We went out on a drive last week and I found this beautiful little flower stretching toward the sun. At first I thought it was a zinnia, but now I don’t think so.
Does anyone know what it is?
Flower Stories: I don’t think it’s a zinnia
Author Archives: Jennie
Saturday Linky Love
I know — it’s Sunday, not Saturday.
We had a busy day yesterday with a funeral and some touring in an area we don’t often go to. The wind was blowing and it was a beautiful sunny day. I tried to catch the movement in these flowers.
But I’ve been saving up some fun stuff for you to look at. I’m linked up today at Vanderbilt Wife; I hope you enjoy reading these curated lists of goodies!
- The post most likely to make you make some changes in the way you spend your days: “How to Carve More Time Into Your Day”
- The post most likely to make you feel inadequate, boring and/or stupid: List of 21st Century literature written by women that you should have already read.
- The post most likely to make you read a book and eagerly anticipate its movie: Top 12 Fall Movies Based on Books
- Most ridiculous claim of the week: Prends Moi perfume will help you to lose weight. Don’t forget to click into the Enorme link. 🙂
- Video of the Week: Miami University (my Ohio alma mater) Men’s Glee Club performing Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah.
Friday Mystery Photo
What is this?
Writer’s Workshop: My So-Called Garden
Writer’s Workshop Prompt: You were supposed to start a garden this summer…share the fruits of your labor.
I had big plans for the garden this summer. I really did.
I had dreams of lush shrub borders underplanted with flowering perennials that kept my flower vases full all summer.
I had visions of freshly made pesto and caprese salad direct from my organic garden.
I had in my daily planner a dip into a cool summer grass of morning while I tended my yard and pots, but that would require there to actually be dew on the grass, for the morning to actually be cool, and for me to get up early enough to see said dew. And apparently I also forgot to stake the tomatoes in recent weeks.
Reality sometimes bites.
I’m linked up with Mama Kat’s Losin’ It this week. Stop by and visit some other delicious garden stories — I’m sure SOMEONE got veggies this year.
(Almost) Wordless Wednesday
Photographers do the craziest things.
I chased these white horses around the field in Sauder Village trying the get the perfectly synced photo.
It turned out that the first one I took was the best… isn’t that always the case?
P.S. After I prepared this post, I realized that those rocks in the corner were actually little horse pies and was aghast. Then I decided to keep them in as proof of a photographer’s folly in not cropping one’s photos. 🙂
I’m linked up today with Project Alicia. Be sure to stop by and visit the work of these talented bloggers and photographers.
Book Club: Wolf Hall
Wolf Hall came heavily recommended — it won the Man Booker Prize, and all that.
Image Credit
Hilary Mantel’s 672 page first installment of her Thomas Cromwell trilogy met every expectation. Once I sat down to finish it, I could barely put it down. I spent most of a full day devouring the last 400 pages. It’s not an easy read, but it’s a good one.
Does the name Thomas Cromwell ring a bell?
Not Oliver Cromwell, who was a distant relation and was also important to English history. Thomas Cromwell rose from impoverished beginnings to a post working for Thomas Cardinal Wolsey, Henry VIII’s chief minister. When Wolsey was unable to secure a dispensation from the Pope so that Henry could divorce Katherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn, Thomas Cromwell deftly insinuated himself into Anne’s favor and became Henry VIII’s favorite minister. This resulted in a rapid rise to power and riches, which lasted until his execution in 1540 over the poor choice of Anne of Cleves for Henry’s fourth wife.
Wolf Hall tells the story of Cromwell’s rise to power along with Anne Boleyn and her family. It’s a triumphant book, in which we can’t help but cheer for the success of Thomas Cromwell and his family. Hilary Mantel has created a new paradigm for Cromwell in this lovingly crafted piece of historical fiction.
We already know the story, but what makes Wolf Hall exceptional is its attention to detail.
The book is full of characters, and if you aren’t already familiar with Henry VIII’s court, you will be by the time you’re done — be prepared to read with your Wikipedia open :).
For example, Mantel vividly describes Thomas Cromwell’s relationship with Hans Holbein, who painted at Henry’s court. This painting shows the turquoise ring that Mantel tells us was given to Cromwell from Wolsey — it’s the little things about this book that give us a human picture of a statesman who was also a man.
In this interesting article from The Telegraph, Hilary Mantel talks about how she decided to write a trilogy about this time period.
I was kind of surprised how the book ended and since I already knew there was a sequel, I felt that the book came to a sudden stop.
When she completed Wolf Hall, she realized she had too much material to just put it into her planned two books. Between Wolf Hall and The Mirror and the Light, which will be about Cromwell’s final downfall, Mantel added Bring Up the Bodies, which covers the year prior to Anne Boleyn’s execution.
“When I came to write about the destruction of Anne Boleyn (a destruction which took place, essentially, over a period of three weeks) the process of writing and the writing itself took on an alarming intensity, and by the time Anne was dead I felt I had passed through a moral ordeal,” the author told the newspaper.
“I can only guess that the effect on the reader will be the same; the events are so brutal that you don’t want to take a breath and turn the page, you want to close the book.”
The beauty of Wolf Hall — and why we as readers care about the essentially despicable Thomas Cromwell — is Mantel’s genius at drawing us into Cromwell’s mind. Her plot structure allows us to trust Cromwell’s plan and we believe that he will be successful.
It’s all very well planning what you will do in six months, what you will do in a year, but it’s no good at all if you don’t have a plan for tomorrow.
I can’t wait to read the next installment; I’ve already got it on hold at the library! I hope I don’t have to wait six months.
Wordless Wednesday: Antique Cookware from Sauder Village
This photo was taken at Sauder Village in Archbold, Ohio.
I’m linked up today with other bloggers; be sure to stop by their sites and check out their work!
Worth a reblog… WWSD (What Would Scarlett Do)?
One of my favorite bloggers writes and writes and writes… and it’s all worth reading.
This post just hit the spot when I reread it the other day. Jillian at A Room of One’s Own writes a conversation between Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler in which Scarlett discusses Jillian’s blog. I’ll warn you, though, it’s important to know the story to get all the jokes. Don’t you just love being an allusion monster?
Jillian has also written a similar conversation between Elinor and Marianne Dashwood from Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility.
If either of these books are on your “save for eternity — don’t you dare put that in the library sale” shelf, you’ll love Jillian’s interpretation.
I’m off to the family reunion; have a wonderful weekend!
Ironing My Pillowcases
I received David Lebovitz’s lovely memoir, The Sweet Life in Paris, for my birthday. I’ve been wanting to read this book for years, and my son’s darling Curly Girlfriend gave it to me. I gave a little shriek of delight when I opened the Amazon package; I’ll admit it. I love Lebovitz’s blog — I’ve talked about it here and here and here! If you like the blog, you’ll also love the wry humor and great recipes in his book.
The book is a series of essays about an American learning how to live in Paris, and is full of juicy tidbits and advice. This one just hit home.
If anyone had told me ten years ago that I’d be standing over an ironing board, pressing the wrinkles out of pajamas and kitchen towels, I would have told them they were insane. What kind of idiot irons his pajamas, let alone kitchen towels?
Lebovitz goes on to describe his discovery of vintage French linen, which he bought by the armful whenever he saw it at tag sales and stockpiled it, thinking that he might never see such fine linen again. It turns out he was wrong, by the way; he says that fine linen is common in France and he didn’t need to become a bedsheet hoarder. 🙂
Then he realized that he had a problem laundering  those gorgeous high-thread-count cotton sheets and cases.Â
I … realized that [the beautiful linens] would come out of my mini washing machine a wrinkly ball, looking like one of those Danish modern white paper lamps; a tight, wadded-up sphere of sharp pleats and folds. So unless you’re a masochist and enjoy waking up after a rough night with bruises and abrasions on your arms and legs — which I don’t — those sheets need to be starched, ironed, and pressed into submission.
David Lebovitz solved his problem by sending them to the laundry to be washed and ironed, because he doesn’t have a dryer in his apartment and sheets have to hang up to dry. If you’ve ever stayed in a Paris hotel room, you know that space is at a premium, and there’s no room in a Parisian apartment to hang sheets to dry.
Being a servantless American, I have a lovely large washer and dryer, and my beautiful high-thread-count linens come out of the dryer pretty well, if I catch them quickly enough after the dryer stops. But I’ve always hated wrinkly pillowcases. Now that I’m a stay-at-home-wife, I’ve started ironing my pillowcases and the top trim on the sheets.
Which leads me to some recent responses to a post I made about ironing pillowcases on my other blog, Retirement 365.
I am blessed to have friends and relatives who take trains, planes, and automobiles to come to visit us, and we’re thrilled to host them in our home. We recently had a visit from college friends and spent two wonderful days running around Chicago eating, taking photos, listening to music, and drinking good wine. My husband’s brother and his family travel every summer from the West Coast, spending a fortune to fly five family members to Chicago, so that we can all attend the family reunion together. And they’ve been doing this for thirty years, never missing a summer. It’s hard to even put in words how much this annual opportunity to reacquaint ourselves with our family means to me.
I think they are worth ironing my pillowcases for.
My Week with Julia: Part One
I’ve always had this peculiar behavior; I like to read by theme or by sequence.
Every now and then I read through all my Cat Who books or my Dick Francis novels in chronological order. You’re probably already sick of hearing about my books about France, but too bad. I got a bunch more for my birthday. It’s my blog and I’ll write about France if I want to. 🙂
I watched Julie and Julia again the other day and decided it was time to do another theme party of books and movies.
First I decided to read Julie Powell’s follow-up memoir, Cleaving, to see if she still had the magic. I had heard that it wasn’t as good as Julie and Julia and that Powell had kind of disappeared into the literary wasteland of has-been authors. When I Googled her, the most recent hit is from 2009, and the last time she posted on her blog was in 2010. Ouch!
Julie and Eric on a good day in the kitchen.Image Credit
The complete title of the 2009 book pretty much tells its whole story: Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession. It truly is a story of obsession following the screaming success of Julie’s blog and Julie and Julia — of Julie’s tormented affair with “D”, of Eric’s philandering, and of how Julie found herself in her next new adventure, learning how to butcher meat. Published before the highly successful movie came out, Cleaving is an intimate story (maybe too intimate) of a woman trying to reinvent herself and build a future.
The book gets lots of bad reviews for its very specific telling of the inside picture of butchering and of Julie’s bad girl sex life. After getting over the structure which requires the reader to make pretty tenuous links between the cleaving of a marriage and the cleaving of an animal’s flesh and innards, I came to love Julie’s obsessions.
What we found endearing about Julie Powell in the movie Julie and Julia was that Amy Adams and Nora Ephron made Julie look kinda quirky and cute, but really, who chooses to cook her way through Mastering the Art of French Cooking in one year? Â I don’t think Julia Child was right when she suspected Powell of trying to get publicity riding on Child’s name; Julie is just that obsessive, and it shows in Cleaving. And most of the time it’s just plain — all right, I’ll go there — verging on craziness.
On the other hand, Powell’s prose is just plain good. I found myself caring about how to create a crown roast and how to use a band saw correctly. If you’re a foodie, she may well hook you in as she did me. There’s a lot of visits to restaurants and food industry insider information and I just ate it up — figuratively, of course.
So do I think you should read Cleaving? Yes, if you are a foodie and loved Julie and Julia. It’s the flip side of a very interesting woman, with a little hot sauce thrown in.
And then there’s the other flip side — Nancy Verde Barr’s memoir entitled Backstage with Julia.Â
This is a really fun book if you care about Julia Child and her impact on the cooking world. Even Barr’s use of her middle name is due to the sagacity of Julia Child; when she found out that Barr’s mother was Italian, she told Barr to use her full name to give her cooking more credence. And that’s just one little story that appears in this loving look back at a phenomenal woman.
Backstage with Julia is a set of fond memories packaged together in a book that cannot help but endear itself to you if you are a foodie. Nancy Barr served as Julia Child’s production assistant and travel companion from 1980 until Child’s death in 2004. When she got the chance to work with Child — already a culinary icon — someone told her to keep a diary. She didn’t, but apparently working with Julia Child has enough emotional impact to sear the memories in one’s brain.
What was fun about this book for me was the parallels to the Julie and Julia movie. Nora Ephron based much of her script for the Julia parts on Child’s memoir (with Alex Prud’homme), My Life in France. Although Backstage with Julia tells of Julia’s success in the United States and her media empire, there are many memories that Barr recounts via Child that are recognizable to the movie fan.
Julia’s love story with Paul Child also plays itself out here. In 1980, when Nancy Barr first began working with Julia Child, Paul Child had already begun to have the small strokes and memory issues that plagued his later years. It didn’t matter to Julia; Paul was an integral part of her success and he went everywhere with her.
The scene in Julie and Julia showing Paul and Julia in the bathtub for their annual Valentine message was real, and in Barr’s retelling of this story, the reader can feel the humor and the love shared.
Both of these books are about dreams — Powell’s with finding herself and Barr’s amazing chance to work with and become a close friend of Julia Child. They are also really interesting to read, if you are the person who will find fun in knowing more about three fascinating women — Powell, Barr, and la divine Child. I thought this quote from Powell’s book really summed up why I wanted to share these two books with you. It’s fun — you get me — and since you keep reading my blog, you must enjoy sharing with me.
You share things with the people who want you to share them. Who get it. Otherwise, where’s the fun?
You’ll have to excuse me now; I need to roast a chicken. Bon appetit!
Want more Jennie and Julia? Check out my previous posts about Julia Child here and here.
