Today was a pretty quiet day, for being such a major holiday. I went to my grandma’s and we ate ham (?). I made peanut butter pie, my aunt made peanut butter pie. My grandma made some corn stuff, my aunt make some corn stuff. I felt kind of bad for my aunt.
My grandma ate pie right out of the pan, which was probably the best part of the dinner, especially when she put the pan back down as soon as we grabbed our cameras.
There weren’t very many of us this year. Only about fifteen of us when there used to be at least twice as many people all packed into my grandma’s tiny house. It seemed too quiet this year. I missed all the noise. I even missed being banished to the living room where I would claim the TV in rebellion, watching A Christmas Story instead of football. I missed playing Hungry Hungry Hippos and harassing all my cousins.
At least I still get to go shopping tomorrow with my sister. Then it’s back to Iowa and work.
So it’s been obsenely long since I blogged about anything, and today seemed as good a day as any.
I am currently sitting in my room listening to Julia Nunes, who by the way is a fantastic musician who you should listen to as soon as possible. In fact, I’ll even make it easier for the lazy people:
Anyway, I’m sitting in my room, but I’m about to leave and go to the grocery store, in the RAIN, just because I can. I’ve been kind of in a funk lately, but after an impromtu trip up to the cities to retrieve the last of the pottery that I made my last semester, and the fact that the weather has turned distintly fall-ish, has drastically improved my mood.
In other news, I moved to Des Moines, IA about a month ago to look for jobs. Things are still pretty up in the air, but I’m hoping to get a job in a bookstore soon.
Well I better get to the grocery store. If anyone is interested, I’ve tried to fill out my book reviews a bit, and I just posted one for A Farewell to Arms. I’m fairly doubtful that I’ll be able to make my goal of getting to 100 books before the New Year, but I’ll keep going on the list until I do get to 100, just to see how long it takes me.
I think I’ve been getting more hits since I haven’t had time to blog than when I was posting regularly. I’m not sure whether that is an insult or not. Maybe I should just shrug and be happy about it.
I’ve been adding to my 2009 booklist, and I will add mini-reviews post-graduation when I’m not writing two major papers and taking tests. The latest one is The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman. You can hear Neil reading the whole book here, though I would also recommend buying it as it is a quite wonderful bit of writing.
The other day I wrote a post presenting some of the problems that are going on in the publishing industry right now.
Basically, people are panicking because some dubious statistics are saying that people read less, and a lot of the big publishers are freaking out and either firing people or publishing a lot of books that look (pretty much) exactly the same.
The problem with this reaction is that I don’t want to read twelve books that sound almost exactly the same. I went to Target the other day and there was an entire shelf of knock-offs of Marley and Me.*
The thing is, I don’t know what I want to read. I walk into the bookstore and there are so many books that look good that I almost have an aneurysm trying to decide. Most of the time I end up buying something that a friend has read and recommended. I keep a list, actually, of books that people have recommended to me.
I’m tired of publishers trying to guess what people want to read. Most of the time they’re wrong, anyway. I think that what publishers need to do is stop worrying about making money and concentrate on publishing books that are written well. If that means more small publishing houses and fewer of the massive ones, then that’s what should happen.
But then, what do I know? I’m just a reader.
*Also, someone who commented on my last post reminded me about the incident of Harry Potter, which, according to publishers at the time, wasn’t supposed to be popular.
Today I was wandering around youtube, like I tend to do, and I ran across this video
Obviously, it is very important that these kids get adopted by someone in the long-term. So after I watched the video I went straight to the article to see if by some stretch they actually talked about the man’s actual rather than implied health status and lo and behold they did. Here’s what the man in question, Damien Hall had to say:
I’m not a couch potato and I don’t sit eating takeaways every night. I just feel as though we were only judged on my weight and not all the other good things about us. We don’t drink or smoke and we could give a child a safe and happy home. I’m 24.5 stone, that’s what it eventually comes down to. Everything stops because of one element.
His wife had this to say:
We had an inkling they’d say something about weight – but to be turned down flatly just on that, it’s just harsh. My husband has a full-time job and is very active. He walks our dog at least twice a day and doesn’t feel unfit or unwell.
I think that it is ridiculous that they are turning this couple down because of potential health problems in the future. Anyone can get sick somewhere down the road and there are a lot of people out there who “look healthy” who have terrible problems with their health.
What do you guys think? Join the discussion here or in the comments of Jazza’s video.
