asteroid B612

After reading a couple of Dirk Gently novels by Douglas Adams, this story from the BBC should not strike me as unusual:

French police are trying to find homes for over 80 garden gnomes kidnapped in eastern France earlier this year.

The tiny, bearded ornaments were taken by the self-styled Gnome Liberation Front from homes in the town of Saint-Die-des-Vosges.

They resurfaced lined up on the steps of the local church one Sunday morning.

Police have never caught the culprits, but the gnomes' owners seem strangely reluctant to come forward to claim their stolen property.

....finish the story

The seeming allusion to the movie Amelie is almost too tantalizing not to mention. Or perhaps there's a whole French thing about garden gnomes that movie merely tapped into. I certainly have heard of nothing of the sort.

I read a book today. Other than Harry Potter 5, I hadn't read a work of fiction since Harry Potter 3 & 4 at the beginning of October. I get so pulled into the book, it kind of scares me, so usually I find other things to do than read...like make cookies or mop the floor. One thing I really don't want to do right is read stuff related to my field of study. I should be researching and writing a paper due almost a year ago over this break. But computer is still dead, and I won't use another one until it is absolutely necessary. It's not absolutely necessary yet.

Anyway, so I read a book today. I really need to get a copy of Lymond 4 by Dorothy Dunnett, the best historical fiction I have EVER read. But since I don't have it yet, nor did I feel like slogging through another portion of Eco's The Island of the Day Before I took to perusing our shelves for something I hadn't read yet. I picked up a short novel by Douglas Adams, famed author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Chris only has the radio scripts of said Guide. He does, however, have several other novels he wrote. So I picked up The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, a title encapsulating my mood at the moment. I love British humor and Adams is a really good writer, so it was thoroughly entertaining. I especially loved the allusion to the movie "Cold Comfort Farm", or perhaps the movie was alluding to it, though I rather think the former, because of a certain twist of words in order to make it fit. I won't bother going into details, because if you haven't read/seen either of them the humor will be lost, and if you have read/seen both you probably will have already gotten it.

Suffice it to say, the book is not about tea-time at all, at least in a literal sense, though it is peppered with people who really long to find a comfortable place to relax and be at peace and are prevented from finding their happy place by endless and impossible predicaments and are constantly annoyed because of it. A few of these characters also possess just the amount of curiosity to propel them along these paths of inconvenience and misery rather than just ignoring it (whatever "it" happens to be) and going home to their happy place. And, of course, it's all sorted out properly in the end.

Marley was dead to begin with....

For some reason, even though I have not picked up a copy of A Christmas Carol nor have I seen a film version of it this year, this phrase has been stuck in my head all week, unwittingly persistant like the lyrics "Jingle Bells, Batman smells..".

We had a lovely Christmas. I had a difficult shift at Banana on Tuesday, 8 hours of utter frenzy, ending at 10 pm. At 10 am Christmas Eve morning I was back for another stint and feeling exhausted and miserable. Cookies lay unfrosted, snowflakes and paper chains conspicuously absent. This job has been taking up all my Christmas prep time and I was seriously pissed off as Chris drove me to Banana Christmas Eve morning. Not to mention the fact that Christmas Eve is my family's big holiday and I was totally missing it. Missing the pine garlands gleaned from the yard, the poinsettas, singing and music with various family members, my parent's fireplace. The whole time I was at Banana on Wednesday I felt like I was going to cry any minute. When I did get home, I finally did. But then I felt better. And I no longer had to face Banana anymore, so life looked a lot better.

In fact, we had a blast Christmas Eve evening. I rested a little then got up to make our Christmas Eve feast. This was my first attempt at a traditional Italian Christmas Eve dinner. Only I only had three fishes instead of seven. Italians eat a pure seafood dinner on Christmas Eve...usually seven fishes ranging from the always present baccala (cod) to calamari (squid). I passed on the squid, but had a big fillet of cod that I fried up. I always made crab ravioli and some pasta for which I made a clam tomato sauce. It was all fab. For the crab ravioli I made a cream sauce to serve over it with Brussel sprouts on the side. And I served the fried cod with the clam sauce and pasta. This was all accompanied by a nice French rose (sorry, I just prefer French wine). Then for dessert we had hot chocolate with panettone (an Italian bread that is sort of a cross between fruit cake and brioche) while we watched The Grinch (blockbuster only had the Jim Carrey version, wh. we like...so it was fun).

Christmas morning we opened our presents. It was so fun! Just CHris and me!! It was so nice to just be together and not distracted by so many people, wh. is fun when they're there, but it was nice just being hte two of us, too. We got each other lots of little presents. And there were some from his parents under our tree, too. So we had a nice little haul for just the two of us. We both got each other two cd's (he got me a new Baltimore Consort CD..yay!!), and I got him some sci fi books and a special cheese grater (we have a thing about grating cheese). He also got me dominoes, wh. i've been wanting, a matching hat and scarf, and some special cookie cutters.

We had church at 10 am, wh. was a nice, simple lessons and carols. And then we spent the day at the Hamilton's (our pastor), where they pulled out their traditional Brit delights, like flaming pudding. After a soporific turkey dinner, we came home and played with my dominoes and watched Freaky Friday, wh. I need to return NOW before noon. All in all, we had a fabulous Christmas together.

now that I've seen hte movie, I've permitted myself to read blog entries about Return of the King. As I don't have particular devotion to the books, I didn't know what liberties were being taken or not.

But I will say that my favorite parts in the movie (all three of them--was it even in the first?) is when Gollum/Smeagel is talking to themselves. I always find that really fascinating.

And I think that i have to agree with my cousin that another favorite part was the lighting of the signals.

The bad thing, though, about reading Harry Potter in the morning and watching LOTR in the afternoon is that I kept wanting to call the Dead Army, Death Eaters in my head...and I kept wanting Frodo and Sam to pull out their wands and say "Lumos!" when they got to a particularly dark spot.

And how did Aragorn get a torch in the middle of the cave when he went to go get the Dead Army? He didn't have one when he went in.

We finished Harry Potter 5.

We watched Return of the King.

I finished the Christmas cards.

Aaaah! It's so nice to have Chris home on his school break, too, now. I only have to work tomorrow and Wednesday this week. I finally started making Christmas cookies last night. I don't know why it's taken me so long to get going on these things. I LOVE making cookies and snowflakes and things... Well, this year I'm not going to make the standard cutout sugar cookies. I'll decorate gingerbread cookies instead. I'm a HUGE fan on gingerbread cookies. And I'm going to try out the cookie press my mother-in-law gave me last year with a fab cream cheese-orange cookie.

I think I'm starting to come out of my end of semester slump. Through a regime of so-called organic, "immune building" teas and a ton of vitamin C, I narrowly missed what could've been potentially a really awful cold. Another thing, my feet are starting to get used to standing for hours on end. They didn't hurt nearly as bad as they had after my shift at Banana last night. You have to consider that I was coming from a singularly sedentary lifestyle (what do you expect from somebody who spends the majority of her time reading, writing, or driving?) to having to be energetically on my feet for hours on end. But, like I said, I felt a lot better when I came home last night than I had previously.

Chris put the decorations on the tree last night. It's so cute! But I think I'm going to get a few balls at Target. I really like balls.

I also mopped the kitchen floor yesterday. So all in all, feeling better, Christmas spirit meter up, and clean kitchen add up to considerably better spirits on my part. We're also having one of my profs over for dinner tonight, so that should feel fun and festive. I also got some really great socks at Banana last night. Socks always make me feel better. We're also deeply engrossed in Harry Potter 5, wh. is very fun. Tomorrow is Chris's last day of school! Hooray!

I just found out that my paper got accepted to the regional meeting of the AMS!! I'm SOOOO excited!!! This will be my first paper at something more than a just student conference. It also means that I'll be able to apply for funding for the trip from the Graduate School. Oh! I'm so happy!!

I'm beginning to rethink this whole holiday job thing. At first we were all pumped: yea! we'll stay at home and rake in the holiday dough! Well Chris can't really get a job with his measly little Christmas break, and even though I'm so thankful I have a job, I'm so exhausted from my semester that it's taking every ounce of mental determination to move my aching and tired body down to Banana Republic. And now I'm getting sick on top of it. blah.

On the positive side, we got Harry Potter 5 and began reading it last night. I really like the beginning episodes with the Dursleys have more meat than like a slapstick pre-show show. What I don't like about Rowling's writing style is how she write in all caps when people's voices are raised. Is that really necessary? Can't she deliver the force of the words through prose instead of typeset? It also makes it rather difficult to read-aloud, because it's almost impossible to avoid the urge to shout when reading all-caps, and then you get hoarse.

Well, gotta go drink my tea to fortify my soul for another stint at Banana.

...who is a dork??

Why is it that I don't get flurries of emails asking me what my snail mail address is? I just get nice, timely Cmas cards. Meanwhile, I'm over here scrutinizing over my paper address book desperately wondering how current these addresses are, shocked that I don't have addresses for others. I spend weeks just tracking down addresses!

Even though it costs way more than I imagined to make the copies of the letter and picture and buy stamps, I'm pleased with my frugal foresight in buying cards last year when they were super, super on-sale after Cmas. Last night when I dug out my bag with the carefully stashed cards, I was also thrilled to find happy snowflake napkins and sparkly ribbon. Woohooo!!

I just wrote this huge long post complaining about how stressful last week was but I accidently closed my browser window and lost it. I guess I don't need really need to be complaining.

One nice thing about last week was that one of my classmates (a theory PhD student) and her husband came down from Baton Rouge to go to a concert with us and come over for dessert. It's so difficult being 85 miles away from people my age who are my friends in normal day-in and day-out life and with whom I'm sure I would hang out with more if we lived in the same town. We had a really nice time with them. The concert was terrible, however. It was a performance by an early music ensemble that has been active in New Orleans for a really long time. I had never heard them, but always have meant to try out one of their concerts. I figured a CHristmas concert would be fun to try. It was just awful. The instrumental part was actually pretty nice. There were four instrumentalists, vielle, lute, harp, and recorders/spinet. I think my favorite number on the whole program was a set of divisions by Ortiz. But the choir and the lead vocalist were awful!! The lead sang as if it were opera and not the light, straighter tone that early music requires. And the women's choir had absolutely zero expression. Everything sounded exactly the same, and all the singers were miserably flat. It was actually quite painful to sit through. But now my curiosity is quenched, and I'll continue to ignore their concerts. I have a lot more fun with my early music friends anyway. Tonight I'm going to go play Christmas music with them. It should be a lot of fun. I'm going to bring the treble viol, wh. I've recently been learning. By the way, that is a family of viola da gambas (or viols) pictured from treble to bass. The picture is a little deceiving, the little girl isn't playing a child-sized viol, just the treble viol.

In other news, my entire email address book is gone. They erased my hotmail account and my computer crashed. So please email me with your email address: jjone84 at lsu dot edu if you're someone I correspond with via email, but haven't in a while. I'm really hoping Chris can do something about my computer when he gets a little more time.

Well, I better get out and do some Cmas shopping while the day is still with us. That's another thing. I didn't realize how much I would miss my brothers and sisters until Cmas shopping time comes around. Shopping is almost as fun as opening them. All the planning, secrecy and conspiracy. One brother allying with another sister with plans for Mom or Dad or the other brother or sister... Now I'm Cmas shopping all by myself. I don't even really have friends I can go with. Okay, gotta go.