#MicroblogMondays: Annoying things & small pleasures

Annoying things: 

• A return to colder temperatures (including strong winds/windchill factor) after a relatively milder period. I guess March has decided to come in like a lion (vs a lamb, as the old saying goes...).  
• The painfully slow rollout of COVID vaccines here.  :(  
• My shaggy COVID hair.  :p  
• Not having any other ideas for a #MicroblogMondays post this week.  :(  ;)  

Small pleasures: 

• February is over!! 
• A brief, masked visit with Little Great Nephew (and, oh yeah, BIL & SIL too, lol) on Saturday night -- our first in two months (since New Year's Eve). 
• I've read 12 books over the past two months, which is pretty good for me these days... 
• Spaghetti rapini agli e olio from our favourite local Italian restaurant on Saturday (with wine!), easy crockpot chicken & dumplings yesterday -- and leftovers of both for dinners this week. :)  

You can find more of this week's #MicroblogMondays posts here.  

"Chronicles of Avonlea" by L.M. Montgomery

Having read & thoroughly discussed "Rilla of Ingleside," "Jane of Lantern Hill" and "The Blue Castle" together as a pleasant diversion over this past pandemic year, my L.M. Montgomery Readathon Facebook group will be tackling "Chronicles of Avonlea" as our next read.   

"Chronicles," originally published in 1912, is Montgomery's fifth published book and her third Anne/Avonlea-related book, following "Anne of Green Gables" and "Anne of Avonlea," sequentially. It's 183 pages long (in the edition I read, anyway) and includes 12 short stories, all set in or around the mythical Prince Edward Island community of Avonlea. While some consider it part of the "Anne of Green Gables" series, Anne Shirley appears only briefly or is merely mentioned in passing in some of the stories. (Under pressure from her publishers to come up with more Anne stories, Montgomery produced this collection by editing some of her previously published short stories to include references to Anne and Avonlea.)  Some of the stories in this book and its sequel volume, "Further Chronicles of Avonlea," were used as source material for the "Road to Avonlea" TV series in the 1990s (which was primarily based on "The Story Girl" and "The Golden Road").  

I'd always thought I'd read just about all of Montgomery's works, with the exception of "A Tangled Web," which I tried to read as a pre-teen and gave up on, and "The Watchman," a collection of her poetry, which I was not able to find as a kid.  I've always preferred novels to short stories, though, and if I'd read this collection before as a pre-teen, I had absolutely no memory of any of the stories in it. (I suspect the same would be true for "Further Chronicles of Avonlea," which was published in 1920.)  

Generally, I prefer complete books to short stories (although I have enjoyed some non-fiction essay collections). That said, short stories and essay collections have their merits, and I've come to appreciate them more as an adult, I think.  They can be great to dip in & out of when time is an issue and attention spans are short, and in this case, it was fun to read a Montgomery book that was as good as new to me.  At the same time, though, there were a lot of themes/plotlines here that were pretty familiar/predictable to anyone who is familiar with other Montgomery works.  Many of the stories here are ultra-sentimental, populated with "old maids," cantankerous bachelors and orphans -- but they also display Montgomery's usual gifts for vivid characterization and beautiful descriptions. 

I can't say I have any favourites among the 12 stories in this volume, although "The Quarantine at Abraham Alexander's"  was both humorous and timely in its theme (and I suspect is one reason why the organizers chose this book to read while we're living under COVID-19 restrictions...!).  I will add a caveat that many of these stories are definitely of their time, and contain themes/elements that those of us who have been through infertility or childlessness might find uncomfortable or even offensive. "Pa Sloane's Purchase" (involving an orphan baby), while meant to be humorous, definitely gave me pause! 

We are only just beginning our discussion of this book (and you are welcome to join us, at the link above!) -- and when we're done, I'll be counting & re-reviewing this book again as a re-read, as I have previously. 

I initially decided on a Goodreads rating of 3.5 stars, rounded up to 4, but after some reflection while writing this review, I decided to round down to 3 stars on Goodreads. 

This was Book #12 read to date in 2021 (and Book #7 finished in February), bringing me to 33% of my 2021 Goodreads Reading Challenge goal of 36 books. I am (for the moment, anyway...!) 7 books ahead of schedule. :)  You can find reviews of all my books read to date in 2021 tagged as "2021 books." 

(More) Odds & ends

• Why we are doomed...  (footage from a big-box home decor store in my region, which just reopened this week).  Also: check out this related tweet (& responses)(featured in the story).  
• I love Homesense (and I will admit I found myself thinking wistfully about all the great stuff I usually find there when I was decorating for Christmas....) -- but is now *really* the time to be lining up to buy a decorative basket or pillow or farmyard sign or...??  The longer people keep doing dumb stuff like this, the longer this is going to drag on... 
• Even in non-COVID times, I don't think you'd find me waiting 45 minutes in line for a photo frame or pillow...!  
• (Also: aren't there supposed to be store capacity limits in place right now, as part of the reopening rules? Were they being enforced?) 
• Katy at Chasing Creation has put together an online summit for childless women!  Four days of amazing (free!) programming (March 18-21), with options to upgrade for longer access to videos, bonus podcasts and other perqs. Check it out and register here.  
• Jess ("My Path to Mommyhood") has a new blogging home! Go say hello and congratulate her on the launch of "Finding a Different Path." 
• My best friend from growing up emailed me on my 60th birthday last month (which I mentioned here) -- she asked me then for my current phone numbers, and she called me earlier tonight! I recognized the area code but not the number -- though it might be one of my aunties, who call me occasionally -- what a surprise when I realized who it was!  We talked for an hour & a half!! As I said in my earlier post, we don't see each other or talk on the phone often these days, but whenever we do, we just pick up where we left off.  It was a real pick-me-up.  :)  
• The hair salon we frequent (back in our old community, where we had the house -- a 30-45 minute drive from here) reopened last week, and I've been trying to call for appointments for haircuts, on & off. I finally gave up trying to reach a live person there and left a voice mail message this afternoon... and got a message back while I was on the phone with my girlfriend tonight (of course...!).  They are open again, BUT our regular stylist of the last several years is not back to work yet. Her little girl has health issues (asthma) and she is not comfortable with returning to work yet.  So we're trying to decide:  should we wait a while longer and see if/when she's coming back? (It's already been 12 weeks since our last haircuts, and we're both feeling pretty shaggy -- albeit it was 17 weeks between haircuts last spring/summer...!)  Should we ask for appointments with one of the other stylists there (whom we've known for a while too, albeit she's never cut our hair)?  Or should we make the break and try to find a new salon/stylist(s) here, closer to home (in the middle of a pandemic...!)?  I don't know... what would you do?? 

#MicroblogMondays: Odds & ends

• 
  BIL called dh on Friday afternoon... Someone he works with had had close contact with someone else who had COVID-19 symptoms and was being tested... so this coworker was getting tested too. Of course, BIL won't hear what the results were until sometime today, when he's back at work. To date, the only person in our circle (that we know of) who's had COVID is dh/BIL's cousin's husband. But it feels like it's getting closer & closer all the time... Reports of the new, more contagious variants, are scary.  And meanwhile, the vaccine rollout here continues to be painfully slow...  
• Our region is reopening today (moving from grey to code red), after more than two months under lockdown/stay-at-home orders (with capacity restrictions, etc., in place). (The city proper and one other nearby region remain closed for at least another two weeks.)  The region where we used to live -- and where we still go for haircuts and doctor visits -- reopened last week. I've been calling the hair salon almost daily for the past week, trying to book haircuts, but I just keep getting voice mail. It's been almost 12 weeks since our last haircuts -- I may eventually get desperate enough to just leave a message and hope for the best, lol.  
• I've heard that salons, restaurants, etc., in some regions are asking people for ID/proof of address, and if you're from out of region, they will not serve you -- trying to discourage people from regions still under lockdown from coming there for "frivolous" reasons. That's fine with me, but it's not like we're just roaming around looking for haircuts -- we've been customers of our stylist for several years now (if not at this particular salon -- she moved over there last year after the one we'd been going to for years closed). 
• Fire alarm testing in our building today... uggghhhh.... SO. LOUD!!  
• Thank you, Jody Day, for introducing me to Yael Wolfe and her beautiful, thoughtful writing about childlessness and other subjects. This recent piece was just about perfect -- about the experience of childlessness, about motherhood, about labels (the ones we choose for ourselves and the ones that get applied to us), about the stories we tell and the ones we don't and why...  Definintely worth a read! 
• Brandi at Not So Mommy recently pondered the "childless vs childfree" label question too. 
• I wrote about this issue early in my blogging career (the third post on this blog, actually!). 

You can find more of this week's #MicroblogMondays posts here. 

"Sourdough" by Robin Sloan

Well. THAT was... interesting...! 

"Sourdough" by Robin Sloan is/was our Gateway Women/NoMo book club pick for February. There are no babies or pregnancies in "Sourdough," which fits the parameters of the club. 

There is, however, bread. Lots and lots of bread. This is not a book for the carb-phobic, lol. The cover shown on the left is the one I had on my Kobo ebook, but other editions feature a loaf of sourdough.  Just looking at it made me hungry. And crave bread -- preferably warm out of the oven, with lots of butter, lol.  

Our young heroine, Lois Clary, learned about robots when she started working in Detroit's auto industry. Now she's been hired by a Silicon Valley company that programs robot arms to do various tasks. Like many of her coworkers, she spends long hours at the office, existing on a "nutritive gel" with the rather unappetizing name of "Slurry."  Then one night at her apartment, she decides to order in from a local hole-in-the-wall restaurant run by two immigrant brothers, and falls in love with their "Double Spicy" -- soup and sandwiches made with delicious sourdough bread. When visa issues force the brothers to leave the country, they entrust her -- their "Number One Eater" -- with a crock of their sourdough starter.  

And so Lois begins to bake bread. And strange things begin to happen... 

I don't want to give away too much of the plot here, but suffice to say the writing is highly readable, and the story takes a few unexpected/weird twists & turns that kept me turning the pages.  I was reminded of "Uncanny Valley" by Anna Wiener -- a young woman's memoir of her experiences in Silicon Valley (which I read & reviewed here).  And maybe a couple of sci-fi &/or fantasy movies I've seen. (I'm not much into sci-fi or fantasy, but there are definitely elements of that here.) There's everything here from ancient civilizations to the hippy-dippy/crunchy-granola San Francisco of the 1960s to modern foodie culture (a restaurant that made me think of Alice Waters's Chez Panisse) to the sleek high-tech world and the belief that technology can solve everything. Can these things all co-exist? What happens when worlds collide? 

I'll be thinking about this one for a while... 

(I do like books that make me think, even if I don't entirely understand.)  

Four stars on Goodreads. 

This was Book #11 read to date in 2021 (and Book #6 finished in February so far), bringing me to 31% of my 2021 Goodreads Reading Challenge goal of 36 books. I am (for the moment, anyway...!) 6 books ahead of schedule. :)  You can find reviews of all my books read to date in 2021 tagged as "2021 books." 

"The Young Clementina" by D.E. Stevenson (re-read)

My online D.E. Stevenson group just finished our chapter-by-chapter reading & discussion of "The Young Clementina," one of Stevenson's early published novels (1935). I read the book for the first time in December (before Christmas), before our group read began, and reviewed it here. 

I reviewed the plot, its shortcomings and strong points in my previous review, so I won't repeat myself here. I did note then that our group discussions usually added to my appreciation of the book, and that was certainly the case here. My feelings about the book's flaws remain (and I was glad to learn my concerns are shared by others in the group) -- but overall, it was not without merits, and my fellow group members helped me to see those more clearly too. 

That said, my original rating -- 3 stars on Goodreads -- still stands. It's not my favourite DES novel (the highly predictable ending will have anyone who's ever dealt with infertility rolling their eyes...!), but I am glad I read it.  

Our group's next Stevenson novel will be "Katherine's Marriage," a sequel to "Katherine Wentworth," which we read together last summer (reviewed here and here). 

This was Book #10 read to date in 2021 (and Book #5 finished in February so far), bringing me to 28% of my 2021 Goodreads Reading Challenge goal of 36 books. I am (for the moment, anyway...!) 6 books ahead of schedule. :)  You can find reviews of all my books read to date in 2021 tagged as "2021 books." 

"Unimaginable" by Brooke D. Taylor

Brooke (Brooke D. Taylor) -- who blogs at By the Brooke  -- has written a book!   

"Unimaginable: Life After Baby Loss" tells the story of Brooke's pregnancy with her first daughter, her "Baby Duck," Eliza, who was stillborn in December 2010, and what happened next. 

I will admit that I was predisposed to love this book. I started reading Brooke's blog shortly after Eliza died -- found it through Mel's now-defunct Lost & Found Connections Abound (LFCA) blog, I believe. The first post she wrote after losing Eliza consisted mostly of a passage from "Dover Beach" by Matthew Arnold, which I recognized immediately from my university days (and which The Bangles used as inspiration for their own amazing song, "Dover Beach" in the early 1980s... but, I digress... ;)  ). (I loved studying the Victorians, and I loved Arnold -- I remember doing a paper on his "Empedocles on Etna." And I adore The Bangles. :)  ) 

Brooke is almost (gulp) 20 years younger than me;  Eliza died almost 12 years after my Katie. She went on to become the mother of three (more) adorable, high-spirited little girls -- Eliza's younger sisters;  Katie remains my only child.  And yet, there's a common thread that runs through our grief experiences -- through most pregnancy loss & grief experiences, no matter how different the circumstances. Brooke's words, in her blog and now in this book, beautifully capture the experience of bereavement, and how it evolves over time.  The book is not a long read (258 pages) but it's jam-packed with wise words and thoughtful observations -- minute little details that instantly took me back 23 years with a shock of recognition at the memory -- and had me bookmarking page after page. I don't often cry over my lost pregnancy or wee baby girl these days, but I needed Kleenex at several points, reading Brooke's story. 

I've read lots of pregnancy loss books & memoirs in the years since the stillbirth of my own daughter.  This ranks right up there with the best of them, including Elizabeth McCracken's "An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination," which I have long considered the gold standard.  ;)  It would be the perfect book to hand to someone who is dealing with the unimaginable -- or to someone who doesn't know what to say or how to help someone who is. (Actually, it would be a great book for anyone dealing with any kind of traumatic loss.)

Check out Brooke's blog, as well as her book. You can order your own copy of "Unimaginable," in Kindle or paperback format, on Amazon, here. 

5 stars on Goodreads. 

This was Book #9 read to date in 2021 (and Book #4 finished in February so far), bringing me to 25% of my 2021 Goodreads Reading Challenge goal of 36 books. I am (for the moment, anyway...!) 5 books ahead of schedule. :)  You can find reviews of all my books read to date in 2021 tagged as "2021 books."