Book club is about more than reading books!

Well, our book club has just celebrated it's one-year anniversary. 

We've read some wonderful, must-read books like The Kitchen House by Kathleen Grissom. They inspired us and ignited some fantastic, lively conversation. We've also read some real duds, like the second book by Anthony Bourdain called Medium Raw. Also a bomb for our group was How to Be a Woman by Caitlin Moran, who was claimed to be the British Tina Fey, a claim I wholeheartedly disagree with! However, as much as we did not enjoy the book itself, the bad reads brought about some great conversation, specifically related to women and women's rights, something us six ladies could relate to!

Our latest read, Wild by Cheryl Strayed, was great for most of us. It is a true story about a woman who loses her mother to cancer, how her world starts to fall apart, so she decides to hike the Pacific Coast Trail, the PCT, alone. Two of my fellow book club members have lost parents to cancer. They had a much harder time getting through the book and could very closely relate to the experience the author wrote about. We had such a good talk, that we may start our next get together still discussing this book! It's been fun to see how each of us interprets each of the reads in our own way. Like for the book Wild, some of us thought of it as a foolish adventure, and others saw it as a cathartic healing journey. It was probably a bit of both, but either way it's worth the read!

We've chosen My Name is Memory, by Ann Brashares, for our next meeting, and after that it's onto Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov. We sometimes choose books with strong feminine characters, and sometimes it's just the opposite. Whether a great page-turning novel, or a dud of a book, I always enjoy the time we spend together. Our discussions aren't always about the books we've read, they are more importantly about each other and what's been happening in each of our lives. This has proved very cathartic, and worth every dull page I may have had to read to get there.

Book club favorites

People watching...

I have a guilty pleasure I'd like to publicly confess here. I LOVE people watching! 

I mean who doesn't like to observe our fellow citizens at their unsuspecting best or worst? There are so many great venues to do this. We just returned from a trip, and the airport is a prime people watching spot. Who hasn't just sat and simply observed those around you?? My husband and I used to make up stories, where were they heading, what were their lives like? The more absurd the better! Childish maybe, but definitely fun and a good way to pass the time.

I just glanced up from writing this in a coffee shop, that shall remain nameless, and saw a man in a neon check kilt, wearing headphones and a shockingly bright neon shirt. Complete with tall checked socks and sandals. If it were permissible I would have taken his picture to post here. He was a bit too old to be rushing for a fraternity, so what was his story? It was a great outfit, and I liked his individual style! I've seen a grown man rollerblading in a leather bikini brief, very brief I might add, shirtless, with a giant blue mohawk, cruising down the middle of road like he'd just won the lottery. Who knows, maybe he had!

It's fun to see how we, the public behave when we think we are not being observed. You know we have all seen the nose pickers in the car who think no one is watching! I hope I didn't just offend any of you! However you choose to dress or behave, be careful, this people watcher just might be watching you! And for heavens sake, please use a Kleenex!

How to begin people watching!

Please? And thank you!

As a committed writer for this blog I made a promise to myself when accepting this job. I would try my hardest not to use it as a platform from where I preach my morals and beliefs onto you, the unsuspecting audience. But I do have something I would like to get off my chest, vent about, blow off some steam. That is specifically what has happened to our manners? 

 Where have all of our pleases and thank yous gone? I know there are some uber polite folks out there, kudos to all of you, keep it up! But the rest of us (yes, I too am guilty of occasionally missing a please or thank you) we have no excuses. 

We all have bad days and don't feel like saying thank you or being polite. But that is not the person behind the counters fault, they don't know that. A simple hello, a quiet thank you or even a nod carries a lot of weight. What kind of example are we showing our children? 

Now, as a family, we are admittedly pretty adamant our kids says please and thank you. But they are kids, and they need almost constant reminders to do so. We have had several proud moments where we have been complimented on how polite our child was (when we weren't even there to remind them!) I think our hard work aka nagging, maybe working! But come on, this isn't a hard thing to insist our youth do. Yes, it may take a bit of prompting, a polite nudge now and again, but we all should do it. 

And yes, I do feel better. Please, and thank you.

P.S After finishing writing this piece, I left the coffee shop and waited in the snow to hold the door open for a woman walking in. She never thanked me! I should have slipped her the link to this blog!

Benefits of good manners
Manners and morals of today's children and teens

Ode to Janis!

In my alternate life, I am a rockstar.

At least that's what I've been telling myself every Tuesday for the past month.

I channel my inner Janis Joplin and try my best to jam with Bill--my guitar teacher. Yes. I am trying, key word trying, to learn how to play guitar.

There is the old saying "the heart is willing" but my fingers are not cooperating the way I would like. So far, I'm on the fourth string, can sometimes play a C chord and can crank out an ok version of Ode to Joy.

Janis Joplin, I so am not. But I'm persisting. My respect for musicians has grown immensely. Then to watch them sing and play at the same time, wow! I do know it is possible to teach an old dog new tricks, I just know this old dog doesn't learn as fast as I would have as a kid. I'm not complaining though. It's been extremely exciting to try my hand at something I've always wanted to do. I can feel a part of my brain light up as I attempt to make my fingers play a G chord, without looking. My Yankee Doodle is almost recognizable. At a month in, never having read music before, I'll take it!

If you've ever wanted to try an instrument or new hobby, take it from me, don't wait! It really is a blast. Though my aspirations of playing lead guitar in a famous rock band have dwindled a tad, I'll always have Janis. Or at least her cds!

Tradition!

If I had to describe a family tradition we do every year, without fail, it would be coloring Easter eggs with my grandparents.

My father's father was born in 1919 and one of this man's greatest joys comes from dunking many dozen hard-boiled eggs into little cups of color. Each and every year, through moves and new houses, my parents, grandparents and now my kids, get together and color seven or eight dozen eggs.

There is the discussion of the proper way to boil the eggs, are they peeling well this year? How does the color look? Which crayons work best to write the names on the eggs? My husband just laughs and can't really understand our love for such tradition. But we've managed to do this every year, without fail, for the better part of thirty five years.

No one gets a bigger kick out of it than my PaPa. He positively beams at my kids as they dunk their eggs in each cup to get the perfect color. He's the first to enjoy a cracked egg, always remarking at how it peeled or didn't peel. At 94 he's slowed down a bit. But nothing dampens his love for coloring eggs. And I say to my husband, the look on my grandpa's face as he looks around the table at his family is reason enough to keep up this tradition.