I'm free, I'm free!

I've been stuck in Mom's camera since Halloween!

Did you miss me?

this guy understands

I must be brain dead

I had no idea Thanksgiving was next week.

Really.

I thought I still had two weeks...

gratus animus

Inspiring as always, C recently posted a list of things for which she is grateful. 'Tis the season, so here's mine:

~My gorgeous husband. He loves *me*. He makes me whole. He makes me happy. I want to be there behind him, smiling apologetically at the bank tellers, when he's a crabby old man.

~My four precious, exceedingly strange children. Healthy and whole.

~A loving, generous, kind-hearted extended family. You know who you are. I love you all.

~My washer and dryer - still going strong after 14 years!

~Food to feed my family, even if it's often nothing more than spaghetti, or beans and rice.

~In lieu of a disposable income, with which I could line the walls of my home with books: my library card.

~Our little house, which is way too small for all of us; somehow, it fits us just fine.

~Beatrix Potter, E.E. Milne, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Kenneth Grahame (I could go on. And on.) - they make being a mom so much easier.

~New socks. (it's the little things, ya know)

~Pilates. Balanced with a healthy dose of muffins. And chocolate. And chocolate muffins.

yes sir, I liked it.

I finally got my hands on a copy of The Thirteenth Tale from the library. It was engrossing. Satisfying. A dark, dark tale...

Peppered with allusions to The Secret Garden, I often felt like I was reading a sick, twisted version of one of my favorite feel-good novels. Weird.

an excerpt:

Life is compost.

You think that is a strange thing to say, but it's true. All my life and all my experience, the events that have befallen me, the people I have known, all my memories, dreams, fantasies, everything I have ever read, all of that has been chucked onto the compost heap, where over time it has rotted down to a dark, rich, organic mulch. The process of cellular breakdown makes it unrecognizable. Other people call it the imagination. I think of it as a compost heap. Every so often I take an idea, plant it in the compost, and wait. It feeds on that black stuff that used to be a life, takes its energy for its own. It germinates. Takes root. Produces shoots. And so on and so forth, until one fine day I have a story, or a novel.

crabby old man

Overheard at the bank:

Teller #1: Hello, sir, are you doing well today?

Crabby Old Man: Of course I am! I wouldn't be here if I wasn't, would I? What kind of question is that?

Teller #2: Sir, he's just doing his job.

Crabby Old Man: What's his job? To aggravate the customers?

Poor old guy, his face was beet-red. To their credit, the tellers remained polite and respectful during the whole exchange.

our current read-aloud

Black Ships Before Troy, by Rosemary Sutcliff.

The stunning illustrations by Alan Lee are the perfect accompaniment to this retelling of The Iliad. If you aren't offended by a wee bit of nudity, that is.