1. The drive is often the best thing about traveling.
2. I love a good snuggle with my husband when I'm cold.
3. I often use pasta when I am cooking.
4. I'm reading Little Women right now; I love it.

The sun sank, and they both felt its final shudder of warmth.
Turning, he looked into her eyes.
“I feel as though you are the one I have waited for, all my life. And now you are here.”
“I’m not even sure if I believe in such a thing,” she whispered.

Sex is something I really don't understand too hot. You never know where the hell you are. I keep making up these sex rules for myself, and then I break them right away. Last year I made a rule that I was going to quit horsing around with girls that, deep down, gave me a pain in the ass.

Yesterday I was a dog.
Today I'm a dog.
Tomorrow I'll probably still be a dog.
[Sigh!]
There's so little hope for advancement.
-- Snoopy –

Have a great Wednesday!

Wow! I’ve had the most relaxing weekend
Ever. While winter has been frosting the
Windows and filling the driveway, my
Friend and I have been lazing about
In the hot-tub talking, reminiscing
About so many things. Listening
To a lot of terrific music. Also
Just generally catching up
With each other. Eating
And laughing 2 much.
At one point, I even
Wrote a poem, &

Though justice be thy plea, consider this,
That, in the course of justice, none of us
Should see salvation…
-- Portia in The Merchant of Venice, Act 4, Scene 1 –

Have a great Monday!

Chris Neil celebrates his game-winning goal, Nov.10, 2007.

In Grade 3, Neil’s principal asked him what he was going to be when he grew up. “I’m going to play in the NHL,” said Neil.

It's that time of the year again when Major League Baseball hands out its annual awards. On Monday, the first two awards will be announced, and that is the AL and NL Rookie of the Year awards.
Here are my choices for the awards and the days they will be announced:

Nov. 12: AL Rookie of the Year: Dustin Pedroia
NL Rookie of the Year: Ryan Braun

Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.
-- W.S. Merwin –

Absence sometimes makes the heart grow ANGRIER, I say!
I have so missed being able to blog, and to converse with my great blog-friends.
But I think I am back in business now!
The MAC is fixed!

Have a great Thursday!
**********

1. The last compliment I got was from my husband; he/she said I was doing great on a project I have undertaken.
2. I'm reading The Septembers of Shiraz by Dalia Sofer.
3. I woke up today and thought T.G.I.F!!!!!!!

Two newlywed University of Illinois grads were driving through Louisiana.
As they were approaching the town of Natchitoches, they started arguing about the pronunciation of the name.

There's really nothing like a woman's purse to tell whether she is prospering or languishing. It's not about the money inside so much as the BRAND of the purse. The smaller the better too. Mine - the one I like best - is a Fossil. Never in a million years would I have bought it for myself. Kids. Kids buy moms stuff.
-- Anonymous Woman –

Can someone, anyone out there, please tell me how it can already be the month of March?
No, seriously, though. In a matter of hours, it will be MARCH!
March?
What the hell happened to February?
Am I going senile? Did I sleep through January or something?
Even with the extra day here, the 29th, I’m sorry, but something seems mightily askew!
Why does it feel like I was just back home not so long ago, for Christmas?
Is this just a classic symptom of old age?
Is the rest of this year going to be just as fleeting?
According to Robert Frost… perhaps…. perhaps it is!

The sun was warm but the wind was chill,


A University of Illinois student went to a bookstore & asked the saleswoman, "Where's the self-help section?"
She said if she told him, it would defeat the purpose.

Have a great Friday!

In the novel the voice that speaks the first sentence, then the second, and so onward – call it the voice of the narrator – has, to begin with, no authority at all. Authority must be earned; on the novelist author lies the onus to build up, out of nothing, such authority. No one is better at building up authority than Tolstoy. In this sense of the word, Tolstoy is the exemplary author.
-- From Diary of a Bad Year, by J.M. Coetzee –

Life has loveliness to sell,
All beautiful and splendid things,
Blue waves whitened on a cliff,
Soaring fire that sways and sings,
And children's faces looking up

Well, here I am on the final leg of my holidays.
Still visiting. Still having fun. Still eating.
But come Monday, it is back to the coal mines for me. Tomorrow I will be boarding a plane and flying back home. Back to my meowing Jack, and the snowbanks I left behind in Ottawa.
At the end of each year I like to reflect upon the books I have read over the past 12 months. I reminisce about each one and see which come to the forefront as being especially memorable and worthwhile.

Well, I finally finished the frank Lloyd Wright biography. WOW!
What a wild book! What a wild life!
Today I am going to begin reading Sara Gruen’s [2006] novel, Water For Elephants.

INTERVIEWER: So how do you make that move in your writing process from a body of research to a story?

SARA GRUEN: I stare at the screen (laugh). I pick some music...I guess I figure out what the crisis of the book is going to be and then I sit down and I get my first scene. But once I have my first scene I really just have to keep going. My method is I spend an hour and a half sort of revving up every morning and I’ll read what I wrote the day before and maybe do a little revising of it, and then just keep going. I just read that last tiny little bit until I feel like I can continue.

I think us here to wonder, myself. To wonder. To ast. And that in wondering bout the big things and asting bout the big things, you learn about the little ones, almost by accident. But you never know nothing more about the big things than you start out with. The more I wonder, he say, the more I love.
And people start to love you back, I bet, I say.
They do, he say, surprise.

← “In a sense, this book is not an autobiography but a biography, because I am writing about someone I used to know.”
-- Steve Martin, on Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life –

Have a great Monday!

Just wondering…
Have you ever gotten involved with a book like for instance

Do you think God gets stoned?
← I think so . . . look at the platypus.
-- Robin Williams –

Have a great Tuesday!

Interviewer: What do you do about writer's block?

Well, today was back to reality.
I had six days off, and that is a rare thing for me… workaholic that I am!
My next vacation is in August.
That's like an ETERNITY away!
Ho-hum!
Must make little stones out of real big stones, until then!
I spent those six days of vacation with my best friend, and one of the things we managed to accomplish was the complete restoration of over 3,000 songs on my iTunes Library.
I lost all of them earlier this year in the Great Hard-Drive Crash of 2008!
Remember that? Remember my anguish?
Restoration was a lot of work, but fun, and worth it all.
I am addicted to iTunes on my Mac. Best invention since..... HAMBURGER!
I NEVER HAVE TO PUT IN A CD!

"I love film. But it can't in any way do what a book can. In the first place, a film has only two hours to make you fall for it. Not much time."
A Bookpuddle reader sent me the above comment.
Movies vs. Books.
We have wrestled with this subject before, haven’t we?
Anyone who argues that movies are superior, [how do I say this?] umm… their campfire is not one I want to warm my cold hands at.
Last weekend, I watched The Door in The Floor, hoping to see something worthy of John Irving’s A Widow For One Year. [Movie was re-named, and only went to Part One of a three-part novel].
I was very disappointed.
I agree with the above reader’s statement, which was in reference to the same movie.

I am sitting at Starbucks and just randomly thinking, as I sometimes do.
I am still slogging through a couple of non-fiction books, and just took a break from that to read a bit of the Nick Adams stories by Ernest Hemingway.
Just chillin’ out after a long day at work.
In this lull of a moment, while getting another coffee, three horrendously deep philosophically challenging scenarios have sprung unbidden into my mind, and I pose them to you…

#1.
You are wandering around in a blind fog and you are starving to death. Literally, you could almost die. Then the fog lifts, to reveal the following three equi-distant buildings. To which of these would you mostly likely drag yourself?

a) McDonalds.

Years later, when he tried to remember what the maiden idealized by the alchemy of poetry really was like, he could not distinguish her from the heartrending twilight of those times. Even when he observed her, unseen, during those days of longing when he waited for a reply to his first letter, he saw her transfigured in the afternoon shimmer of two o’clock in a shower of blossoms from the almond trees where it was always April regardless of the season of the year.
-- From Marquez’s Love In The Time of Cholera –

Even in translation, so beautiful. I’m really enjoying this book.
Have a great Monday!
**********

Seldom will I flagrantly endorse a book.
Seldom will I compel you to RUN to the store and buy a book.
Seldom is one as god… I mean as good as this one is, though.
And, it has just been issued in paperback format, [not only in the U.S., but also here in the Great White North, I saw it just tonight, in all of its shiny paperback glory, at Chapters…] so…. now you have no excuse.