In bed

I started this drawing with a completely different intent than what I actually produced. I was going to use colored pencils and make it more abstract, but I liked what I was drawing with my #2 too much to change it. Maybe I'll draw it again from a different lense another day.

Songmaster

I love to sing, and I've always played a little piano and viola. I'm just enough of a musician myself to appreciate the way music can stir the soul. It's one thing to hear and appreciate music, but it is another to feel the music pass through you, hear it as it expands and vibrates the air around you. Singing, I feel closer to God than I ever can feel in the silence of prayer.

When I read books that capture the power of music (which admittedly is a difficult thing to do with mere words), I become entranced by the story. Songmaster, by Orson Scott Card, swept me up and spun me around. I was drawn in by the initial concept: a school/orphanage that trains singers from infancy. They live in song in everything they do. They speak with music, each note singing their thoughts and feelings in a way that spoken words could never do. The story followed one singer who became the best of them all, who could sing back to a person whatever they were feeling. But as with any genius, his ability came with a price. The story is so human, the characters are so true. I read the whole book in the course of three days and I was sad when it was over. What could I possibly read next that could be this good? But then Orson Scott Card's books usually have that effect on me.

P.S. The picture above is the Polish version, I think. It had the best picture on the front.

Cookie frenzy

I had been craving chocolate chip cookies for over a week. When I crave chocolate chip cookies, what I really want is to make them myself. No store-bought cookie will do. Even if somebody else made them home-made, it still wouldn't quite satiate the need. I love making cookies. I usually do it on an afternoon when I have the house to myself and no pressing needs to attend to. I clean the kitchen completely first, then I lay out all my ingredients. I have known the recipe by heart since I was about eleven years old. Back then my older sisters' friends used to sing my cookie praises as they scraped down my hard-earned treats. I make sure to taste the batter at every stage: first the butter/sugar mixture, then add the eggs and vanilla, then the flower mixture, and last the delightful chocolate chips. I have no qualms about salmonella poisoning. I haven't caught it yet, have I? The mixture is divine in every phase. Sometimes I have to test it a few times, just to make sure it's quite right.

I'm never very hungry for the actual cookies when they are done. I'm too full. I send half the batch to work with justacoolcat and freeze the other half for my own personal enjoyment later. If I'm careful, I can make the freezer batch last a whole week or more. What is it about chocolate chip cookies I love so much? The chocolate? The butter? The sugar? I think that those are all factors, but I think that what I really like about them is that to me they symbolize productive solitude, accomplishment, and pride. They make the perfect comfort food when I am down and they are the perfect celebration when celebration is needed. I really do make a damn good cookie, and nobody knows it better than me.

Sex and Death

I finished Love in the Time of Cholera this morning. The ending was silly, but at least it wasn't sad. It was a pretty good book. To me, it was almost more of an essay on love, life, and death with the help of a few interesting characters than a novel, but I guess that's what the best novels are all really about. My mom's an English teacher, and she used to always say, "Sex and death. That's what it all boils down to in the end. Those are the underlying themes in all literature because they are the two driving forces of human life." I've never been able to disprove her. Anyway, it's a good book, and I'd recommend reading it this time of year so that you can transport yourself to a warmer climate. Ahhh, the Caribbean.

I'm on vacation this week and now that I've finished my book I have to think of something to do with myself. I'm thinking that today will be a productive cleaning day. I'll take care of some things that I have been putting off because I didn't have the time, and maybe I'll wrap it up with a little scrapbooking at the end. By tomorrow, though, I'll need a new book. Any suggestions?

Love in the time of Cholera

I basically have two genres of literature that I read: Science fiction/fantasy and Mom/Kelly books. I think that everybody who reads regularly has a secret pulp fiction vice. For me, I love losing myself in the imaginary worlds of science fiction and fantasy. I need a healthy dose of fantastical literature, especially when I am on vacation or thoroughly depressed. The other genre, Mom/Kelly books, consists of recent fiction, local fiction, and classical fiction. My mother and my sister Kelly both read voraciously and seek out the best literature that our society has to offer. They are my filters. When they read a really good book and suggest that I might like it, I know that they have read at least one hundred books before that one which weren't quite as good. I try to always follow their suggestions, with one caveat: I don't like to read books with sad endings. I get too emotionally attached to the characters. When a book ends sadly, it wrecks my whole week. So if I know a book has a sad ending, I will avoid it if I can.

It usually takes me a while to get around to reading all of their suggestions. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez has probably been on my reading list for about ten years. I read One Hundred Years of Solitude when I was in high school and loved it, but heard some reports that this one wasn't quite as good, so I put it off. I started reading it about a week ago and I am really enjoying it. It took me a while to get into it because the language is so dense; it's a little bit hard to read. I found myself re-reading paragraphs and falling asleep after a few pages. Now I've gotten into the story, and I've been eating it up. The characters are interesting and loveable. The story is written cyclically, so that it starts at the end, swings around to the begining, swings again to the middle, and then scoops up the beginning again. But it is easy to follow and not in the least confusing. I'm about two-thirds of the way through, and I'll let you know if I still like it at the end.

Quote of the day:

"A man should have two wives: one to love and one to sew his buttons."

Or maybe the wife he loves just needs a personal assistant. Don't you think?

Jamaica

Last weekend I brought the photos for my next scrapbook in to get developed. Now that I've finished my wedding scrapbook, I need a new project. I'm going to make a scrapbook for our honeymoon, which was in Jamaica. I spent an hour in the photo shop picking out the pictures that I wanted to include. I also developed some five by seven photos for this frame we got as a wedding present. When I got the photos back I was astounded. We've had these pictures on oucomputers for the last year and a half, and many of you have seen them on Justacoolcat's website, but I was not expecting them to look this good on paper. Wow. My husband is really an amazing photographer. Didn't this frame turn out nice? I hung it up in the kitchen as soon as I got home.

As the week has progressed I have started on the first few pages of our honeymoon scrapbook. I love the new paper and tools I got at Michael's.

My work life has been pretty stressful lately, and it has meant a lot to me to be able to come home, relax next to the fireplace in the parlor, work with my hands and look at beautiful pictures. I wish I had a better way to present them online. They are 12X12 pages, so I can't scan them and capture the whole page. At least you can get an idea.