Comment to be added.

Or, actually, what I am calling:
This is the first time I have devised a recipe from scratch. I was worried about proportions, especially with trail mix, which I have always hated because I find it contains too much of the stuff you don't want (cereal, raisins) and not enough of the stuff you do want (chocolate). I think with this one I have hit on the right mix: you want it to be heavy, and hearty, and with something special in every bite. (No handfuls of just plain Chex, thank you very much).

I also wanted it to have a festive fall flavor, to fit the season, so I added cinnamon and pumpkin seeds and craisins. And I am super proud of myself for coming up with the honey trick to make it all stick together!

And now, without futher adieu, I give you: 

Cinnamon Almond Trail Mix

1 1/4 cup whole almonds
1/4 cup pumpkin seeds
3/4 milk or dark chocolate chips
1 1/2 cup whole grain cereal (I used whole grain cheerios)
1 1/2 cup mini pretzel
1/3 cup craisins
1/3 cup raisins
1 tsp cinnamon
honey

Put almonds and pumpkin seeds together in large ziploc bag. Drizzle with honey (be careful not to use too much) and shake in bag to distribute honey evenly. Add 1 tsp cinnamon and shake bag to distribute.

Combine with all other ingredients in large bowl. Mix.

Makes about 7 cups.

I think it could use a little more pretzels and a little less chocolate, but James says to leave it, and I trust him.

Tonight I found my old penpal, Heather from Australia, on Facebook! There used to be this old series of books, the Penpal series, about a group of friends who were--wait for it, can you guess?--penpals! And at the back of each book was a form that you could fill in to apply for a penpal of your own. And I filled one out when I was 11 or so, and wrote, "Please send me a penpal from another country" and they connected me with Heather! We wrote until we were about 15 and then fell out of touch but I've always wanted to find her and reconnect again. And now I have! 

I'm looking forward to finding out what's up in her life. Hurrah for old friends! 

Current Mood: excited

There is a fly dying on my stoop; it's too cold for him and everytime I go down to smoke he has crawled a little further away but he isn't flying and I can't bring myself to mercy-kill him. I feel sentimental toward him, like "I will keep vigil with you on your deathbed, poor little fly," but I think this is taking my not-killing-bugs psychosis to an extreme. I wonder if he is thinking, I heard a person buzz as I died.

I wanted to write down some important goals that I am going to work on this summer. I'm feeling so much better, and I'm graduating in May of 2010. I'm not sure I want to take the bar, but I am pretty sure that I'm going to pursue a career in the nonprofit sector. Ostensibly I'd like a position as a program coordinator, marketing director, or fundraiser, and I think I can swing that, but I've identified a few other things that I think could help.

1) I am taking nonprofit law this fall semester and I think it will be invaluable and it will also help me identify what other courses to take in my last semester. I'm taking poverty law, too, and since that's the area I'd most like to work in, I'm feeling good about that.

2) Volunteering at the library this summer a couple days a week: this will help me get acclimated to working again. To just being in the work environment, being comfortable there again, overcoming workplace anxiety issues.

3) Finally joining the DAR. I know, I know, they're a shitty organization and horrible and evil...but really, they aren't quite so bad and I think I can make a lot of really important networking connections. And the DAR is a charitable organization, and employs people. So maybe helpful.

4) Learning things like SAS and Adobe, and Dreamweaver, or some other HTML type program. These seem to be in high demand.

5) Increasing my volunteer schedule at Food For Others. The director, Liz, is an amazing woman and once I've adequately laid the foundation and built up that relationship, I plan on asking her if I can be her unpaid intern for a few months, shadowing her to get work experience (and get a recommendation).

6) Pimping familial connections. Putting it out there that this is what I'm looking for. Bonnie, Ken, Elia, Joyce, Martha, Donna's Brookings connections. Also: I should probably talk to someone in Career Services at AU to see if they have any books I should read, etc.

Anybody with any advice--what else should I be doing? what should I be reading?--hit me up, please!

I am feeling so good about this. It feels nice to be making plans again.

At the antique store this weekend, I found a poem in a scrapbook, written by an unnamed soldier in WWII. It touched me, so that I felt I couldn't leave it there. I had to take it home. Somebody had obviously put a lot of thought and genuine feeling into it and I feel it presents a very different view of the men who fought in the world wars. The men who fought in all wars. So here it is, reproduced. I wish I knew the man who wrote it. I don't think he's any less a hero than the man who felt the heat of battle.

THE SOLDIERS WHO SIT


I would like to write a poem about the soldiers in this war
Who just sit.
They sit on islands the enemy won't attack,
Knowing they're sitting there.
They sit in bases taken long ago,
In the damnedest places.
These soldiers turn yellow with atabrin.
They sit in the only places in the world
Where you're up to your knees in mud
And get dust in your eyes.

Yes, I would like to write a poem about the soldiers in this war
Who just sit.
They don't get many furloughs, for furloughs are mostly for
The men on active duty.
They just sit,
For one or two or three years,
And when, after all that time, they apply for leave,
They are asked, "What the hell have you done to get leave?"
And they have to say, "Well, sir, all I've done is sit."

And these soldiers, after one or two or three years,
Get funny letters.
"Dear Tom, Sonny passed away last night with pneumonia.
I need you so much."
Or "Dear Charlie, I hate to tell you this,
But I've fallen in love
With Joe Bloomingham,
And I think it only honest to tell you
That I am breaking our engagement."
Yes, after one or two or three years
It's funny the letters a guy gets."

And these soldiers who just sit get only one area ribbon,
And when they go home they can't talk about what invasion they were in
Or about the shells screaming
Or about the Jerries or the Slopeheads,
Because they've had it easy,
And all they've done is sit.

Yes, I would like to write a poem about the soldiers in this war
Who just sit.
And I'm doing it now.
It's a damn dull poem. That's about the only honest kind
You can write about soldiers who just sit.
What I'd really like to do is just repeat one word over and over
Like "Day, day, day, day, day, day, day, day, day, day...."
And make you read that three hundred and sixty-five times.
Then, for just an instant, you might know what I mean.

-Author Unknown.

• A herd of deer grazing in a field
• Two wild turkeys
• A bunny rabbit
• A hawk
• AND A MOTHERFUCKING BEAR.

That is right. James and I were driving along this picturesque road and we go around a curve and there is this HUGE black bear lumbering across the street. I have never ever seen a bear in the wild and I sort of didn't believe it actually happened. For about two miles James and I kept saying, "I saw a bear. I saw a bear." And then the other would say, "Dude, I know. A BEAR. I SAW A BEAR." 

It was really awesome. I'm glad I've seen a bear, now.

Little triumphs in my life, lately: 

• Driving again
• Finally starting my book review blog
• Getting an A-plus-plus report card from Dr. M.
• Seeing the light at the end of the tunnel that is this semester
• Feeling excited about summer classes
• Getting some really good writing done--I think I'm writing better lately than I ever have.
• Seeing the numbers on the scale going down, down, down. Feeling better physically than I have in a long time.
• Finally managing to concoct the perfect, dairy-free chicken corn chowdah.
• Sitting in the sun, playing hippie songs on my guitar.

Things I am looking forward to: 

• All the traveling of the next few weeks: Liz's wedding, Kristen's graduation, West Virginia, and Judy, Jon, Dane and Brynn's beach visit in June. 
• Spending time with friends tomorrow: at Derby Day and Doso de Mayo.
• Moving up to Bronze Level 1. Salsa classes, what what!
• The books I have coming from paperbackswap.com: Forever, by Pete Hamill, The Little Giant, by Elizabeth McCracken, Look at Me, by Jennifer Egan, The Lake of Dead Languages, by Carol Goodman.

What are your little victories? What are you looking forward to?

I've started my book blog! It's constance-reader.blogspot.com. I'm still tinkering around with layout and stuff like that. I am so bad at it.

Basically the premise is that I'm Constance Reader, a play on Dorothy Parker's book review column, The Constant Reader. I'd like to make it Constance Reader and Friends, so would anybody be interested in writing a review for me to post? tediousandbrief, I'd love if you could write something about Prep. I know I have some other big readers on this board so if anybody else would like to that would be awesome.

April books, part II:

 

1. A Widow for One Year, by John Irving.
2. Oystercatchers by Susan Fletcher
3. The Doctor’s Daughter by Hilma Wolitzer
4. A Crime in the Neighborhood by Suzanne Berne
5. Midnight Champagne, by A. Manette Ansay
6. Testimony, by Anita Shreve
7. The Wife, by Meg Wolitzer
8. Vinegar Hill, by A. Manette Ansay
9. The Art of Mending, by Elizabeth Berg
10. We Are All Welcome Here, by Elizabeth Berg (re-read)
11. Object Lessons, by Anna Quindlen
12. Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine, by Ann Hood
13. Good Harbor, by Anita Diamant.

Because it's exam time, I think I'll try a themed grading system.

Top of the Class: 

Over the past few years, I have repeatedly picked up The Doctor's Daughter, by Hilma Wolitzer, skimmed the back, and put it down again. The fact that it promised to be a book in which a woman worries she has cancer put me off. As a rule, I don't like to read about cancer.  I'm so glad that I finally gave TDD a try, because it ended up being funny and smart and well-written. Another Wolitzer, Meg, didn't disappoint with The Wife, the story of Joan, on the way to Finland with her famous writer husband, who's receiving the Helsinki prize for his body of work, reflecting back on the course of her marriage and where it all went wrong. We Are All Welcome Here, a Berg re-read, tells the story of a mother raising her daughter while crippled from polio and in an iron lung, and it managed not to be either maudlin or grim, but funny and genuinely sweet so EB gets extra points for that. A Crime in the Neighborhood by Berne was a good book about a child's murder during the Watergate scandal that sets a pleasant suburban neighborhood on its head as the same time that the entire country is experiencing a loss of innocence. A small little gem of a book.

Gentleman's C: 

Sadly, the majority of the books I read this month seemed to fall in this category. John Irving and I just do not get along. I enjoyed about 2/3 of A Widow for One Year but the other 1/3 just felt stupid and pointless to me. Mansay's Midnight Champagne wasn't inherently flawed but I did find myself wondering, while reading: "Why do I CARE about any of these people?" Her Vinegar Hill was too grim to be enjoyable, the kind of fiction that Jennifer Weiner calls Gray Ladies. It is meant to teach you Important Lessons About Life, including the fact that Life Is Sometimes Awful. We know this. Let's move along. Occasionally, Elizabeth Berg phones it in and The Art of Mending was one of those occasions. Object Lessons was fine but lacked that je ne sais quoi which sets a good book apart from a just-OK book. Somewhere off the Coast of Maine is fairly good representation of what happened to the hippies during the heydey of the 1980s, but too short: you don't get enough time to get to know the characters before its over.

You Fail It: 

It is incredibly rare that I do not finish a book but Oystercatchers didn't stand a chance. The most overwritten, deadly poetically shit I've ever read. Ostensibly a book about a girl visiting her sister in a coma, it devolves into 20-page ramblings about the way that ice looks in the morning on the surface of the sea, the sensation of chewing on one's hair, the way wet shoelaces sound on pavement, and the appearance of a toad as it is bisected in biology class. This writer had nothing to say but didn't know it. After reading Anita Diamant's The Red Tent years ago and liking it I decided to break my cancer-rule and read Good Harbor, which was so bad it made me wonder if the same person could have written both. Testimony, the story of a sex scandal at a New England boarding school wasn't a bad book but it was poorly-written enough to make it a waste of a good premise, and that is unforgiveable. And I guess I'm jaded by life and YouTube and all that, but I just couldn't see three sixteen years olds having an orgy on tape as so shocking as I think Shreve intended it to be. Generational thing, I guess. I can't see the national media reporting on it, or it being on the cover of people, or anything like that.

What are you reading?

Tags: april books, book reviews, books, part ii, reading