Jen's Library - Dewey's Nine Lives

Dewey's Nine Lives : the legacy of the small-town library cat who inspired millions
By Vicki Myron

This book is a sequel of sorts, so I'll have to fill you in on the original story. Dewey Readmore Books was a cat who became an Iowa library's mascot after he was rescued from the book return chute that he'd been stuffed in one freezing winter night when he was a few weeks old. The library director, Vicki Myron, adopted him, and he lived out the rest of his 19 years at the Spencer Public Library, making it a warmer and friendlier place for its patrons. He was an adorable goof with a lot of love, like most cats.

The original book about Dewey (Dewey, The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World) was published in 2008 and was a big hit, inspiring thousands of people to write to the author about their own cats. Dewey's Nine Lives is a collection of 9 stories, all very different, about some special cats and the people whose lives they've touched. It's a great book for a cat lover, because while all cats are different, they are all so very much the same, and I love knowing that so many people love their cats as much as I love mine.

The hard part was reading about the goodbyes: most of these stories end with the death of the beloved pet, and it's heartbreaking to read. I dread the day we have to make the toughest decision about our furry boys, and it was difficult to get through some of these stories without a few tears.

If you're going to read this, please consider picking up the 2008 Dewey book first, because otherwise you won't be getting the whole picture. You'll enjoy it, but you'll enjoy it more if you know who Dewey was and how he touched so many people.

Rescuing Veggies

I buy veggies. That's not the problem. The problem is that we don't always manage to eat them quickly enough and they get soft or moldy or otherwise inedible.

For example: do onions make good houseplants? This one has great aspirations!

I'm trying really hard to get better at this because I hate wasting food. So far, I'm roasting peppers that are too soft for decent salads, and using floppy broccoli, carrots, and celery in soups (broccoli gets its own soup, and the others assist in chicken soup). If I can't do it right away, I try to freeze them before they're past the point of inedibility. When my mushrooms start looking a little sad, I fry them up in butter and eat them that way. But what about onions that are starting to sprout? Or potatoes that are mostly eyes and brown spots? Bagged spinach that's started to wilt? Tomatoes that are too squishy to slice even with the most incredible of infomercial knives? Does anyone have any ideas for using up almost-unusable veggies?

I don't usually have this problem with fruit, except for strawberries, which refuse to last more than a day or two in the fridge, but I'll gladly take pointers on rescuing fruit from the brink, as well!

Jen's Library - The Guinea Pig Diaries: My Life as an Experiment

The Guinea Pig Diaries: My Life as an Experiment
by A.J. Jacobs

I've read a few of this guy's books, and he's usually pretty entertaining. He always has a gimmick, like trying to read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica in The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World, or trying to live by all of the rules in the Bible in The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible. Both of those books are very funny reading, and surprisingly educational as they're filled with a lot of random facts he learns along the way. In this book, he shares some of his other, shorter-lived experiments, that weren't big enough to become books on their own. He does this stuff because he's a writer for a magazine, and doing weird things like this makes for good stories. I think he's nuts, but it sure is fun to read.

Over the course of this guy's life, he's tried on a whole lot of roles and written about the experiences. Like when he outsourced as much of his life as possible to India, having his assistants overseas deal with birthday cards and presents, emails to his boss, and reading stories to his kids over the phone. Or when he tried "radical honesty" for a while, which is where you not only refuse to tell lies, but you also remove your mental filter and just say what's on your mind. Like telling the waitress you can't help but look at her lovely cleavage, or telling the man beside you on the bus that he smells funny. Oh, and the time he went to the Oscars impersonating an actor whom he resembled, and mostly got away with it. Most of the stuff he does will make you glad he's not your neighbor, but also glad that someone tried all this insanity and lived to tell about it.

It's broken up into chapters, one per experiment, so it's an easy book to put down and pick back up again. I liked The Year of Living Biblically best out of everything of his I've read so far, so if you're looking to try this writer out, I'd tell you to start there.

More stuff growing in the yard!

We have progressed to the "daffodil" stage of spring!

The ones by the house started to flower last week, and I was happy to see that a few bulbs also survived under the pines on the side of the yard. I planted a bunch there before we had the landscaping guys come in to clear the poison ivy and overgrown mess, and they dug up the whole area - I wasn't expecting to see any yellow flowers at all, but half a dozen made it through the ordeal. That's a shady and useless area of the yard, so I'm going to add more daffodils for next spring, and possibly some lily-of-the-valley... but that gets pretty invasive, so I'm hesitating. Grass won't grow there because of the pine needles, and I don't want it to be just brown dirt and dead needles all year, so I'm hoping to find some good ground cover plants to make it look more pleasant. Any ideas from the peanut gallery? This is what the side of the yard looks like:
As the guys were clearing stuff out in the fall, I noticed that there were big rhododendrons between the trees, and I marked them off with tape so they wouldn't get overzealous with their purge and rip them out. They seem to have buds on them, so I'm hoping they pop into flower this spring. We've never really seen the house in early spring, so I don't know what colors to expect from the various flowering shrubs. I wonder how long the poor things were choked off by the ivy and low pine branches? I'll give them a good shot of Miracle-Gro once it gets a little warmer - they deserve it. The azaleas will get some too, because they're in pretty bad shape.

Tulips are coming along nicely:

I threw out the bag the bulbs came in, and I already forget what color tulips I planted. I think they were a purple and white mix, but I can't be sure. Maybe Mom remembers. Either way it looks like there will be a whole mess of tulips in the backyard in a few weeks! Hooray!

Roasted Green Beans

Without a doubt, my favorite way to eat green beans is to roast them in the oven with some olive oil.

It's so easy, just chop off the ends, cut them in half if they're really long, and then toss them in a bowl with olive oil, salt, and pepper. Put them on a baking sheet in a single layer, into a 375 oven for 5 or 6 minutes, and then take them out and stir them around, because their bottom sides will be getting brown and you don't want them to burn. Back into the oven for another 5 or 6 minutes, and they're ready to eat.

This makes them a little sweet and gives them a nutty roasted flavor that makes it hard for me to wait until they've cooled off to eat them.


Why would anyone ever eat canned green beans again, when they could do this instead?

Vicious Pals

Horton has befriended my Monty Python "Rabbit with Big Pointy Teeth" bunny slippers. I fear they are plotting against me. I always took comfort in the fact that Horton only has small pointy teeth to kill me with... but apparently he's recruiting.

What's for Dinner - Steak, roasted veggies, and garlic mashed taters

This was my second-ever attempt to cook a real steak by any other method than "George Foreman Grill", and I was nervous that I would ruin it completely. I bought nice steaks, ribeyes, at about $7 each on sale, and I shuddered to think of the wasted money if I overcooked them. I mean, we'd have eaten them anyway but it would have been a sad waste of a tasty hunk of meat.

I took them out of their packages, rubbed them with salt and pepper, and allowed them to come to room temperature (per cookbook and Food Network instructions) while defending them from feline attack. Meanwhile, I cut up a green pepper, a red pepper, and half a red onion, tossed them with olive oil and a dash of Mrs Dash Original Blend, and put them on a cookie sheet in the oven at 375. I checked them and tossed them every 5 minutes until they looked properly roasty and weren't raw-crunchy anymore. It took about 20 minutes for me, but the size of the chunks will affect the cooking time. Smaller is faster.

I peeled and chopped 6 small potatoes and boiled them until they were soft. At the same time, I warmed up a cup of milk in a pot, after adding two big garlic cloves, peeled and smashed flat. I also added some pepper, mostly because it looked too white. I moved the drained potatoes (and some thick slivers of butter) to a plastic mixing bowl and used my hand mixer to whip them, slowly adding the garlic milk (take the garlic cloves out!) until it was the right consistency. I didn't end up needing the whole cup of milk, but it's always safer to have more than you need. Next time I'll just put the butter in with the milk and let it melt, because I had little butter chunks left in the potatoes. The garlic level of these potatoes was exactly right for me, but I think maybe the addition of smashed roasted garlic would enhance them.

For my steaks, I just plopped them into a very hot, buttery frying pan and left them for about 5 minutes before flipping them and leaving them there for another little while. I'm not sure exactly how long I cooked them, because I kept thinking I needed one more minute. It's very hard for me to tell when they're done enough and not overdone. These ended up on the medium-to-medium-well side, and I would have preferred them not quite as done, but they were still very tasty. Next time I'll just use the cooking times suggested in my cookbooks for various levels of doneness and stop doubting them. They just never seem long enough to me, and the steaks don't seem to be cooked enough when my time is up. Maybe it will be good for me to just follow instructions completely for once!

I'm learning. Slowly. I will master steaks eventually.

Jen's Library - The Happiness Project

The Happiness Project - Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun.
By Gretchen Rubin

This one wins the "longest subtitle" award for sure.

This is a look at one woman's year-long attempt to become happier in all areas of her life. It doesn't pretend to be a self-help book with all the answers to make you happier; in fact, she comes out at the start and says you shouldn't expect the things that worked for her to work for you. It's her story and she's telling it for herself, and maybe it'll help a few people along the way.

It's really hard to give a good overview of the book because it's got a lot of information in it. I'd almost end up rewriting the whole book here in order to cover all of it, so this review is going to end up being more about my response to the book, than the book itself, but I honestly recommend picking it up, because it's interesting and well-written and you may have a light bulb go off while you're reading.

To start the project, the author did a lot of reading on the subject of happiness and found certain ideas or principles she wanted to try and apply to her life, and in this memoir she attacks one aspect of happiness every month. Things like "energy" and "money" and "relationships" and "mindfulness". Not everything works well; in fact, some strategies or ideas piss her off and she drops them pretty quickly - you have no idea how relieved I was to discover someone else who just doesn't get why yoga is so awesome! It all boils down to figuring out what will make you happy and making sure you find ways get to it and fit it into your life.

That's something that resonates with me - feeling like you're supposed to like something. I feel like I'm supposed to want to throw fancy parties, and I feel guilty about preferring a night on the couch with my husband or some friends, enjoying pizza and Wii bowling. I find myself wishing I had more occasions to wear a dress and fancy heels, but in reality, fancy-schmancy restaurants make me feel out of place. I wish I loved a fancy life, I wish I was into opera and classical music and expensive champagne. But I prefer watching Mythbusters, listening to the Barenaked Ladies, and drinking Dr Pepper. Coming to terms with what I actually like, as opposed to what I wish I liked, isn't easy.

Happiness is hard. It takes effort, at least for me. The author agrees, and suggests that those people for whom happiness seems to come so easily are actually working very hard to achieve it. It's unfair that it has to be that way, but like exercise is essential to getting fit, hard mental work is necessary for staying happy. It's easy to complain, harder to let go and enjoy. The author ends up reducing her own happiness to a simple rule: Thinking about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right, in an atmosphere of growth. Do things that make you feel good, stop doing things that make you feel bad, and do things that feel right to you. And strive for growth, whether that's making new friends, trying new experiences, or challenging yourself. Again, that's her solution. But it's not insane.

She has a website, happiness-project.com, where you can learn more about her project and start your own. I'm not sure I'll be going that far quite yet, but the book was very much worth my time and I plan on trying some of the ideas that spoke to me.

Project: Red Room is now Yellow Room

We finally settled on a new color for the ex-red room. It's called Provence Creme from Behr and it's a gorgeous creamy yellow, exactly what I had in mind when I said I wanted that room to be yellow. My dear man is finishing up the painting because he's better with a roller than I am, and I'm getting a headache from the fumes, but here's a picture of a finished area.

We still need a second coat, and we'll need to buy another gallon because the walls are drinking up the paint more than we expected, but this color is making me very happy. We'll do the trim in an almost-white color called Vermont Cream (I know, this room is totally creamy), but that will happen in a few weeks when we find some more time.

I'm concerned about the curtains now, because they're beige and will probably look funny against the yellow, but I really don't feel like spending more money on curtains. Does anyone care about how the curtains contrast with the paint? Honestly? Ok, I sort of do, but I'm hoping I'm being picky and most people wouldn't even notice.

They're Alive - In The Yard!

We have flowers! I planted crocuses here and there in the front yard last fall, because I love having the bright little dots of color in the lawn in the spring. They flower so early that they're done by the time we need to start mowing the lawn, and they sure cheer March up a lot! I'm still not used to how early spring arrives in Maryland. It's about two months sooner than back home in Montreal. They still have over a foot of snow on the ground, according to my extremely jealous mother.


The daffodils are set to bloom within a week or so, and the tulips are poking up and growing fast. The grape hyacinths seem to be nothing but leaves so far, with no sign of flowers at all - either I got duds or they flower a lot later then I thought.