Books, etc.

Steve is cooking steak. It smells yummy. Hangar steak, wet aged (if anyone knows what that means aside from Steve and the Butcher) rubbed with some seasoning and thrown on our electric grill. There are zucchini and potatoes being par-boiled as well. Wonder if we have any wine....? We were going to do risotto, but we're out of chicken broth and I had no desire to go to the store.

Anyway, I couldn't sleep last night so I read a book. My cousin recommended it and I have to say that I enjoyed it. Frenemies, by Megan Crane. Bits of it were predictable, but since I read it in one sitting it didn't suck entirely. I remember laughing at parts of it, too. And commiserating.

Today I started TWOC, by Graham Joyce. He's one of my favorite writers. He always writes a straight-forward novel and then there's some little twist that makes you cock your head and wonder if he's fucking with you or if it's really been that way all along. And it's totally believable. Like, she's not a full on read-your-mind psychic, but she knows things. She dreams/sees/feels them. She knows what's going on. Which is a common theme, I know, but when it's well done it's very interesting to watch. Particularly if the other characters are well written to play off of it. TWOC I'm only a few chapters into, and it's Young Adult (not all of his books are) so I'm not sure where the twist is, yet. But it's good. Of course it's good. It's Graham Joyce.

The other book I finished yesterday (earlier in the day...when work is slow, Emily reads a lot.) is Touchstone, by Laurie R King. If I could write half as good as she does I'd be published several times over by now. Touchstone is a stand-alone book, but she has two series - the Kate Martinelli books and the Mary Russel books. All suspense/murder mysteries. Not all historical (Kate Martinelli is current to the time they were written, but she enjoys post WWI as well) and not all set in England (Kate is in San Fransisco) but all page-turners.

I did a bit of digging around in my past yesterday, too. For this family tree project. It would appear that not only do I have a Patriot, but less than 100 years before that big thumbing of the nose at England, there were ancestors who thumbed their noses at Germany and came with the Mennonites to settle Germantown, Pennsylvania. There's an odd feeling associated with this. I spent much of my life feeling rootless -- my father was in the military so we moved a lot and then he left my mom and life went the way it did and I never really felt like I had a home. There were places I belonged, yes. And places where I stored my things, but none of it felt permanent.

I looked forward to that changing with Steve, and it did. Slowly. After that initial oddness of living together - that feeling of being a visitor in your own home - I assumed that home was wherever he was. And now that I'm digging around in my roots (interesting visual -- I can see the bottom of some Huck Finn type character sticking in the air while from the waist-up they're buried in the root system of a tree) and finding that they go as deeply as they do -- and they make the statement that they make -- I want to create that here. Even as nebulous as it is right now, the knowledge that my ancestors Did Something is motivation. Yes, archiving it is important, but shouldn't I make a stand for something? Do Something? I'm stuck in the What of the What To Do and so far it's manifested in early-spring cleaning. Which isn't bad, in itself. Charity starts at home.

And right now it's starting with my husband dishing up dinner. :-D