I'm sure fireworks will be going off in the background just like last night and I'll pretend to care long enough to half-rise from my seat

OMGYOUGUYS. Best day ever. Went to the chemist, took a jaunt around the supermarket, and was home by 10a just in time for second breakfast. After lunch the bathrobe I found on the back of the bathroom door came on and a terribly self-indulgent chick-flick entertained Betty and I for the better part of an hour (disclosure: it was 2.5 hours long), and now it's nearly time for our lamb and potato supper and the sassy stylings of Strictly Come Dancing.

I think it's safe to say when your entire Saturday can be summarised in two sentences, it's been done well. Coming here is great - no expectations, and all the babybels you can eat. Life beyond the wall is sweet, indeed.

Weather aside.

Tomorrow I'll be taking a train into Edinburgh for a delightful afternoon with Wolf's sister Marie, so the excitement continues!

Bonfire night celebrations also continue - I can already hear the crack of fireworks in Glasgow which can be seen from the kitchen window. Look at the roof of the garages lit up in the reflection of their blast. What beauty.

Now if you'll excuse me, I must continue blissing out*. Big night ahead!

Big hugs and lots of love,
Esss


*doing nothing

Because Monday Deserves a Showcase

One must still have chaos within oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. - Nietzsche

Real World Confession: I am currently listening to the Pitch Perfect soundtrack on Spotify. Because I LIKE it. I like to think this is an upgrade from youtubing the riff-off, but I think we all know better.

Today let's talk about Things of Late That Have Given Me Joy (TOLTHGMJ, for short):

1. My sister has started her first blog! I am directing you to her first post because it's all about how awesome I am, so that's my favourite.

2. My friend Marie is assisting at a fashion shoot this week involving DOUGLAS BOOTH. Also quite possibly SAM CLAFLIN - you know, that shirtless guy from the Hunger Games? Finnick? THAT GUY. Needless to say, she's obviously going to be wearing her adult diapers. As am I, because I will be paying her the big bucks to take some illicit cell phone snaps when no one's looking.

3. Remember My Favourite College Roommate of All Time? She's officially NPR-endorsed AND performing at the Kennedy Center next month! Tom HANKS will be there, youguys. He is like the Douglas Booth of Amerka. Her career just continues to climb which means that it is ONLY a matter of time until I'm working on her Late Late Show.

4. Speaking of My Favourite College Roommate of All Time: remember her husband Kyle, the poet extraordinaire? He has recently shared this wonder of a Wordsworth. It will make your day.

5. And last but not least, this gift of gifts from The Annie:

And that concludes the day's list of brilliancy! It doesn't get better than this. 

Big hugs and lots of love,

Essss

Writing about thinking about books does not make a good blog post

"For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business." - T.S. Eliot

It's dark right now, at 2 in the afternoon, the skies about to open as they do daily and have done for weeks. Every day the clouds blacken and roll, then crack and dazzle with sunlight, then pitch to black again. This cool summertime June is hardly a summertime at all, and the longest day has passed.

I just got The Wasp Factory for The Increasingly Morbid Book Club. Over the spring we* read The Killer Inside Me and The Collector (taking a break in June for Enduring Love! What??) because apparently one can never dive too deeply or too often into the mind of a psychopath. I clearly need to go in with a Sweet Valley High recommendation soon. But until then, has anyone read The Wasp Factory? Thoughts? I can't resist good black comedy, but I'm a wuss when it comes to the truly macabre.

Ego romp! Romp romp!: The other day I was thinking about posting every single book I read for, I don't know, the next year or so. Not in the sense of giving a review or anything, but more with the intent to see what full disclosure would do to my reading habits. Would my choices embarrass me if they were visible to everyone? (Yes, hi, young adult dystopian fantasy.) Would they embarrass me several consecutive times in a row? (There are six in the series!) And what would they say about me? (I have the attention span of a ten year old and I'm a total poser.) But (maybe) most importantly, would knowing that I had to tell what I was reading change the books I read? Would my vanity drive me to tackle those literary greats just so I can casually list 'War and Peace' in place of 'The Hunger Games'**, all no-words-needed, what's the big deal, Russian lit is how I roll for a good time, I don't even know who Scott Westerfeld IS. That I'd change my usual reading material for vanity is an appalling thought, but one that I must confront nonetheless. And while I'm 99.9% sure I won't actually start this List O' Embarrassment, still...it's personally challenging. If you'd be interested in trying this with me, though, let me know! We can give our experiment a clever name and create a blog badge*** to legitimize it and then we'll pretend like we're part of a literary movement because we're so cutting edge with our transparent lifestyles in today's exhibitionist culture.

On a completely unrelated note, I took this picture in Paris of two girls clearly having a great time together, and it reminds me of me and my sister:

We traded off on the torment fun times once I outgrew her.

Random, but...I'm having a poetry craving. I KNOW. I don't know what happened. It's probably because of this bleak London weather, you know how clouds make a person all moody. And I don't even know where to begin. I just looked in my shelves and all I have is one book by Neruda and Ginsberg's Howl. I also found (how often do I actually go through my stacks?) three copies of Raise High the Roof Beams, Carpenters, two copies of Nine Stories, and one copy of Franny and Zooey. This ratio makes sense: the inverse correlation reflects the order in which I give them away. (Godspeed, Franny. Go! Fulfill!) But anyway. I don't know what to do about this strange and persistent need to find and eat some poetry. Do I indulge it? And if so, with what? Or should I banish the whim altogether with a good zombie romance? Clearly that seems safer.

So I don't know. I need to think on that. In the meantime:

If you're a Vonnegut fan. 

If you were a voracious reader as a child and you were as lucky as I was to have a mother who took you to the library every week and let you read anything you could get your hands on and this literary freedom made you who you are today. Also, if you love Sherman Alexie.

It must be book day. I should go find mine. (The Wise Man's Fear, Patrick Rothfuss)

Hugs and love,
Essss

*And by 'we' I mean 'they.'
**Which, by the way, is fantastic. 
***I don't actually know how to do this. And of course you wouldn't need a blog to play. There's also Facebook, or Twitter, or Tumblr, or the Pioneer Woman Cooks.

On More Books to Read, Volcanos, and George Michael

So I'm (inadvertantly) (still) on the (e)mailing list of a creative arts group I was involved with in London-town, and they've recently voted on reading two books together. In the interest of (e)involvement, I decided to join in. Of the two they chose, the one I wanted wasn't available at the library (at the time I stopped in), so I got the other: Zeitoun, by Dave Eggers. This is a book I've avoided for some time (what with it being by Eggers), but since I couldn't get the one I wanted, and there were like fifteen copies of Zeitoun on the shelf, I was like, 'Okay, fine. It's free, no harm done.' And so I got it, and it reads like a Reader's Digest Drama in Real Life, and every night I'm like, 'Where's the Humor in Uniform?' and since there isn't any, I'm really over it. And just now I looked at my library holds list, and lo and behold! The book I wanted is ready! So I'm going to try and head over maybe tomorrow after work to pick it up: The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, by Philip Pullman. I'm psyched.

In other news related to London, Yotam Ottolenghi has published a new cookbook and it looks AMAZING.

And in the interest of volcano popularity, check out these pics of the Chilean Chaiten from a couple years back. I don't know how I missed these on their first run, but HOLY FREAKY ARMAGEDDON. This might replace tornados on my 'I know I should be frightened, but I'm sickly drawn' list.

And because anything involving a Bluth gets me every time:

Next time you see me (and ideally for more than two and a half seconds), I have news of an Asparagus Festival, a Polish Festival, a Weekend with the Babas, a new job, and Friday Night with the Girls. In no particular order.

OH! And Deee is so overdue, it's fantastic.

Hugs!
esssssssssssssss

on white castle, rocking chairs, and male models

So I'm watching the superbowl right now. And by 'watching,' I mean, 'eating nachos and doing a blog post while it roars mildly in the background.' Of course I pause when the commercials come on--they really ARE the best part of the game--but the rest of it? * no idea *

Sara, my professional chef super-rad roommate, made white castle burgers for a pre-nachos snack. That's right: a pre-nachos SNACK. I love it when burgers are an appetizer and nachos are a meal. And I'll bet you didn't know you could make white castle burgers at home. But you can, and I'm not lying when I say they're even better than the real deal. I ate at least three. Maybe four. Maybe even five, but let's not talk about that here.

Speaking of Sara's cooking: check out these bbq'd ribs we had for dinner the other night, along with baked beans-and-bacon and biscuits. It was heaven:

And tonight we're having Korean tofu soup. Also made from scratch. I'm so psyched I can barely handle it. I haven't had tofu soup since I used to tutor a Korean girl and got paid in food. And Sara's doing all this while feeding toddler twins, changing toddler twins, playing games with toddler twins, and navigating a kitchen with toddler twins around her ankles. I don't know HOW she does it. Pretty much all Young and I do is holler at her to get out of the way when she's blocking our commercials while scrubbing down the coffee table.

It was absolutely gorgeous out today--sunny, warm, all things that make California awesome. If it's similar tomorrow, I'm leaving this computer and heading to the beach and catching up on some reading. I'm checking out too many books from the library--for every book I finish, there are three more I want to try--and now I've got more piled up than I can possibly read. This is a GOOD problem to have, but one that has to be solved nonetheless.

Let me share with you--while I'm on the subject of amazing people--a couple more 'I can't believe she is my friend' stories: my friend Deee--while pregnant--has just re-designed an entire rocking chair for her nursery. She learned how to make the cushions in a matter of minutes, she primed stuff, she painted. Just LOOK at this picture of the before-and-after. Of course, I'm not REALLY surprised at her supreme hand-craftiness--after all, she WAS the inspiration behind our Wind-Up Bird business. But seriously. She's now accomplishing her mega-feats while a sixteen-inch-baby incubates inside her. She's building chairs and growing ears, ALL AT THE SAME TIME. And then there's TB, my Jamaican sweetpea, who not only just got an offer for a completely-covered ph'd from UC Davis for her work in mathematics-in-literature, but also got pulled up on stage last Saturday night for a dance with the guy in the middle of the photo below. I don't know what to be more impressed by:

I'll just leave you with this photo. You're welcome.