Nom de Plume

The search phrases that come up on my web statistics are endlessly fascinating (to me at any rate). Here are just a few from April:

jenny nimmo s address
indu sundaresan
girl with a pearl earring ending of the story
petzl
t.c.boyle april 2004
blood deficiency avoid marriage test
polycystic kidneys
boston street numbering

Another late Petzl night reading Tracy Chevalier’s The Lady and the Unicorn. Pretty good, although I still think The Girl with the Pearl Earring was her best.

Steve nuzzled his wetsuit as I read.

Steve bought himself a wet suit that’s thick enough for cold Washingtonian waters on Saturday–and spent that night parading around the house in it. “Smell the neoprene,” he urged. “Isn’t that the best smell in the world?”

Apparently, the fact that I wouldn’t let him sleep with it means I’m jealous. All I can say is that it was on my side of the bed, and it was hogging the covers.

Keeper of the House, Rebecca T. Godwin
Another book that I had to finish the same evening I started it, which meant pulling out the Petzl while Steve was sleeping. (It’s a good look, let me tell you.) The story of a black girl who is plucked from a bad home to work in a white whorehouse as a maid. She spends her life there, part of the background, until she is essentially running the place with the owner. Godwin has a great ear for dialect; it’s rather Zora Neale Hurston-esque.

Jerry Junior and Patty Went to College, Jean Webster
Daddy-Long-Legs has to be one of the best books ever, but these two books clearly demonstrate why Jean Webster’s only famous for that one. Don’t bother.

The Second Time Around, Mary Higgins Clark
The thing about mysteries is that you have to finish them. Read this Saturday, lounging around in Gasworks Park. Ending was a little predictable, but light, frothy and fun.

Park City: New and selected stories, Ann Beattie
She is an absolute master of the short story. Wonderfully written stories that illuminate.

This afternoon, off to my first day volunteering at Hugo House. Should be a bundle of fun, not to mention some creative work.

Been very productive lately: finished three short stories, mailed them off, have about 30 poems circulating. They get rejected, I send them back out. Please, someone, give one of my pieces a good home.

When I first started this blog, I had meant to do book reviews, but I forget. So here’s a partial list of what I’ve read recently, or at least what I remember reading.

Darjeeling, Bharti Kirchner
Two sisters, one man, a tea estate. Kind of like Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. Not particularly well-written, but hard to put down. Pat endings. In other words, Indian chick lit.

The Feast of Roses, Indu Sundaresan
Continues The Twentieth Wife, the story of Nur Jahan, Mughal king Jahangir’s favorite wife. Another compelling one, but not nearly as good as the first.

Jamesland, Michelle Huneven
One of the better books I’ve read in a long time. I always associate Michelle Huneven, who also wrote Round Rock, with T. C. Boyle because they share a wacky L.A. sensibility and detail the lives of lost souls who reach some sort of understanding with the world around them. This is full of them. Recommend highly. I’ve had to renew it twice because Steve’s now reading it.

The Family Markowitz, Allegra Goodman
I do like Allegra Goodman. Her characters are strong, her prose vivid. As the title suggests, this is a novel, really a series of shorts, about three generations of a Jewish-American family. Other characters pop in and out, but one closes the book feeling part of the family.

The Rising of the Lark, Ann Moray
This is a reread; it was my favorite book when I was eleven. A coming-of-age story of a girl in Wales who is raised by a governess and a tutor who she falls in love with. (It goes nowhere, thank heavens. Even though he loves her too, she is far too young and inexperienced.) Loved it when I was a kid, but have to be honest: If I were to read it for the first time right now, I would find it a little pretentious and the tutor part would horrify me. But still, it evokes a lost way of life.

An Invisible Sign of My Own, Aimee Bender
Totally bizarre–and therefore refreshing–book about a dysfunctional family with a daughter who has become an expert at quitting and seeks refuge in numbers. She is offered a job teaching math to kids, where she introduces Material and Numbers (I think that’s what it was called). She hangs the axe she bought herself for her birthday on the bulletin board because it’s a seven. It gets worse.

That’s all I remember.

Every now and then you have a day that reaffirms your faith in people. Today was one of those for me.

Last Friday, my muffler fell off. My poor car. It’s one thing or the other. I have a tire that won’t stay full, the motor revs high until it warms up (and sometimes revs really high, at which point I wiggle around something under the air filter and it goes back to normal_.

So this morning, I called Ballard Muffler, which the autobody shop across the street recommended when they very kindly unbolted it for me. “Hi, my name’s Zia and I have a falling apart BMW 2002. My muffler just fell off.”

“Just like that, huh?”

“Just like that.”

“Those are fun little cars.”

“When it’s not falling apart.” I started laughing. “I’ve got a tire that won’t stay full, a muffler that just fell off, and I just moved here.”

“Well, we like your attitude. Bring it on in.”

I showed up, and the guy was yelling at the UPS man because he blocked the street. “I heard you coming a mile away,” he said, between yells.

Then they welded the darn thing on and wouldn’t let me pay a dime. “I yelled at the UPS guy,” he said. “So this is my good deed of the day. Bring us some coffee some time.”

Which I’m going to do tomorrow. Along with some homemade cookies or something.

So anyone who’s reading this, go give someone a hug for the heck of it.

Ballard Muffler. They do more than mufflers. That’s (206) 783-7530.

Great weekend–even though we camped.

Hit the Edmonds-Kingston ferry on Saturday morning, wandered around Port Townsend, a charming little town and then found a great (free) campsite on the Lyre River. Even the kids with rock blaring from their Camaro at 3 in the morning couldn’t kill the charm of the location. (Although the aforementioned Camaro ramming the little wooden posts around the site came close.)

Next day, we went to Olympic hot springs. It was a lovely drive through primeval forests carpeted with ferns and moss. One expected to see dinosaurs trompling about. There was no one there–and as we climbed higher, we started to get excited about the fact that there were all these hot springs–and no one around!

I blame Steve. He marveled his way up the hill, and when we reached the top, there were more cars than on the I-5 at rush hour.

But we hiked the two and a half miles up, managed to find a hot spring although it was actually kinda skankadelic, since there was no drainage. But it was lovely and now we know to come very very early to snag one of the good springs. We rinsed off in the river and hiked back down. Masses of people were making their way up there; one group was wheeling an oversized cooler. They asked Steve how much further it was, and he gravely informed them it wasn’t much further and that it was all downhill. We laughed the rest of the way.