Fool’s Errand by Robin Hobb

This is a fantasy book, hopefully that won’t put you off, they are my favorite genre so while this is the first that I’ve read since starting the blog there are bound to be more of them.  Robin Hobb (who also writes books under the name Megan Lindholm neither of which are her real name!) is an awesome writer but let me try to explain what I loved best about this book.

This is the first book in the Tawny Man trilogy which is a trilogy that follows The Farseer trilogy.  Sometimes when you start reading trilogy’s that follow trilogy’s (and for those of you who don’t read much fantasy that isn’t uncommon) by the time you hit the first book of the second trilogy you have a list of characters that goes halfway down your arm and you hardly get to hear about some of your old favorites. Or there are authors who just keep cranking out books and by the time you reach book 12 you have three thousand characters an entire world of intrigue, plotting, religions and wars that only really serious fans can possibly keep straight and then you up and die before the last two books are finished leaving it up to a different author to finish up for you. And if you think that is some crazy story I made up check our Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time books, The Eye of the World is the first, and a great book, just don’t say I didn’t warn you!  On the other hand reading Fool’s Errand was more like sitting back down with old friends.

Would I recommend it? Yes, but first you really need to read Assassins Apprentice, and then Royal Assassin and then Assassin’s Quest, and I promise they are worth it! Also I’m sure her Liveship Traders trilogy factors into all this somewhere but they are still on my to read list.

The Disease Part III The Sleep Crawler

By now you are perhaps wondering what did prompt me to move Clara into her unfinished room. I mean really, I’d held out for nine months and have written two long posts about how I thought it was a bad idea, why did I cave? I’ll tell you why, because she’s a sleep crawler, that’s why. Here is the whole story:

Clara started out sleeping in bed with us, then as she became mobile she took naps and started the night out sleeping in her own crib in our room. Inevitably she ended up in bed with us by morning. This is because I nursed her, and there is no point in staying awake when you could be sleeping, and so therefore she ate, I slept and she was still there in the morning.

This worked great for many months until Clara started doing this crazy thing where she crawls around in bed with her eyes closed then flops down when her head hits something and lays where she falls sleeping. Sleep crawling? I don’t know, but whatever it is it is not conducive to co-sleeping.  She would finish nursing then lurch around the bed between John and I like a really drunken sailor.  I would start awake when she would move, watch her flop down against John, immediately fall back asleep only to be woken up to her lurching back toward me and flopping on top of me instead.  For awhile I tried to just get up and put her back in her crib. This was difficult for two reasons. The first, I had to get up. The other was that once Clara was back in her crib  she did her crazy sleep crawling in there instead.  John and I are much softer to land on than crib rails so she would bang her head on the side which would wake her all the way up, then see us and want to come back in bed.   Back in bed it never improved. Once I woke up as she crashed into my knees, multiple times I grabbed her as she was headed for the edge. Our happy co-sleeping set up was suddenly missing the the oh so important sleeping portion of co-sleeping. Clara had to go. The girl needed bars, she needed walls, she needed her own room. So last Monday after an especially bad night because of the nighttime crawler I moved her into her own room lack of baseboards and all.

After a few nights of squawking  Clara settled in and sleep has more or less  returned for everyone. Some nights I still wake up and her her rustling around and then a distinct thump as she hits the side of her crib but she almost always goes right back to sleep.

In addition to all the of advantages that come from having a baby free bedroom we have also gained the peephole advantage. At some point someone replaced the door knob on Clara’s door with one that wasn’t the same and left a hole in the door. I purposely set the crib up opposite and now I have a perfect little spy hole to watch and see what she is doing when she is supposed to be sleeping. I can watch this: Turn into this, and so I’m conceding that moving her into her almost finished room was the right thing to do. I just hope the sleep crawler does not turn into a sleep walker or nights or going to get really interesting when she graduates to a bed!

I know in the picture above it looks like there are baseboards on the wall, but it’s just propped up behind the furniture!

Birdology by Sy Montgomery

The chronicles of this lady’s “adventures with a pack of hens, a peck of pigeons, cantankerous crows, fierce falcons, hip hop parrots, baby hummingbirds, and one murderously big living dinosaur” are full of facts and information, unfortunately they are also full of Sy Montgomery. Sy Montgomery is a bit too, for lack of a better term, woo woo for me. I’m glad that birds fill her heart with awe and wonder and make her spirit soar. But when I read things like “My whole soul feels like a yawning hole that only this bird can fill.” I throw up a bit in my mouth as I roll my eyes.

Would I recommend it? No Parts of it, particularly the parts about the cassowary, I found pretty interesting but I have very little tolerance for woo woo mixed in with fact. It made my head hurt from all the unintentional eye rolling and I wouldn’t want to subject anyone else to such pain.

Finley

 

Today my internet has flaked out and so instead of continuing my remodeling disease story I have gone to visit my friend Jessie, her computer with it’s fancy high speed connection and her new puppy Finley!  

Finley is very cute, and she makes me want a puppy of my own, but then she eats my toes with her super sharp puppy teeth and I think that maybe I’m OK with living vicariously through Jessie!

 

I Wanna Iguana by Karen Kaufman Orloff and David Catrow

I love this book. Ivy seems to like it but I don’t think she thinks its as funny as I think it is. Didja get that? This book is a series of notes between a boy and his mom about getting an iguana. Here are some of my favorite pages, you can click on the picture to make it bigger if you need to.

Would I recommend it? Yes,  your kid might not think it’s as funny as you do, but parents need a good chuckle too!

The Disease Part II

I left off Part I with this picture :

This hole in my kitchen wall is a great example of why so much of our remodeling project is stalled right now and how the disease is spreading through the house. It’s pretty obvious how the spreading is working, stairs end in kitchen, therefore the kitchen has been infected. The stalling is a bit more complex.

You might not be able to tell very well from my picture but that wall has no insulation in it, and it is continuing to fall apart. Also the white thing in the wall  is a towel because when it rains really hard the roof leaks and the water comes into the house.  No doubt that has quite a bit to do with why the wall is falling apart.To fix this hole the remodeling disease is going to spread even further.

-There is no point replacing the wall ’till we fix the roof.

-The roof doesn’t just need fixing in that spot, it needs new shingles everywhere. (That project will be a spreading disease of it’s own I’m sure!)

-We can’t just rip out that chunk of wall and fix it without having half the ceiling cave down (it’s all plaster and lath in the kitchen).

-Which would be alright since there is a huge crack across the ceiling running through where the ceiling fan should be.

-I use the word should because I took the blades off when we did the electrical work  in order to access wires.  I had to get in there and accidentally messed with how it was anchored to the ceiling. Worried we would forget it was basically unanchored and turn it on causing it to crash across the room I just took the blades off. But it would be good to have a working fan again.

-There is no insulation in any of the kitchen anyway so after the ceiling comes down ripping apart all the falling down walls wouldn’t be a bad idea.

And all of a sudden we’ve gone from fixing a hole in the wall to re-roofing an entire house and ripping apart the kitchen… and as long as we are ripping apart the whole kitchen… I’m not even going to finish that, it gets too scary.

End result: After two years we still have a hole in our kitchen wall.

In addition to the hole, the pantry is still down to bare studs inside, (but with a working light), the stairs need to be finished, railings need to go up, trim needs to go on…

But lets not dwell on all that unfinished stuff lets talk about Clara’s room.

I had been stubbornly holding out trying to get the trim finished in Clara’s room until she moved in. Some people might argue that I was being unreasonably stubborn about this since it meant that Clara was still in our bedroom, but I had reasons.

You see the summer I was five my parents built a house.  When we moved in that fall we still didn’t have tile on the floor or many other finishing touches. Most of the important finishing work was completed fairly quickly, other things like closets not so much. Tyler and I each had a door-less closet in our room with holes in the walls on either side for a set of drawers to fit in.   My Dad put in drawers in about five years later. When I was in middle school  Dad did the drywall finishing work above them. I  had been used to having the wall open and had been storing things inside next to the drawers so that the finish work walled in one of my Moms birthday presents, but that is another story.  The closets never got real doors.  We begged my Granny for curtains that are still hanging today.  My point is that I knew that if Clara moved in before her room was done the odds of us ever finishing it would plummet. And the odds, lets just say it’s looking pretty ugly…

Trim and baseboards, the final step to a completely finished room, and not just finished completely, redone from the studs on in. Window trim and door casings went up in the last month… …but then we got to the baseboards, which of course led us to another nasty chain of events.

-The old baseboards do not fit anymore becuase we changed from plaster to drywall and took out a chimney from a corner, so we need to cut new ones.

-The baseboards in our bedroom are also off because of the closet work.

-It seems like someone ought to be able to figure out how to make all the baseboards fit on all the new walls  becuase we should have really close to enough and then we wouldn’t have to buy any new ones.

-I can’t figure that out. Math has never been my strong suit.

-One of the reasons I can’t figure it out is because we need new plinth blocks under the casing for the doors. For some reason those have been a favorite of teething dogs.

-The closets still don’t have casings or doors on them much less the plinth blocks on the bottom  making it very hard to determine if my math is right before I start turning 14 foot boards into toothpicks.

-The wood is a hundred years old, weird sizes and difficult to match to say the least.

Needless to say we did not get the baseboards done in Clara’s room before she moved in. Fortunately I don’t think there is any space to hide a birthday present behind them so if it takes us a few years at least we don’t have that to worry about!

Come back tomorrow for The Disease Part III The Sleep Crawler.

The Disease Part I

Our house has a disease.

It is a remodeling disease and we have been fighting it since July 2008.

Mostly the disease has been spreading and winning but this last week we had a minor victory when Clara at the age of 9 months moved into her own room.

You see in our old house we have some plaster walls. And some of our plaster walls were falling apart, really falling apart. Falling apart so that if you pushed a spot on our stairwell a three foot in diameter piece of wall would move and if you pushed too hard parts would start to fall off.  At the time Ivy was at the age where that looked like a good thing to eat. So we had a family friend (Alec) come out to help us rip out the old plaster and lath and then drywall our stairwell. Just one wall in the stairwell

But then the disease hit.

-So long as we are doing one wall, we should do all of them.

-Now we need to do the ceiling too, that caused John and Alec to look like this:

-Hmm, there is NO insulation in the walls, and the stuff in the ceiling is a million years old and only an inch thick, better take care of that.

-The pantry under the stairs is already half ripped apart and now lots of plaster is falling off the walls in there… rip it out too!

-Well, since everything is torn out should we make new stairs?

-We hit our head on the old ceiling above the stairs so now is a good time to cut it out and change it!

-Oops, accidentally made a hole into this bedroom (now Clara’s room) and look it has no insulation either, well it’s a little room… rip it out!

-There is a part of an old chimney in this room? Rip it out, throw it out the window, and try not to hit the dog!

-Now everything is exposed and we can see the old nasty scary wiring, lets re-wire everything.

-Now that the ceilings are ripped up lets put a real entrance into the attic so that we can use it.

-Can’t use the attic unless it has a floor.

-New lights in the stairwell, because  really at this point, why not?

-New light in the pantry.

-The old duct work is a catastrophe, everything is still exposed, lets do that too.

By the end of the summer we had taken loads of garbage to the dump, and made a lot of progress that didn’t really look like any progress.

It was awful hard to say to people, yes I know it looks worse than before and you can see the insulation but really it’s progress… You see our house was held up by, in the words of Alec, “Hope and Magic” insulated with nothing and powered by old electric wires with the insulation rotting off, and now it’s not. Progress.

One year, later we finally put up the drywall and discovered I was pregnant.

That caused some problems.  You see during the course of this disease Ivy had been moved out of the small bedroom that got ripped apart into what we call the attic room. That meant that all the stuff in our house that was in the attic room got moved into Ivy’s old room once it was finished.  So when we found out Clara was on the way we needed to do some rearranging. The problem was even with the now usable attic, there just wasn’t anyplace for the stuff to go having only one closet in the house and one pantry still in shambles. So John and I moved into the attic room with Ivy and we had two closets built in our bedroom. Hooray! John and I moved back to our room, the stuff was moved into one closet, we got rid of FOUR dressers we had been using and put our clothes in the other closet. The little bedroom was empty

This winter I painted, the little room twice. The first time I chose a god-awful color that looked like scrambled eggs barfed onto the walls. Since then I have gone back to my previous technique of color choosing which is that someone else does it for me.

This spring John refinished the floor while the girls and I were out of the house.

All that was left was left to do in the small bedroom was to put trim back up…

The to do list for the rest of the place is a bit more extensive.

To Be Continued…

The Disease Part II

The Disease Part III

Run by Ann Patchett

It has been over a week since I read this book and I can’t think of anything in particular to say about it. Seems like a bad sign.

I remember thinking the writing was good.

She also Wrote Bel Canto maybe you should read that instead, I read that three years ago and I still remember parts of it!

Would I recommend it? Nope, can’t even remember it.

Pontoon by Garrison Keillor

I’ve heard Garrison Keillor on the radio many times and enjoyed listening to him. I don’t think he’s the greatest things since sliced bread but good for a chuckle if you are stuck in the car. So I thought I’d try a book of his.

I don’t think I’ll try that again.

The rambling pointlessness of it was not enough to counter the wry humor and I kept hearing his voice reading it in my head, which would have been fine except that he talks really slowly, even in my head! By the time I made it to the grade finale at the end I was too irritated to really enjoy the scene that had been set up.

Would I recommend it? No. Sometimes the spoken word should stay the spoken word.

Confessions Of A Lawn Hater

It has been two weeks since I mowed the lawn.

Today while mowing the lawn I found a dead cat.

If that bothers you please stop reading I doubt this story is going to get any better.

Fortunately years of mowing at high speeds with minimal before mowing lawn pick-up have honed my swerving skills and I was able to stop next to the cat. It took me a good thirty seconds of staring to identify the flattish, orangeish, hairyish, splotch in my yard. Without the ear and tail I might have been stumped. So I probably don’t need to say this wasn’t a freshly dead cat.  The good news is that if you find a dead cat it gives you plenty to ponder while you finish mowing your lawn.

There are questions with probable answers:

-Where did it come from? I’m guessing the neighbors barn cat or a feral cat, there are lots of both around.

-Why is it in MY yard? Well cats do come through the yard occasionally although the dogs really dislike that and so it’s not real common.

-If John had been mowing would he have run it over? Probably, he is color blind and runs everything over with the lawnmower, a classic case of if I do it really badly I won’t have to do it anymore.

Questions that I can only guess at the answers:

-Did something kill that cat?

-Does that explain why I also lost three ducks while we were on vacation?

-Do things that eat ducks not eat cats?

-What is wrong with my dogs, that they haven’t noticed it?

-Thank goodness my dogs haven’t noticed it!

-Can I convince John that dead cat removal is a mans job?

And questions that might indicate I spent too much time in the sun:

-Would running over a dead cat be better than running over a pile of chain?

-Would I have to extract dead cat from the mower deck if I did that?

-Would that require taking off the deck?

-Does my Dad’s knowledge of lawnmower fixes include dead cat damage?

-Would anyone help me if that was my problem or would they just laugh?

And the biggest question of all:

-Why am I mowing a patch of lawn that we use so infrequently that it can have a very decomposed cat in it without anyone noticing?