In an effort today to not clean the house or cook dinner or pack for my month long trip to Philly (stupid sister made her stupid cake which meant I didn't get to make dessert, and I don't even particularly like her cake, not a fan of the TJ almond flour), I wrote my stepbrother's wife an extremely long email where I passed on Julia, Mirabai, and Bek's notes about book suggestions, as well as the ones Jamie and I thought of ourselves, and that Katherine helped me think of when I said "Do you think 13 is too young for Tigana?" Katherine suggested Watership Down, and has possibly futher convinced me to never ever read it. Ways not to convince Tori to read a book: "Well, it's kind of like The Aeneid. Only with rabbits." ((Last year, when I read Ursula LeGuin's Lavinia, I wondered if reading good Aeneid fanfic turned it back into Homer. The conclusion was no, but it was still better than Virgil. (Virgil is the best cure for insomnia ever. I nearly wrote an essay for a Latin class about why they should have honored his dying wish.)))Crazy long email, including books that I thought I would never recommend to someone after my style snobbery was trained, or I realized someone had only ever come up with one plot, but milked four series out of it. _

My stepbrother's stepson is feeling the urge to make the jump from kid's fantasy novels to more grown up fantasy novels. I tried to give suggestions, and then realized that, at 13, I (mostly) read fantasy novels about girls, and he likes books about boys. After saying things like "well, Xanth was written for 13 year olds, and David Eddings did too..." I sort of fell flat. I tried to suggest Pern, because I feel like everyone read Pern, so he should too. (I read a handful.) Jamie and I threw out a couple of other ideas, like Prydain and Earthsea, but then we failed to think of what 13 year old boys might like. Any help? _

Difference between me and my brother:

We have both gone running and diving into waves and have just reemerged. I am thinking, vaguely, about dolphins and mermaids and the fantasy novel I am half rereading (The Blue Sword). And he says, "Ah, here I am, floating in waves, trying to figure out the best 'if statement' for this query."

And I laughed at him, and then said "well, probably not the sort that begins with a double 'i.' But you knew that already, I'm sure, and that was probably not the sort of answer you're looking for."

So he laughed at me, agreed that "iif" was useless if you're not using Access, and that that was also completely unhelpful. _

My skin still feels ocean salty, in a good way, and there is sand in my hair. Everyone in the family is sort of exhausted in that way you get when you spend all day in the sun and the sand and the water and then eat lots of delicous food. I have finally gotten the corn and peaches out of my teeth. _

Ah, beach. After absurd travel, and ridiculous waiting at the airport (5 hours! At Applebees in the airport! This gets really boring!) we are finally at the beach. We turned off the AC and opened windows and the waves are awesome and sound like...well, one of those white noise sound machines they make.

I went into a bathroom in a new house, and, unsure where the lightswitch was, I reached on the inside and outside of the door for it. And then I laughed and laughed at myself, and wondered what is up with Massachusets anyway. _

Our new house is (temporarily) without washer and dryer. I have enough clothes that the two weeks we have lived here were fine, except for jeans. I have one pair of jeans, the bottom six inches of which are full of little pieces of gravel. It makes me sad, and has put me into skirts. _

I'm not really sure what is in Magic Erasers (and I'm also fairly sure that I don't want to know), but we got some thinking about the paint scuffs we made while moving. I just ran around the house with one, and I'm willing to believe that that thing was magic. _

Damn, damn, double damn. I leave boston for at least a month on Saturday, and most of my books are still in boxes, stored under my old house. I had meant to find the magic box that has all the books I've been meaning to finish/read and take some of those with me, and maybe also pack along books that I read a while ago that I've been wanting to reread. Instead, I fear, I will wind up with Guy Gavriel Kay's _((bad)) France book and Anna Karenina, and beyond that I will have to content myself with Google Books. ((sigh)) Maybe I can raid other bookshelves here before I head off. (I'm not sure my grandmother even owns books, and if she does, where she keeps them. It's rather strange. _

I love Alice. I do. I used to collect different versions of Alice in Wonderland. And I think a lot of the pictures they've put out for Tim Burton's new movie look pretty awesome, I wish he would do a movie without Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter. _

Yesterday, I made semi-congeled brownie soup. The only thing I did differntly from my regular brownie recipe was folding (homemade) marshmallows into the brownie batter. And then I cooked it for like an hour. I don't understand why they are so runny. Tasty, but runny. No more marshmallows in my brownies, oh well. _

We have a security system at this house. It's so bizarre. We have never had such a thing. At my parents' house in PA, we didn't even have a key to the front door. I've been spending enough time in or just outside cities that I've gotten in the habit of locking doors when I leave, or when I go to bed, but the security system thing is strange. Also, I think something might be wrong with it, because anytime we open any doors/windows it says there is a fault. _

There is a church, somewhere near my new house, with bells that plays songs on the hour. Like, The Battle Hymn of the Republic, and God Bless America. There are probably others, but those are the ones I notice and they get stuck in my head all day. I've been trying to figure out if they are recordings or mechanized bells that ring on the hour (that is my guess, since they sound more real than recorded). Searching on the internet for "church bells in Charlestown" gets me a lot of info on the Old North Church, and how it was used for the One If By Land thing, and also that they do Change Ringing there. But I think that's too far away for those to be the bells that I hear. And also it sounds nothing like the bells I heard in Scotland, so I'm guessing that's not it. (Also, their schedule is largely on the weekends.) _

This morning, my sister and I tried to help my brother buy tickets to see the Eagles. The tickets went on sale at 10. Before the clock on our computers read 10:01, all the tickets for good games were sold out. It was crazy. _

My sister made herself a plate of chicken, mayo, and a piece of (very good) bread, put it on the coffee table, and left the room. When she came back, the only dog who hadn't followed her in the first place had eaten the bread. Not the chicken, but the bread. (Actually, she realized a few minutes later, the dog had taken the bread off the plate and taken it over to her favorite cushion and was working on eating it.) _

I think I swallowed an not quite properly chewed cracker funny and scratched my throat. It's really pretty extremely painful.

Also, I have managed to pack my bedroom unassisted for the first time in my life. It has taken most of the week and people have been making fun of me. But, still, aside from the last box of assorted sundries that always happens, I think I am done. _

My sister is under the impression that all you need to avoid issue with the digital TV conversion is cable. I was under the impression that cable was changing as well, and you either need one of those converter boxes or a cable box. Does anyone know? _

The recurring joke Jamie and I have been throwing aroudnd for the past week is that whenever one of us drips food on our clothes and the other doesn't point it out, we threaten to walk to the airport and fly away, but only if we don't have to take our shoes off. This cracks us up. It probably isn't funny at all for people who didn't just read Olive Kitteridge, but we did, so... _

Jet Blue has listed on their website things they have done to be a "greener airline." These things include no longer supplying in-flight headphones (please bring your own! this will reduce waste!) and no longer suppling in-flight magazines (save paper!). While I'm sure these things do reduce waste, they also reduce cost, which I imagine was the intial reason Jet Blue decided to do this. (To get to the Outer Banks, several of us are flying from Boston to Richmond, and then being picked up by the people who are coming down from PA.) _

Have just finished Olive Kitteridge, this year's Pulitzer Prize winner, and didn't particularly like it. I'm not usually a huge fan of short stories; I tend to find that as soon as I have really started to engage with the story and characters, it ends. And this was a novel as told in short stories. Also, it was about a bunch of people who were old and retired. The first story threw me off; it was set after Olive's husband had retired, but it kept flashing back several decades, and so I was expecting the rest of the stories to pick up from there, but they continued on from the later time. It just didn't sit with me. I felt far too young for the book, and I also felt like rather than the experiences forming the characters, the characters were already well formed, and they were just batted about between what was happening, without anything changing them.

((sigh))

I was reading it for a book group, otherwise I might not have bothered finishing it. The last 50-some pages of the book felt like they took forever--it was like slodging through the tedious middle (i.e. not the 20 pages at the beginning or end) of Don Quixote. I declared it to feel something like my reading of at least 2/3 of War and Peace in two days, with the major difference being that I loved War and Peace and reading that much that fast felt like an indulgance more than it felt like homework (the whole "how have you not read this all summer! Seminar is in two days!" barely phased me). _

Our neighbours recently got a dog who's mostly beagle. It does that baying thing that beagles do. All day. Poor dog. Also, I'm glad we'll be moving away from it. _