Lessons

Here are a few more pictures of the Phoenix Marathon, courtesy of Action Sports International. I think the first two are at the halfway point, and the last two at the finish line. I seem to have some sort of tic that makes me throw my hands into the air when I see a camera:



In other semi-athletic news, today I broke my lucky streak where snow biking is concerned. Most of Franklin Avenue has been cleared, but I hit a rough patch, realized I was going too fast with traffic slowing ahead of me, made the mistake of braking (and probably turning my wheel), tipped, and slid. I was lucky, though; the snow and my padded jacket broke my fall, and I got away with just a bruise or two on my elbow and hip (and pride, of course). I'd been fine slowly surfing through the inches of snow left on the less-traveled streets; my mistake (and it's an unforgivable one under these circumstances, clearly) was slipping from snow mode to commuter mode when I hit a main, and better-cleared, thoroughfare. It pays to remember that the snow is always boss.

It won't be melting any time soon--tonight's predicted low is -6°, and we won't even hit double digit lows until Monday at the earliest--but someday spring will come. I can't wait.

Snow

Seriously, whose idea of funny is it to put a dapper little snowman as the picture for what the weather is doing right now? It's the penultimate day of February, after all; civilized locations are already having spring!

I'm not as worked up about this "late season snowstorm" as I could be, actually. I did a bunch of grocery shopping before I returned my rental car on Sunday, and so I'm full of spicy and delicious Thai peanut curry and have the makings for many more meals. Wednesdays are usually the only day I have to be on campus, so that's out of the way. This afternoon and evening's classes were even canceled at the U--the first snow (half) day I can remember seeing here!

Last weekend was a snowy one for me, as well. I was at a graduate conference in Milwaukee, presenting a paper on Sarah Palin, Saturday night Live, and the Tina Fey Effect. The house where I was staying (its occupants, as it happened, out of town for the weekend) was right by Lake Michigan, of the eponymous effect snow, which may have accounted for the dumping we received Friday night and Saturday. Thankfully my little rental car (a cute turquoise Corolla that I'd happily own if it ever came to that again) was able to navigate the drifts out of the driveway that morning, though I did have to do some pretty heavy shoveling to get it back in again that evening.

Here are the pictures I got--sunrise, the really awe-inspiring Lake Michigan, and the drive home:

Again With the Book List

Hathor and Chelfea have recently posted this meme, which is also making its rounds on Facebook and is similar to a list several of us did a while ago (of which I've since read 10 more). This one apparently is based on the BBC's Big Read's "search for the nation's best-loved novel."

My results, with ones I've read in bold and ones I want to in italics, plus asterisks for books I haven't read by authors I have:

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (entire trilogy + The Hobbit)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (most of it)
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (7-for-1!)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens*
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare * (complete seems rather extreme...)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot*
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens* (seriously, why all the Dickens??)
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy*
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky*
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck *
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens*
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen*
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen*
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (see also No. 33)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Berniere
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne ('have somehow only read parts!)
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez*
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy*
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen*
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens*
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas (again, most of it...)
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy*
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens*
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker (own this one, but got too creeped out...)
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett*
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce*
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt*
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens*
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Alb
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas*
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare (see also No. 14)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

So... that's 42/100? But, seriously, all that Dickens and Austen--and, for that matter, Hardy--is killer. I know Heather might disagree with me on this one, but I think the best book (or maybe two) of each should suffice.

Also, I just noticed that the list I posted here is not at all the same list as the BBC one I linked to above. That one has, for example, far more Terry Pratchett (and fewer of Austen, Dickens, and Hardy! ). Maybe I'll work on that list later.

Things That Are Awesome IV

Things That Are Awesome (IQD Edition):

• For IQD, David gave me not one, but TWO secret compartment books!


• The first one was actually the second of the two he'd made, because he hadn't been happy with the first one. It was beautiful. Note the endpapers, which are a map of Mpls and its suburbs. I live in the left crook of the Y. Both books have magnetic closures that make the covers snap satisfyingly shut.


• The second one was the earlier one he'd made, and although it wasn't quite as pretty, I still loved it. The endpapers on this one are a bigger vintage map of the Midwest, with some cities circled (Lincoln, Wausau, Marshfield, Stevens Point, Prairie Du Chien). Plus, this one came filled with two little boxes!


• In the first box was a pair of handmade earrings from Etsy--little black beads making a cute fan at the base of a delicate gold hoop. I put them on immediately.
  


• In the second box was another pair of handmade Etsy earrings, this time an elegant gold pair with long graceful lines. I wore them out that night.


• There were all sorts of runners out Saturday morning during our frozen adventuring, both at Minnehaha Falls and at Lake Calhoun! I have a witness that I do not just make this stuff up!
  

More of David's IQD pictures are here, if you're feeling brave.

Valentine

I think it's still fair to say that I celebrated IQD this year, although it did admittedly bear more similarities to Valentine's Day than past ones have. Then again, it was also way more fun!

David flew in pre-dawncrack, at 5:48 a.m. My neighbor had loaned me her car, so I was able to pick him up, and then drive around for a while searching (beanlessly) for coffee until it was light enough to see at Minnehaha Falls Park. The falls weren't frozen solid, thanks to last week's thaw--although it was 10° when we were there--but were still impressive in their iciness.

We stopped by my favorite Dunn Bros for the coffee we hadn't found earlier, took a quick tour of Uptown, and wandered down to the frozen expanse of Lake Calhoun. There's enough Northwesterner left in me, especially with a fellow web-footer, to be deeply impressed by that much ice!

Speaking of ice, we later went skating at Lake of the Isles, which not only has a cozy temporary warming shelter, but offers FREE ice skates for the borrowing! I was dreadful, of course (incurring the looks only persons two and half feet tall--and, naturally, extremely proficient on their own blades--can bestow upon such a hopeless elder), but did make it three loops without falling before deciding I'd had enough.

In the evening, we went to the ever-delightful Cafe Brenda, and then to The Two Gentlemen of Verona at the Guthrie. The latter was staged as a 1950s live television quasi-musical extravaganza, which made for some very creative characters and a lot of fun. It was too cold to explore the mill ruins; David was very brave and never actually complained about the cold, but although 20 (which it did eventually hit before dropping again) feels balmy under certain circumstances, it's still freakishly bitter for most normal people, and he suggested we enjoy more of the Cities' outdoor activities when it's a bit warmer. He had to fly back this afternoon, concluding the whirlwind arctic holiday adventure.

Remember, although only the hardiest visit during the winter, Chez CëRïSë and the Disaster Kitchen always welcome visitors! Make YOUR reservations today!

Photos courtesy of David

Bullets

• One of the Popcan's (many) names was the Sapphire Bullet of Pure Love
• Tonight I started my taxes, but couldn't finish them because I was missing a tuition form
• I lost one of my toenails
• I painted the other nine, and the spot where the tenth used to be
• I've been sick all week, but I'm feeling better (not dead yet!)
• My voice isn't totally back yet, but I'm only missing every fifth syllable or so now, instead of every second or third
• I've been drinking a lot of tea and ginger/lemon/honey goodness
  
• It has been raining here
• I feel like I should be happier about that, because at least it's warm
  
• I don't, though, because (a) it's gray and ugly and (b) it's still going to be winter for another two months, at least
• I am, however, happy about this upcoming weekend!
• I love my new red laptop
• I used it to edit the paper I'm workshopping tomorrow, but mostly I'm liking catching up on TV on the Internet
• Oh, and video chat with the built-in webcam! Who knew?
• I forgot to rip a copy of my brother's new CD before giving my last copy away, but he sent me one a few days ago
• It's brilliant, the kind of album you want to listen to over and over again (which I've been doing)
• Someday I'll succeed in persuading them to set up a website that actually sells said album (each of which is a beautiful, individual piece of art)
• Until then, you can mail $8 to an address I'll give you if you're interested
• Seriously, though, I'll work on them on the website. Setting it up myself is far more tempting than, say, writing a dissertation

New Lappy!

The last picture doesn't even begin to describe how thrilled I am!

Soup, Etc.

This afternoon I made what I think was a pretty awesome soup. I can't be completely certain, because I was absolutely ravenous and because I accidentally sacrificed a corner of a finger to the project. Still, I think it was pretty good.

Mostly, it was leftover vegetables from the Superbowl party--celery, carrots, a tomato, red and green bell peppers--chopped up with an onion and sauteed with garlic until soft, then cranked up to a boil with water and red lentils. I seasoned it with fresh grated ginger, cumin, a little bit of Better Than Bouillon, chili powder, red pepper flakes, and salt to taste--topped with the juice of half a lemon. Hearty, a little bit spicy, and hopefully full of goodness.

I've been trying to eat even more fruit and vegetables than usual recently, because I'm fighting a sore throat. I'm blaming it it on the marathon's lingering immunosuppressive effects (and, frustratingly enough, the sugar I consumed at Sunday's party--not much, but apparently enough more than the very little I'd consumed in the past few weeks to totally throw my defenses). So I'm drinking a lot of water and tea, taking my vitamin, and thinking happy thoughts. Speaking of which, look! Flowers!

And here are a few of tonight's sunset (note the icicles in the upper left-hand corner of the first image):

Done

Yesterday I reviewed a bunch of my December and January reading over at the book blog; check it out if you feel so inclined!

Today, I accomplished two things that had been plaguing me, and which I had been consistently putting off, one because I am not looking forward to the actual event, and one because the options were overwhelming me. They were, respectively, booking and organizing my Dry Run presentation for my upcoming Milwaukee conference, and buying a new laptop. I am relieved that both are done, and although I'm still not at all looking forward to the former (to be held Friday the 13th), I'm definitely looking forward to the latter, which should be here this Friday. I guess I'll blog about it when it arrives!

Now, I just need to finalize my travel plans to Milwaukee, and finish the paper for it...

Favorites

A few things I'm loving recently:

• Covergirl LashBlast waterproof mascara in black. A recommendation from my aunt, this goes on smoothly and doesn't seem to flake or smudge. I forgot my L'Oreal mascara on a weekend trip several years ago, and my friend's mom gave me an unopened tube of Cover Girl mascara that I ended up loving, and buying for years (especially since it was cheaper than L'Oreal!). I experimented with other brands after Covergirl stopped making that product, but now I'm back and happy.
  
• Sephora FACE waterproof eye makeup remover. This was another recommendation by the same aunt, and I cannot emphasize how awesome it is. Waterproof eye makeup remover, in my experience, is either greasy, useless, or overpriced, but this is none of the above. It seems to lift mascara magically away. My skin is really sensitive, and sometimes this stings a little, but it doesn't even need to stay on for long because it dissolves makeup almost instantly. Best yet, it's only $8 for 4.22 ounces.
• Alba Sea Plus Renewal Cream. I've blogged in the past about Alba; I love their mango body wash, and last summer discovered their lip balm. I just bought this cream yesterday, so my recommendation might be a bit premature, but so far I'm sold. The consistency is very thick: almost like butter, but not greasy. It does contain some fragrance, but doesn't sting my (seriously, morbidly sensitive) skin. This may be a bit too much for the spring and summer, but is doing wonders for my winter flakiness. The site says it's $14.95, but it was only $12.99 at my grocery store.

Butterfly

I have enough introverted tendencies to know how important alone time can be, but I still don't think I'd mind if the vast majority of my weekends were like this past one, full of friends, cultural activities, and shared food!

On Thursday, after spending the day running errands with my neighbor and her mom, I met a friend downtown for Spring Awakening at the Orpheum. It was an excellent production, with strong acting and enjoyable music, though a bit dark and full of an almost dizzying array of teen issues. Friday, I had dinner with my neighbor and her fiance at Pancho Villa before heading into Saint Paul for another friend's CD release party. Two of the three bands that went on before them were great, and of course my friend's band rocked (the less great band just made my ears hurt). Saturday, a friend and I spent the morning pursuing bargains (I scored a $150 dress for 90% off and a pair of Anne Klein shoes for $10!). Later, I joined another friend for dinner at her place before we headed to the Russian National Ballet's Sleeping Beauty and met up later with more friends for pizza. Finally, today, I cooked for and attended a Superbowl party I had convinced friends to host (lacking a telly puts me at a disadvantage for these things). I made seven-layer dip, cream cheese caramel dip, and a huge vegetable tray, and brought lots of chips, tzatziki dip, apples, and cherry cider. I was disappointed with the outcome of the game (the last time I watched a Superbowl was when the refs won for the Steelers against Seattle,* and although I didn't think this year's calls were quite as egregious, they didn't seem entirely fair, either), but it was engaging, nonetheless. What made it priceless was watching the halftime show with an entire room full of Springsteen fans my age. In the early 80s, I knew the Boss as a sort of deity (watching him sing Glory Days with Steve brought back memories I'd forgotten I had!), but I was far from the biggest fan in the crowd of art historians. Oh, and the look on his face alone when he slid into the camera was worth the entire Superbowl!

So. My to-do list for today only made it as far as two items ("Dishes" and "Clean kitchen") but I accomplished both (multiple times, in fact, as things in my tidy kitchen quickly devolved into disaster once again as I made guacamole, assembled the dips, and chopped vegetables), which is probably about right for a Sunday. Soon enough, I'm going to have to get really serious about producing some writing--summoning those introverted tendencies to the charge!--but for the moment, I'm totally slacking and absolutely loving it.

*Thanks to Chelfea for the link--although from the post, I'm not sure she shared my sentiments about the officiating!