2004-08-24
What have I been checking out of the library lately, you are perhaps wondering. Well, I got a pressure cooker a couple months ago so I got a slew of pressure cooker cookbooks from the library. I've found some good recipes I will be repeating, and it is really astonishing how quickly things cook in it, but I have to say it hasn't quite changed my life in the way I was hoping it might.
And I've introduced Clay to Curious George. This represents a shift for him, from what I'd call baby books. The CG books are quite a bit longer than I thought his attention span could handle but he is completely enchanted. I suspect he relates to the good little monkey who gets into trouble because of his boundless curiosity. He fixes his eyes on the page with an intensity I haven't seen in him before.
I got a few from the library and began with the origina CG. Clay loved it so that he insisted I read it over and over for almost a week, despite my efforts to branch out to one of the others. I don't think he could imagine liking any of the others as much. Finally, one night I convinced him to try one of the others--Curious George Rides a Bike--by assuring him that if he didn't like it we could stop and read Curious George. I opened it to the first page, which shows George sitting on his bed. As soon as he saw it, Clay said, "I like it!"
I've also been borrowing some videos. "Far From Heaven" was wonderful (I love Julianne Moore's retro beauty). "Hollywood Ending" was so unbelievably bad I couldn't stop watching it. "The Accidental Tourist," which I watched for the first time since it first came out, was a great treat. I watched that as a follow-up to "Broadcast News," which reminded me that William Hurt can be really good. However, I'm not sure I'm ready to watch "Children of a Lesser God," even though it's almost always on the shelf.
Not from the library, but one of the best media experiences of late is watching the boxed set of Freaks and Geeks I got B for his birthday. B and I have a fairly small area of overlap in our viewing tastes, and it was very cool to discover this show together back when it was being aired on cable. So now we're watching the episodes again and loving them. It's funny because now, unlike when we first viewed them, we're parents and are relating to the parents in the show as much as the kids. Maybe we did a little before, too, but now it's especially poignant to imagine Clay going through adolescence and pushing us away.
Oh, also not from the library, but we recently brought our turntable and lots of our records (you know, LPs) back to the house from our storage unit so suddenly all this great old music is available to us again. I hadn't realized how much I'd missed it.
And I'm reading an engaging novel for the first time in recent memory: Carrie Pilby by Caren Lissner, who is perhaps responsible for my own current chattiness.
(I put up another entry a couple hours ago.)
�
�