Just needed to get this off my chest:

What a pretty place I live in. Honestly.

Where have all the book worms gone?

I know that I’ve been slacking a bit on the blog entries–this is not news–but rest assured that I’ve been diligently reviewing every single book that I read (with the odd exceptions of Isabel Allende’s Eva Luna and Pauline Melville’s The Ventriquist’s Tale, both of which were good but both somehow missed getting reviewed) on my book review site. If you’re not familiar with my book site, well, it’s obviously linked (look up), and it’s full of goofy reviews that include personal anecdotes and more often than not say little to nothing about the book itself: I’m awful fond of meditating on my own personal experience of the book without including so much as a decent summary. However, I do like to offer a list of links to other book review blogs, so that you can read summaries to your heart’s content without the reviewer getting in the way with her dumb stories.

I’ve found some good ones in the past year: namely Wannabe Inkling, which is chockfull of good books and very thorough, very literary reviews (with excellent summaries). Also I’ve found some wonderful ones that focus primarily on Victorian literature (my English major heart went all aflutter when I read that one), or that, like The Restricted Section, subtitle themselves “what we read while we wait for the final Harry Potter” and sign themselves either “Flourish” or “Blotts” (my Potter-nerd heart gets all fluttery over this one).

Periodically, I go through this list of links to make sure they’re still active.

Suddenly, with this testing of links, I found that only Wannabe Inkling, The Restricted Section and Reading Corner were still active: all the others had abandoned ship while my back was turned and left me and my two comrades to review all the books under the sun unaided and without company. Alas! thoguht I. I must sojourn into foreign lands and seek out new blogs and new reviews!

And, oh, what complete dismay I suffered when a Google search for “book review, blog” turned up nothing (well, there was a site or two dedicated to reviews of murder mysteries, but I, in all snootiness, admit that I’d hoped for books a little more, well, challenging). This, on a day when my friend Paul, from whence many excellent recommendations come (he works, after all, in my favorite bookstore: you can thank him for J.D. Salinger, Wallace Stegner, Ian McEwan and more), announced, with his nose rather high in the air, that he was getting rid of all his books and giving up reading.

I sighed, rather melodramatically, from somewhere deep down in my soul.

What is this world coming to when a girl has to track down her book reviews, hunting bow in hand? I know it’s a pretty specialized interest, but honestly, it wasn’t this difficult a few months ago–I found all kinds of stuff. But those sites are no longer active.

I heave another dramatic sigh, and take off to review Tolstoy, unaided and alone.

Mrs. Crunch sings at the top of her lungs

Hello. My name is Thea, and my husband plays World of Warcraft.

(Now is when you all chime in and say, “Hi, Thea,” in that cheesy AA-parody voice.)

But seriously, he does, and we have this little evening ritual: he gets home first and cleans up after last night’s dinner. When I get home, I cook dinner. We eat, and then I take off to the bedroom and my guitar, where I play my little heart out for an hour or so (on a good night), and he camps out at the computer with WoW, where he chats with his fellow guild-members via microphone.

It’s a nice habit, with this one odd glitch: his guild-members can hear me playing every time he talks into his microphone. Most of them, apparently, are used to it, and sometimes they’ll even ask Mitch to leave his mic on so that I can, apparently, serenade them as they march into battle.

I always find out about this later, and am usually mortified, but flattered.

Occasionally, though, somebody new will join the guild and inevitably they will ask, “Um, who is that singing?”

Pause for a bit of backstory. Mitch’s primary character is named Supercrunch, after a particularly tasty burrito served at a “Mexican” restaurant where Mitch worked while I was in college (all of his characters are named after food, I don’t know why).

So, the new guys asks, “Who is that singing?” and before Mitch gets a chance to answer, one of the other guys interjects, “That’s Mrs. Crunch.”

I take it as a compliment.

Event Review: Jolie Holland at the Nightlight Lounge

Yes, it’s true: the marvellous Jolie Holland actually made her way to Bellingham while touring to promote her new album, Springtime Can Kill You.

And yes, I was there.

For those of you not familiar with Miss Holland’s music, I’m afraid I’m not a whole lot of help–you see, she’s difficult to describe. The closest I’ve come is a weak comparison to Billie Holiday, with an old timey acoustic finger-pickin’ guitar for accompaniment; her melodies are eerie, unpredictable and gorgeous, and while the songs and the guitar are one thing, her voice is something completely other. Over the course of the last two months, with the purchase of both her debut, Catalpa, and her sophomore album, Escondida, I’ve fallen completely in love with Holland’s complicated, bewitching sound.

Imagine my joy when I found out she’d be playing in Bellingham.

Sean Hayes, a fellow I’d never heard of (but had somehow become convinced was from England–he was not from England. I didn’t catch where he was from, but it was not England), opened, and he was intriguing enough that Mitch and I bought a copy of Big Black Hole & The Little Star–we have not been disappointed so far. On his last few songs, Jolie Holland came on stage and harmonized with him, which made for an enchanting duet or two, and a sufficient lead-in for Holland’s set.

And her set was good, definately. Her voice was every bit as chilling as it ought to be live, but truly she wasn’t the most gracious of performers: she sound-checked her way right through the first song, and talked down to the audience, and denied us a much-requested encore. I was not impressed, really, and that made me sad.

However, the music was amazing, and not to be sniffed at: Jolie Holland has the best whistle I’ve ever heard, and her versatility as she switched from piano to guitar to tambourine to box fiddle (often in the same song) was awesome to watch. When she played “Mad Tom of Bedlam”, I got the shivers, and the shivers didn’t stop til after she finished “Old Fashioned Morphine.” All in all, it was an excellent show, but it missed one key ingredient: Holland didn’t seem to be enjoying herself much. That also made me sad.

Minding my own business

So, I’m standing in the Express Lane at Haggen, minding my own business, right? I’ve got my little box of contact solution (that’s right: got contacts on Friday, holy crap, I can see), and I’m reading the headlines of People and National Enquirer when I notice that this little kid is drifting out of my check-out line and into the next one. His dad, standing in front of me, trying in vain to remember his Haggen card number, does not seem to notice. Then he does notice, and he doesn’t seem much to care.

“Nathan,” he calls distractedly, “…or was it 85? Hey, Nathan, over here, buddy!”

The kid is maybe two.

When he does finally make his way back to our line, he’s got a big peppermint York patty in his hand, which he tries to hide behind his back as soon as his dad looks his way–but it’s shiny and silver, and about the size of his little head, so his dad spots it and says, “Okay, I saw that,” and shakes his head, No.

Which is when Nathan (who, I’m figuring out now, has this system down pat), deliberately, and with this cherubic look on his face, rips the wrapper right open and takes the patty out.

I’m sure fireworks will start flying, but no. The dad just says, “Well, guess it’s ours now,” and hands the now empty wrapper to the cashier for her to scan, along with $.69.

About now is when I notice a tiny, forlorn little black puppy sitting in the baby seat of their shopping cart. I notice it because it starts up this piercing series of yips–everybody else in the store notices as well, and so all eyes, for three lines either way, are trained on our aisle as the kid (Dad’s back is turned again, still busy with the cashier) offers the puppy some York patty.

Aw, shucks, I think, as the dog slobbers all over it, and takes a big bite. And then Oh… as the kid puts the now-defiled patty back in his mouth.

At this point, the lady behind me–”proper” is, I think, a good word to describe her flawlessly styled white hair and pursed lips–hisses, “Chocolate poisons dogs.”

“What?” I ask, not certain she’s addressing me and, if she is, not sure why she’s telling me this at all.

“I said,” she reiterates, “Chocolate poisons dogs.”

Coming from a family where the dogs beg for whipped cream and Reese’s peanut butter cups and live, generally, long happy lives, I am less concerned about the puppy at this point that I am about devious Nathan and his slobbery candy.

“Oh,” I say.

She continues huffily, “It’s hard, sometimes, to mind your own business.”

“Hmm,” I say, “sure is.”

I can see myself figuring prominently in some narrative later today about the callousness of kids these days, as she regales some poor relative with the tragic tale of how unfeeling, how self-absorbed and oblivious my generation must be, for me to stand by and let that poor puppy be force-fed poison. As though it was my duty, being next in line, to throw myself in front of the dog and cry, “No! Not the puppy!”

Nevermind the kid. I like to give parents the benefit of the doubt in most cases, since I don’t have kids, so what do I know? And the scenes in check-out lines are so often dramatic, and taken out of context. But…hmm. Seems like a kid needs a little bit of attention every now and then, doesn’t he?

Sometimes it is hard to mind one’s own business.

(One from the vaults: here’s an old school post for you, also about strange women in the check-out line)

The things you find on a Thursday night

After an early and marvellous evening at the Temple Bar (somebody, quick: how many references do I make, on this whole whopping blog, to the Temple Bar? Answer: roughly a bazillion), Morgan and I set off into the sunset, on a mission for entertainment. This brought us to the Wild Buffalo, where one of Morgan’s co-workers was apparently performing with his band.

What sort of music do they play? I asked.

She didn’t know.

What was really happening, we learned–after paying our cover, getting our hands attractively stamped with a black-light reactive “B”, and finding ourselves inside the Wild Buffalo as we’d never seen it decorated before–was a circus. An honest-to-goodness circus. To which her friend’s band was providing the soundtrack.

There were balloons and streamers everywhere, and servers in odd costumes–face-paint, corsets, black boots and ruffles. Clowns, wigged jugglers, people in stilts and gold lame and/or cheetah print pants–to say the least, we were outnumbered, because it was not just a circus, but a costume ball as well.

But it was wonderful. The opening band was a bit rough, and far too loud, and an act involving a clown-themed striptease was a bit disturbing, but the band, Captain Seahorse, was excellent, and every act (except for the creepy, stripping clown) was funny, engaging and a bit amazing. What fun, to stumble upon a small, independent circus, particularly when it was so good and so brilliant.