So I have been feeling a little bit adrift, at a loss, recently, and that has showed in my lack of any interesting content on this blog.  When there’s nothing to say, well… there’s nothing to say.  I need a little bit of a kick to do some things that make me feel at least slightly accomplished, so I believe that I will set some personal goals for myself for the coming year and then write about them as I complete them.  After contemplating a lot of unreasonable ideas and outrageous deadlines (such as, reading 100 books in the next year?  Debone-ing a duck?  I don’t think so) I am going to attempt the below to do list:

• Cook one unnecessary, completely new recipe every month (I did this in December/January, making chocolate babka and peppermint marshmallows, and I wish I’d written about them).
• Create one new scrapbooking page or card per month.
• Learn one new helpful home, shopping or healthcare tip per month.
• Read two Russian novels, a James Fenimore Cooper novel, a William Faulkner, and a James Joyce work (I have been attempting this goal for about five years.  I have never read more than three pages towards this goal.  The three pages were out of August 1916 by Aleksander Solzenhitsyn.  Worst ever.).

I have the most trepidation towards #4.  Yet  it really is the one that I feel is most critical to my mental well being.  You see, I have avoided each of these authors/books for a particular reason, some more or less rational, some… not… but I will deal with those stories in due time.  So overcoming meaningless paranoia would be quite a positive benefit.  And besides, I am ashamed at calling myself well read and never having read anything from that little list… like a fraud.

So, here goes!

It’s funny how dismissive you can be of a book before you have actually read it.  If you’d told me last January that I would spend the year making my way through Harry Potter, I would have been rather disinterested, or, maybe, a little frustrated at myself for caving to cultural pressure.  I was always rather distrustful of the books that all of society seemed to devour.  An overly popular book always seemed to remind me of Goosebumps, or the Babysitter’s Club.

But in the last couple of years I’ve begun to see the value of being relatively culturally informed.  I finally read the book in an evening this spring, and deemed it engaging, cute, and whimsical, with a bizarre strain of gratuitous darkness that just didn’t seem to fit.  The characters felt a little flat and cliche, but it was enjoyable.

I waffled about reading the rest of the books, but when a co-worker offered to lend them to me several months later, I had no more excuses.  I decided to buckle down and read them all if only to make myself a more informed member of society.

With each chapter, however, I began to change my mind.  Eventually, I saw that maybe I hadn’t been so wrong about the first book – maybe it was a little overly bright and flashy, and maybe the Voldemort-ian story line did seem horribly out of place.  But I suddenly saw that Rowling was quite brilliant to write it that way, and she knew exactly what she was doing.

Simply put, Harry was only eleven.  The magical world was new.  She was able to portray this wonderment, fascination and freshness and yet still give evidence of the dark, horrible, and frightening history and future that underlay Harry’s introduction to the wizarding world.  The sight of a teacher stooping to suck blood from a unicorn in a dark forest probably seemed grotesque and out of place to an eleven year old Harry as well – shocking, even, in its incongruousness.

It was Harry’s first real emotional experience, the discovery of his godfather in book 3 that made me realize that I had been the shallow one, expecting adult-level emotions and actions from a mere child, and that what I really had wanted was for Harry Potter to be a meaningless childish side character to a story involving adults – which would, I reasoned, be so much deeper.

It was Dumbledore’s revelations to Harry at the end of book 5 that really fleshed out the creativity of Rowling’s angle on the story to me.  Harry was protected from having to grow up immediately, to be young.  The horror and darkness mount throughout the books not simply because Voldemort grows in power, but because Harry changes too - both as his understanding, age, and emotions develop, and as the experiences he has each year at Hogwarts irrevocably shape him, jade him, and confuse him.

The use of a growing child as the main character in an extremely complex adult-level story was brilliant and unique.  The story could have been written from Dumbledore’s point of view, of course, and we could have had so much more information and facts from early on.  But it was more challenging and the mark of a greater writer to show the story from the mind of a young boy, who not only learns the facts piece by piece as he grows up, but comes to understand them in new and increasingly deep ways as his mind and heart develops.

It is true that Rowling does not delve into deep questions of human nature, after life and redemption like Tolkien does.  But she does engage with good and evil, love, mercy (Peter Pettigrew and the silver hand… wow) and sacrifice and she tackles the complex issue of respecting and trusting people even when there are facts about them you can’t fully understand.

I have less than 150 pages left of book 7, and already I miss Harry Potter.  This last book has been the best, and more than worth the effort and time.  When I read books like this, I thank God for the blessing of stories, especially the ones that take us outside of ourselves.

Pioneer Woman (Ree Drummond) was holding a book signing for her new cookbook in West Chester today, and Andy and I had been planning for weeks to attend.  I hadn’t yet seen a copy of the cookbook – it made the anticipation of the event that much more exciting to wait to read it.  I’d been waiting and waiting and waiting…

Isn’t it pathetic, then, that this morning I was such a nervous wreck over attending the book signing for this woman that I admire and respect so much that I just kind of crumbled into a pathetic, teary I-don’t-know-what-to-wear-I’m-going-to-look-stupid-I-don’t-know-what-to-say-we’re-not-going-to-make-it-in-time  freak.  Pathetic?  Yes.  But we’ve all had those moments, right?

Andy weathered the storm and decided that we would skip church and get to the event early, and I managed to pick out a semi-decent outfit; and we were out the door.  I cheered up on the way there, but visions of unfriendly, chaotic mobs of the overly beautiful people that Philadelphia seems to be populated with kept playing in my head.  Upon arriving at the independent bookstore, I hid in the car to fortify myself with a vanilla pudding while Andy ran in to “scope things out”.

All of my fears were ill-founded.  The PW book signing was extremely well run, efficient, fun, and attended by kind, lovable, very normal, non-model people of all generations who just seemed to want to have fun and be friendly.  Everyone was issued a number (mine was 74, incidentally), and once we’d purchased our specially tagged books, we were herded back to a large back room with seats set up.  Andy and I snagged good seats and settled in to read and relax until Ree arrived.  Things filled up quickly, and I would guess that in the end there were 300-400 people there.

Ree arrived and did a really fun Q&A session with the crowd.  We were so impressed at how articulate and diplomatic she was.  She answered every question gracefully and tactfully.  And she was as funny as ever.  I was interested to hear about her homeschooling curriculum, and did you know her major was Gerontology in college??!!

After that, we were called up to the signing line in groups of twenty.  The atmosphere was so jovial and friendly, and Ree was so gracious and generous with her time, never becoming brusque even with people who were lingering too long.

Time flew for me, and before I knew it I was next in line, and completely panicking.  I still had NO idea what to say.  So, in the last split second, I decided to just not bother being super chatty.  I just got out a lot of grins, as usual.  I did manage, when she explained “Oh, a boy!!!” at Andy, that he was willing to come because he loved her cinnamon rolls so much… and goodness, if I made those every day, Andy just might love me even more than he already does.  She signed my stuff and, seeming to sense that I was just a tad shy, saved me by asking if I wanted to take a picture with her, which I was still working up the guts to ask for!

She chatted with me a bit more and then… it was over.

All that anticipation and build up and it was over in such a whirlwind!  I stayed and took a few more pictures and then it was home through the pouring rain for a hot shower and some hot soup and to look through my new cookbook!