“The hard part about being a bartender is figuring out who is drunk and who is just stupid”*

I was going to post with pretty pictures of colorful things but I can't be arsed (in Australia-speak) to find the camera, snap the photos, download them, crop them, and upload them. So you'll all just have to use your vivid (and in some cases, over-active) imaginations. Thank you for your cooperation.

Things I am digging right now:

- Bar towels. [A shot of fluffy, pristinely white stack of bar towels, just awaiting my boys' spilled juice, dribbled chocolate milk, and smeared baby food.] Over the years I have bought and tried every kind of kitchen/dishtowel I could find. I like the flour sack ones, but they aren’t that absorbent. Cheapie ones I get at the grocery store end up stinking – must be the icky fabric? I bought a six-pack of bar towels at TJ Maxx a few months ago and will NEVER buy any other type. They are absorbent, easy to clean, don’t smell, and cheap. LOVE ‘em.

- Sour cherries. [Close-up of big bowl of lovely, deep red, glossy cherries, stems, pits, etc.] The ONLY thing I miss about the old house is the yard. And in that yard, a sour cherry tree. But turns out there are two sour cherry trees up by the public park I take my kids to all the time. I have four pints in the fridge, awaiting pitting and baking into a sour cherry custard tart with sliced almonds.

- My goldfish. [Eh, he looks like every other goldfish in the world.] He’s FIVE years old. I KNOW. And just lately he’s been making the baby very happy, as Quarto watches him cruise around his little bowl...

- The ice cream truck. Four ice cream treats (a Fudgesicle, a Creamsicle, and two Sno-Cones), for four dollars. Can’t beat that with a stick!

- Small diapers. [Shot of Quarto's cute, eensy little size 1 diapers with baby Sesame Street characters gamboling about, juxtaposed with Terzo's size 6 monsters.] Quarto's come 120 to a box. As opposed to Terzo’s ginormous ones that come 48 to a box. Must...potty train...

- Heineken. [Food porn shot of sweating beer bottle, full of the elixir of life.] A summery change from my usual go-to, Bacardi rum and coke. Nice especially with barbecue.

-Trader Joe’s Pound Plus chocolate bars. [Another food porn shot of big fat chunky chocolate.] At 3-something a bar, a total steal. I started buying the bittersweet ones to bake with, then one day after making homemade pudding with bittersweet that H and I loved but the boys found too intense, I brought home a bar of the milk chocolate to try in the pudding. And then I bought a milk chocolate with almond. Nice big fat whole almonds in good Belgian milk chocolate. For THREE DOLLARS. I wish we had Two Buck Chuck but since we can’t, I am happy to have Three Buck Choc.

- My working vacuum! (Not!) [Um, maybe before and after photo of my disgusting-and-then-not carpets...] My vacuum was rated tops for pet hair. Yet I considered myself lucky if it picked up normal dirt. On a whim, when H went to price washing machine parts (flood in basement from broken filler-timer mechanism, oops), he took the vacuum to our guy to fix. It needed a new belt. No wonder the damn thing had been doing nothing. The rug I vacuumed this morning (before the damn belt snapped AGAIN) looks like new, with nary a cat hair to be seen.

- New Crocs [Jumble of colorful shiny new crocs in rainbow colors.] It was time for new Crocs for the boys. Primo picked royal blue, Seg wanted turquoise, Terzo requested orange. So cute. And I don't have to tie shoelaces.

- The pool. [Perhaps a shot of the expanse of cool blue water and frolicking children. Maybe. Or maybe a shot of the overweight, harried mothers (myself included)with swimsuits stretched to their breaking point and toddlers with water-swollen diapers about to explode...take your pick.] For the first half hour we were at the pool yesterday afternoon, Primo and Seg raced each other from end to end, over and over and over again. I couldn't have worn them out more if I'd tried...God bless the exhausting effects of sun, chlorine, and yelling.

What are you guys loving these days?

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*Richard Braunstein

“The cure for anything is salt water - sweat, tears, or the sea.”

I received an email from a friend who is about to leave on a beach vacation. (She referred to me as the "Book Goddess," and you may also. Ahem. Or not.)
She is stocking up on reading material for the trip.
Her requirements:
- Not annoyingly stupid
- Entertaining
- Not heavy/depressing
- Something you can't bear to put down...

So, this is easy.
Here are my 2008 beach read recommendations.
(And I usually prefer to take paperbacks to the beach (but not a hard and fast rule) and definitely prefer to own whatever I take, as there are few things more annoying than a library book full of sand.)

- If you have not read Sandra Gulland's Josephine books (Many Lives & Secret Sorrows of Josephine B., etc.), try those. I am currently reading her newest, Mistress of the Sun, about Louis XIV's mistress, and it's also terrific.
- Love Walked In by Marisa de los Santos. What a pleasant surprise. Well-written, engaging characters, and a little bit of something for everyone. I have the sequel, Belong To Me, awaiting me...
- Sarah Addison Allen's Garden Spells. A modern Practical Magic. I just read her second, The Sugar Queen, and I liked it but not as much as her first.
- Michael Lee West's stuff is fun, nice long cozy novels about crazy Southern women; start with Crazy Ladies and its sequel Mad Girls in Love.
- I have been telling EVERYONE to read Lauren Groff's Monsters of Templeton. She is going to be an author to be reckoned with. (Monsters is her first novel.)
- Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy is fabulous – maybe a bit heavy for some for a beach read, but no one can go wrong with his Sally Lockhart books. Do yourself a favour and get the fourth, too; it’s not focused on Sally but on minor characters from the first three books, but is easily the best of the lot. Pure Victorian melodrama. Think Dickens meets Maisie Dobbs...

Classic/oldies but always goodies, in case nothing more recent appeals:
- Anything by Josephine Tey.
- Rosamunde Pilcher’s “big” books (Shell Seekers, September, etc.).
- Laurie King’s Beekeeper’s Apprentice.
- Richard Russo’s Nobody’s Fool (I read this on a flight to London and was actually sorry when the plane landed...)
- Pride and Prejudice.

If you are more interested in nonfiction, I can heartily recommend these riveting but true books:
- In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex – Nathaniel Philbrick
- Into Thin Air – Jon Krakauer
- The Devil in the White City – Erik Larsen
- The Sex Life of Cannibals & Getting Stoned with Savages – J. Maarten Troost
- Shark: Unpredictable Killer of the Sea – Thomas Helm. This is my all-time favourite shark book, which is saying something, but maybe, after all, not too smart for the beach. Although I read both The Perfect Storm and Close to Shore at the beach, and never blinked an eye.

My number one recc though?
Anna Quindlen has a terrific list of “Top Ten Books That Will Take You All Summer to Read (but are not beach reads)” (meaning that for me they are PERFECT beach reads).
(I would produce the entire list here for those of you who are as obsessed as I am but alas, I cannot find my copy of her book because we are currently rearranging bookshelves and books are piled everywhere. As my pediatrician says while probing the screaming baby's ears, I apologize.)

Anyhoo, it was from this list that I picked Gone with the Wind the first week of my first semester of graduate school. I took her at her word when she said it would take all summer. I gobbled it down in two days, stopping only to finish some annoying assignment for some stupid class, and longed for more. So my quintessential beach read is now Gone with the Wind. Even a guy (Rogue Lib?) might like it (but probably not you, Joke.)

And so off to the beach goes B, and I hope she found something useful here.

When we go down the shore (as we Jerseyites say) in September, I wonder what I will take. Have to start thinking about it now...there’s the new Mary Doria Russell I have been saving, as well as The Terror, Emotionally Weird, and Under the Banner of Heaven.

I can in good faith tell you that last time we went down the shore, I was reading Captain Corelli’s Mandolin and it most decidedly is NOT a beach read.
Consider yourself warned.

And please tell me what YOU are reading on vacation this summer.

*******
*Isak Dinesen

"I have an existential map; it has 'You are here' written all over it."

Great parenting moment #167,356:

The boys and I are on our way to a Spiderman birthday party.

Primo asks me, out of the blue, from the backseat, "Mom? Why are we here? I mean, what's the point of living if you're just going to die anyway?"

"Welllll..." I begin slowly, "I believe that we are here to enjoy life. To love the people you're with. To make your little bit of the earth a better place, and maybe have some fun while you're doing that."

Primo looks dubious.

"I'm not sure..." he says.

And I snap, "Well, then, ask your father!"

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*Stephen Wright