Myrecipes.com

I am in cooking heaven. Come to cooking heaven with me!

All recipes from Sunset, Cooking Light, Health, Coastal Living, Cottage Living, & Southern Living can be found at MyRecipes.com! To know just how important this is, I was looking for a particular Baja Fried Fish Tacos / Sunset Magazine, January 2006. No other fish taco recipe will do, THAT'S how good they are. (Judy do you remember them?)

Fall is my favorite time of year. Anyone up for a simple Soup & Christmas Wrapping party in NOVEMBER? That's right, I said it...NOVEMBER! Let's get the shopping and wrapping out of the way early, shall we?

~Robin

October 27th, 10AM, Blue Willow

Let's meet around 10AM, I'll book a table for 6...Preview the menu at www.bluewillowtucson.com. I'm already looking forward to it!

Have a great week, everyone!
~Robin

October 27th-A new anniversary date?

Breakfast on October 27th at the Blue Willow, it is...but what time?

Alcohol optional and not even encouraged (but don't discourage me, okay?) Just kidding.

Well, Judy, our anniversary is October 12th, and speaking of big plans...I just finished making them. We're escaping all the way to...CHANDLER!

Judy and I discussed the importance of retreats, and given our incredibly consistent anniversary tribulations with the men we undoubtedly love (and who could both sue *us* for spousal support anyhow), we wondered what you all would think of holding an all girl's "Anniversary" retreat each year (date TBD) in honor of all the anniversaries in which we ladies did all the predicting, planning, paying, packing, prettying up and putting out.

Your thoughts?
~Robin

MONKEEWRENCH by P.J. Tracy

Call it a rebound romance, but as soon as I turned my back on MIDDLESEX, I fell in love with MONKEEWRENCH. It was a brief encounter -- nothing too deep or demanding -- but God, I loved every minute of it. I'm already thinking about going back for seconds.

The basic plotline of this thriller is that a small software company has created a new video game, and a serial killer is mimicking the deaths in the game. Two different law enforcement agencies are involved in the investigation, so we have lots of characters and their dynamics to amuse us while we wait for the killer either to strike again or be revealed.

The dialog is fresh, realistic, surprising and funny -- sometimes simultaneously. There's really something for everyone in this book: a little murder and mayhem, a little romance, a few deep dark secrets...it's good stuff. And (always a bonus, I think) it's available at the library. Enjoy!

~Michelle

September 15th, Marco Polo's birthday....MARCO?

The Long-Awaited Panning of MIDDLESEX

When I was a kid, one of my mother's friends divorced her husband after 35 years of marriage. This seemed to me, even at that young age, a powerful testament to just how bad it had been, that she would invest so much time and heart in a relationship and finally decide that she just couldn't take any more. This, ladies, is a perfect metaphor for why I gave up on MIDDLESEX a mere 200 pages from the end. Sometimes you just know things aren't ever going to get better.

This was my second attempt at this book, spurred by Oprah's enthusiasm (yes, I KNOW I need to get a job) and allowing for the possibility that my reading tastes had shifted since I first put the book aside. Jeffrey Eugenides is a Pulitzer prize winner, for pete's sake! Surely there was a reason for the hoopla.

Not really. The plot moves through the lives of a Greek immigrant family over several generations, but all the events are filtered through the narrator, Callie. Never do we see things from anyone else's perspective, and she's prone to pages of internal monologue and exposition which I find unbearably boring. Give me more dialog, or at least a few different narrators obsessing about how they see things. I never got a sense of Callie caring deeply about the people in her family, and as a result, they didn't matter to me, either.

Sometimes when things aren't working, it's better just to walk away.

~Michelle

Love, Loss and What I Wore

While googling something else I was reminded of this little illustrated book. It's a touching, funny, heartfelt look at a woman's life and even though it sounds superficial it isn't because we all remember certain things: 1. What we wore. 2. Giving birth.

And it has PINK on the cover!

Pink On The Cover

Ain't that the damn truth? Sometimes, you just gotta judge a book by its cover! I loved all your comments...avoiding pink in the cover, as real as CSI getting the DNA results by the 2nd commerical break, and admitting to a brain candy addiction. Now that kind of stuff - your comments - is good readin'!

Breakfast sounds fab. We can welcome Judy to the Land of the Working Weenies! How about Blue Willow, 8 or 9 AM, Saturday Oct. 20th or Saturday Oct. 27th? They do take reservations and are pretty centrally located for all of us. Plus, who doesn't love their gift shop?

Michelle, if we keep it to Saturday instead of Sunday, we can order alcohol, thus having a Happy Hour Breakfast. There has to be a book we can write outlining what dark beer goes best with pancakes. Or do we drink red or white with granola? A mimosa would sure be fun!

I'm too Neanderthal to post a poll about it, so RSVP under comments. Feel free to suggest other locations, dates and times!

~Robin

Day Off

BTW, (raise one eyebrow) today was a preplanned mental health day at home for me, in case some of you suspected I was posting at this time of day during working hours! I'm on a personal pathway to put more fun in my life, and sadly, I do have to put it on my calendar to do so...

Anyone up for joining me at a Happy Hour or Group Breakfast in late October (time enough so we can synchronize our schedules?)

Fondly, Robin

Interruption of Everything

Interruption of Everything by Terry McMillan. What an interruption of my free time! No wonder my mom found this in the $5.98 bin at Borders.

Thought I was off on a grand adventure given Ms. McMillan wrote How Stella Got Her Groove Back. BZZZZTTTTT. Thanks for playing. The poignancy of the thing ran out in the middle; would have been suitable to end the book (or put it down) there. But alas, I thought, "Surely something better is waiting around this corner!" Not so much. While not outright awful, the book really petered out in the end, with the husband basically forgiven for having a Y chromosome, and the narrator forgiving herself for waiting for 'her time' to come. I would have loved at least one hot scene with a nude Gordon described for me in shockingly delicious detail!

Ladies, perhaps this is why I love non-fiction, because I am pretty tired of reading about women who are trying to remake themselves and their entire lives because they are just plain pretty tired of everything in their lives. We're probably all in the middle of this sentiment right now, each of us, no matter what we are doing or not doing, having or not having in our lives.

As a believer of pearls coming from irritation in the oyster, that happiness is a choice (in the absence of physical or emotional illness, abuse or tragedy), that openness to 'what is' is not optional, and that life sucks and sucks often and our real job is having fun despite this realization; I am definitely tiring of the "I am woman, and I'm not going to take this domesticity anymore" genre of books.

Unite, women of the page and plume!

With school back in session, reading anything other than texts will involve veritable moments...onward, through the fog!

Have a great weekend,
Robin

Crank the Pit!!

I was just looking at the Antigone site upcoming events because Nancy Turner author of These Is My Words will be there tomorrow. However, I can't tell if it's a reading. There are some other interesting things coming up, including a visit by Jennifer Block author of a book called Pushed: The Painful Truth about Childbirth and Modern Maternity Care
Wow, we should pack the house, ladies!

Judy

Antigone Upcoming Events

And here's a favorite of mine on the politics of birth
The American Way of Birth
by Jessica Mitford. If you've never heard of Jessica Mitford, you should! Here's a great piece at Salon.com about Jessica, one of The Mitford Girls (another great read). She's my Muckraking hero!

MIDDLESEX Question

I'm about 200 pages from the end of MIDDLESEX by Jeffrey Eugenides and need some help from one of you who has already ready the book. (Not a spoiler question, don't worry.) Can somebody tell me why Calli's brother is named Chapter Eleven? All the other characters have normal names except this one, and it's not explained at all -- or I missed it. Thoughts?

~Michelle