Book Review, etc: Funny You Should Ask by Elissa Sussman

This post got long because I had a surprising number of thoughts. Since I can't imagine anyone is all that interested, I decided not to divide it in two. This is the goodreads review I wrote of Funny You Should Ask, a romance novel by Elissa Sussman, followed by further reflections, because the book has been the subject of a minor controversy that I knew nothing about until after I was done reading (and writing my review).

----------So the review I wrote, slightly edited:

Funny You Should Ask by Elissa Sussman

Ten years ago, Chani Horowitz was just starting out as a journalist when she was handed the chance of a lifetime, an interview with Gabe Parker, the actor who had been chosen to be the new James Bond. The story she wrote after spending a crazy weekend with him ended up going viral and changing both their lives.

They've barely seen each other since, but now Gabe’s career has nosedived and his PR team wants her to do it again. Funny You Should Ask is a complicated story that moves back and forth between ten years ago and the current time, but it reads easily— Sussman does a great job of managing the timelines so we get just enough information to move the story along. What did happen during that weekend?

What worked really well for me was the story of a smart, maybe over-educated writer who is trying to reconcile her career of writing “puff” pieces with the more serious careers of her former grad school friends. Chani’s story was pitch perfect. 

What didn’t work so well for me is the same old stuff that hasn’t worked well in almost every recent romance novel I’ve read. And since I’m clearly in the minority, I’ll just make myself sound ridiculous by saying it, but I find it tedious to read through (literal) pages and pages of how strong their sexual attraction to each other is. OK, so you want to lick him. Got it. I don't need two pages of elaboration. That stuff is easy to skim over, though, so not necessarily a deal breaker if the rest of the story is good, and in this case, it is. 

There’s another aspect of the story that had me doubtful, though. I’ve lived in Montana for thirty years, and it’s rare that a writer who doesn’t live here gets it right. So when Gabe turned out to be a Montana native, I rolled my eyes. Montana so often means some symbolic thing to people — it’s romanticized and westernized and sanitized; people who have only visited in the summer in the tourist areas, or winter in the ski towns, don’t get the reality of life here.

But I'm giving Sussman a pass on this, mainly because she didn’t make the mistake of trying too hard. In fact, you have to wonder why she picked Montana, because the handful of scenes that are set here could have been in Wyoming or Colorado or even the Sierra Nevadas. At least there was no wrinkled old ranch hand named Willy who’d known Gabe since he was knee-high and taught him everything he knows about riding a horse. In fact, she leaves horses out of it entirely. There are a lot of people who ride horses in Montana (and more who don’t), but again—super hard to get it right, so good for her.

Besides the obvious wish-fulfillment/fantasy aspect of a world-famous movie star falling in love with a nerdy nobody, the development of Chani's and Gabe's story is believably done. I read it on vacation, and it was exactly the kind of book I wanted to read at the time. Highly recommended if you're in the same sort of mood.

p.s. Gabe is from the fictional town of Cooper, Montana. It didn't occur to me until after I was done reading the book that that is probably a nod to Gary Cooper, the actor and star of many westerns, who was from Helena. 

--------------------

(If that sounds appealing to you, please stop here and read it before continuing on.) 

Then at some point I was reading reader reviews on Goodreads and discovered that Sussman has come under fire for writing this book for a reason that struck me as puzzling. Apparently, Sussman said in an interview that the original idea for the story came from an interview that another writer did with Chris Evans (of Captain America fame) that appeared in GQ. The most upvoted review related the reader's outrage that Sussman never says this in the acknowledgements, never name-checks the other writer, plus more, and is therefore a reprehensible human being because she stole the idea and etc etc etc.

I disagree with the commenter on two fronts, and but it turns out that she changed my experience of reading the book for a reason I don't think she intended. So here goes: First off, she claims that a journalist having a drink with the subject of her interview and interacting with him/her on a personal level is unethical and unprofessional. I'm not a journalist, so I don't know if there are professional ethics standards here, but I call bullshit on this. 

For one thing, it's hard to imagine a similar claim being made if the interviewer were male. For another, there's a long, complex conversation already occurring around the impossibility of any journalist being able to remain "objective" and personally uninvolved in the story they're telling. The myth of the passive observer journalist is just that, a myth. At least in this case she is upfront about her involvement.

Also there's the claim that since Sussman started with something that someone else wrote, she is stealing someone else's idea. I didn't go check, but I don't think there's any accusation made that she actually cut and pasted the words of the GQ article, so I'm inclined to let this one go, too. If you handed the original interview to a room full of novelists and told them to go write a book loosely based on that article, you would get a room full of entirely different ways of working it out, even if you restricted them to writing romance novels. Are there any novels that spring up whole cloth out of the writer's imagination? It's hard to believe that there are.

I do agree that it might have been nice for Sussman to own up to the original spark for her story in the acknowledgements, but seriously-- I am not going to start judging authors for what is and is not in the afterword. Up until the 80s (90s?) or so, most books didn't even have acknowledgements. This is not as big a problem as the commenter wants it to be.

But on the other hand, having a real person identified as the fantasy Gabe really changed my feelings about the book. Chris Evans is someone I follow on social media, and he's someone I like and admire. Putting a real person's name and face on the character of Gabe gave it a ewwwwww factor that wasn't there while I was reading and just imagining some impossibly handsome nameless movie star. 

Honestly, it's surprising to me how much this changed my attitude toward the book, all in retrospect. I originally gave it five stars (I've told you before that I believe strongly in star-inflation, but let's not get off on that right now), and I even considered going back and knocking off a star or two just because of this. The older I get, the more sympathy I have for celebrities and how their "adoring" public must make it practically impossible to have a real life. Which I suppose you could argue, they are complaining about all the way to the bank, and you have a point. 

Trying to think of some smart thing to say in summary, but I can't. That's all. 

7ToT: I laughed at all of your jokes, my love you didn't need to coax

1. Since the last time I've posted a personal update, we flew down to Texas for a family wedding. It was the first time I've flown since February 2020. It seemed pretty safe-- I've had covid, and since there are many medical or medical-adjacent people in our family, most have been vaccinated. 

2. I don't think I told you that when I had covid last November, I didn't notice any changes to my sense of taste or smell. But then about a month ago, suddenly I could taste and smell again. It was subtle enough that I hadn't really noticed until it came back. Sort of like going from black&white to technicolor in the Wizard of Oz.

3. I've lived in Montana for so long now that I've lost the ability to dress the way people dress in other places. Around here, dressing up means you wear your new jeans. Or maybe your black jeans. I've never been to anything in Montana, no matter how fancy or formal, where there weren't people wearing jeans. Of course, if it's formal, some will dress up, but there are always jeans. 

4. The wedding in Texas was stated to be formal on the invitation, which is something I don't think I've ever even seen on a wedding invitation here locally. I ordered a couple of dresses from Nordstrom's, neither of which suited me or fit right, so finally I sent them back and pulled an old dress out of the back of my closet. Since I almost never dress up, even though it's an "old" dress, I'd only worn it once. It fit perfectly, and it was comfortable, and I had a pair of shoes to match, so I thought it was a total win. But there were no sequins or shiny bits, and I don't wear high heels. I didn't realize how under-dressed I was until I started looking at pictures after we got back. Oops. But I was only aunt of the bride, so probably nobody cared. 

5. This week's Interesting Listen: George Saunders (author of Tenth of December and Lincoln in the Bardo) has a new book out and he's been making the rounds of several of the podcasts I follow. He is always interesting. I was fascinated by his conversation with the So Many Damn Books guys. He is both a great writer and a long time teacher of writing (at Syracuse)(where Mary Karr also teaches, an embarrassment of riches), so if you're interested in Saunders or writing or teaching writing, definitely worth a listen. 

5a) bonus listen. I'm more cheap than I am vain, so chances are slim I will ever do cosmetic surgery or procedures (never say never, I guess). But if you're curious about what exactly people mean when they say they've "had a little work done," I thought this episode of Laura Tremaine's pod was fascinating.

6. This week's Interesting Read: Also if you're interested in writing or teaching writing, don't miss Craft in the Real World by Matthew Salesses. It's about reimagining the writing workshop, which has been hallowed ground in creative writing programs since the 1950s. He talks about the experience of being someone who is not a white straight cis male in a system that was designed for white straight cis males. Even when I disagreed, it was fascinating, but usually I was nodding my head. (for the record, that is not an affiliate link).

7. I got so tangled up trying to write part two of that last post that I punted. And because the problem was that I really, truly couldn't figure out what I was trying to say, it led to several days of deep thinking (danger, Will Robinson). Which in turn led to the not-very-surprising realization that I need some time away. I told you I was going to do this a couple of weeks ago, but then I kept on posting. It's hard to get out of the habit! Thanks for checking in. See y'around.

7ToF: we're reopening around here

This got long. Save it for when you have time.

1. The governor of Montana has started a three-phase plan for reopening the state, starting with allowing non-essential businesses to reopen, but keeping in place all of the social distancing guidelines, limiting groups to no more than 10, etc. Montana has the lowest incidence of COVID-19 of any state (per population), and most of the cases have been in Bozeman and a senior care facility in Shelby County.

2. Montanans as a group are nothing if not stubbornly opposed to anyone telling them what to do, and some have taken the lack of virus as a sign that the whole thing was just an over-reaction by the liberals who are trying to take control of our country. And, you know what? If we follow the rules of social distancing and cautious public gathering, maybe we will be able to avoid an outbreak long enough for a vaccine to be developed, and they will be able to believe that they were right.

3. Which is a really strange thing about this whole situation (among about a million other strange things). There are all these people, one is tempted to say all these idiots, who in spite of the mounting numbers of cases and deaths, are determined to believe that it's not really a crisis. That this is just another in a long string of examples of liberals over-reacting and getting hysterical about something that's really not a big deal, and that if we'd just treated it like the flu, it would have gone away-- and I wouldn't have lost my job/had to home school my kids/had to cancel my wedding/etc.

As, one is tempted to say, a more reasonable person, you're left in the strange situation of almost wanting things to get bad so that you can prove to these people that see, it really is a real thing. We're not exaggerating. It's like the classic lose-lose situation: either you're right, and hundreds of thousands more people are going to get sick and some of them die (lose); or you're wrong (lose), and those idiots are going to say they were right all along.

4. Anyway. I hate wearing a mask, I hate having anything on my face, and always have. But I'm wearing one, because Dean is one of the faces of our medical community, and I'm trying to be as supportive as I can. Sometimes I forget, but for the most part, when I'm in a building besides our house, I wear a mask. I have a bunch of oversized bandanas that I bought to use as napkins last year when I was trying to cut down on our use of paper products, so usually I wear one of those, quadruple folded. But as it is becoming more apparent that we are going to have to stay masked at least in certain situations for a long time, I finally got on Etsy and ordered half a dozen homemade masks. Yet another time I've wished I could sew.

5. I don't think I've talked all that much about my never-ending sickness, which I've had for a couple of months now. There is a fair amount of evidence that it's not COVID-- I'm pretty sure I did tell you about Mel's negative test when she went back to work after spring break, and it hasn't behaved like COVID seems to behave. But still, once antibody testing becomes widespread enough that I can justify getting tested, I am looking forward to finding out.

What I'm getting around to here is that I have had a lot more headaches than usual. In a good month, I have maybe 10-12 headache days, and about half of them will be bad enough to take migraine drugs. But recently, I've just had a headache all the time. I've had to not take migraine drugs, because I'm worried about running out. In the past month, I had maybe three or four days of feeling healthy and headache-free.

6. So I've finally decided I have to do something to make a change. And the only thing I can really try right now is changing the food I eat. I'm somewhat skeptical about this. Believe me, I tried all the things back when I was having a similar headache-intensive stretch in my 40s. I tried dairy-free, gluten-free, sugar-free, caffeine-free. Sugar and caffeine made a difference, although not a huge one--my headaches decreased in frequency, but were not "cured." Dairy and gluten made no difference at all.

7. But my metabolism has changed. It changed for the first time in my late 40s/early 50s as I was dealing with pre- and post-menopause. And now it seems to be changing again. For example: I've been drinking black tea with unsweetened soymilk first thing in the morning for more than a dozen years now, but more and more often, I come downstairs in the morning and the idea of tea is not appealing. Or coffee, but that's less surprising since my stomach dictated that I quit drinking coffee long ago. I've switched to green tea for the moment, but maybe it's time to get off caffeine again.

ALL THAT LONG RAMBLING MESS was just to tell you that I'm on an elimination diet at the moment. If it was for weight loss, my inner rebel would come out with flags flying and refuse to participate, but since it is to see if I can freaking feel better for a change, I seem to have sucked it up and gotten on board with the plan. I read about Whole30, but the logical inconsistencies in their theories made me nuts (don't get me started), so I just made up my own plan. No alcohol, which is easy because I don't drink much alcohol anyway, no dairy (not too hard since my only dairy is yogurt and cheese), no gluten (harder), and low sugar (which also comes under the heading of "don't get me started" but I'll save that for another post).

Who knows how long I'll be doing it. My initial commitment to myself was to try it for a week and see how I feel and re-evaluate. I'm five days in right now and although I do feel a bit better in terms of energy and general well-being, as I'm sitting here typing this I'm trying to decide whether or not this headache is bad enough to warrant migraine drugs. Ugh.

So in spite of that downer of an ending, other than physically not feeling well, I'm actually doing fine. I seem to have figured out a rhythm for sheltering at home, and my mental status is pretty good. Headaches are status quo for me, so having them isn't necessarily a sign that things are bad.

Have a great weekend. Sorry this got so long. It's about twenty things instead of seven.

7ToF: ding dong the decorations are dead

1. Finally got the Christmas decor put away. It seems like it took 7 or 8 hours divided between last night and today, but that can't be right, can it? No wonder I was dreading it. I do love all my Christmas tchotchkes but that seems a little excessive. If I had to do it again next week, I would do something about it. But by next December I will have forgotten, so I will do it all again. Happily.

2. Do you keep up with food and nutrition news? In the past few years, many of the sacred cows of healthy eating have fallen -- it's OK now to eat eggs, fat is no longer the big demon it once was, and more and more signs are pointing to sugar as the real problem in our diets-- and then did you notice that it's OK to eat full fat dairy products again? (as long as you can handle dairy, I guess. I have several lactose-intolerant friends/family.)

Montanans were never fooled. The dairy industry has been part of the local economy for decades, and long-time locals have never varied from their preference for full fat milk. If we have full fat milk at the food bank, it gets grabbed off the shelf so fast you'd think there were $20 bills inside. I used to think they were uneducated, but turns out they were right.

3. But you know what food advice has never, ever changed? Eat your vegetables. No one has ever come along with a fad diet that said to avoid vegetables. (Have they? given the insanity of the diet industry, maybe they have.) I was raised in the sixties and seventies in Middle America, when veggies were usually soggy and canned, or frozen and then overcooked. I was not a fan. Is there anything more disgusting than canned spinach? What was Popeye thinking? I didn't experience fresh veggies lightly cooked until I was in college. I liked those just fine.

4. But you can only get fresh, in-season veggies a few months of the year in Montana. So I am making a concerted effort to investigate creative ways to use winter vegetables, or frozen out-of-season ones. Maybe I will even try some canned ones. I read an article that with modern canning techniques, less time elapses between harvest and processing canned vegetables than getting them to your grocery store. (I'm still not doing canned spinach, though. I have my limits.)

5. The first try was cabbage. When I was a kid, cabbage was always a soggy, overcooked mess that smelled terrible. I was determined to try it, though, so I found a recipe in Joshua McFadden's Six Seasons cookbook for steamed cabbage. Result: I was so worried about overcooking it that it was still practically raw. The recipe called for coring and quartering the cabbage and then steaming the wedges and drizzling with butter, lemon, and thyme. But it was almost impossible to eat those big chunks (possibly because it was still crunchy-raw). I think I need to give it another try, because the outside leaves that were reasonably cooked tasted pretty good. What doesn't taste good with butter and lemon drizzled over?

6. However. It was also a perfect illustration of the problem with organic produce (at least after it has been shipped three or four states over to Montana). The 3 lb head of organic cabbage was nearly $7. I bought a 2-pound pork roast (hormone- and antibiotic-free and no additives) that was less expensive than the cabbage. It's ridiculous. (The pork roast was also an experiment, I'd never cooked one before. It was OK. We are not big eaters of roasts.) It's not going to break our bank to pay $7 for a head of cabbage, but that puts it out of the reach of many. We're talking about cabbage.

7. Lots going on around here. It always seems a little silly to announce that I'm taking a break, because why don't I just do it without feeling like I need to tell everyone? Plus, I'm not sure how long I'll be offline. Maybe a weekend will be enough. Or maybe I'll post once a week instead of twice. But since I'm in the sort-of habit of posting on Tuesday and Friday, it always feels like I should give you a heads up if I'm going to miss one or two. Or ten. Last time I said I'd be gone at least a month and it only ended up being a couple of weeks (did you notice?).

This week's interesting read: hope vs. cynicism (from 2015)

Have a great weekend.

7ToF: take a long ride on my motorbike

1. Here we are again, sim-ply--hav-ing--a wonderful Christmas time!! For better or for worse, I'm one of those who love Christmas. I love the music, and the movies; I get all sentimental as I'm unpacking the Christmas decorations; I love getting Christmas cards, even the family newsletters.

2. But I know not everyone does. So for those of you who bear with the Christmas onslaught with gritted teeth and mounting depression, I hope you can find creative ways this year to get through it. There should be a badge or a lapel pin or a secret handshake so the anti-Xmasers can find each other.

3. This week's interesting read: an article in The Atlantic about parks that allow kids to explore and experiment without adult supervision (it was actually published in 2014 but I just ran across it a couple of days ago). We all assume that the world isn't as safe as it used to be, but the idea of these parks makes me happy. Back in the day, we ran all over the neighborhood, walked to school nearly a mile away, and played with matches (although only after my mom lit a single hair on fire to show us how flammable human hair is). All without adult supervision.

4. But I'm definitely not encouraging you to get nostalgic about the past. In fact, it occurred to me this week that maybe that's part of the problem we're having these days-- all of our visions of the future are dystopian, while we watch endless Hallmark/Lifetime Christmas movies that idealize small-town rural living as if it were still 1956. I enjoy living in a small town, but I can promise you that not everyone is warm-hearted, generous, and tolerant (for example, me). For every good thing about small town life (and there is a lot that is good), there's a downside. Why can't we imagine an urban future that is vibrant, friendly, positive? I don't know-- no answers, I've just been thinking about this.

5. I bought an Instant Pot when they were on sale over Labor Day weekend, but I hadn't even taken it out of the box until this week. I've made a couple of things with it now, and I'm impressed. It's definitely not instant-- you still have to chop onions or whatever, and the cook time that the recipe specifies doesn't include the time it takes to come up to pressure, or to release pressure when you're done. But it does all happen in one pot, which makes it seem simple. I think I'm going to like it.

6&7. We went to see Bohemian Rhapsody this past weekend. I told you about my love for Queen on Tuesday, and I've written about it before in this post. Also back when I was trying to write novels, one of my favorite scenes I ever wrote was a woman my age who breaks her ankle, and in the backseat of her daughter's boyfriend's ancient car, high on percodan on the way home from the ER, she belts out the entire six minutes of Bohemian Rhapsody. So I have a history with Queen, and I wasn't sure if I'd like the movie, especially given the terrible reviews.

It is easy to pick it apart-- it's more than a little weird that Brian May and Roger Taylor were involved and they made themselves out to be pretty blameless; the costumes look like something you'd see at your office 70s party, and could they not afford decent wigs? And why would you make Freddie's teeth worse than they were in real life? I was never able to forget that Rami Malek had a mouthpiece in. Good grief.

And then I came home and did some fact checking and discovered that it wasn't all that accurate. I loved Queen's music, but it was back in the days before the internet, so I didn't really know that much about them. You couldn't google "What is Freddie Mercury's real name?" and get an instant answer back then. They definitely played fast and loose with the facts and the timeline in the name of creating drama where there wasn't any--Queen never really broke up, and in fact had been touring together right before Live Aid; Roger Taylor put out a solo album before Freddie did; Freddie's AIDS diagnosis was probably a couple of years after LiveAid.

So I don't know what to tell you. In spite of all those reasons not to like it, I had a great time just listening to Queen's music on a massive sound-surround system for an hour and a half. In fact, I'm thinking about going to see it again. But if you don't like their music, it probably won't change your mind.

Have a great weekend. Stay warm out there -- we were down to single digits this morning.

Nov 18 Day 8: when the weather outside is frightful

Suddenly it is cold here (the high today was 34), which reminds me of the best bits of cold weather advice I've collected over the years. Some of you will never need this, and then there are some of you who could probably contribute more. 

7ToF: Fruit salad, fresh air, Burts Bees, and filling up

1. When we first moved to Montana 26 years ago, it seemed so exotic, like we were moving to the edge of the known world. It felt like a Real Adventure. Then we got here, and realized that there is an entire country north of us, a vast country, and we're nowhere near the edge of the world. Really it's astonishing how ignorant I was about Canada before we moved here.

2. But that's not the point I was going to make. Montana is gorgeous, and there are plenty of world class outdoor adventures available, but it is also pure Midwest. A small town in Montana is going to bear a remarkable similarity to any town anywhere in middle America. And that means that we do POTLUCKS. Often. When our church has a potluck, there is enough food to feed twice as many people as are there, and you can feel your arteries hardening just looking at the spread. I adore potlucks.

3. So after 26 years of experience with potlucks, I'm telling you that if you don't particularly like to cook, the answer is fruit salad. All you do is buy a bunch of fruit (apples, bananas, and grapes at a minimum) and cut it up, and everyone loves it. If they're not too outrageously expensive, throw in a pint of blueberries, or pomegranate seeds, or sliced strawberries. If it's February and all the fruit is sad looking, you can stir in some vanilla yogurt, but I usually just go with bare fruit, since after it sits for 30 minutes, it creates its own dressing with the fruit juices.

4. As a fruit salad aficionado, I've been intrigued recently to see a new development: fruit and veggie salads. Just like a regular fruit salad, except with chopped up carrots or halved snap peas or even bits of radish thrown in. It's great. I've had green salads with oranges or strawberries or blueberries plenty of times, so it makes reverse sense, I'd just never thought of it. Thumbs up.

5. There are lots of cool things about winter (XC skiing, alpine skiing, ice skating, fires in the fireplace, Christmas), but one of the things I don't like is having the house all closed up. I like fresh air. So we've still got windows open trying to get every last bit of non-frigid air before the cold sets in. The longer I live here, the harder it is to remember the good things about winter, especially since the last two winters have been truly harsh. I'm really working on not feeling a sense of dread that winter is inevitably closing in.

6. Is anybody else having post-menopause chapped lips? It started for me a few months ago, maybe back in May or June. Some days it's so bad that I have to put chapstick or vaseline on in the morning so I can get my mouth open. Dean told me the name for it, which of course I can't remember right now. He's got me using over-the-counter cortisone cream, which helps, but I'd really like it to just go away. If you have any advice let me know.

7. I'm a little bit proud that I have never, ever run out of gas. (excuse me while I stop and knock on wood.) So it was odd the night before last when I had a long, extended, very vivid dream about running out of gas. I was on an interstate, and hadn't even noticed that my tank was low. I realized I was completely out of gas as my car died. When I woke up, I was so distracted by the vividness of it and by bemusement at the fact that I ran out of gas that I missed the obvious dream interpretation at first. If I managed to schedule this correctly, as you're reading it, I'm on a quick trip to the west coast, so I hope that next week I will be all tanked up. Maybe I just need a few days away.

Have a great weekend!

7ToF: my kid likes pride and prejudice

1. My eighteen-year-old would rather ski or hunt or play golf or stick needles under his fingernails than read these days, although he enjoyed reading when he was younger. But Jane Austen has won him over. He's reading P&P for AP English and he sheepishly confessed at dinner last night that he kind of likes it. Mic drop.

2. Politics. LA LA LA LA LA *fingers in my ears*

3. So everybody knows that mom jeans are totally lame (even though we all wore them back in the 80s before we had kids, so they weren't mom jeans then). Nobody wears them anymore. They're embarrassing. Except you know what? I bought a pair by accident about a month ago (bought them online, didn't read the description very carefully) and omg I had forgotten what comfortable jeans feel like. They are awesome. I've never worn low-rise jeans, because hello two pregnancies and menopause, but I had made the switch to mid-rise. Not anymore. I have returned to my roots. 

4. I re-read A River Runs Through It this week as background for my Montana Short Stories class. It's too long to read as one of our stories, but it's the gold standard for Montana literature, so I thought it would be good to have it fresh in my mind. It was both better and worse than I remembered from the last time I read it a dozen years ago. I remembered it as more of a fable or a morality tale than anything else, with not much to say beyond setting up the metaphor of fishing and life. But it is more than that: the love of a wayward brother you cannot save, the mix of honorable and dishonorable traits in the same young man, the play of  the narrator's life, lived within the lines, against his borther's wreckless life, inevitably gone too soon. And of course there are some breathtakingly lovely descriptions of rivers and fishing. But it has the annoying problem (shared by Guthrie's The Big Sky, Montana's other literary claim to fame) of a view of women that is so dated as to be almost unreadable. The old dichotomy between the angel in the home and the whore at the bar is blatant. Still, definitely worth reading.

5. Over the winter, our seven chickens were averaging two eggs a day, which is about perfect for the amount of eggs we eat. Then several days this past week there were five eggs. Maybe because the days are longer? (although not much longer, sunset was at 5:40 today.) Who knows. They're tough little things. There's still quite a bit of snow on the ground and they get out and scratch around in it every day.

6. We watched way too much Big Bang Theory a few years ago and got heartily sick of it. We didn't watch it for about a year and a half. But we've been catching up on the episodes we missed over the past few weeks, and they really do have an amazing team of writers. They've done some pretty creative stuff to keep it interesting. If they would just ditch the laugh track it might be my favorite sitcom ever. We've also been watching lots of movies (see previous statement about sunset at 5:40). Most of them were just a way to pass an evening, but if you haven't seen Once, it's really good. Kind of slowly paced, character-driven, with lots of music. 

7. Weight Watchers update: still doing it. Still slowly losing weight. I may not adore it like some do but it's working, so I'm not complaining.

Have a great weekend.

Day 25: oh the weather outside is frightful

We had our first real winter storm today. It was a typical winter storm for us, the kind we get 2-3 times a year: half a foot of snow coming down sideways. (Hmmm, is it coming down if it's blowing sideways?) Of course, there are the ones that are considerably worse, which we only get once a year, or maybe twice.

And although I never like it when this happens in November, it's not like it's the first time we've had one this early. The worst experience I had during the three years I drove back and forth to Missoula for grad school was in November.

We lived through this one. A friend ended up in a ditch, I saw three fender benders, and traffic was a bear, but the house is warm and we didn't lose power, so it's all good. And the boys are thrilled because skiing.