Melissa Wiley's Blog, page 179
January 3, 2010
I Can't Keep Up
Rilla comes hobbling in, using a wiffle ball bat for a cane.
"Look, Mommy, I'm playing I'm a grandma!"
Me: "Why, hello there, Grandma."
Rilla: "Mommy. I'm not playing that any more."
January 2, 2010
2010 To Be Finished List
The trouble with being a contrarian is that the second you make a statement like 'have realized making TBR lists brings out the contrarian in me & spells doom for books on the list, therefore no more TBR lists shall I make,' the contrarian rears up and says Who are YOU to tell ME not to make lists??? I'm making a list right this second and you can't stop me. Make that TWO lists. Hahaha. Bullet point! Bullet point! Bullet point!
Which is another way of saying: I looked at my shelf and realized ...
January 1, 2010
And So It Begins…
"For some weeks now I have been engaged in dispersing the contents of this apartment, trying to persuade hundreds of inanimate objects to scatter and leave me alone. It is not a simple matter."
—"Good-bye to Forty-eighth Street,"
Essays of E. B. White, page one
Can you say, 'had me at hello'?
2009 Booklist
Gosh I read some good stuff in 2009.
I've been tinkering with this post for days and am just going to give up and post it, despite some screwy links. I'll fix it later, maybe. Or I might be too busy reading.
Fiction I especially enjoyed:
• The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley (notes)
• The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson (notes)
• When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead (notes)
• The Sherwood Ring by Elizabeth Marie Pope (notes)
• The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey (notes)
• Lost by...
My Year in Books
Gosh I read some good stuff in 2009.
I've been tinkering with this post for days and am just going to give up and post it, despite some screwy links. I'll fix it later, maybe. Or I might be too busy reading.
Fiction I especially enjoyed:
• The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley (notes)
• The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson (notes)
• When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead (notes)
• The Sherwood Ring
by Elizabeth Marie Pope (notes)
• The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey (notes)
• Lost by...
Turn, Turn, Turn
Happy New Year, my dears.
December 31, 2009
Links for December 30, 2009
How To Make Chicken Tikka Masala Recipe – I love this dish so passionately that it really is time I learn to make it myself.
December 30, 2009
Eight Words
An SS noncommissioned officer came to meet us, a truncheon in his hand. He gave the order:
"Men to the left! Women to the right!"
Eight words spoken quietly, indifferently, without emotion. Eight short, simple words. Yet that was the moment when I parted from my mother. I had not had time to think, but already I felt the pressure of my father's hand: we were alone. For a part of a second I glimpsed my mother and my sisters moving away to the right. Tzipora held Mother's hand. I saw them...
December 29, 2009
On Michelangelo's David
"During the tour I became separated from the group, and, searching blindly through the corridors of the Galleria dell'Accademia, I came upon the statue from the wrong direction. Suddenly there it was. My first glimpse of it was from the reverse. It is normally viewed from the front, and from that direction one sees a powerful body firmly planted on the earth, poised, balanced, muscular, set in its essential form, like the triumph of the will.
"But I saw it first from an entirely different...
Five Golden Rings
Well, it has been a funny old Christmas in these parts. About half of us, including me, were sick with a rather vicious bug on Christmas Eve & Christmas Day—fever, chills, aches, cough—and others succumbed over the weekend. Today, Tuesday, the fifth day of Christmas, most of us have climbed back to normal. I'm sitting in the playroom watching three girls ride scooters in rings around the patio, while half a dozen sparrows scold them from the bushes. The feeder sat empty since Wednesday (you c...
