palace of winds

Momentous occasion: Wednesday night, I went to the grocery store. Okay, that’s not so momentous (I love the grocery store, particularly the banana section), BUT: when I got home, I cooked! Just a simple throw-stuff-in-a-pot soup and some pan-fried tofu, but it’s a start, and now my fridge is stuffed with leftover soup, and the beginnings of horiatiki and a Mexican skillet.

I’m trying not to hate February just because it’s February. Deep in the long grind of winter, no end in sight. Lately I’m dreaming hard of far-off places. (Well, not precisely: I’ve actually been having strange, troubling dreams since the end of December; topic for another day, though!) The Boy and I are going somewhere this year, and here’s the dilemma (the wonderful, overwhelming dilemma): where?

First constraint: time. When I went to Peru in 2007, I took 2 1/2 weeks off work, and — how to put this? — it was less than appreciated by my boss. I was basically told that would never be happening again. But everyone survived, I’m very good at what I do, and — well. Let’s call it a week and a half, no problem. (I’ve already taken, or will be taking, 7 of my vacation/sick days — and can I just take a moment to thank my last-August-self for knowing I’d really, really appreciate 6 days in St. Louis in January? Because I totally needed it. Anyway, leaves me 9 for the rest of the year.)

Second constraint: location. I really want to go somewhere neither of us has been before. The Boy is adorable and pretty fantastic all around, actually, so I’ve decided to forgive him for this, but: he’s been basically everywhere. All around South America (Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, etc), the Middle East (Egypt, Morocco, Turkey, etc), India, Thailand, China, Japan, etc etc. To be fair, this is MY restriction; and also, the world? Big place.

Third constraint: money (of course). I’ve been researching in a dreamy, haphazard sort of way the last few days, and have come up with lots of places that would be wonderful: Bhutan! Vanuatu! Outer space! (I’ve been informed that they’re not actually sending people to the moon — just into outer space.) But they’re rather expensive to get to and/or be in. All part of the balancing act; I have some money to go somewhere fabulous, but I’d also like to, you know, retire one day (and I have that small, not-inexpensive horse habit). And once you’ve spent a ridiculous amount of money and time getting somewhere awesome, what’s the point if you can only stay for a week or so?

And then it’s trying to figure out the time of year, because, confession: I want to be somewhere right now. I hate February here. Okay, so today it’s all Look at me, I’m a bright fluffy beautiful snow globe! But mostly there’s the wrath of EIGHTY-SEVEN BELOW and YOUR CAR GOES SIDEWAYS NOW! and riding outside is some far, impossible dream, and no one can remember what green looks like anymore.

So what I really want, right this second, is to be somewhere hot. I want SUN and I want to be baked alive. But I also don’t want to wait a whole year to go, so I have to temper that with knowing I won’t still feel this way next fall. Mostly, I want somewhere that’s going to take my breath away.

(And alas, I’ve gotten utterly distracted by work for hours and hours now. So I’m going to just post this, abruptly and as-is, or I know I never will.)

This year, I made a New Years goal (not Resolution!) to read at least 24 books: two a month. And so far I am (yay) on track!

A few weeks ago I finished listening to the audiobook of Harlan Coben’s The Innocent, read by Scott Brick. Not really my usual type of book, and — well. When you’re listening to audiobooks, the person reading makes a huge difference. Huge. If you don’t really mesh with the person doing the reading, it’s hard to separate how much you dislike how they’re reading the book from how much you dislike what they’re reading. Brick was just So Overdramatic! about everything, and I found myself not really buying any of it, particularly the dialogue. Maybe the fault of Brick, maybe the fault of Coben. My favorite thing about this book was the complete and utter ridiculousness of the technology. Cell phones must’ve just been — wait. Okay, so I went to look up when this was written, and 2005? Really? Because Coben makes this HUGE deal about the main character and his wife buying camera phones — these cell phones that can send pictures! — but neither of them can really figure out how to use them, or be bothered to try, because they are So. Hard. for realz. And when the main character receives a picture on it, there are maybe eighty-five pages of description about which buttons he pushes to bring up the picture. And there is a private investigator who has super-special software (I KID YOU NOT) to get the picture off his phone and sharpen it. Ditto the video. Which, fine, okay. Let me spend five pages explaining pixels.

Oh man, okay, I have a new favorite part of the book, which is this review from Amazon:

You are Harlan Coben and you are a writer. You are tired of your series character and you have a contract to deliver a book. You decide to write a stand alone book about a guy who can’t become a lawyer because he killed some guy at a fraternity party. So your character becomes a paralegal whose practice is only eclipsed by Danny Devito playing Deck Shifflet, the “paralawyer” in The Rainmaker.

You aren’t a lawyer so you don’t know how utterly improbable this is. Your character marries a wonderful girl, who has a past worse than your protagonist. You offer lots of plot twists, but with fifty pages to go and the bad guys dead, you don’t use them up. So you spend fifty pages showing off how clever you are.

You are so clever that you try to write the book in second person, present tense. Your editor stops you, but you manage to open and close it in the second person. In the middle you write third person past tense from differing points of view. You consider yourself daring. Others are just annoyed at your waste of talent and waste of their time. They know you can do much better.

I didn’t actually mean to rag on the book so much (except the part where the wife tells her backstory to her hubs and it’s supposed to be dialogue but instead it’s like Coben wrote the scene out and just put quotation marks around it. Dear Coben: People do not talk like that! Not even people like me, with weird vocabularies!), but…there you go.

Book #2! Watership Down, by Richard Adams. Y’all probably read this a long time ago, but it was my first time, and I LOVED it. I’m not entirely comfortable with the state of violence or gender politics among rabbits — but then again, they’re rabbits, and it seems like Adams did his rabbit research. So I guess I was more bothered that it didn’t really bother me. ANYWAY. I don’t really like to say too much about books I think people should read — and if you haven’t read this one, I think you should! I’m not ashamed to admit I cried a little when someone went off to bunny heaven. (Which is not a spoiler because c’mon, you know it’s going to happen at some point in a book all about rabbits.)

I also read three (3!) romance novels when I was in St. Louis visiting Steph last week; horrible romance novels are something of a tradition we started in college. We spent one particularly memorable sunny afternoon with them on the rooftop of an Italian hostel, looking down the terraced city of Manarola to the Mediterranean Sea, sipping limoncello. (”Sipping” may not be exactly the right word; we didn’t realize until we went to stand up just what type of alcohol limoncello is. Tip: it is not to be drunk like wine.) They’re books and I read them; do they count? Maybe I’ll keep two running totals…

January 2010 count: 2 (5 including fluff).

So, I’m posting this rather late, but plan to distract you from that by UTTER CUTENESS:

Reliant passed his vet check (and became officially mine) on December 28. He’s at this completely gangly big-headed no-necked phase, and though he’s already 16.2 (5′6″ at the withers [place above the shoulder, where the neck and back join] for you non-horse-people) the first thing everyone says about him is “He’s big!”, followed by “You know he’s going to get bigger…” Which, yeah, he will. He’s only 3, and has the ADD to go with it. And I LOFF him. He is wonderful.

I’m not one for big New Years Resolutions. Let’s face it: I’m going to do what I want, regardless of having (or not having) a defined goal. Even I can’t make myself do something I really don’t want to (so, those of you who know me, rest assured: it’s not just you).

Anyhow, I feel like I can have a few modest goals for the year. Not Resolutions; just goals.

• Post more than last year. This one should be pretty easy; apparently I only had 16 posts in 2009. Shame on me.
• Read more; keep track of it. Can’t compare this one to 2009 since I have NO idea how much reading I did. So, this year, let’s say: 24 books. Two a month. That seems do-able. I won’t even cheat and count the one I finished at the very end of 2009. (Though it was really really good! The Year of the Flood, by Margaret Atwood. You should all run out and get it and Oryx & Crake and read them — Oryx & Crake first.)
• Take more pictures. I have a nice camera and like using it. So I guess this is more a reminder than a real goal.
• Travel. This is a little bit of a cheat, I guess, because I already know I’m going to be traveling this year. But I like checking things off lists (hi future self!), so I’m putting it here anyway. I really need to get started figuring out where I’m going to go — doing masses of research to prepare is a big part of the fun for me.
• Start cooking again. I’ve totally fallen off the cooking-at-home bandwagon in the last year or so, and that’s sad. I love to cook, and it’s tastier and cheaper than eating out. I just need to balance it with riding, and I know exactly how to do that: PLAN. I need to start making weekly menu plans again.

So, there we go. That seems like enough to be going on for now. Well — that and this, which is the list of stuff-I’d-like-to-do-but-probably-won’t:

• Website facelift. I like coding, I do, but the thought of updating WordPress and re-learning their whole system (and anything new) just makes me want to go lie down for a nice little nap.
• Write about Peru. I have this sort of fantasy (tied in with the WordPress upgrade above) about making a travel subdomain, or just one for Peru, separate from this main part of the site. And I would lift stuff from the journal I kept, and spiff up some of my pictures, and finally have a nice online recap for your viewing pleasure.
• Write fiction. DO NOT GET EXCITED. There’s a reason this is in this category and not the one above. Or, rather, many reasons; lack of time and discipline chief among them.

Okay, there we go for real this time. Happy 2010, y’all. My real hope for my own is that it’ll be better than the last third of 2009; shouldn’t be hard.

God I miss having a horse. I dream of nothing else now. Last night I was aboard a smallish liver chestnut (a sign, perhaps?), in the middle of a vast field: rows and rows of gleaming green cornstalks, with narrow mowed grass corridors threading through. I leaned forward, eased my hands up his neck, and we flew.

I had one out on trial last week. He was perfect - perfect! Everett, reimagined as a Thoroughbred. And he failed the vet check, miserably. I’m so disheartened by this whole shopping process. It’s silly how bad I feel, particularly after coming through a really rotten summer and fall still cheerful, feeling blessed by life, sickeningly overjoyed to get out of bed most mornings. And now — I don’t know. I’m desperately unhappy with the whole horse situation. I just need patience, I know. A little patience.

At least I’m surrounded by wonderful people: a lovely boyfriend, impossibly generous friends, sweet coworkers. I surely wouldn’t be surviving half so well without them.