Yarn Along

 I'm still knitting. The knitting bag is overflowing with mostly unfinished hats. I'm working on three very distinct hats: The Dustland Hat, the Woman's Hound-Tooth Hat, and the Camden Cap which involves knitting over a piece of plastic to make a brim. I've also learned a new technique to make my stranded knitting much less tight. I'm getting a lot of practice on the Hound's Tooth Hat.

This is the Hounds Tooth hat picture from Knit Simple Magazine. 

I just started Diary of a Wimpy Kid today. It's going to be a quick read. My oldest son, Luke and I thoroughly enjoyed the first two movies. A while back, my husband checked out the first movie from the library. I almost sent it back to the library without watching it, but then Luke and I sat down to watch it. We both found ourselves unexpectedly laughing out loud.

My eight-year old son, Sam likes anything comic-y. I am not very well-versed in the whole graphic novel genre. He recently finished the entire Calvin and Hobbes canon. I started to worry that he would lose interest in reading if I couldn't find more age appropriate graphic novels. Diary of a Wimpy Kid features a middle-schooler named Greg. Sam is in third grade. He went ahead and read the first book, but I am just not sure if the entire series is appropriate for him. So, despite having seen the movies, I'm jumping in and I'm reading Diary of a Wimpy Kid.

Who knows? I may just get sucked into the entire Wimpy Kid series!

For more yarn tales, click on over to Ginny's.

My kind of fan fiction

I recently listened to a Bookrageous podcast about fan fiction the other day. I hadn't really ever considered fan fiction other than what my son Luke tells me about the ever expansive universe that is Star Wars. I prefer my Star Wars to contain only Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, and Princess Leia. I really don't care about the back story of Boba Fett. I don't want anyone messing with the Harry Potter universe, but yet there is all kind of fan fiction about Hogwarts. There's fan fic that imagines Harry Potter without the epilogue in the final book. I originally thought that fan fiction was really relegated to the world of DC and Marvel Comics and science fiction geeks, but I learned something. There is fan fiction for everything! What is fan fiction? It's stories written by fans about characters or settings of the original work.

So, I may not be comfortable with all the re-imagined universes of other favorite books and characters, but I'm excited about almost all Austen-inspired fiction. I suppose I prefer a re-imagining of the original tale vs. a story that moves Austen's characters in a different trajectory. Longbourn, a recent book club selection has a shifted narrative of the story. While the elements of Pride and Prejudice remain the same, it's vantage point is from the help.

This is my recent book club selection. It's Pride and Prejudice from the perspective of the help. Think Downton Abbey meets Austen. 

So, I realized that I'm steeped deeply in the world of Jane Austen Fan Fiction. I never read Austen in either high school or college, but shortly after graduating from college, I realized what I had been missing. The first Jane Austen novel I read was Emma. I remember being delighted by the Gwyneth Paltrow's Emma  in 1996.

  Are you surprised that it wasn't the Colin Firth Pride and Prejudice mini-series that made me mad for Austen?

I'm pretty sure this is the reason that most women decided that Austen was irresistible. It's this iconic Darcy-in-a-wet-shirt scene.

 Emma was the reason I fell in love with all things Jane Austen in the first place. I proceeded to read all her novels and collect multiple editions of Pride and Prejudice and Emma.

Can I just say how much more I prefer Mr Knightley to Mr Darcy?

                                         Then, there were a slew of Austen-inspired movies.

As if!

Fox Books. F-O-X.

Mark Darcy!

This adaptation of Pride and Prejudice transported to India is just lovely.

The Jane Austen Book Club. The movie is WAY better than the book.

Just when you didn't think we needed another adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, we kinda did and while not fan fiction, I'm sure this new movie rekindled the Austen imagination. So, in 2005, a feature length P&P was released and guess what? The new Mr. Darcy grew on me. 

The trend continues today. Last weekend, I watched Austenland based on the novel of the same name by Shannon Hale. Remember, I'll read anything Austen-related. (Well, almost anything.) I remember thinking that the book was just so-so, but I thought it might make a delightful movie. As it turns out, the movie is so-so as well, but it did make me think about how much Austen has impacted our culture.

When Austenland landed in theaters several months back, my friends and I made plans to go to see it wearing Regency gowns. It never happened, but that doesn't mean I haven't paraded around Bath, England wearing a Regency gown during the Jane Austen Festival. Because I have! Yup. I'm that girl.

Anyway, I'll continue to read a lot of Austen-inspired fiction. I have read two (yes, 2!) YA novels that re-imagine Pride and Prejudice in the modern high school. Of course, you're dying to know the titles so that you can read them too, right?? Right? Okay, it might just be me, but these books were cute and just fun.

I have a whole shelf dedicated to Austen-related fiction on Goodreads. Check out my Austen-pastiche shelf.













So, yes, I love fan fiction. I just happen to love my particular brand of fan fiction.

There should be gold medals for speed watching the Olympics

Meryl Davis and Charlie White win Ice Dancing Gold!

Are you  watching the Olympics? I am. Lots of it. I blame my recent exhaustion on watching the Olympics every night. I will fully admit that I can watch maybe three luge runs before they all look the same. Without the excitement in the announcer's voice, I would never be able to tell you that this luge run is .087 of a second faster than the last luger.

I'll watch a couple of Skeleton runs and think about who these crazy  people are who decide to slide head first at nearly 80 miles an hour! I watch speed skating and slope style snow boarding! I do a lot of speed watching, but I always stop and settle in for the figure skating. All of it.

I used to hate ice dancing. It was weird, over-the-top, theatrical, and there were no jumps. I wanted to see Axels not Twizzles. I mean, seriously. Twizzles? This year, I liked the ice dancing the best. I hadn't realized that ice dancing had changed over the last decade. (The last Winter Games I watched were the 2002 Salt Lake Games where figure skating was fraught with cheating and scandal. Remember the double gold medal in pairs figure skating? The French judge?)

I think the reason that I'm watching so much of the Olympics is that I missed everything from both Torino and Vancouver.This was the period where we didn't have network TV. We watched everything via Netflix streaming and movies from the library. I didn't feel deprived, but it turns out that I've missed a lot. So, when Paul added Aereo  this year giving us the opportunity to watch TV online, I was enthusiastic. Very enthusiastic!

My husband did not anticipate my enormous enthusiasm for the return of network TV to my house. I've never been a TV person and I'm still not, but I'm happy to be back to engage the culture in real time.

Next up? The Oscars!!!

Friday Morning Book Post

I read a quote on Melissa Wiley's blog this week and it just so resonated with how I read that I have to quote it here:

 I have eleventy-thousand books queued up, so naturally I decided to reread Middlemarch. (I’ve given up trying to figure out my capricious reading whims anymore. If a book insists it wants to be read, I read it.)
Melissa just nails it! I'm never going to get to all the books on the to-read pile. I don't even try to have some systematic way of tackling them. Unlike the rest of my life, I just give in to all of my fleeting reading fancies. I simply just read and follow any rabbit trail that I can.

No matter how much I try to organize my reading, I give into my reading whims all the time too. I'll be in the middle of a book when another book presents itself and my fickle reading self will put down that book and pick up another. My reading habits are random, disorganized, and often times irresponsible. I should be reading my book club book (The Goldfinch), but I'm rebellious that way.

Yesterday, I started reading Stolen on my phone. Melissa Wiley announced that it was pretty cheap on Kindle and it was a book that she still thought about. Some books completely slip out of my mind once I'm done with them, but there are those precious few that linger within in my thoughts long after I've finished them and moved onto something else. So, if Melissa says the books sticks with her, I'm hoping for the same thing except I think this book may be a little on the haunting side.

Stolen is considered in YA, but already I can tell that it's the kind of YA that is just at the edge of that Emerging Adult label. It's dark and edgy. It involves a kidnapping and well, possibly Stockholm Syndrome.
It's not fun reading, but it is compelling and even though the subject matter is serious, heavy, suspenseful, I can tell that this book might be one of those that lingers.

By the way, I'm still reading all the stuff I was reading in last week's book post!

Twin Tuesday

Liam and James

I've wanted to add more pictures of the twins here on my blog and Tuesdays seem like a good day for this. They boys are growing and changing so quickly that I need to capture them a little better. I don't think that I will always photograph them together. Sometimes, even I forget that they're not a set, but unique individuals who happen to look alike. Here they are on Christmas Day looking like the identical twins that they are.

A Long Wintry Weekend

I'm not really sure why last week felt extra arduous. I suspect that the whole family was experiencing some burnout and then Tess got sick. The week even ended on a Thursday. There would be no school on Friday, Valentine's Day, making President's Weekend four days instead of three. I had some loose plans for the kids. I planned for some ice skating at Evergreen Lake and maybe some snow shoeing, but then the twins came down with the cough and fever as well. Paul took Sam swimming and he cut his toe badly on something sharp in the pool. Our plans were sidelined. As much as I look forward to weekends, they're not always relaxing.

As an extreme introvert living in a noisy crazy house, there is little time for the quiet I crave all day. On Saturday, I elected to take Luke down the hill to the library so that he could spend a good chunk of the day getting his homework all up to date. It wasn't exciting or anything, but going to the library was calming and refreshing for both of us. The weekend unfolded slowly and I could feel the day moving at a less stressful pace. We both agreed that we may need to make our library date a weekly thing. In the quiet of the library, he realized he could concentrate better than at home and he was less distracted. Well, of course he was less distracted! It's quiet in the library (contented sigh).

On Sunday night, I took Luke to see The Book Thief before it leaves the theaters. I've realized that I cherish one-on-one time with each of my kids. I get to see them outside of their siblings and I discover a whole other side to each of them.

Paul and I were able to carve out two mini-dates this past weekend. After we put the Littles (Tess, Liam, and James) to bed on Saturday night, we left Luke in charge of Sam and headed to a late movie.We find small pockets of time whenever we can. On Monday, we spent a couple of hours at the local Starbucks just talking.

We talked about how hard it is to come up with an activity that's appealing to all the ages in the house. We talked about how I feel every emotion that each of my children feels. All.the.Time.We talked about managing stress. We talked about how our time with Luke is dwindling. We talked about turning points.We talked about boredom and routine. We talked about vacation this year. It sounds so trite, but it was wonderful not being interrupted for more than five minutes. Again, I could feel time moving more slowly. It actually seems weird when time isn't flying by. I'm not even sure if it feels comfortable for time to move slower, but I welcomed it.

Paul treated me to breakfast in bed all weekend. He knows that after making breakfast and packing lunches for the kids all week, the last thing I want to do is cook more eggs on Saturday. So, he took on weekend breakfasts a long time ago. He lets me sleep in, brings me breakfast in bed, and then leaves me alone for a little while longer. It's Heaven and he makes a great poached egg.

Don't get me wrong. The weekend was still loud and somewhat chaotic, but I realized that there was still some peace tucked into a lot of its moments. I did get to relax and I did get to waste some time. I wasn't really productive, but I created little events for the kids and I realized that the weekend doesn't have to be perfect.

It just has to be relaxing. For the whole family.

Twitterature-February 2014 edition

So, yeah, I didn't get to my Friday morning book post. I blame the Olympics. I've been staying up way too late speed watching the Sochi Games. I watch a little of everything, but I watch all figure skating. Last night, it was nearly midnight when I finally went to bed after watching the Men's Long program final. I couldn't just fall asleep right away and despite the hour, I read for another half hour.

So, in lieu of my Friday Morning Book post, I'm linking up with Modern Mrs Darcy today and I'll talk about what I've been reading in a Twitter-like style.

Unveiling Grace is Lynn K Wilder's memoir of what happens when she discovers that the Jesus of the Mormon world is quite different than the Biblical Jesus.

Red Ruby Heart in a Cold Blue Sea is the atmospheric coming-of-age novels of life in Maine. I'm not too far in this novel just yet, but I'm so excited about novels that have a clear sense of place.

The Goldfinch is queued up on my Kindle. Can I read it in time for my March 7 book club??

Pride and Prejudice- I'm always reading this one to my twins and my five year old daughter. My twin boys can recite this one by heart. They can name all of Lizzie's sisters. They know who Mr. Bingley is. They know who Mr Darcy is. They can tell you about Longbourn, Netherfield, and Pemberley. This is my favorite board book ever! I am going to have to buy another copy since mine is getting ragged. It's amazing how the entire story of Pride and Prejudice can be distilled into a delightful counting book for the pre-school set.

Ken Libbrecht's Field Guide to Snowflakes: If you have a passing interest in the science of snowflakes, this is a wonderful small guide to understanding how snowflakes form. The photography is amazing.


What have you been reading lately?