teresafloyd

At least two people have told me in that last few weeks that I really should watch Pretty in Pink, so today I did.

I do not get the appeal. It's so fluffy and pointless.

The only characters I care about are the girl's father and co-worker. I would have enjoyed watching their stories. Why is he unemployed? How do they live? Did his wife leave him over his drinking? What's up with the co-worker's love life?

Maybe I would have enjoyed it when I was in high school in about 1981 or so, but watching it today and remembering who my friends and I were back in the 80 there is no one with whom I can identify, except maybe Duckie.

Even the supposedly "poor" girl seems to have a minimum wage job with little responsibility and full time use of a car. Things I couldn't even aspire to until I was well out of high school.

I don't get how this is a cult classic, unless it's nostalgia for a life that I never had.

I just watched "Room 237". It really makes me want to watch the "The Shining" as well as re-read the book. And it's making me even more motivated to get my hands on "Doctor Sleep".

Lots of questions, but it will be fun to examine them. Is the film about Colonialism? The horrifying burden of history? Mazes? Families falling apart? Faking the moon landing? Puberty? All of the above? More

I really like where they superimpose the film run backwards over having it playing forwards. I would love to watch the whole film that way.

I still think Americans actually did walk on the moon though. I don't think Kubrik was that much of a genius.

I love snow days so much - they amount to no-cost time.

So far I've lined up a part-time tutoring gig
Finished a detail for my on the job training, learning how to use my fax machine in the process.
Done some shoveling
Watched a horrible movie
Started the process to find a physician.

And it's really just lunch time.

by Teresa Floyd

Maple Cream Fudge (From Edith Boone's Cookbook)

4 cups brown sugar
1 cup cream or milk (I remember her using evaporated milk)
4 Tablespoons butter
dash of salt
1 cup nuts (optional)
1 teaspoon maple flavouring

Instructions if you know what you're doing:

Combine sugar, milk. Cook on low heat to the boiling point. When mixture reaches soft ball stage (234F on a candy thermometer), add butter, salt, and flavouring and then cool quickly without stirring. . Beat until mixture thickens and loses its gloss. Add nuts, and pour into a greased pan.

Instructions for the rest of us:

Get out your heaviest large saucepan.

Grease an 8 by 8 inch pan to have cubes of fudge, or a larger pan if you want flatter pieces.

Fill half of your sink with ice water to about half the depth of the pan. Put some more ice water into a Pyrex cup or bowl.

You may want to only make half of that amount, just in case! Put the sugar, milk, into the saucepan and put it on the stove on a low to moderate heat. Slowly bring it to just almost a boil. Stop stirring once in boils.

After a few minutes, start testing the temperature with a candy thermometer. You're looking for 234F. If you're not a rich so-and-so with a special thermometer just for making candy, drop a bit of the mixture into the water in the Pyrex cup. When it sticks together to form a soft ball that you can sort of smoosh flat with your fingers, the syrup is cooked.

Remove the syrup from the heat and add the butter and salt without stirring. Put the pan immediately into the cold water in the sink to cool the syrup quickly. Do not stir at this point, and be careful because the syrup is very hot!

Once the syrup has cooled to just over room temperature (probably around 100F or so), start beating it. I use a stand mixer, but Mom used to use a big spoon. Beat it until it starts to thicken and isn't shiny anymore.

Add the nuts, if you're using them, and pour the mixture into the cake pan to cool. It's a good idea to cut it before it hardens completely, although you may have to cut it again after it's completely cool.

Note: If you don't cook the syrup enough, the fudge won't get hard, if you cook it too much, it will get too hard and brittle. If you stir it once it starts to boil, it will 'sugar,' or become grainy.

A few of these are books I've started so many times without ever being able to finish.

The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
The Bible - Council of Nicea
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
Middlemarch - George Eliot
Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
Bleak House - Charles Dickens
War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
Emma - Jane Austen
Persuasion - Jane Austen
The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
Animal Farm - George Orwell
The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
Atonement - Ian McEwan
Life of Pi - Yann Martel
Dune - Frank Herbert
Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
The Secret History - Donna Tartt
The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
On The Road - Jack Kerouac
Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
Moby Dick - Herman Melville
Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
Dracula - Bram Stoker
The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
Ulysses - James Joyce
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
Germinal - Emile Zola
Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
Possession - AS Byatt
A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
The Color Purple - Alice Walker
The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
Charlotte’s Web - EB White
The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
Watership Down - Richard Adams
A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
Hamlet - William Shakespeare
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

I had worked late the night before, so was just barely awake when I heard the clatter of dishes in the kitchen at about 9 am Oh shit! It's Mother's Day! I had promised myself I would get up and make breakfast, but I had ended up working until 4 am. Shit!

She was furious, so I threw my clothes on quickly and slunk downstairs as quietly as I could. My brother was in the front room looking worried so I went in there and mouthed "Mother's Day." He ran upstairs to his room just as she came around the corner and bellowed, "Can't anybody even say, 'Happy Mother's Day?'

My brother came downstairs and handed her a card from the dollar store and ran out the door.

I don't remember the rest.

The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, 2011 Edition by Paula Guran

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror
Edited by Norman Partridge

Though there is very little here that is truly revolutionary, the stories are lovely, dark and deep. There are vampires, werewolves, zombies, wizards, and gingerbread houses - but none quite as they've been told before.

"You Dream" by Ekaterina Sedia was one of the most touching stories of the collection. I love this: " And yet you understand his point, the essential impossibility of revealing one's secrets - especially if those secrets are not one's fault. We can get over the wrongs we do, but we cannot forgive ourselves for the wrongs done to us, for your own helplessness."

"The Things by Peter Watts is another retelling of Jon Carpenter's short story but from a very different point of view.

Neil Gaiman's "The Thing About Cassandra" has a delightfully terrible twist.

The last story is "The Mystery Knight: A Tale of the Seven Kingdoms" by George R. R. Martin. If you love the Game of Thrones series, here is a bit of background set before the time of the first novel. A bit complex for a short, but great for those who just can't get enough Westeros.




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The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


For a "Young Adult" novel, this is an incredibly sophisticated story.

The part that sticks with me the most is the complex relationship that develops between Katniss and Peeta. Their choices and actions are so often shaped by outside forces that Katniss doesn't even understand how she feels. Although it seems that Peeta has things figured out, Katniss is a child only on the cusp of becoming adults when she is forced into the most complicated relationship she can imagine.

This is a metaphor for the way I see adolescents maturing. They are so often subjected to outside influences telling them how they should feel and appear that they often become confused about their actual emotions.

You may have heard that the book is violent. And yes, people die but they are not killed coldly nor without reflection on the parts of their killers. The real agent of violence is a harsh regime that inflicts these 'games' as a punishment.

If you can get hold of the movie Battle Royale (Japan, 2010), do take a look at it for a very slightly different view of children being punished through being forced to kill each other. In Battle Royale, the children are punished for their own disrespectful actions, while in The Hunger Games, they are punished for actions by their ancestors.



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Here's WWII era cookbook that belonged to my Nana. Tea really will help and in various ways:

http://photobucket.com/TeaWillHelp?albumview=slideshow