Reading and Wall Washing

 I admit that I’ve spent the pandemic reading a lot of trashy books. With Kindle’s free Unlimited you can get a vast range of---shall we say---writing skills. Some books are just too stupid for words yet they have no trouble stringing a bunch of them together and calling them a book. I never write reviews of those too-stupid-for-words books because I’m quite sure if I’d been born a few decades later than I was some of those hardcopy manuscripts I had stored in the basement and I finally downsized out of my life last summer would have made their way to a self-published book on Amazon Unlimited where no one apparently proof-reads them or edits the content for quality. It takes enormous dedication and guts to get a book written and I'm not about to step on someone else's dream and, yes, I'm one of those people who thinks every little kid deserves a participation ribbon. Time to sort out the winners from the losers when kids are old enough to figure out what they enjoy doing. I sound like my mother. "I don't care what after school class you take, but you WILL keep taking classes until you find something you like doing." She didn't actually say those words but when I was an adult it's what she told me when I asked why she turned me into class-aholic and herself into a chauffeur.

I’ve read that real publishing companies routinely comb the stats at Amazon looking for those writers who know how to promote the heck out of their work and have parlayed themselves into great sales with a track record of favorable reader reviews. Those who can do that eventually land themselves honest-to-goodness book deals. The author of Fifty Shades of Grey comes to mind---barfing my breakfast up on that one---and Andy Weir who wrote one of my all-time favorite books, The Martian, are two examples. The latter of which I read free on Amazon before he made it big and his book was turned into a movie.

Another example of someone who was discovered through Amazon Unlimited was Mike Omer and his mystery, A Killer’s Mind that outsold J.K. Rowling, James Patterson, and Stephen King one summer. Some others who started out as self-published and made it big include: Christopher Paolini (Inheritance Cycle), Lisa Genova (Still Alice) and Amanda Hocking (My Blood Approves). So even though reading Amazon Unlimited books can be a hit and miss thing you can still find some thought provoking stuff. Not so much in the romance genre where I tend to hang out but I’ve come to the conclusion that the genre makes sense for me. 1) I was so boy crazy as a teenager I can hardly stand looking back at those embarrassing years. 2) People watching has long been a favorite hobby of mine and living vicariously through the pages of a book where people fall in love puts me in a better mood than reading a thriller, for example, where I start looking at others as a possible threat to home and body. I admire Stephen King, practically worship his writing prowess but I can't sleep nights with one of his books in bed with me.

Nope, if the pandemic has done anything for me it’s made me come out of the reading closet, no long hiding or being ashamed my preferred reading genre. The last romance I read, for example, was a weirdly engaging book about a famous artist who lost his sight for a year due to a car accident and then he gets eye transplants of eyes from a photographer who was once engaged to a woman the artist couldn’t stop thinking about after they met and who he couldn't stop painting before they met. The whole premise of the story line was that our eyes are the windows to our souls and the soul remembers... Oops, sorry about the spoiler but I doubt anyone reading this will pop over to Amazon to find The Girl in the Painting. And if the title sound familiar it's because I shared a quote from it in my last blog. “She is the red string on my finger. I can’t forget her.”

Change of topics: The project I’m doing this week around the house involves working my way toward staging my house. My library room that used to have two walls lined with book shelves and hundreds of books now has only one wall of empty shelves and the sleeper chair that was sharing a room with my artist easel and arty-farty supplies got moved to my library that is now rebranded as an office/guest room. The son-I-wish-I-had came over to help me move the furniture around including moving an antique Morris chair patent dated in the 1800s and monster size showcase with four sides of glass. They went out to the garage where I’ll try to sell them in the spring. We agreed that transporting the showcase in the winter would be a major problem for a buyer, so there's no point advertising it now. I’ve been busy washing the walls in those two rooms and spreading the art stuff out to take over the whole space. I finished the "room swap/rebranding project" and the photo at the top of my sleeper chair corner in one room and the photo at the bottom is of one end of the other room I call my art room. I'm really proud of those clean walls! And in case you're wondering why I don't have my window blind pulled all the way down  in the office/guest room it's because that's my dog's window to the world of other canines.

As for me at my age washing walls, I’ve got a special mop with a round head that I use exclusively for washing walls which means I don’t have to get on ladders. Next week, though, I have someone coming out to give me a price on washing the walls in my living room and adjoining dining area. Those walls are too high for my mop and I have too many heavy pieces of art hung for me to wrestle them off and back on the walls. While he was here, the-son-I-wish-I-had and I went over the master plan of what all has to be done to get ready before the house goes up for sale. My 'To Do' list is getting shorter and most of it involves stuff that can't be done until spring or can't be done without some help from others. I'll get there but I'm getting sick of making decisions. Like what color to paint my deck furniture that Tim took with him when he left and dropped off to a body shop where it will get sandblasted and painted with car paint that will outlast me. The vintage chair, side table and foot stool will only cost me $150 to paint and if I had to buy new deck stuff I'd spend that much if not more. But I'm so worn out from decisions and I sometimes need to remind myself why I'm going through all the trouble. Monday, though, it will start feeling real. I have an appointment to go to the construction site where I'll actually get my first look inside my unit. ©

This is the chair that's getting painted "Liquid Jade" (see color chip below). It's a really comfortable chair---rocks a little, the wire mess makes it cool to sit in and the arms make it easy to get out of. The deck siding the chair will go against is a dark gray and I'll get a colorful outdoor rug for the space.

 

This is one end of my art room. I think people will be able to visualize it as a bedroom now.

Since a few people asked, this is my mop... I call it a round headed mop but it really isn't. There's a pump action part on the handle that moves those two rollers down to squeak out the water.

The Goldfinch and the Book Club

When I first looked at the novel my monthly Book Club selected I was overwhelmed. It was 771 pages and as I thumbed through the book I felt like I was back in grade school where I often got hopelessly bogged down in the minutia of trying to sound out words. The book was filled with foreign words and art and antique terms that were so far out of my vocabulary that they might have been written in Klingon and I knew I’d struggle too much to read The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. Perfectly timed to my dilemma, a gift from the gods of Amazon came along---an offer for two free audible books appeared in my email box. I downloaded The Goldfinch so fast I’m surprised my Kindle Fire didn’t squeal like a stuck pig in the process, but I soon figured out that the volume on the device was so low that even with my hearing aids in I had to sit in my La-Z-Boy with the Kindle on a table three feet away. A master at multitasking I thought about knitting something while Kindle read to me, but instead I ended up following along, my eyes touching every single word in the entire book. Wow!  Thirty-two and a half hours of listening and I did it all over five days which should tell you something about how highly I’d rate the book. That's definitely the way to devour books that intimidate you. 

I loved the characters, loved the story line and looked forward to discussing them both in Book Club. The depth of the author’s knowledge and/or research abilities blew me away. The book is being made into a movie coming out next year and out of curiosity I wanted to see how IMDb summed up the plot and can you believe it, they did it in one lousy sentence! “A boy in New York is taken in by a wealthy Upper East Side family after his mother is killed in a bombing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.” Wikipedia did a better job saying: “The novel is a Bildungsroman told in the first person by Theodore Decker who, at the age of 13, survives a terrorist bombing at an art museum in which his beloved mother dies. Staggering out through the debris, he takes with him a small, Dutch Golden Age painting, The Goldfinch, which will serve as a singular source of hope as he descends into a world of crime. The painting is one of the few surviving works by Rembrandt's most promising pupil, Carel Fabritius; nearly all of Fabritius' oeuvre was destroyed in the Delft explosion of 1654, in which the artist himself was killed.” I dare anyone reading this to tell me what “bildungsroman” means without looking it up. Give up? It’s just a fancy way to say it’s a coming of age story. 

Book Club took place just a few hours before a major snow storm was due to hit the area. All of us showed up with the same plan to stop at the grocery store on the way home so we'd have supplies to hunker down for the weekend weather siege. But no one seemed to be in a hurry to start discussing the book and finally it came out that only four of the twelve us had finishing reading it. What a disappointment! Those of us who read the book spent the rest of the hour answering questions from the others who hadn’t read it wanting to know how this or that aspect of the complicated plot turned out. And for once, I came to club super prepared with my answers to the Readers Guide Questions written out, complete with page numbers to passages like: “Because our secrets define us as opposed to the face we show the world, the painting was the secret that raised me above the surface of life and enabled me to know who I am. And it's there: in my notebooks, every page, even though it's not.” I thought about that passage a lot and I wanted to know if the others in the club agreed with that passage. Am I defined by the secrets I keep? Are you? As much as I’ve written about my life, I still have a few secrets tucked away. 

I’ve been reading a lot of books lately. Some good, more a waste of time. I’m getting better at not finishing those that don’t hold my interest or are riddled with stuff that drives me crazy. I mean come on, if you set a scene in Minnesota on Christmas you don’t have your characters splashing water in a backyard swimming pool! I checked, the author lives in California so maybe she didn’t know that back yard pools get drained in the fall in climates where water freezes in the winters, but that's what Google is for, isn't it? You research what you don't know---but how do you know what you don't know? Oh well, wordsmiths like Donna Tartt who take your breath away and make you think more than make up for the writers who don't. ©

Dialogue from The Goldfinch

My Amazing new Christmas Gift to Myself – The Kindle Fire

I got my Christmas present to myself early this year. I didn’t want to wait for the craziness of Black Friday when I could have gotten the All-New Fire HD 8” Tablet with Alexa for $25 cheaper. I was afraid they’d get back ordered and it took me FOREVER to decide what I wanted. I debated about getting an Apple iPad for hundreds more than the Fire but I already have a desktop that I dearly love and a laptop that I fiercely hate plus a Kindle 3^rd generation that still works fine, a smart phone, an iPod and a four-cup coffee pot. In other words, the essentials of life in the modern age. Well, that last one should be a Keurig to qualify for a ‘modern life’ but that was my Christmas present to myself a few years ago and I finally got so frustrated with it getting clogged up and having to fix it with a paper clip when I needed my morning coffee the most that I sent that Keurig off to the Salvation Army last summer and I never looked back.

I love Alexa. I wish I could change the voice to a male but the best I can do is change her to a British accent. That was cool when I played 'Simon says' with her and asked her to repeat "bloody hell." She bleeps out other swear words to keep it family friendly, I presume. Oh, yes, I’ve been having fun with my new playmate. Already I’m in love with her spelling skills. Just writing this, so far she’s spelled ‘fiercely’ for me and she beat my beloved Franklin Language Master 3000 that has been my constant writing companion since the ‘80s. But her pronunciation skills needs work. I asked her how do you pronounce c.a.t. and she replied, "C" and when I asked her how to pronounce m.u.c.i.l.a.g.i.n.o.u.s. she apologized for not knowing the word. She sings a mean rendition of Happy Birthday though.

I spent Thanksgiving with my youngest niece and her 2 ½ year old grandson walked up to her Amazon Echo and said, “Alexa play…” and he named a child’s song I didn’t know and can’t remember and his mother said he’s getting so good at giving Alexa commands at her house that’s she’s going to change its name to something he can’t say. On the way home I got to thinking about that. We’ve got a whole generation coming up who will be so used to asking Seri and Alexa for stuff they’ll be clueless if they see something like a radio from my youth. They won’t understand what knobs and dials are for---and forget record players. "You have to do to play music?!" What will be the point of kids ever having homework in the future when they can get Alexa or Siri to do it for them? But for disabled people who are confined to beds and wheelchairs what a godsend these voice activated devices are.

Guess what, I’m not finished writing about my new toy. I went off to Amazon to find some cheap books and I’ve finished reading one and have started another. The first was The Dog who knew too Much by Spencer Quinn. Apparently he has a whole series of mystery/detective books written in a dog’s voice and I’m a sucker for canine points of views. I even gave that style of writing a whirl in a blog I kept for my dog before my husband died. Sadly, I abandoned it to switch to writing this widow’s blog. Quinn's dog is a bit of an airhead at times which adds a sense of humor to the book. It was popcorn for the mind kind of reading. Now I’m reading Neanderthal Seeks Human by Penny Reid, another 'popcorn' book. I hadn't read a romance in a long time and I was curious if the formula had changed. 31,673 people reviewed it with an average of 3.93 overall, so it’s safe to say more people liked the nerdy, socially awkward heroine in the romance than didn’t. To me it was another gorgeous, brooding wealthy-man-falls-for-a-woman-who-doesn't-know-she's-beautiful plot. But since I identify with heroines who talk in their heads the book sucked me in early on:

My heart skipped two beats. I turned around.

Oh my God, it’s you.

“Oh my God, it’s you.” I realized too late that I said and thought the same thing in unison.

I never warmed up to on reading with my old Kindle because I like real books that I can underline passages in and write in the margins. If I buy a book, I don’t mind making it mine in this way. I never could figure out how to do those things on the Kindle. This time around I’m going to try learning to use all the features in the reader app. Already I’m a pro at using the Fire's Silk browser, e-mail, maps, weather and OneNote apps and playing music. And I was about to learn manage grocery lists using Alexa but my niece told me if I do, don’t be surprised if she places an order at Amazon for what I want and it’s delivered to my doorstep in two days. Oops. ©

Kindle, Books and Stupid Doctors

KINDLE: If you own an older Kindle you probably got the email notice about the required updates that if you don’t do them by midnight on the 22^nd you will no longer be able to download books. The directions for doing the updates sounded easy enough and I followed them to the letter. Four nights in a row without success. Then I googled some troubleshooting advice and found out my 3^rd generation Kindle can’t be updated with a simple sync via Wi-Fi like the email said, but supposedly there is another way. Once again I followed directions, this time to do a manual download delivered through my computer via a UBS cable and again multi tries didn’t get me anywhere. After a couple of hours of monkeying around and reading troubleshooting tips I refused to waste any more time deciding, instead, to go with Plan C. Plan C involved spending time on Amazon, downloading a bunch of free classic books----50 in all---and enough puzzles and games to keep me happy for a decade. Part II of Plan C also includes me deciding to take the plunge to buy an Apple I-Pad Air and putting a Kindle app on it. Like I need another electronic gadget to torture my patience.

BOOKS: I have a lot of trouble sleeping around the full moon. If I had any sense I’d take a sleeping pill at midnight but it usually doesn’t dawn on me that I need one until it’s too late to take an Ambien and still get up in the morning. Last night was no exception. I hung in the zone where my brain wouldn’t turn off but I wasn’t fully awake either. In my head I was busy "writing" about the lives of the people living on Guernsey Island during the WWII when it was occupied by the Germans. I’d been reading a book on that subject before I turned off the light. One of the first lines in the book was worth scribbling on a Post-It note: “Perhaps there is some sort of secret homing instinct in books that brings them to their perfect readers.” I think that homing instinct brought me The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. At the last Red Hat Society tea someone had returned that borrowed book back to its owner and everyone was saying such positive things about the book. So when the owner offered it for loan again, I raised my hand. I had no idea of the topic or time frame of the story or the fact that it was written like an exchange of letters between an England author, her editor in Australia and the islanders in the Society. With a title like that I thought it would be a bit of fluffy fun. It wasn’t. Nor was it as gloomy as the topic sounds. It's a great study of characters set in the little known---at least to me---occupation of an island in the English Channel.

STUPID DOCTORS: “Gloomy” did enter my life this week though. Tim, the son-I-wish-I-had called me looking for advice. His uncle just had a massive stroke that sounds very much like the one my husband had---right side paralysis and no speech. Tim was at the hospital when a doctor came in and told his aunt (right in front of his uncle) that there was no hope for recovery, his brain is gone. The aunt said, “But he can squeeze my hand! I know he understands what I’m saying” and the doctor told her it was just instinct like when a baby holds on to your finger. Then Tim told his uncle an insider-type joke that no one outside the family would recognize as a joke and his uncle laughed. (We did that with Don, too, to test his reactions.) The doctor didn’t believe the laugh meant anything! How can doctors who spend minutes with someone presume to know better than a family member if a speechless stroke survivor is or isn’t communicating in non-verbal ways? I was told that Don had half his brain destroyed, that he’d be "nothing but a vegetable for the rest of his life." I was so angry at the neurologist who said it that I snapped back, “Half his brain is still better than most people’s whole brain!” The more Tim and I talked the madder I got to the point that I was literally shaking by the time I got off the phone. 

The sad thing is that during the twelve years following Don’s massive stroke we ran into at least a dozen others in speech classes who’d been told the same thing---people who, like Don, had proven they were anything but vegetables. Speech therapists will tell you that communication is about more than just the words that come out of our mouths and anyone who’s been married a long time can back that up. A touch, a look, body language---we read it all and it gets sharper when vocabulary is gone. To be fair, I do understand why some/many ICU doctors act that way. They see the brain scans, see only the beginnings of the stroke but they never see a scan a year later when the blood has dissipated and new neuron-paths find their way around the damaged areas. And without a family member to be a strong, hands-on advocate for a massive stroke survivor it's nearly impossible to get a quality of life back on their own. Advocacy to push for therapies and a patient with a strong will to recover are key. One without the other doesn’t work. 

Well aren’t I ending on a little Miss. Sunshine note today? I’ll try to do better next time. I've got a couple of interesting things on my day planner if the coming snow storm doesn't knock them off. ©