4 posts tagged “maine”

What have I done!

Checking out the equality score card to find out if GLBT citizens in my state are second class citizens, I got a shock (not a huge one...but still...)

I have taken you, my Trentie, from a state with a 4.0 score (out of six) to one of the three worst states in the union with a score of 0.5 Ohio is in the company of only Idaho & Mississippi...we're behind Alabama fer Buddha's sake!

How does your state fare?

http://www.equalitygiving.org/States-of-Equality-and-Gay-Rights-Scorecard

(Oh, and it doesn't matter if you pick the state I actually took him from: Massachusettes or the state of his birth: Maine...both have that 4.0 score).

Sigh...

I need a laugh...here:

Thanks to Heather who had this on her Vox & it made me larf so hard...since we live it every morning...minus the bat, though I do have recurring headaches lately, hmmm.

Ok, it might have been a little cold...

That's ice on Squawpan Lake...and that is snow Mr. Trent is standing in. Well, after a winter of 197 inches of the stuff, it's bound to take a while to melt. We had two kinds of home made donuts (yum!) and I had a lobster roll and fried clams (yum!) We played lots of Upwords & did crossword puzzles while talkign and watching TV (some Canadian).

Trent got to spend his birthday with our northern nieces Taylor & Sophia. I got many videos with the new camera. I'm hoping the one of Trent and Sophia playing horsey came out because it was hysterical. Trent and Taylor invented a new game...one of Trent's quotes from Bugs Bunny is "I'm a fiddler crab! Why don't you shoot me? It's fiddler crab season!" from the cartoon "Duck! Rabbit! Duck!" wellll, Taylor was walking like a puppy so Trent showed her how to walk like a fiddler crab--that somehow devolved into "Fiddler Crab Wrestling"

Which Taylor wanted to play at every chance. That and she wanted to make episodes of "Taylor TV" with the new video camera.

Got to go out to camp, but not stay :-( maybe next time. Got to visit the Grandmas and spend lots of time with Grenda and Roger. I even saw six moose--mooses--meese Well, to be truthful I think two of them were repeats (the same moose over successive days) but they were my first!

Flying was a pain...driving is a pain...maybe we should just STAY next time! :-)

Sold ten more copies of my book over the weekend! Do you have yours yet? ;-)

I've been sick for a number of days. I got in my Jeep this morning to come to work...and was bored by NPR (which happens). So, noticing I had a CD on pause in the player, I just unpaused...

And Patty Griffin started singing "Burgudy Shoes."

I love this song. Every time I listen to it I cry. I don't really know why. It is the reason I asked for the CD (Trentie got it for me). I heard her interviewed and she explained the song was about herself as a wee one. Then she played it and that was the first time it made me all weepy. It's just a perfect evocation of my idea of the mind of a little girl. I am so THERE and it's beautiful.

Here's a reeeeally poor quality YouTube video of it.

Did you cry? (Could ya hear it?) God I love that song!

I wondered at the start of all this (when these posts were a Xanga page) why anyone would read my blather--

Then I was shocked when I found that Jane St. Anthony or someone at her publishing house logged on to my Xanga after I mentioed her book--

I was further shocked when author Jenny Han did the same (and I felt bad about the tone of my comments about her book).

Finest Kind

Now something similar has occured...Seems Cynthia Lord among others read the post on April 3rd...and I just got a letter from the author of the fabulous book "Finest Kind" Lea Wait thanking me for mentioning her book and championing it on the committee. Well it is a great book. My Dad reads science fiction (he loves Andre Norton) and physics textbooks (he has a deep and abiding love of Feynman) for fun...but he started reading the books that I was giving to my nieces and nephews (when stuck in Raliegh with nothing else to read) and his two top picks are "Penny From Heaven" and "Finest Kind." So not only did it win over a historical fiction curmudgeon like myself, it got the Dad of the curmudgeon.

Upshot: good prezzie for the historical fiction lover on your gift-giving list! Page-turning action, fine writing, & characters you feel you know by the end. No easy answers & set in a little explored time in history. Jake Webber is left to prepare his mother and his disabled brother for the harsh Maine winter when his dad (who until lately was a banker) goes off to work as a logger. Jake learns the value of a good neighbor & how to tell which ARE good.

Here's a fun story: I got the ARC of this book and thought "ooo! Maine!" (we've established, I love Maine). I was on my way out the door for work. I flipped through the book quickly--and something caught my eye, the first line of a chapter, and I hooted with laughter. The line was: "Does Granny McPherson ever go to Wiscasset?" This is funny because Trent's grandmother is a McPherson...(he HAS a Granny McPherson)...and she lives in Presque Isle, Maine. I propped the book open to that page with a post-it under the line & wrote "Well, DOES she?"

OK, maybe we should get out more. We laughed. And I loved the book.