Gargoyles

LW and I looked at Cathedral yesterday, in preparation for our France trip. He was especially taken with the gargoyles and how the rainwater runs down the gutters and flows out of their mouths.

His swimming teacher was not quite as impressed with his imitation of a gargoyle during his lesson today.

Vie de France

Subtitled Sharing Food, Friendship, and a Kitchen in the Loire Valley, this book is essentially food porn.

The author, a former chef, spent a month in France with a group of friends, doing some sightseeing and a lot of cooking and eating. This book is a meal-by-meal description of the month. I salivated over every page. It was all I could do not to grab my passport and head for the airport.

And since Michael told me he'd like me to do some of the cooking in France, it was good to start thinking of shopping and cooking in a foreign country. Michael's a great fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants chef (his chicken noodle soup last night was divine), but I tend to be overly reliant on recipes and not very flexible. Two months of mental preparation is about right.

One funny note: I checked this book out from the library, and emblazoned across the front and back cover, it says, "Uncorrected Proofs for Limited Distribution. NOT FOR SALE."

The Princess of Cleves

Wanting to continue reading books about France, I scoured our shelves for something appropriate and found this book left from Michael's college days.

Once you get past the info dump on who was who in the court of Henri II, this is an easy read. Of course, I had Michael's margin notes to guide me: Important page. Theory of romantic love.

The Princess of Cleves is a woman faced with a dilemma: tell her husband she is in love with another man so he can help her avoid tempting situations? Or keep her love a secret and risk succumbing?

I think Anna Karenina would make a fascinating contrast, but my memories are twenty years old and far too fuzzy. I went so far as to pick my copy off the shelf, considering re-reading it. The sight of the 868 closely typewritten pages dissuaded me, and I put it back. I'm not quite that curious.

Snow!

Tuesday morning when I woke up, I could see grass in places. Grass. In February. In northern New England.


Wednesday morning, I woke up to this:






It snowed for the next fifteen hours, although the rate eased up at times. We ended up with around two feet, with a chance for more later this week.

And the phone rang off the hook. The guests who had reservations were cancelling them because of the driving conditions, while others were making new reservations to take advantage of the improved skiing conditions.

The Happiness Project

I found this book in a round-about way. The author has a blog, and Michael's cousin Lis linked to it from her blog a couple of months ago. I liked what I read, and meant to pre-order the book, but life intervened and it took me until February to actually get my hands on a copy.

I love self-improvement books--it's so much easier to vicariously improve yourself than to do the actual work of changing--and this was no exception. It's akin to The Year of Living Biblically, which I also enjoyed. (It turns out the authors know each other.)

Much of this book resonated with me, starting with the premise of the Happiness Project:

And more important, I didn't want to reject my life. I wanted to change my life without changing my life, by finding more happiness in my own kitchen. I knew I wouldn't discover happiness in a faraway place or in unusual circumstances; it was right here, right now. (p12)

I tend to be drawn to books and movies and music with that same central theme: Carpe Diem. Live deliberately. Dance.

Maybe I'm a slow learner.

The Count of Monte Cristo

Shortly after we were married, Michael discovered I had never read this book. Once he recovered from his shock, he urged me to read it. Sixteen years later, I decided it was finally time.

It's a very fun read.

Alexandre Dumas wrote it roughly twenty years before Victor Hugo wrote Les Miserables. Both are French novels with long time lines. Both involve one character pursuing another through the years.

But there the similarity ends.

The Count of Monte Cristo reads like a soap opera: jealousy, intrigue, disguise, murder, revenge, secret romance, fabulous wealth. The story is very plot-driven, and Dumas keeps the story moving at a modern pace. No fifty-page tangents here.

It's a good classic to give a young teen, and I plan to assign it to EM before our trip to France, but IM has asked to have a stab at it first.

Olympics snark

From tonight's TV Guide listing: In live action, U.S. men's curling faces France

Action? Has the writer ever seen curling? The Canadian women's team has an alternate player who is five months pregnant, for heaven's sake.