Quitters never win 19 November 2009

I am going to admit something to you that I’m not very proud of.  I am sad to admit I think I am going to give up on a book.

I don’t give up on books!  I just don’t!  I don’t know what my deal is, but I can count on one hand the number of books I have forsaken partway through.  (One was The Hobbit — and now I duck as SJAT throws something large and heavy at my head.)  I will read and read, regardless of how painful it is to me, because what if halfway through it turns into a fantastic book?  Or three-quarters of the way through?  Or near the very end?  How can I possibly give up so soon?

But alas, I do believe this one has done me in.  It’s a book about Saladin and Richard the Lionhearted during the Third Crusade, and that’s part of the reason I am so sad about this development.  I have always been fascinated by the Crusades (in fact, as I compose this post, I’m listening to the soundtrack to Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, and I’m at the beginning when Robin is still in Arab lands — the perfect background music for this post).  The beginning of this book likens the Crusades to the Holocaust set in motion by Hitler, and I never thought of it that way.  But it makes so much sense.  The Christians set off into the lands ruled over by Muslim Arabs in order to win back the Holy Land for the “right” religion, and they slaughtered the Arabs en masse for their beliefs.

If that isn’t a Holocaust, I don’t know what is.

I was also looking forward to this book to come away with a better grasp of why that area has been such a bone of contention for so many years.  Yes, it’s the Holy Land for three different religions, so it’s not going to be a land of peace and tranquility with three religions claiming it as their own, but why all the wars?  Why the violence and suffering?  This book promised to give me an inkling of how it all started.

But I can’t get into it.  I really can’t.  It’s soooooo dry.  The reviews made it seem as though the book would grip me from page one, but I find myself reading and re-reading a paragraph because I have read the words without grasping the meaning.  And then I try all over again, and it’s just not working.  I’m 77 pages into it.  I hate to give up now, though.  I only have 300 pages more to go.

Should I stick with it?  Or should I give up? There are some passages that make me want to keep reading, like the chapter about Richard’s beginnings.  That part went quickly, and learning about Muslim tradition is quite interesting.  Apparently Saladin had captured two Crusaders, one being the King of Jerusalem and one a local lord, and the Sultan sat down with them in his pavilion.  He gave the King a bowl of rose-water sherbet, and the King passed it along to the lord after he had taken some.  Saladin became angry because in Muslim tradition, a man who had taken another prisoner is required to show him mercy if he offers him food and water.  Even so, the lord was executed within the hour due to the atrocities he had committed against the Muslim people before his capture.

See?  It’s interesting.  But only in parts.  The bigger part of me wants to chuck it and read something interesting, and fun, and gripping, like the November book for Books & Snacks, which was The Guernsey Literary & Potato Peel Pie Society.  That book was amazing.  I was sucked in within the first twenty pages and kept turning one page after another to see what was going to happen next.

Maybe I’m not cut out to read non-fiction.  My goal is to read something educational every once in a while, just to keep my brain in shape after so many years of being a stay-at-home mom.  I don’t need my mind turning to mush!  Although I guess I should cut myself some slack; at least I read, and that in itself is keeping my brain exercised.

I know I’ve said it before, but I don’t get people who don’t read.  I love love love to read, and I will make time to read.  My father says he likes to read, that he enjoys it, but that he doesn’t have time for it.  Well.  I don’t know about you, but I always make time for the things I really enjoy doing.  The laundry will sit in the dryer for five days, but I’ll sit down with my book for twenty or thirty minutes.  I cannot fall asleep unless I’ve read for at least ten minutes.  It’s the only way to shut my brain off from all the worry and stress and concern I have going on.  Otherwise my mind just goes round and round and round and round with all sorts of random crap, and one thing feeds into another, and it goes on and on as I toss and turn all night.  It’s not pretty.  I need my beauty sleep!

I’d much rather read than take a sleeping pill, any day.

Hmm.  Maybe I’ll read some more and see if this book gets more interesting.  Wish me luck.

The holidays have begun 16 November 2009

Yes, indeedy, they have.  Even if I discount this past weekend, it would be very evident.  XM has decided to begin the 24/7 playing of Christmas music on my beloved 1940s channel, which has left me rather bereft.  In previous years, they had simply inserted various Christmas classics into their regular lineup.  That suited me perfectly, but apparently it wasn’t good enough for XM.  So now I can either listen to “Holiday Traditions” or I could mosey over to the Sinatra channel.

Maybe I’ll just stick with my BBC Radio 1.

This past weekend was our holiday kickoff.  My grandparents are snowbirds, wintering in Florida every year.  This winter is no different, though there is a bit of a bittersweet tang about it.  My grandfather suffers from Alzheimer’s, and it’s been decided that they can no longer make the arduous trek from central Pennsylvania down to Florida.

It’s quite sad about my grandpa.  He used to be the man who would hold forth at our holiday get-togethers, his deep, booming voice a comforting soundtrack to my childhood.  He doesn’t speak much anymore, I think because he’s not entirely certain what’s going on.  He can’t drive anymore because he can’t remember how to get from point A to point B in the little mountain town that’s been his home for the last fifty years.  I know I’ve written about this before, but he’s getting worse.  I’m not even sure he remembered which grandkid I was, who I belonged to, or that I had y own mkids.  He just seemed so… distant.  And it’s such a shame too — his brilliant mind stolen away by the ravages of this disease.

It makes me want to cry when I think about it.

Anyhow, my grandparents are set to make their yearly trek this week.  My dad will drive up to retrieve my grandparents to bring them to DC where they will catch the train southward, and my uncle will drive their car to Florida.  It’s a system that works well, and one that will be repeated in the spring when they return north.  Because they were about to head south, it was decided that this past weekend would make an excellent one to gather the family together for an early Thanksgiving.

Almost everyone was there.  The only ones that couldn’t make it were my brother (he had to work), and what I call the Florida contingent.  My aunt and uncle and their three kids live near where my grandparents winter, and because my sister lived in Florida for quite a few years, I still count her among the Florida contingent though she now resides near Atlanta.  But we even had the Kyrgyzstan contingent show up!  My aunt and uncle and their three kids are missionaries there, although their eldest son and their daughter CA now attend college in Maryland.  I’m not sure why they’re in the States now, but I was very glad to see them.  I had to pat CA down before I said goodbye to her; I was afraid she would smuggle ME back to college with her!  She loves babies, and oh how they love her.

But the best part of the whole weekend was seeing my grandma with Mary Ellen.  That’s her namesake, after all.

The two Mary Ellens got along famously.  There was some concern about the baby ME toddling along, as she’s not all that steady on her feet.  Since I’ve seen her through falling down my friends’ yard onto asphalt and tumbling down a flight of stairs onto concrete, I was a bit more sanguine that she’d turn out just fine.  I was outvoted, though, and there was a movement to find her a helmet to protect her precious cranium.  Fortunately it was abandoned before the motion could carry.

It was a fantastic weekend, though, and it was so nice to let my grandma finally meet the baby.  Now I’ll just hold my breath till the spring in hopes that my grandparents make it back north safely.

*crosses fingers*

Don’t stare at the mirage 12 November 2009

Grace and I are starting to form a new habit for our quiet afternoons together on Tuesdays and Thursdays.  Those are the mornings she has school, which invariably means I am very tired from staying up too late reading the night before.  I know I have to go to bed at a decent time, but I can’t seem to manage to turn off my light before 12:30 or even 1am.

So after we pick up Grace from school, I feed myself and Mary Ellen, and then I let the kids play for a little while.  Finally ME will get to the point where anything and everything pisses her off, at which point I announce, “NAP!” and she toddles off to her room, where she waits next to the crib till I arrive to lift her in.  I kid you not.  She’s so freakin’ smart, it’s shocking.

That leaves Grace and I on our own.  I usually do a bit of housework while I have ME out of my hair, but then my late nights tend to catch up with me.  At that point, it’s time to rest.  Grace runs to the closet to get my old green blanket, the one that went to college with my mom back in the early 1970s, and we snuggle up on the couch, each with our own book.  Sometimes we cuddle and talk, but mostly I lay at one end of the couch with my book while she lays at the other end and reads her sticker book.  She likes to say that our feet are cuddling together, which always makes me laugh.

And invariably, I’ll end up snoozing while she is still reading her book.  She keeps up a constant stream of chatter, but I’m so used to it by now that I just tend to tune it out.  If I didn’t, I’d never get any rest.  This girl wakes up talking and never stops until she’s asleep once again.  Sometimes she goes to play with her toys, and I like to listen to her play-acting with them.  Any toy of hers, not just the dolls, can be a character in one of her stories.  Sometimes it’s her cars that become part of these elaborate stories.  It amazes me to no end because I can remember being a kid and wondering how my friends managed to play with dolls.  I never seemed to have that level of creativity.

Grace sure does!  And I’m so glad for it.

Tonight Kurt had a long day at work.  Final exams, for lack of a better phrase, are next week for his students, and like any group of students, they’ve let their studying to the last minute.  Kurt came home for less than an hour for lunch, stopped by for another hour to grab dinner, and then came home for good at 8:30pm — and he went in at 7am this morning.  Poor guy.  This meant I had to do the whole bedtime routine for the girls, which generally isn’t my job.  Ever since Kurt came home from his first deployment after Grace was born, he decided it would be his job to put the kids to bed.  Considering he’s been on shore duty for the last two years, I haven’t had to do it very many times.

But every so often, Grace requests that I read to her, even though Kurt’s putting her to bed.  And of course I oblige every time.  For a while we were reading The Little Prince, but somehow we never managed to finish it.  Oops.

We have a new book now!  I managed to score a set of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books  that was printed in the 1970s so that I could have the lovely Garth Williams illustrations with them.  Tonight we opened Little House in Big Woods, and Grace seemed quite enthralled by it, even without a picture on every page.  We got all the way through the first chapter, cuddling and snuggling in my little reading nook in my bedroom, before Daddy got home to finish putting her to bed.

I think I get as much out of this time with her as she does.  My parents weren’t really hands-on parents, being too busy providing a good life for my siblings and I, so I did a lot all on my own.  I read voraciously, whatever I wanted to, but I always wanted to talk about what I was reading, or what was going on in my life.  But my parents had other things going on that took up all their time.

Now I’m sharing so much with Grace, reading and cuddling with her, playing with her and just listening to her.  And it’s not just good for her.  It’s good for me.  No matter how crappy my day has been, it never fails to make me feel better to do something so simple with her.

I just wonder what’s going to happen when ME gets to this age.  Will I be pulled in two different directions, or will I have two kids to have fun with and pal around with?  I hope it’s the latter.  I don’t really have any good models for parenting this whole sibling thing.  My memory really starts when I was 6, when I went to go live with my dad, and by that time my sister was so much older than me (she’s only four years older, but she was five grades ahead of me), and our personalities were so different, that I know my parents dealt with us completely differently.  And I don’t really remember my sister and I doing something with just my mom.  Of course, that was a weird situation, my mom being “just” my stepmom.  Plus my brother, aside from being the opposite gender, is ten years younger than me, so I felt more like his favorite aunt than his big sister.  He and I did a lot together, but not really with our parents.  They just took us wherever it is that we needed to go.

I guess I’ll make it up as I go along.  That’s what all adults do, right?  Right???