Did You Miss Me?

I bet you didn't even know I was gone, did you? Thing is, I normally try not to make a habit of announcing when I'm going to be out of town to the Internet, because I'm worried something like this might happen:



Someone did this. We suspect a neighbor kid because wouldn't an adult who was interested in causing mischief know that you can pry the top off a can of paint pretty easily? Who ever did this spent some time hammering the edge of the scraper into the can top and then tipped it? Spilled it? Intentionally messed it around? Maybe even tried to clean it up and made it worse? It's super hard to tell. The reason we suspect a young person, too, is because Mason has this friend across the street who has been known to get destructive when Mason isn't around or can't come out to play. He slammed a huge rock down on our porch before--our doorstop, and it could have caused damage then, but didn't. I've also seen him go over to the neighbor's and break some of their wall stones out of frustration/boredom. Unfortunately, he has a mom that is... well, the best we can say is absent, but borders on neglectful, so we won't get much resolution trying to talk to her about it, I don't think.

BUT, because I have an awesome friend who was watching the house, who happened to catch it when it was still fairly wet, it now looks like this:



Actually, it looks even better than that at the moment because I did some sanding and am touching up with a similar colored paint. Shawn and I actually like the weathered, patina look we have going so I'm trying to resist a complete re-paint. But, that could still happen. We'll have to see how the touching up goes.

It may be an unintended house project I get to tackle.

Ode to joy.

On the other hand, we had a lovely, uneventful trip to Indiana and back again to see my in-laws--who are kind of step-in-laws, but this is the only grandmother on Shawn's side that Mason has ever known, so it's a visit to see Grandma Rounds. But, because of the sort of loose familial relations, things have, in the past, been.... as we say in Minnesota... "interesting" in the past.

But, this time was great, nothing "interesting" to report. In fact, it did a lot of raining, so I did a lot of reading and such. I finished THE COUNTRY OF ICE CREAM STAR which I should return to the library ASAP, since it's overdue. That's a book I'm going to have a lot to say about, I think. I'm going to have to do a serious think, though, because it's a book I am surprised that no one has screamed 'race fail' over (but I don't exactly want to start that, either, if you know what I mean.) So I'm going to have to be careful how I talk about it. Thing is, there author looks pretty white, but all the characters of note are black and the entire thing is written in a "future" dialect that could be taken the wrong way, since there is literally sentence structure like, "I be bone." Bone, one presumes might be a corruption of bon, the French term, since they're in Massachusetts, which is not that far from Canada, I suppose. I don't know. All I can say is that I read all 550 some pages of this, enjoyed the book, but wondered how I'd feel if I were black....

Just looking down Goodreads, I see that MOST people are saying the dialect was inventive and "audacious" but at least one reviewer says, "It takes a lot to offend me, but the 'dialect'? I mean, let's just call it what it is: postapocalyptic ebonics written by a white woman."

And... I'm kind of surprised there's not more of that. I feel like I could start my review of this book by asking, "How to tell if a book is literary or SF?" Answer: the fact that this book is still greeted with words like 'breathtakingly ambitious' and not ALL THE FAIL, means it's literary.

Here's the thing, though, I found this book super-compelling. As another Goodreads review noted, "This book be wolfen." And it is. It's really EPIC in the traditional sense of that and I was drawn all the way through to the end.

So, like I said, I'm going to have to think about how to write about this. Very carefully.