June 2012 – Jam and Idleness

Pesto season–it’s the most wonderful time of the year

Do you love basil? I’m sure you do, but do you love it the way I love it, i.e., do you think it’s the most delicious smelling food both in this universe and all other possible universes? If I had gotten married in summer, I would have had a gigantic bouquet made of freshly cut…

Salad and cold tea will see me through these desperate times

Well, the hellish hot heat has returned with a slavering, evil-eyed vengeance and that means two very important things: 1) salad, and 2) cold drinks. (It means much more than this, of course, such as: I hate summer. I am confronted again with the climatological conundrum of winter vs. summer, i.e., you can keep putting…

2.5 by Sayers, or, the new/old way my reading brain works

I used to be adamantly opposed to reading multiple books by one author in short spans of time. I have, in my day, tended towards rationing and have feared running out of the reliables. Somehow, lately, I’ve stopped worrying so much about this. Indeed, with certain authors (mostly Sayers and Trollope), I’ve come to prefer…

Subdued

Kind of a tough day over here. Hubby and I spent the day racing to finish getting everything prepared for the drywallers to come into the house tomorrow and begin working their clean-lined magic. He’s been working much more than I have; nonetheless, he seems as though he could continue, tortoise-like, to plod on until…

Drywall dust in my hair, sugar in my belly

Friends, the demolition of our house (prior to the reconstruction of it by a crew of talented contractors) is nearing completion. To which I say, thank feck. I look forward to the civilized and relatively clean project of painting the walls, when the walls which require painting have finally been constructed. The demo hasn’t been…

A much overdue post on The Yacoubian Building

I recently read Alaa Al Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building for this month’s group read over at Slaves of Golconda; indeed, I finished it weeks ago, but have been too busy with my house renovations to write a post; today, for example, I spent several hours scraping 18 layers of wallpaper off brick. Well, that’s what…

There’s history in these walls…a sometimes creepy, sometimes sweetly nostalgic history based firmly in the 1980s

Our demolition of the walls of our house continues on apace. Pretty much everything is stripped down to the studs and most of the waste (i.e., large pieces of wall and ceiling) have been sent to the big landfill in the…ground. Gawd, I’ve really been struck anew during this process about how horrifyingly wasteful and…

I’m well behind on my book reviewing…here’s a little bit of why

I am really terribly behind on my book reviews here–Whose Body?, The Documents in the Case, The Yacoubian Building, and Anathem have all been read and all require and deserve some attention from me…but they’ll have to remain neglected just a little bit longer. You see, my husband and I are engaged in some messy…