Book Review: Sea of Monsters

The Sea of Monsters by Rick Riordan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I picked this series back up after despairing in the library one evening to the librarian on the lack of well written young adult series outside of Harry Potter, the Hunger Games and His Dark Materials. While I still don't think that the Olympians can hold a candle to any of those, Rick Riordan spins a charming, exciting and funny story which kept me entertained through a cold.

I love the addition of Tyson to the gang, especially once his nifty talent was revealed. I love the idea of seeing more unique items in the future and hope that Riordan follows that character through.

My biggest quibble is that almost every character has a Harry Potter equivalent. This does diminish a bit of the originality of the stories and takes them from being something really clever to sort of A been there, done that. Hopefully those parallels will also fade as the story arc and characters develop.

All in all, a good read and an decent adventure that I will continue for at least another installment.

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Bowser Therapy

Bowser - just your basic dragon/turtle bad guy with penchant for mohawks and ships.

Bowser - the ubiquitous villain from Nintendo's Mario Brothers game is just your basic bad dragon/turtle hybrid guy. He enjoys roaring, throwing fireballs and most of all, kidnapping Princess Peach who by now I think pretty much digs it as revealed in this hilarious video by College Humor.

Nonethess, when J, our foster son, joined us in October, he had never played video games before. It was our logical first step in the middle of the chaos of being placed with a stranger-to-us 5-year old. We had no toys, books or even a bed, but we did have Wii and Mario Kart.

Turns out, in the aftermath of a traumatic separation, video games provided him the perfect outlet to release frustration and grief. There were tears and yelling – but it was aimed at the game and eventually, with enough determination and grit, he fought his way through levels and began collecting the coveted Mario Galaxy stars.

Along the way, J (who cannot be pictured due to confidentiality issues), developed quite a fondness for Bowser, the ultimate Mario bad guy. Who knows why, but nothing Bowser threw ol’ Mario’s way could dissuade this love. When I jokingly suggested one day that I make him a Bowser costume, the idea stuck. And unlike the suggestions for eating vegetables or drinking milk, this one has been pursued with a vigor that has surprised us all.

So I've added this to my Life Life (it has to be a quick one!) on GoMighty.

Make a Bowser Costume for My Foster Son Before He Leaves Us in March.

So, now it is off to Pinterest, Joann’s and crafting sites to figure out how in God’s name this costume is going come together.

Sewers and crafters, your ideas and suggestions are welcome. In a rare instance to a foster case, this one will have a happy ending and I’d like to send him off with his costume.

Book Review: Will Grayson, Will Grayson

Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

My very first thought upon finishing this book was where was John Green when I was in high school? Of course, if my math is correct, he was likely potty training, but nonetheless, I stand in awe of his
brilliance.

Green can capture the "everystudent" - the one who is not super concerned with being popular, but worries about grades, getting into college, finding a girlfriend/boyfriend - like no other. He writes about the kind of kid that I was - except now I just wish there was a female protagonist.

The book is a fast read - a quick coming of "relationship" story since I feel all these characters are still behind on their actual "coming of age." Instead, the book traces the characters as they learn what it means to love, like, talk and just be. Everyone's life will be changed, but there is a realistic feel that these, after all, are just kids. And high school is but one phase on a long road of change.

The back and forth chapter-by-chapter partnership of Green and David Levithan is terrific. Each Will Grayson has his own voice and the supplemental characters keep their individual voices even through the different author's eyes. The book is funny and moving and a great example of the "it gets better" campaign without ever once uttering that phrase.

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Life List #12: Ozark Pudding Cake

One of my Life List goals is to cook my way through an entire cookbook. I've started and stopped this so many times with so many different cookbooks that I almost just nixed it from the list. Clearly, something wasn't working.

Then, on a random whim, I purchased Vintage Cakes by Julie Richardson. I'd seen it on a blog and suddenly I knew, there was my cookbook. I'll be posting the various recipes made from time to time here as well as on Go Mighty.

We shall start with Ozark Pudding Cake.

Please excuse the poor picture quality. Read the post for details.

Thanksgiving 2012.

Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday. What’s not to love about a day dedicated to my favorite hobby and butter.  But this year was different. This was the year that only five weeks earlier, we became foster parents to two brothers ages 2 and 4.5.


Now, we are not young. We are not old either, but we also don’t have any children of our own. These babes came with nothing but sweatsuits and socks. Still reeling from the shock of readjusting our entire state of being, along comes Thanksgiving, hosted at our house out of sheer sympathy for our new lives.

I foolishly volunteered to do a side dish and dessert. Thanksgiving morning dawned and I realized, I had no lists, no timing plan, and not even a clean house. Underwear was strewn on the basement floor (what is up with that, mothers of boys?) and a barf-filled afghan had been dragged into the yard by our dog from the night before. Great.

Out of desperation, I grabbed my new cookbook, took stock of my ingredients – pears, check! Dried cranberries, yes! Nuts – found buried deep in the freezer, jackpot!

The cake came together quickly (in one bowl!) while my parents were setting out the food they brought. It baked while we ate. We had no ice cream or whipped cream or creme fraiche, but served warm and buttery from the cast iron pan, even the barfy child could not resist. It is neither a traditional cake, nor is it pudding. But it is pure comfort – the pears melting into moist vanilla-y cake spiked with the sweet tartness of cranberries.

Did my luscious but humble cake save Thanksgiving? No, but maybe Thanksgiving doesn’t need saving from mess, noise and the unexpected. It was my parents looking bemusedly on the chaos, my sister and her boyfriend laughing about the “built-in birth control” and the two happy little boys snuggling and playing in the messy house…that’s what Thanksgiving really needs.

Book Review: Cloud Atlas

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

In the interests of keeping it real, I almost put this book down after the first three sections. The subject matter of the first story was challenging, the second story seemed a bit pointless (although the best of these three) and the third was simply annoying. But perseverance won the day and in the end, the story I liked the least became one of my favorites.

Told linearly yet abstractly, if that is even possible, the book is divided into six stories connected by various threads. You get the first half of five of the stories, then the entire sixth story and then you cycle backwards through the second half of the five stories. Make sense? It does when you are reading, oddly enough.

What makes this fascinating, besides the constant puzzle to figure out connections, is that each story is completely self-contained and a totally different genre than the others. I can only imagine the storyboarding that went into writing this thing.

I would normally write a longer, more detailed review for my blog, but honestly, to reveal more would be a) too spoilerrific and b) plain confusing. To sort of get a feeling for the WTFness of this book, I highly recommend watching the film's trailer. There have clearly been quite a few changes, but it gives a better summary than I can - and you will still be shaking your head at the end.

I am looking forward to seeing how this is adapted when the movie comes out in October.

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How to Fill 66 Jars in a Day

In the late 90s, I became a certified "Master Food Preserver" through my local county extension office. It sounds very fancy, but at the time, canning and food preservation was truly out of favor. I was undoubtedly the youngest person in my class of about a dozen people.

As Master Food Preservers, we were expected to field questions from county constituents contacting the understaffed extension offices as well as give demos and teach classes. In the entire time that I lived in Weld county, I never once got a question nor did I ever teach a class. I fulfilled my required hours mostly by helping out at the county fair and manning a little visited food preservation booth at various county functions.

Fast forward to 2008, after a long time away from my canner, I decided to make some pickles. I wrote this about the craft:

There is no doubt that canning is as laborious and useless a kitchen task as there currently is. But there are fewer culinary tasks more satisfying than seeing rows of your own (tastier) pickles lined up in the pantry. 

And while that is still true, over the past three years, for whatever reason, canning has seen a resurgence. Whenever I mention my pickles, which is frequently as I am an unabashed canning evangelist, I inevitably get a request to "teach me how!" I started with a small class to a  friend and her husband, then another much larger class to my church, and then my closest friend asked to learn. One hot August day, we put up our favorites:  jams, pickled beets and bread and butters pickles. The Annual Cannual was born.

This year was the third Annual Cannual and every year we learn more. Canning is still useless, hot and laborious, but this is how you do it right.

The Set Up

Apparently, glass top stove manufacturers forbid canning using traditional ridged-bottom canners due to a combination of weight, pot size and the temperature fluctuations of the glass top stove. Knowing the volume of the Annual Cannual, I was unwilling to accept canning in my smaller flatbottomed canner. So we did this instead:

Yes, a propane-powered, dual-burnered camp stove with an output of 35,000 BTUs per burner. We kept two canners constantly going (even in the rain), the heat stayed outside and all four burners were available on the range inside for cooking. Also, spills? No problem.

The Bounty

Tomatoes from fellow choristers, peaches from coworkers, cucumbers, onions and chiles from the local farmers markets and the rest from the uber gardeners, my parents. The fresher, the better.

The Tribe

Many hands make light work - never truer when you have pounds and pounds of produce to convert into pickles and jams. Everyone did prep work at home so on the morning of the Cannual, we only had about two hours of blanching, peeling, chopping and foodmilling left to do.

Cilantro and tomatoes for salsa

Apples for apple butter

Peaches and strawberries for jam

The Yield

We started at 10:00 am and finished at about 8:30 pm. Plenty of time left for ice cream and consuming extra jam.

7 pints of peach salsas

7 pints of tomato salsa

4 pints of pickled beets

7 pints of bread and butter pickles

10 half-pints of apple butter

17 half-pints of peach jam

9 half-pints of strawberry rhubarb jam

5 half-pints of plum preserves

10 half-pints of apple butter

Everything definitely has a season.

Life List #5 - On Top of the World, part 2

(see part one of the story here)

Chris and I spent the night before in Fairplay - arriving at nearly midnight and waking after a restless night at 3:30. I'd brought instant oatmeal which we ate liberally loaded with nuts and drank hot tea. I desperately hoped this would be enough to power us through the start of the day. We had a store's worth of REI gear on our persons. I'd bought anything and everything - I had no idea what to expect.

Was I actually going to climb a fourteener?

At 5:00 am we met Mike (my boss) and our friend Brian at the Kite Lake trailhead. It was dark, and Chris and I were quickly outfitted with borrowed headlamps, gloves and poles. All of my extra weight had been redistributed among our crew. Adrenaline quickly replaced my knotted stomach and my four-hours of sleep addled anxiety.

OMG. I was going to climb a fourteener.

The first thing that Mike told us was that we were going to go slow. Really really slow. Even slower than I thought I had ever gone before. So slow that we would be frustrated and want to go faster. That slow. Did we get it? Slow.

The second thing was to remember to breathe. Breathe deeply and continuously. This might sound elementary but have you ever noticed when exercising that you sometimes forget to breathe? It is key as you start gaining vertical feet.

Admiring the ice crystals that were everywhere.

As we started getting closer to the ascent part (the trail was very long), I began to notice something particularly troubling. Everything was coated with a thin sheet of ice. By everything, I mean the trail had turned from dirt to rocks. And the rocks were solid black ice. Yikes.

Ping pong goodness

The darkness finally eased into light and someone commented that it was like being inside a ping-pong ball. We were in a cloud of fog - or maybe just a cloud - we were already at about 12,000 feet.

Um, hello. I was freakin' climbing a fourteener!

See the ice coating my hair. My hairsicles. It was everywhere.

We stopped at 13,000 feet to check pulse ox rates. Mine had slipped to 85. Breathe, I was told. Don't talk, just breathe.

Nanuk of the Mosquito Range

We powered up with electrolyte gels and water as we hit 14,000 feet. Another check of the pulse ox showed mine back up to 95. It never fell below 94 for the remainder of the climb.

Don't be fooled by the sun. These rocks were icy.

One foot after another and all of a sudden, we were there. We were at the top of Mt. Democrat at 14,155 ft. We'd climbed two miles and 2,300 vertical feet. That's a 20% grade. My pulse ox was 95, my heart rate was about 145.

I had just climbed a fourteener!

But wait! There's more...