There we were, driving down the highway on our way to a dental appointment. It was one of those days when the trucks bore down on the traffic and slowed it to a crawl. In front of us was a large touring bus; to the side a couple of ancient, dirty dump trucks.
We travelled in the middle lane, seeking the likeliest trickle of vehicles as we inched along. The left lane narrowed, coming to an end a few hundred yards ahead.
But wait! What was that? A beautiful little convertible sports car overtook and passed us on the left, narrowly missing the orange cones as it sliced just ahead of us. Who was that?
"That must be... Maniacbug*!" Triss announced ominously.
Maniacbug cooled his heels between our van and the touring bus. He was trapped like the little spiders we catch in our house in the summertime, unable to make any significant movements under the clear plastic cup. He craned his neck, then straddled the center line, provoking Triss to remark:
"It can't be Goldbug. Goldbug would never do that!"
He came back to the lane, then straddled the left line and the shoulder, coming back within bounds just in time to avoid more orange cones.
We paused at a light. Maniacbug took out his cell phone and proceeded to punch buttons.
The light turned green. But Maniacbug was absorbed in his buttons. So we sat.
The old dump trucks turned right, and suddenly he saw his chance. Straddling the center line again, he paused to consider, then...
Vroom!!
Out and around and in front of the bus. Past the cars ahead and back to the right lane. And he was gone.
"After him, Officer Flossy! Go get Dingo!"
But alas, there was no Officer Flossy, and no pedestrian-spilled nails on the roadway either. Dingo Dog, aka Maniacbug, had escaped. We can only hope that Flossy was hiding in the grass a mile or two down the road and was able to, er, arrest Dingo's progress before he caused an accident. We made it to the dentist office safely and on time.
*(Cars and Trucks and Things That Go by Richard Scarry)
Thursday, March 08, 2007
Wednesday, March 07, 2007
For My Husband
My housekeeping skills have not been shining through for the last few months, and our home is beginning to develop piles. This bothers me a great deal. I have also been organizing things for the last few weeks, and that results in piles as well, because I have been forgetting to make time to do something with the things I pull out of the neatly organized drawer or closet. Mr. Honey, bless his heart, has not really said anything about it beyond, "Uh, do you think we could keep the hamper clear of stuff so I can put my dirty clothes in it?" I have seen him grit his teeth a few times as he walked into a dishevelled room, like he was trying to forbear in love but it wasn't easy.
Why all this self-disclosure? Well, I learned something last night. I am sure most of you already know this, but it was a pretty big breakthrough for me.
I learned something about manhood.
I sat down with Mr. Honey after the kids went to bed last night and talked to him about the house. I told him that I had noticed he wasn't comfortable with the level of tidiness and that I was sorry. He said it was all right, he knew I had a lot on my plate. I said that I wasn't comfortable with it either, and that I am trying to find a way to get it all done and remain relaxed, but I haven't figured it out yet. He said that he has a rough time relaxing at home when there are so many piles.
So what did I learn?
Two things. One, that it really does bother him, but he is not going to throw that in my face. Two, and this is the biggie, that he is not going to make a big deal of it because he is a real man.
Real men take up the slack. Real men don't flinch or whine when they are given additional burdens. Real men soldier on.
What I had always counted a weakness, I realized last night is actually a strength. He is a noble man. He will take the brunt of whatever happens for his family, for as long as necessary.
I do not want him to shoulder unnecessary burdens. He has enough already.
So what does my house look like today? It's still a mess. I just couldn't get it all done. I know he is not going to berate or belittle me for that. He won't even mention it. But cleaning just went a lot higher on my list of priorities, because it helps him. And I want to help him.
Why all this self-disclosure? Well, I learned something last night. I am sure most of you already know this, but it was a pretty big breakthrough for me.
I learned something about manhood.
I sat down with Mr. Honey after the kids went to bed last night and talked to him about the house. I told him that I had noticed he wasn't comfortable with the level of tidiness and that I was sorry. He said it was all right, he knew I had a lot on my plate. I said that I wasn't comfortable with it either, and that I am trying to find a way to get it all done and remain relaxed, but I haven't figured it out yet. He said that he has a rough time relaxing at home when there are so many piles.
So what did I learn?
Two things. One, that it really does bother him, but he is not going to throw that in my face. Two, and this is the biggie, that he is not going to make a big deal of it because he is a real man.
Real men take up the slack. Real men don't flinch or whine when they are given additional burdens. Real men soldier on.
What I had always counted a weakness, I realized last night is actually a strength. He is a noble man. He will take the brunt of whatever happens for his family, for as long as necessary.
I do not want him to shoulder unnecessary burdens. He has enough already.
So what does my house look like today? It's still a mess. I just couldn't get it all done. I know he is not going to berate or belittle me for that. He won't even mention it. But cleaning just went a lot higher on my list of priorities, because it helps him. And I want to help him.
Saturday, March 03, 2007
A Diversion
(Updated to note: A strange thing, but for some reason the bold I used to highlight books read has gone all the way through the post if you look through an RSS feed. In that case, the books I have read havea number to the right.)
Well, Triss and I have been grappling with big ideas lately-- virtue, magnanimity, socialization-- and both of us are in need of a diversion. Hers is a Redwall book. I thought I would see how many of these BBC Top 100 Books I have read. I enjoyed seeing the Headmistress', Cindy's and Mama Squirrel's lists. I also enjoyed the true confession time on Dominion Family, but I came to the post late and decided not to comment. Just for the record, I absolutely abhorred Wuthering Heights. Could not see the point in it except madness, despair and death. Yuck.
I will bold the ones I have read and italicize the ones I want to read. The numbers to the right of the bolded titles are me counting how many books on this list that I've read. (Look at me counting, look at me counting, Pooh!)
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen 1
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien 2
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (This was the first hard book I read by choice. I started at the beginning five or six times, getting a little further into the book each time before I gave up. I finally got all the way through it when I was in college.) 3
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee 4
6 The Bible (I have never made it completely through, every word, but I am still going to count it.) 5
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte 6
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell (I can't remember if I have actually read it or not. Isn't that awful? I think I might have read it in high school or college, but there is a good possibility I only heard about the storyline.)
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott (This book was my constant companion when I was a teen.) 7
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller 8
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (not completely-- I have read Taming of the Shrew, Hamlet, Much Ado About Nothing, Richard III, and we just started A Midsummer Night's Dream. I think that's it.)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien 9
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot (I really, really, really like this book. It's so different from your average romance novel. So much to think about. I like reading George Eliot. Silas Marner was great. I couldn't get into Romola, though.)10
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell 11
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald 12
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens (This is another one I am not sure if I read or not. The book I'm thinking of may be a different one by Nathaniel Hawthorne.)
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams 13
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck 14
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (I probably read this ten to fifteen times in middle school. Drove Dad crazy how many times I would reread my favorites. He finally went out to the bookstore one day and came home with a bag full of classics to encourage me to read new things.) 15
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame 16
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy (I only just learned how to pronounce the title last year. And kept Mr. Honey in stitches until I got it through my thick skull that it is An' na Ka-re'-ni-na and not An'-na Ka-re-nee'-na. Ahem.)
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis 17
34 Emma - Jane Austen (My favorite Jane Austen. Mr. Knightley. Need I say more?) 18
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen 19
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis 20
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne 21
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell 22
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez 23
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery 24
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood 25
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding 26
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen 27
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens (Remind me to tell you about the time I was in an original Nashville dinner theater musical called The Miserable Ones of the Tale of Two Cities-- the music of Les Miz and the plot of A Tale of Two Cities. I got to be Lucie Manette. In a hoopskirt and corkscrew curls. It was fun.) 28
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley 29
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (I never would have sought this author out, but I had some sort of South American literature class in college and read two of his books, and a couple other books by South American authors that were very hard for me to get through at the age of eighteen. I had a Bible-as-Literature class on the New Testament also. The teacher was a non-believer. Not fun. I had a very good pastor who helped me through it.) 30
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck (Again, I may have read this in college, but possibly not. I went through a Steinbeck phase, very shortlived. I know I read Travels with Charley and Grapes of Wrath, and possibly one other.)
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov (I have always been curious about this book since I heard about the book Reading Lolita in Tehran. I don't really want to read Lolita, but I feel like it is probably a prerequisite to reading the other.)
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens (Triss and I started this last year, were enjoying it, but never finished it.)
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray 31
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens 32
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker 33
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White 34
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Alborn
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Mr. Honey and I are big Sherlock Holmes fans. We even listened to the old Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce radio shows as we drove across country on our honeymoon.) 35
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery 36
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole 37
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare (My first foray into Shakespearian tragedy. It was hard.) 38
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl 39
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo 40
Well, Triss and I have been grappling with big ideas lately-- virtue, magnanimity, socialization-- and both of us are in need of a diversion. Hers is a Redwall book. I thought I would see how many of these BBC Top 100 Books I have read. I enjoyed seeing the Headmistress', Cindy's and Mama Squirrel's lists. I also enjoyed the true confession time on Dominion Family, but I came to the post late and decided not to comment. Just for the record, I absolutely abhorred Wuthering Heights. Could not see the point in it except madness, despair and death. Yuck.
I will bold the ones I have read and italicize the ones I want to read. The numbers to the right of the bolded titles are me counting how many books on this list that I've read. (Look at me counting, look at me counting, Pooh!)
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen 1
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien 2
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (This was the first hard book I read by choice. I started at the beginning five or six times, getting a little further into the book each time before I gave up. I finally got all the way through it when I was in college.) 3
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee 4
6 The Bible (I have never made it completely through, every word, but I am still going to count it.) 5
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte 6
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell (I can't remember if I have actually read it or not. Isn't that awful? I think I might have read it in high school or college, but there is a good possibility I only heard about the storyline.)
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott (This book was my constant companion when I was a teen.) 7
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller 8
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (not completely-- I have read Taming of the Shrew, Hamlet, Much Ado About Nothing, Richard III, and we just started A Midsummer Night's Dream. I think that's it.)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien 9
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot (I really, really, really like this book. It's so different from your average romance novel. So much to think about. I like reading George Eliot. Silas Marner was great. I couldn't get into Romola, though.)10
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell 11
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald 12
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens (This is another one I am not sure if I read or not. The book I'm thinking of may be a different one by Nathaniel Hawthorne.)
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams 13
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck 14
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (I probably read this ten to fifteen times in middle school. Drove Dad crazy how many times I would reread my favorites. He finally went out to the bookstore one day and came home with a bag full of classics to encourage me to read new things.) 15
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame 16
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy (I only just learned how to pronounce the title last year. And kept Mr. Honey in stitches until I got it through my thick skull that it is An' na Ka-re'-ni-na and not An'-na Ka-re-nee'-na. Ahem.)
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis 17
34 Emma - Jane Austen (My favorite Jane Austen. Mr. Knightley. Need I say more?) 18
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen 19
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis 20
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne 21
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell 22
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez 23
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery 24
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood 25
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding 26
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen 27
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens (Remind me to tell you about the time I was in an original Nashville dinner theater musical called The Miserable Ones of the Tale of Two Cities-- the music of Les Miz and the plot of A Tale of Two Cities. I got to be Lucie Manette. In a hoopskirt and corkscrew curls. It was fun.) 28
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley 29
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (I never would have sought this author out, but I had some sort of South American literature class in college and read two of his books, and a couple other books by South American authors that were very hard for me to get through at the age of eighteen. I had a Bible-as-Literature class on the New Testament also. The teacher was a non-believer. Not fun. I had a very good pastor who helped me through it.) 30
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck (Again, I may have read this in college, but possibly not. I went through a Steinbeck phase, very shortlived. I know I read Travels with Charley and Grapes of Wrath, and possibly one other.)
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov (I have always been curious about this book since I heard about the book Reading Lolita in Tehran. I don't really want to read Lolita, but I feel like it is probably a prerequisite to reading the other.)
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens (Triss and I started this last year, were enjoying it, but never finished it.)
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray 31
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens 32
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker 33
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White 34
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Alborn
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Mr. Honey and I are big Sherlock Holmes fans. We even listened to the old Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce radio shows as we drove across country on our honeymoon.) 35
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery 36
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole 37
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare (My first foray into Shakespearian tragedy. It was hard.) 38
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl 39
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo 40
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