Covering a Classic

Hi people! I know, it's been too long, I suck at blogging on a regular basis, etc. etc. While we were apart, here's what happened to me. I got a part time job at my local Borders here in Brentwood. I will be the Children's Book Specialist, which is basically the job title I would have made up for myself in a fantasy world, so how fortuitous that it turned out to be real!

For these first few days I've just been learning the basics. Days one through three, I spent almost all my time at the register. Having never worked retail before, it was a whole new world for me! A little nerve wracking when something out of the ordinary comes up, but I'm getting the hang of it. The past two days I've spent shelving (or as I apparently pronounce it, "shelfing"), which means taking all the new books that come in and putting them in order where they belong on the shelves. It's a bit of a puzzle, as each shelf has to be full, but books with several copies have to be facing out, and all the books have to stay in order, but also make room for all the new product. So there is lots of scooting stuff around and squeezing things to fit.

The primary function of this task is apparently to taunt me with book after book that I am inspired to add to my must-read list. I was having a hard enough time keeping up with the books I knew about; now I discover there is a whole world of books I DIDN'T EVEN KNOW EXISTED that I also want to read!

One other thing I've come to realize is that the phrase "don't judge a book by its cover" is kind of ridiculous when actually referring to books. Probably half the books I come across that I pick up suck me in first by having an awesome or interesting cover. Ah, you got me again, marketing! (Shakes fist.)

For example, today I shelved these really gorgeous new editions of three classics. Penguin commissioned artist Ruben Toledo to illustrate these covers, and I wanted to buy them just for prettiness sake. Take a look:




I love the Wuthering Heights one especially, with the caricatures of haughty Heathcliff and crazy Cathy, and the fabulous way the really intricate branches are drawn into the defined shapes of the trees. What a great way to hook readers into picking up these classics.

What's a book cover you are especially crazy about or have a vivid memory of? Share in the comments!

Yadi Love

Seems ESPN finally realized what Cardinals fans have known for a few years now... that Yadier Molina is delightful and so much fun to watch and his adorable mug will sell this magazine to women!


And, also, in a related story, he is THE best catcher in baseball.

Unexpected

I recently checked out Salinger's Franny & Zooey from the library. I always loved The Catcher in the Rye, and its protagonist Holden is one of my favorite characters in literature. Since Salinger only published a handful of works before withdrawing into his famously reclusive life, I figured I should give one of his other books a try.

It was a quick little read, and is technically composed of two novellas which were initially published separately, nearly two years apart, in The New Yorker. The stories concern a couple particular members of the Glass family, in this case Franny, the youngest, and Zooey, her older brother and the youngest son.

I expected and found rambling characters like Holden, struggling with becoming adults, struggling with making sense of life and more immediately, their own thoughts and actions, all described in the frank and coarse language that put The Cather in the Rye on banned book lists.

What I didn't expect was one character's sudden but impassioned discourse on the person of Jesus Christ, and what it means to pray to and follow Him.

This is but one example of why I truly believe that God's power to reveal Himself is not limited only to the work of those who intend to do so. Salinger is not, at least by all accounts at the time he was being published, a Christian. But something of the truth of God was in these pages as I read them, as Zooey struggled to explain to his sister why she ought to think carefully about who she was praying to and how. Here are a few of the quotes that leveled me.

If you're going to say the Jesus Prayer, at least say it to Jesus, and not to St. Francis and Seymour and Heidi's grandfather all wrapped up in one. Keep him in mind if you say it, and him only, and him as he was and not as you'd like him to have been... The part that stumps me, really stumps me, is that I can't see why anybody... would even want to say the prayer to a Jesus who was the least bit different from the way he looks and sounds in the New Testament... Who in the Bible besides Jesus knew - knew - that we're carrying the Kingdom of Heaven around with us, inside, where we're all too ****** stupid and sentimental and unimaginative to look?

To try and understand the whole person of Christ, as he was, not to cringe away from or try and ignore the difficult parts about who he was and what he taught... what a sobering, convicting challenge. The Jesus who sacrificed himself and loved and healed was also the Jesus who threw tables in the temple, who told me to take up my own cross if I want to follow him, who taught things that are radical and absolute, things utterly at odds with the easy life offered by this world. I have to follow, to love, to obey the whole Jesus. Though more difficult to understand, he's infinitely better and more worthy than any other version I might construct.

Ben's Videos!

This is what Ben has been traveling and putting in 80 hour weeks for! These beautiful videos were, for the most part, shot and edited by Ben, and I'm so proud to share them with you!

To view all the videos and the complete site, visit http://www.yamaha.com/allaccess360/. I embedded some of my favorites below.

Birthday Week!

Ben's an 8-2-82, I'm an 8-8-83. That means the first week of August is Birthday Week in our house!

I love nearly sharing a birthday with my husband, but it was a change coming from a family where everybody's birthdays are spaced throughout the year. Ashley is in January, Mom's in March, I'm in August, Dad is in November. Since we've been married, Ben and I always have a big co-birthday celebration because we know we'll have to wait a whole year before we get to celebrate again! It was actually one of the reasons we decided to get married in March instead of waiting til summer, so we would have something else to celebrate the other 359 days of the year.

I thought it would be fun to take a look back on our birthday celebrations from the past couple years...

2006 we celebrated even more things at once with a combination birthday-birthday-housewarming party. The house was as clean like it will never be clean again, since we'd just moved in about a month before. Ben got to fire up his brand new grill. There were hotdogs and brats and it was as hot as August in Nashville can be.

2007 was the year of the FIESTA! We had a rockin' good party featuring the first appearance of the Wii. There was a donkey pinata named Paco. I made fajitas to feed 50. BYOB. Good times all around.

2008 we spent birthday week in Estes Park Colorado, and I had the most magical of all birth-dates ever in the history of birthdays... 08-08-08! It was so fun we just kept chanting it! The discovery of the brookie. White water kayaking. I met Bethany Dillon. Friends and family and all the good stuff.

WILL 2009 top them all? Well, let's just put it this way. There's going to be this:


And lots of it. So bring on the festivities, it's birthday week 2009!

Blackberry Bottoms

Okay, so I tweeted that I was going to attempt these cupcakes a couple days ago. I did, and here they are for your inspection.

I had purchased some gorgeous fat blackberries from the farmers market last weekend, and I knew I wanted to use them in a dessert. I chickened out on a pie. Plus, I don't like pie. Instead, I went with cupcakes. I intended for these to be buttermilk vanilla cupcakes with blackberry centers/filling. Instead what happened is the berries were too heavy and fell through the batter as they baked, ending up on the bottom of each cupcake. So I rechristened them Blackberry Bottoms.

That's the bad news. Construction, fail.

The good news? They still tasted real delicious. Kind of muffin-esque. And all that means is that I can convincingly eat them as a breakfast food. Oh. Yes.


Plus, you can't tell there's anything awry at all... very innocent and proper looking...


Until... chomp chomp. The blackberries have been located.

Coldplay's "Strawberry Swing" and its Music Video Muses

Twitter was a-buzz today with kudos for the new Coldplay video. It IS pretty awesome, and you can see it here. (I couldn't find a good embeddable version.)

I wasn't completely overwhelmed, however, because it so reminded me of Oren Lavie's beautiful stop-motion video for the song "Her Morning Elegance."



I first saw the video in this post from Inkdryer's blog. Coldplay obviously turned it up a notch with the crazy cool chalk animation but I like the way the other video used the real items as props, like the sock fish.

And, while we're at it, someone already fought psychotic squirrels in a music video, and that someone was David Crowder. Case in point.

PS. Sorry, I fail at blogging lately. I will try not to wait two weeks between posts again!

Happy

Your turn!

Complete the sentence: "Today I will be happier than _______."

This adorable print found at Studio Mela on Etsy.

Grill Master

From the always awesome Toothpaste For Dinner:



From my backyard, yesterday, apx. 7:00 pm:


Love you, my little grill-master!

PS. Thanks Heather for the link!

Cupcakes Two Ways

Yesterday I had fun experimenting with two new frostings for cupcakes, and got some lovely results!

First up was strawberry buttercream, made with some fresh strawberries. I cut off the very edges of the berries to get rid of the seed thingies, and then smashed them up and blended them in with some vanilla buttercream. I piped that onto the dark chocolate fudge cupcakes and great googly moogly, did they turn out beautifully!


Next I made some chocolate buttercream with half semi-sweet and half dark chocolate. I figured that would cut nicely the sweetness of the sugar in the frosting. I crushed some cocoa-roasted almonds (such as these) and dusted the tops of the cupcakes to finish. YUMMY.


One of the perils of piping with buttercream frosting is that it is suceptible to heat. Since it is made with butter, it can get melty sitting at room temperature or go soft from the heat of your hand in the piping bag. But I can't bear to make frosting with shortening, which gives it this greasy sort of taste, so I just tried to keep the frosting cool at the various stages of decorating, and it seemed to work out okay. The chocolate, in fact, gave me some trouble because it wasn't very pliable after I stuck the piping bag in the fridge for a few minutes. I had to knead it around a bit to get it working. But to me the taste of real butter in the frosting is totally worth it.

Next I think I am going to make my first attempt at some sort of cake or cupcake with a filling... stay tuned!