julianne Moore playing Evelyn, which seems totally unbelievable and Hollywood-fake. Julianne Moore is just too beautiful (no offense, Evelyn!) to play that kind of role. Although Evelyn did apparently have a good amount of dignity and grace, I would spend the whole movie just thinking how fabulous Julianne Moore looked.

Anyway, it is a good "slice of life" book for the 1940s and 1950s Middle America category. Pretty entertaining and informative.

Now, when will it cool off? My bathroom is half painted, but it was too hot to finish it this weekend....

Inspired

Remember a while back when I was going to make a ripple blanket? It just seemed like it would be a pain to haul the whole thing around while I was making it. Instead, inspired by Julie, I am going to make something in blocks and then sew them together. I decided to do crochet, and I have bought my starter yarn, Cascade 220, also inspired by Julie.



The colors are violet (7809), Highland (9430), Azur (8906), Flamingo (7805), and Tangerine (9444). My husband at first thought they were too bright, but then after I put them on the mantel he said we should leave them up there as decoration. I am hoping that means he likes them.

Now I just need to pick a pattern...

?

Seen painted in large letters on the back of a pickup truck:

Horse Massage

Plant Quiz answer

Amy was right, it is Echinacea. This is Echinacea purpurea, purple coneflower. The one below is the standard species, which I grew from seed.



I also bought some cultivars for our front yard garden. This is either 'Magnus' or 'Spinning Top', probably the former. I guess the petals are a bit wider and less reflexed, but there doesn't seem to be a great difference.


One think that is amazing about plants is their morphological plasticity. When you see a baby bunny, you know more or less what an adult bunny looks like. But plants can dramatically change their shape throughout development, and that makes them fun. I especially like how the flower bud looks so different than the flower.