Find your own purple gloves

I regularly want to write a book of tips on living well.  It would contain some entertaining tidbits, lots of pleasures to be found in small details, and humorous stories about how much my life improved once I stopped drinking sparkling wine only for named occasions and started making occasions to drink it.  I swear the book wouldn't be nauseating.
I'm reading one such book at the moment: Alexandra Stoddard's Living a Beautiful Life (1986) which I received as a birthday present.  And it is nauseating, when it's not being right on, charming, out-dated or insightful.
Stoddard is a interior decorator who emphasizes arranging one's life around where one actually spends time [e.g. spend effort arranging the kitchen and bathroom comfortably before decorating an unused living room] (right on), treating everyday tasks into sensory stimulating rituals (with suggestions that are sometimes insightful), surrounding oneself with books and flowers (charming, and, in my book, right on), and making sure that one's phone cord is long enough to reach the kitchen sink (outdated).  She also suggests one "save old, worn-out white gloves and wear them as silver-polishing mitts"  (Whaaa?  Not from the universe I inhabit)*.
Living a Beautiful Life reminds me of the futility of my (never-to-be-written) book. Living well in the details is personal.  I love making rose petal and violet ice cubes.  Stoddard must love the scent of burning orange, based on her repeated suggestion of throwing orange peels into a roaring fire.  Both of our ideas have limited applicability.  While I think that hanging clothes outside to dry is a pleasant (and money and environment-saving) task, I can see readers bristling, "Like anyone has time for that," the way that I bristled about Stoddards daily "puttering" and "clipping" rituals.
I have a good friend with a lab job.  The gloves in her lab are purple.  They make her smile when she puts them on, and she puts them on every day.
That's really all that needs to be said in such a book.  Find little things that make you smile.  Do them regularly.  Notice them and smile.
Find your own purple nitrile gloves.
If that doesn't work, use them for polishing the silver.

*Alexandra Stoddard is still working, by the way, and that her web page calls her a "philosopher of contemporary living" doesn't do a lot to reduce "for real?" factor.

Dianthus and Aster

February in OK

Life is good

Searching for prairie turnips at sunset

Mule in March

Picking peas with Grandma in Jun

If Dianthus and Aster grow up to be sad, whiny creatures, it will not be for lack of educational play opportunities, for lack of time spent outside, or for lack of people to love them.
But it might happen anyway. (You can envision photos arranged in such a way to support this small bit of text).

Life is rough

Spring Break in OK

Spring Break on The Ranch

Fishing with Grandpa

April in Colorado

Maple helicopters abounded

Has meanest parents in the whole wide world

I'm 40 and my hair looks great

In second grade I met a girl who became my best friend.  We were friends for years and did classic best friend things: we had a secret club, a collective crush on the cutest guy in the class, and spent way too long analyzing most anything on the phone.  And then one year she didn't invite me to her birthday party and we were suddenly no longer friends.  It was all very seventh grade.
Except at that time of the birthday non-invite, we were 25 years old.  We had been friends for 18 years. I was crushed. It hurt worse than any romantic break-up I've experienced.
The day after my 40th birthday, almost 15 years after she quit speaking to me, we became in contact again.  It was all very Beaches.
Except that there was no dying, no children, no fight over men, no fight at all and no drama involved.  And Beaches didn't take place in the time of facebook.  So, while my ex-best friend has long reminded me of Bette Midler, it wasn't like Beaches at all.
She sent a friend request. I accepted. We wrote each about our hair.  We're judging by little thumbnail photos on facebook and we each think the others hair looks great.
I expected some personal drama around turning 40.  I expected some personal drama surrounding my first re-acquaintance with the ex-best friend I've always known I would someday see again.  I did not expect them to be one and the same.  Or both entirely devoid of dramatic tension.
So, I'm 40.  My hair looks great.*
Ex-best friend is still 39.  Her hair looks great too.
That's that.

*Photo taken immediately after blowing out the candles on my birthday.  And, alas, my hair frequently doesn't look this good, but I like to think that it always could.

Spoons are for wusses . . .

or those lacking a certain panache with shimmering, semi-solid accessories.

Acid on the eggs?

When dying Eater eggs this year (yes, back at Easter time) I noticed that the instructions have changed since I was a kid (on both Paas and another brand).  Now there are three levels of color: for pale colors, drop the tablets in water, for classic colors, use lemon juice, and for ultra-bright colors, use white vinegar.

Growing up I remember using vinegar and water in every cup and I had never heard of using lemon juice.
Dianthus used the pure vinegar method this year.  I observed that the colors were much brighter than those I remembered from my youth (and I'll admit to dying eggs every year at least through college and actually much later, so these are not ancient memories), and they dyed the eggs much more quickly, but they actually had poor adherence if you left the egg in to soak for a while, and they did not blend well.
Has anyone else experienced this?  Does anyone know if it is a different formulation or just the switch to vinegar?
And what's up with lemon juice?  Do any of you use the commercial egg dyes with lemon juice?  Is it different?*  How?
In any case, Dianthus was pleased with the results, found all the eggs the next morning**, and ate most of them.
*Lemon juice and white vinegar have nearly the same pH, so this is bugging me.
** He was better at searching for eggs than he is at his new game, hide and seek, during which he will either tell me where to hide or all of the places I should look before I find him in the bed.

Step 2: Flail Around A Bit

When I first started reading The Hunger Games (before the Mister had started reading them), I commented about a friend who had problems with the second book (of non-memorable name).  The Mister and I discussed how that wasn't much of a surprise; we already knew that in book 1 she wins the Games, in book three the system must be overthrown and in book two, well, in book two, things don't go so well.  Han is left frozen in carbonite and Frodo is trapped in Shelob's lair.  This is the way of trilogies.

So I have a question: what second book of a trilogy is really good?**  If there is a single story arch of the whole trilogy, is there any way to make book 2 positive?

My second Hunger Games question (as I am aware that I thought out a whole series of Hunger Games posts back in March and posted exactly once-- I'm not really going to get around to it again.) is about picking the right man. One of my former students (now a pharmacy school grad-- I'm getting old if I have students with doctorates!) celebrated the conclusion of her classes by reading Hunger Games and posted on facebook about being "Team Gail". Is there any coming-of-age book written by a man in which selecting the right woman is the big growing up conflict?  There are plenty of stories in which getting the girl (or selecting the right girl) is a sign of having grown up or otherwise succeeded.  I'm wondering if male authors are ever writing about the angst of choosing the right woman as a major decision.  Harry Potter, of course, suffers plenty of girl trouble, but Harry Potter, you recall, was written by a woman.  Are teenage females just kidding ourselves that teenage males are actually concerned about the right relationship?

As far the "ick factor" I mentioned earlier.  For many people HG is disturbing.  For Debbie, who works regularly in Haiti, the disparity and obliviousness of the wealthy is unnerving: talk to her about that.  For many readers, that these books are written for adolescents is bothersome, but not to me  (I came up with a long list of extremely disturbing short stories we read in 7th and 8th grade English class.).  At least one reader I talked to  was disturbed that something this poorly written was getting this much attention (again, not a big bother to me because I really liked them and have read plenty worse and get pretty excited every time I see young people reading and discussing books).  My mother was disturbed by the fact that this was  young people killing young people as directed by adults.  Yeah, that is supposed to be disturbing. Collins points out that war is young people killing young people at the direction of adults.  The Mister was disturbed by how quickly everyone accepts this, and how quickly the tributes fall into the roles of killers.  I'm not sure it is all that exaggerated, which is disturbing.
I heard  on the radio about a  school happily launching their own "Hunger Games".  This, and similar stories (along with the Team Peeta Team Gail debate) suggesting young readers are entirely unfazed by the games in which kids kill kids, disturbs me.  I was also disturbed by the return to the ring in the second book.  It was icky enough to be reading a book about how violence should not be entertainment for the rich for entertainment without the author acting as if I, the reader, needed a return to the violent entertainment to keep reading.
Anyway, those are some of my thoughts.  Add yours.

*A nod to the South Park underpants gnomes episode and their brilliant plan.  "Step 1: Steal underpants.  Step 2: ?  Step 3: Profit."
**The Mister thinks that Empire Strikes Back may be his favorite movie.  Whatever.  It's great but Han is left frozen in carbonite-- how can that be a best movie?  As for The Two Towers, LoTR is just one book, (or 5) not really a trilogy as far as I am concerned. 

Cuckoo STIR Soon

Some day, say, tomorrow, I will turn in my grades and then someday, after more meetings and graduation and stuff and stuff and stuff, say Friday or next week, I will post the rest of the Hunger Games discussion, videos of my sons sledding (yes, that happened in December) and giggling, new garden images, and questions about acid and Easter egg dye.
As of now, that time still feels like the far-distant-future.  So I write briefly to alert you that the next STIR selection is One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, suggest by Debbie.
Join us as we join NPR (??) and the 50th Anniversary Read-Along.