oh I wish I were an Oscar Mayer weiner

I have just completed my first-ever eBay purchase. I made the plunge for a talking Muck from Bob the Builder. I lost my bid on a talking Lofty the Neurotic Crane (“I’m afraid of heights! What sort of lame crane is afraid of heights? I forgot to take my Paxil today, oooohhh...”), but I won Muck. It was fun in a way, and somewhat nerve-wracking – it would be more so if you really really wanted something. But I may do some of my Christmas shopping on eBay. Large plastic objects are way cheaper on eBay.

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We ordered pizza for dinner, and I plunked the boys down in front of a video while we ate. Such decadence. The empire will crumble any day now. I even gave them chocolate milk for dinner – unheard of! Jude was lying on the floor on his belly, watching Bob and drinking his milk, and without (clearly without!) thinking about it, rolled over onto his back --- with his full glass still in hand and to his mouth. I wonder if chocolate milk is a good hair conditioner?

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I’ve been rereading Laurie Colwin books for the past twenty-four hours. I really like her stuff but sometimes she’s just a bit too precious for me. However, in Passion and Affect, there’s one story, “Wet,” that is haunting and beautiful and almost exactly what a perfect short story should be. I feel like Gina does, that many times short stories are unsatisfying because you either want them to go and on and they don’t, or they are so superficial that you couldn’t care less about any of the people in them. Another thing that irks me about short stories is when an author puts out a book of stories that are obviously cribbed from parts of a larger, already published novel (Richard Russo’s The Whore’s Child) or they are the beginnings of what later became a novel which you have unfortunately already read (Colwin’s Passion and Affect fit this description; two of the longest stories in the book wound up as Happy All The Time). One book of short stories that I loved, that falls prey to neither of these, is Robert Girardi’s A Vaudeville of Devils; Girardi’s books are so memorable and so strikingly odd that perhaps he just feels that he can’t get away with this?

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Snippets:

• I just discovered that Girardi has a fairly new novel out that I did not know about, The Wrong Doyle. I am probably going to break my reading-classics resolution for this one sometime soon.
  
  
• In an author interview I found while researching a different author, Rosamunde Pilcher said that she will probably not write another novel “at [her] advanced age.” I am so sad. I look forward to my favorite authors putting out new books, and frankly, she doesn’t look THAT old. Retirement be damned, Rosamunde, get your AARP ass in gear and write another book please!
  
  
• I’m freehand-quilting a baby quilt at the moment and can’t decide if the process is completely nerve-wracking or completely freeing. But I just couldn’t see spending how many hours drawing the meant-to-be-random swirly quilting pattern on the thing just to repeat it all with a needle. The very thought was making my head hurt.