Superwomen

After a seven months deployment in the Middle East and Far East, my badass sister-in-law of eight-months is in American waters and steaming to her home port of San Diego. On her way home, however, she stopped in Seattle to pick up a couple of guests. That's right. The famous Nimitz aircraft carrier is now carrying a few extra passengers, my mom being one of them (the one on the left). Molly's mom is the other intrepid guest on the right. I should mention here that they are not the ONLY guests on board. They are Tigers, guests of service members, who join them on the last few days of their cruise at the end of deployment.

I mean, really, is that not the coolest thing ever??

I'm so excited for my mom and even more for Molly and Dan's reunion. A million thank yous are not enough for all the sacrifices and dedication of our supermen and superwomen of the military.

You guys rock.

Mom, I hope you're having a great time.

And Molly, me next. Okay?



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Tammar

Predictable

There was a study done recently about just how predictable people's days are. Participants agreed to have their location tracked at all times through their cellphones and within a few weeks, researchers could predict their location 93% of the time. The most unpredictable subjects, those who labeled themselves without a regular routine, were predictable 83% of the time.

I found this study amazing, and yet unsurprising at the same time. I guess I always knew that I was boring and predictable, I just didn't realize everyone else was too.

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Tammar

Mental Relief

I've hardly slept the past two weeks, so I'm stumbling around with a low grade headache, scratchy eyes, and a very low tolerance for bad drivers and sad books. I don't want to know about the pesticides in my lettuce or just what the "broth" that my chicken comes pre-soaked in contains. I don't want a tragic love story or a gritty tale set in the slums.

In a mood like this, there's only one kind of book to read: a romance. And of all romance writers, the best of them all is Lisa Kleypas. After years and years of writing Regency romances, she recently started writing some contemporary fiction set in Houston, Texas. Now I lived in Texas for three years. It has a very fond place in my heart and I have to admit that it makes a fine setting for a romance novel. There's just this feeling that hangs in the air there that anything, anything at all is possible. And in the hands of a talented writer like Kleypas, this setting just enhances every interaction her charming, funny, and sexy as hell characters have.

The book I just read is Smooth Talking Stranger. I'm not even going to tell you what it's about because that's besides the point. The dialogue just zings, the descriptions of high society are vibrate and original, and reading the book helped me forget the cranky tiredness and kept the headache at bay. That's a lot of powerful good from one little novel.

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More Food

I tried reading Thomas Pycheron's Inherent Vice but it didn't work out. Pynchon's one of those quality writers and so I felt obligated to give his book a try. And Colette Bancroft, the book editor at the St. Pete Times said this was his most accessible book and one of her favorite books of 2009. But sadly, I just couldn't get into it. It's kind of a cross between a classic detective mystery and a stony-beach culture, 1960's sort of scene. Cool enough concept but it didn't work for me.

So I moved on to Novella Carpenter's City Farm-The Education of an Urban Farmer thereby continuing my trend of reading food-based non-fiction, which is a very strange trend for me. And oh man, what a book, what a woman. Carpenter lives in the ghetto of Oakland. Drive by shootings, prostitutes on the corner, homeless men as "neighbors". She has to deal with a 13 year-old who pulls a gun on her to steal her bike, with police raids across the street, the highway visible and audible just a few yards away. In the middle of all this, she takes the vacant, weed-chocked lot next to her apartment and turns it first into a huge vegetable garden. Then she adds a small flock of chickens. Then a bee hive. And then finally in a burst of madness, she raises two pigs to slaughter and turn into bacon, salami, prosciutto, and ham.

She also raises and slaughters a turkey for Thanksgiving and sweet little bunny rabbits for stew. I have some major respect for this woman.

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Not pretty

I'm really struggling in the aftermaths of reading Jonathan Safran Foer's book about the meat industry. Eating Animals, you can tell from the title, has a slate to the information presented, but even so, the conditions he describes in chicken, turkey, pig, and cow farms are horrifying. Even fishing isn't off the hook.(Come on, how could I resist that pun?)

The sad thing, and Foer writes this, is that we all know that something's not right with our meat industry, but none of us really want to know the specifics. And it's true. I want my shredded beef burrito, my sushi, my chicken soup, and I don't want to think about tiny chick getting pitched in a grinder, or live cows hung by one leg, conscious seven minutes into their "processing". It's horrifying (see there's that word again.) He describes much worse in his book (don't get me started on the things they're fed) and then attempts to grapple with the moral turpitude that we must all suffer from--how else can you account for the massive cruelty and disgusting evolution of factory farming?

I don't know that this book turned me into a vegetarian. But I know I'll never look at a $4.99 rotisserie chicken from Costco the same ever again.

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Not cool

I just finished reading the mega bestselling memoir Eat, Pray, Love. As you may have noticed, I don't like reading mega-bestsellers, kind of the same way I refused to have a crush on the same red-headed 7th grader all the other girls had a crush on in Junior High. And yes, in Junior High you can decide who you have a crush on.

With EPL, though, I'd read about it when it first came out and before everyone went ga-ga over it and thought it sounded really cool. But then everyone else thought so too and I cooled off on it. Who wants to go out and be friends with the most popular girl in school?

But that was a couple of years ago and Elizabeth Gilbert just came out with another book picking up where she left off and my curiosity got the better of me.

The general gist of her tale is that she had a horrible divorce followed by a horrible affair that just about destroyed her. So she sets off on this Marco Polo-esq adventure going to Italy to eat, India to pray and Bali to learn how to put the two together (I know, I know, Bali?). The thing that is so cool about Elizabeth Gilbert is her amazing ability to meet people and make friends where ever she goes. I'm flat out in awe of that. She meets awesome people in Italy, makes friends in India, and pretty much picks up a new family in Bali. For anyone who's ever been shy, tongue-tied, lonely, and full of wishful thinking about how great it would be to have awesome friends all over the world, well, this lady is like some kind of guru.

But I tell you, it takes one heck of a silver tongue to turn a situation where you instigate a divorce pretty much because you changed your mind about being married to this person, rush off to have this hot and steamy affair while said divorce is happening, and then have the gall to say "woe, woe, woe is me and the pitiful situation I find myself in." Gilbert does just that and as a reader I don't hate her for it. Should this woman go into politics, she'd be unstoppable.

Overall, it was a good read. She's engaging and so well traveled she's got great tales to tell. But she does fall into ruts and starts ruminating on the same few pieces of cud she's already chewed through a few times. Read it to be an armchair traveler (I sooo want to go to Bali now!) and for some interesting thought on G-d. But don't go looking for your new best friend. Elizabeth Gilbert already has too many.

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Mandatory Reading

There are books we read for escape, books we read for mental stimulation, and there are books we read to be better people. Under this last category falls: America, the owner's manual by Senator (and former FL governor) Bob Graham.

The basic point of the book is that we Americans treat civics as a spectator sport. We sit back and watch our politicians enact inane laws, ignore abuses that should be curbed, and lead us with something less than the basic common sense we all hope for. When we have a problem, from something as small as parking issues, to as a large as drunk driving, most of us vent to our friends and family and then shrug it off as something we have to live with, like mosquitoes in the summer.

What Senator Graham does in his book is show how if you have a certain grievance how to figure out which level of government's management it falls under (local, state, Federal) and then takes you step by step on how to air your grievance before the right people and convince them it needs to change.

It was such an inspiring book to read. Immigrants have to take a citizenship test before they can become naturalized American citizens. The rest of us, fortunate to be born into American citizenship, should read this wonderful manual about our amazing, cumbersome, Byzantine government.

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Tammar