Sun in the morning.

Every day I catch the 7:08 at Kenton and for the past few months it has been dark when I got on the train. But we’ve reached that magical time of year when light returns to the morning. Here’s Paul at 7:00 on a clear winter morning. A month before, he would have only appeared dimly through the darkness. I’m trying not to get too attached to the morning sun, as daylight saving time is coming soon and will plunge me back into darkness again.

Rain and Trimet’s inefficient shelters.

Hey look! It’s torrentially raining at an angle of approximately 45 degrees. Too bad our “shelters” have a flat top which enables that 45 degree rain to come right into the shelter and onto us. I wonder how Trimet could have designed the shelters differently? Hmmmmm and hmmmmmm.

ps. That guy with the umbrella has very good boots for the amount of rain that is occurring. Well done, random passerby.

Egg Puff

Of late, I’ve been eating this delightful concoction for dinner. It is essentially the same ingredients as scrambled eggs (3 eggs scrambled, a bit of fat for the pan and some salt and pepper) but tastes so very, very different.
Here’s what I do: I scramble the eggs, salt and pepper together while my smallest cast iron skillet is heating on the stove. Then I add some fat (I’m currently partial to sesame oil) to the pan and swirl it around and let it heat for a bit. Then I add the eggs. I don’t stir the eggs, but instead rotate the pan after a bit because my burner doesn’t cook evenly. Often this is a time for me to pine for a gas stove. After it looks like the bottom is set (but not burnt! Burnt eggs are dreadful!) I take the pan over to the toaster oven, set it to broil and let it get to broiling.

Even when I make this for more than one dinner in a row, I can never remember how long it takes to broil. Here’s what happens. The egg mixture will puff and brown on top and I think it is done and pull it out because of my fear of burnt eggs. Then I notice there is still a lot of liquid egg on top under the brown part, sigh, reset the broiler and put the pan back in. When the egg is puffy and nothing moves–meaning I’ve got a solid now, not any liquid left–I take it out, admire how pretty it is, invert it on a plate, cut it into sixths (my Pizza Hut training comes in handy here) and eat it with some rice and vegetables. So good and delicious!
Of course, if I fried up some potatoes before adding the egg mixture, or put some greens in there I would have a fritatta, but that is somehow not as transcendent as three eggs scrambled, then puffed.

Freegal rocks


http://www.multcolib.org/services/tech/freegal/

Like, really rocks. The library has this new service where you get to download three songs per week for free and keep them forever. I (and you if you are a Multnomah County Library patron) can chose from Sony Music’s entire catalog. Just now, I downloaded three Elvis songs. Amazing!

Yep, it’s Sunday night

Grumpy feeling that the math homework isn’t done? Check.

Annoyance that I still have to rummage up some food for at least the next two days? Check.

Irritated that I didn’t have enough time to work on the blogs this weekend? Check.

Irked that my evenings this week will once again be more busy than I would like? Check.

Bothered by the fact that I can’t have as much time doing the things I want to do as I want, or the things I have to do will never get done? Check.

It’s no wonder I’m never excited for the end of the weekend.

Three sentence movie reviews: The King’s Speech


I can’t recall the last time I enjoyed greatly a movie and simultaneously felt incredibly uncomfortable the entire time. Excellent acting all around. Wonderful settings and do ignore its “R” rating, it’s really a PG movie.

http://www.impawards.com/2010/kings_speech_ver5.html

Books Read in January

My pledge to read about 70 books and no more is not going to work if I keep finding excellent young adult fiction. Young adult fiction these days is well written, interesting and tends to come in series. I can also read it even faster than “normal” books. Do you want to read more good books without putting in more effort than you do slogging through “grown up” books? Check out some of today’s excellent YA authors. Your local children/youth librarian will be happy to point you in a direction. Or you can try some of the books below.

Finished
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
Shakespeare
Yep. Read it. Yep. Enjoyed it more as a play. Yep. That’s how it is going to be with this project.

Incarceron
Catherine Fisher
Read for Mock Printz Workshop.

This book contains a great concept: that the prison is alive. This was my second most enjoyed Mock Printz book, though my sentiments were not shared by very many of the workshop participants. Aside from the interesting premise, I also liked that the entire book kept the main characters apart, while still building tension. The ending I did not like as it was clearly a set up for a sequel. My rule is that if there is going to be a series/sequel, it should be a happy surprise, not clearly obvious by the last page of the book.

Ines of My Soul
Isabel Allende
I did not like this book very much and only finished it because it was a book group book. My problems were twofold: First, the conquistadors were incredibly awful people and the book was very violent in disturbing ways that made my want to stop reading. Secondly, I find Allende’s prose rather dense, so I couldn’t just skim though it.

I did enjoy the main character and the fate of a minor character. As I journeyed along the bloody road with Ines, I gradually grew desensitized to the violence. It was much like the movie Fargo. Once I got to the wood chipper scene in that movie I laughed.

In the book group discussion, parallels were drawn between Allende and the main character.

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
Jonathan Safer Foer
If Dave Eggers handn’t already stolen the description for his novel, I would say this book is a heartbreaking work of staggering genius. After finishing this–the second time through for me–I just sat for awhile, holding the book in my hands. For such a quick and funny read, this is a weighty tome. But while the subject matter gives me “heavy boots” my love for the character can’t help but buoy me.

4th Period English
Judith Arcana
I tripped across this chapbook of poetry while browsing through the library catalog and I picked it for its title. Who wouldn’t? This was a fabulous book of poems from the point of view of people in a multicultural English class. The voices were very different, and held forth on their opinions in a delightful fashion.

The Hunger Games
Suzanne Collins
I’m always looking for superhero stories that happen to have girls as the main superhero and I’m happy to report that this book provided me with one. And not just a run-of-the-mill “Green Hornet” type superhero, Katness Everdeen is kind of a Batman of her world. But a Batman with less angst and more questioning And no money. I guess that would make her like a young Spiderman. But without the super powers. Whatever. She’s great. This book has 300 holds at the library even though it was published over two years ago and I can see why. It’s got a great distopian setting, a scrappy main character, several moral quandaries, two love interests and a writing style that kept me reading. It’s one of those books where you better set aside some time to read it because you may be neglecting your chores once you begin.

The Spell Book of Listen Taylor
Jaclyn Moriarty
For most of this book, I was confused as to what was going on. I followed the story well, but couldn’t see why the characters were doing what they were doing. After about 50 pages, I gave up trying to figure it out and just sat back and enjoyed what was going on. There are nice sketches of adults in relationships making bad choices and how it affects the children around them. Also, a compelling portrait of a girl isolated by her former friends. In that way, I found this more adult than Moriarty’s other Young Adult books. Everything is knit together at the end, but I was left with a perplexed feeling. It all seems to have turned out okay, but was it really okay?

Also, this book is funny, as in snort-on-public-transportation, or suddenly-let-out-a-shriek-of-laughter type of funny.

Catching Fire
Suzanne Collins
The second book in the Hunger Games series, I read this one faster than the first one. We rejoin our heroine to find that what saved her in the last book has multiplied her problems in this one. Excellent commentary on media packaging as well as exploration of impossible situations. One thing I like about Collins is that I am always surprised as to what happens. More than once in this book I thought, “Huh. I wasn’t expecting that.”

Started, but did not finish
Tales of the Madmen Underground
This came highly recommended from two people, but I couldn’t get past the mother of the main character hording cats. So back it went.

Poem for January: The Pool Players. Seven at the Golden Shovel

click over here (http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15433) to read this poem.

I’ve been having a problem lately finding poems. I have not been making time to read enough poems to discover ones I loved enough to memorize. So this month was passing and I still hadn’t chosen a poem. I remembered a very short poem–four to eight lines–that I loved as a teenager that was written by Gary Soto and called, I thought, “Oranges”. So that was going to be the short poem of the month. But when I finally got around to finding “Oranges,” I found that it was not the poem I thought it was. It was a good poem, but too long to cram in my memory in the few remaining days of the month. By chance, I recalled Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem. A-hah! That would be short enough to memorize for January and “Oranges” could be my February poem.

I have fond memories of this poem. For some reason, we spent a lot of time in my English classes during Junior High and High School reading about the Harlem Renaissance. I loved the poems we read so much that my junior year when I had to choose an author to study for the entire year, I chose Langston Hughes. I think the emphasis on the Harlem Renaissance was a way to gear our curriculum toward something beside the white guys. And I have to say, the disenfranchisement felt by this group of talented authors resonated with my adolescent self. While my white, middle-class upbringing wasn’t anywhere near disenfranchised, I felt–as I think many adolescents do–a kinship with these authors. Life wasn’t very fair for me, either, it seemed at the time.

This poem in particular sticks in my head because we watched a video which included Gwendolyn Brooks reading this poem. Until I watched that video I had been reading her poem thusly:

We real cool. Pause. Inhale. We left school. Pause. Inhale. We lurk late. Pause. Inhale. and so on.

When I heard Brooks read it, it changed from a good poem with a kicker of a last line to an awesome poem that sounded like a song. The transformation was such a surprise that I had one of those flash bulb memory moments and can picture perfectly the room where I was watching the video. I remember that I was not the only one surprised as there was a general gasp in the room and the teacher gave a satisfied, “Yep. Pretty cool, eh?” sort of comment.

You too can hear Gwendolyn Brooks read her poem, as well as deliver some commentary about how she would like people to know her for her other poems too, by going to the link above and clicking on the play button. I highly recommend it.

Next month, stay tuned for how I have found a way to read more poems on a daily basis.