Summer of love

When the Lady Gaga episode of Glee aired, I finally succumbed to my Twitter-fueled curiosity and watched it. Even though I felt like the vocals in the big musical numbers were rather over-produced, I liked it enough that I set up a series recording for the remaining episodes. My friend bibliophile81 saw me talking about Glee on Twitter, and she put the DVDs of season one on hold for me at the library. I ripped through season one and found it sharper and much funnier than I'd expected. And so quotable! So now I'm totally that obnoxious person going around reciting lines from a show that everyone else geeked out over ages ago. (But seriously, you guys. "Cross over to my side of this black shiny thing." "That's called a piano, Sue.")

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When Jonniker started The Book Lushes a few months ago, I was ridiculously excited. I've been waiting forever to be invited to join a book club. (And anyone can join! You should!) I have to say, so far these ladies have not steered me wrong. I skipped the first book, The Help by Kathryn Stockett, because Nico was brand new and I didn't get it from the library's hold list until nearly the end of the month. The second book was The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, which I liked so much that I immediately checked out and read the sequel and put my name on the list for the third one. I skipped The Year of Magical Thinking because I wasn't feeling up for a book dealing with the mortality of a spouse and child. Next we read Olive Kitteridge, which I expected to merely tolerate and ended up sort of loving. This month we are reading The Red Tent, another one I expected to not like much and really, really enjoyed. I'm so impressed with the Book Lush track record that I went back and got a copy of The Help and started it at work this week. And holy crap, it's soooooo good.

While everyone else was reading The Year of Magical Thinking, I finally got around to reading Watership Down (which my friend Tamsyn has been reminding me to read for years) and it was wonderful. I managed to find time to re-read American Gods for the 1 Book 1 Twitter project, though their reading / commenting schedule turned out to be way too slow for me and I gave up on the discussions after the second week when everyone else was talking about chapter five and I had already finished and moved on to something new. The bibliophile has also sent me some really excellent books, and I can wholeheartedly recommend Sarah Addison Allen's The Girl Who Chased the Moon and Brunonia Barry's The Map of True Places. So far 2010 has been a very good book year. Even though I've been crap at keeping up with reviews over on my book blog, I do keep a list of what I've read each year going back to 2006 in case anyone wants to look. I love peeking at other people's book lists. I am finding that I have plenty of time to squeeze a book or two in between each Book Lush selection, so if there's a book you think I should read, let me know!

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The baby, God, he's so cute. But also sometimes pitiful. Upon stirring from naps, he often turns and rubs his face on his blanket or my shirt before truly waking up. It's really stinking cute. Unfortunately right before he did it the other night, he spit up and I didn't know it, so when he turned his face to rub it on his blanket, he landed snout first in a pool of milkbarf. So then he was lying there crying pitifully, half awake and all spit-uppy. I managed to wipe most of it off his face, but as I was reaching for another flannel, he went for a second comforting blankie rub and found an additional splort of milk that I'd missed. Poor kid. It was so gross and yet impossibly funny. Infants...full of adorable Darwinian fail.

I did an outreach program at the library today (We made slime! It was great!) and as I was walking out through the children's room afterward I decided to browse a little and ended up checking out four books -- Nico's first library books! I'm way more excited about this than I should be, but I can't help it. When I was a kid, my mom took us to the library every week. She had a giant red and white canvas tote bag (seriously, large enough that I could sit in it when I was little), and we would fill it up with ten books per kid. Back then library books still had a card in a paper pocket glued inside the cover which the librarian would stamp with the due date. Mom collected all the due date cards and kept them in the china hutch so that when we went back the next week she knew exactly how many books we had to dig up. These days the library gives you a printed receipt listing all your checked out items, so I will tape Nico's receipt into my planner to remind me to return his books. A librarian I know tried to talk me into signing him up for the summer reading program this year, but since we usually just read the same two books every night (Bear Snores On and Guess How Much I Love You, we'd never make our goal for the summer. Plus I'd kind of like his first official summer reading year to be one in which he can participate by helping to pick out his books and such. I hope he'll love the library as much as I do.

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"I'll have you know I have my PhD." "You got it online, Sue!"