dear caitlin

this is what i want, so don’t be sad.
- Nina LaCour in HOLD STILL.

So I’ve read a streak of amazing books recently, namely THE MYSTERIOUS BENEDICT SOCIETY and THE KNIFE OF NEVER LETTING GO, which were both phenomenal, and I highly recommend them to anyone, but it’s been a while since I’ve read a book that connected with me on such a strong level as this one did.

And book trailers are usually a bit dodgy, but this one was made by the author and her friends, and it’s so perfect.

Oh… this book is so lovely, guys. I mean, it’s definitely heartbreaking, but also it’s just so wonderful.

Plus, Nina’s website is adorable!

apartment hunting… or not really hunting at all

So my roommate and I have discussed many times the prospect of moving from our apartment at the end of the year, and our lease is up at the end of November, so we were thinking about starting to look for places at the beginning of November. So, right now. And so today, my roommate emailed me a bunch of craigslist ads to call and make appointments. I called three, and only one person answered, so I scheduled a viewing of that apartment later that afternoon. Four hours later, we signed the lease. WHAT? I know. It sounds crazy, but it really happened, and the hilarious part is that now I get to tell people that we found an apartment before they even knew we were looking for one. Because we had been “officially looking” for about 2 hours.

Anyway, the apartment is in Hoboken, which is perfect because my roommate works in Hoboken, and it has cool things like exposed brick walls, and a dishwasher, and two ACTUAL bedrooms, and it’s pretty much perfect for what we need in an apartment. And, I’m very excited to buy bookshelves and other things to decorate!

I’m so happy we were able to find a nice apartment without any of the hassle! So excited to move in next month.

halloweentown (the postgrad years)

Stargirl from Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli

“She was illusive. She was today. She was tomorrow. She was the faintest scent of a cactus flower, the flitting shadow of an elf owl. We did not know what to make of her. In our minds we tried to pin her to a corkboard like a butterfly, but the pin merely went through and away she flew.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

and The Roommate as… The Great Kate Weather Machine (Kate Wetherall) from The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart

“That was close,” Sticky said. “But now what? There’s nothing else to tie him up with.”
“How about this rope?” cried a familiar voice, and to their surprise Kate Wetherall suddenly leaped in through the open window.

And just so you understand the great attention to detail in her costume…

“I’ll show you,” Kate said, and began removing things from the bucket. First came a Swiss Army knife, a flashlight, a pen light, and a bottle of extra-strength glue, which Kate examined to be sure its lid was tightly closed. then she produced a bag of marbles, a slingshot*, a spool of clear fishing twine, one pencil and one eraser, a kaleidoscope, and a horseshoe magnet, which she yanked with some effort from the metal bucket. I’ve been through dozens of these,” she said, holding the magnet up for them to admire. “This is the strongest I’ve found.” Finally she showed them a length of slender nylon rope, coiled around the bottom and sides of the bucket. -The Mysterious Benedict Society

*We tried. We were unsuccessful. Seriously? Where do you go to pick up a slingshot these days?

apples and goats

Hey, remember when I said I was going to make an apple picking blog but that never happened? HERE IT IS. I know. It’s like your wildest dreams are coming true.

So a couple of friends and I went on one of mta’s getaways, which was called the Farm Fresh tour. It was SO AWESOME. First, we all got on a metro north train at Grand Central and made our way up to Poughkeepsie, where the shuttle met us, and about a full bus worth of people.

Our first stop was Sprout Creek Farm, where we sampled their cheese, toured the milking facilities, and saw many farm-y type animals including my favorite… Soda Pop the GOAT!

Hello Goat!

Then we went to a vineyard and winery, named Millbrook, and we had a wine tasting, and the tour took us through the building and showed us how they make the wine (which apparently was totally unknown to me, as I discovered on the tour). The wine was actually pretty good especially their Tocai Friulano, and they served these amazing wine crackers which I would have linked here, but apparently they don’t sell on their site. Anyway, it was really quite fun and I took many pictures of the vineyard through the bus windows, so of course NONE of them came out… I mean hello, BUS WINDOWS, but I’ll show you one anyway.

And then last we went to an Orchard… which of COURSE I no longer remember the name, but it was cute and the apple trees were all in little rows for us to pick from! Now, I had never seen an apple tree like these before, and I was VERY excited. It was so weird to see all of the apples on the ground, and just SO MANY on the trees. It was ridiculous. So many apples! And you could just pick them off the tree and eat them. Not to mention, I had never seen so many different types of apples in my life. My fellow apple pickers were very upset that the Honey Crisp tree had been picked dry, but I’ve never had a Honey Crisp apple, so I’m now on a mission to try them soon.

Oh, the bliss of apple picking in the fall! So much fun, SO MANY APPLES. I wish I could make apple pie of some sort, so the apples don’t go bad. Poor apples.

now i just need a sweater

So remember last post when I mentioned offhand that I loved Emma Pillsbury’s sweater guards?

Well now I’m officially obsessed.

Here are some photos of Emma (played by Jayma Mays) wearing sweater clips in Glee.

Aren’t they just adorable? Here are some sweater clips available on Etsy.

Some of my favorites!

Vintage Sweater Guard Sparkling Lilies

Vintage – Sweater Guard With Gold Leaves and Pearls

Scrabble Tile Sweater Guard Clip in greens

How awesome is that last one, btw? It’s handmade, so you can actually request certain letters for the scrabble pieces! How fun would it be to have initials! Ahhh. Just wanted to share the awesomeness. Expect a blog tomorrow… that includes APPLE PICKING! GET EXCITED!

***update, 1am***

Just bought this pair…

Yay!!! I expect them in the mail soon!

need a larger plate… and stat

Remember back when I used to post in here semi-regularly? Back in the day? It’s okay if you don’t really remember, to be honest, I barely do myself, but there was a time when I posted in my blog a lot.

That was before I had a job. Having a job does so much good for a person… for example as follows:

1. provides said person with money.
2. provides said person with a reason to shower regularly.

but also has some detrimental effects:

1. that person has less time to blog.

I’m going to TRY to rectify that, especially since I ended my internship this week, and I now have THREE days off a week. Of course, I also had today off, and I did nothing but polish off bag of Tim Tams, so we’ll see how well I stick to this plan. The internship ending was hard / difficult / devastating for me, because I LOVED it there, and now I know more than ever that I should be NEED to be working in publishing. I don’t know if you are late to this blog the party, but I spent the last three months interning at a literary agency in the city, and it was fantastic. (I apologize profusely for using the strikethrough joke not once, but TWICE in this paragraph… don’t mind me, I’ll be off in the corner killing myself.) So many people complain about their horrible internships, and I’m so glad I didn’t have that experience. Everyone at the agency was so helpful and knowledgeable, and I really feel as if I understand so much more about the business of book-making than I did prior. Also, after interning at the agency, I could definitely see myself being a literary agent, which was something I had never really entertaining seriously in the past. (I think I always assumed that I wouldn’t have the ability to see a book with potential if it slapped me in the face, but after reading many manuscripts and writing readers’ reports, I definitely feel as if I would be a good judge of the quality of a manuscript, and I think I was underestimating myself.) So I’m going to start seriously applying for jobs in literary agencies and publishing houses, and hopefully something good will eventually turn up. But until then, my number one priority is this blog.

Wait, that’s not entirely true. My number one priority is looking for a job, and my number two priority is catching up on television. Now, I’ve always been a person who watches maybe two or three shows a season, at the most, but my current roommate LOVES television, and so tv shows have become a bigger part of my life as of late.

So here is the TV show line up:

1. Gossip Girl: This show is effing fantastic, I don’t even care what you all say, it’s brilliant (except Joanna Garcia… I’m sorry, but I just watched you tutor rich girls in Florida for a year… it’s too soon). And for the record, that killer line last week? “The next time you forget that you are Blair Waldorf, just remember that I’m Chuck Bass, and I love you”? It’s RIDICULOUS how emotionally moved I was by that line. Seriously. It was like I was Edward, and the show was Bella, and that line was my own particular brand of heroin… and I think I’ve taken that one a bit too far… backing up now.

2. Glee: This show has been a craps shoot recently. Sometimes the episodes are fantastic: like this week… HELLO JANE LYNCH DIARY SCENE! And sometimes they are horrible: Like that acafellas disaster that made me want to put my foot in a blender. I’m sticking around, though. Emma Pillsbury wears the most adorable outfits. And she makes me want sweater clips.

3. Dollhouse: I honestly don’t even remember what happened last season. I feel like this show has the potential to be a lot better than it actually is, but maybe it’ll pull through and have a great second season. If not, I’ll probably drop it.

4. America’s Next Top (Short) Model: It’s pretty sad when you have to rely on a reality show by Tyra “did you see my horrible acting on Gossip Girl this week?” Banks to be the only constant in your life, but Top Model is that for me. It’s always entertaining. Every week. My favorite is Erin. So she’ll probably get second, but what else is new.

5. Greek: This whole season / chapter / whatever they call it has been weak as a free drink at ladies night, but they really stepped it up with this past week’s episode. I love the Cappie / Evan bromance.

6. Vampire Diaries: I was totally about to write this show off as lame, and no matter how great WitchBonnie is, I can’t stomach the pain for another episode, when at the end of last week, they show the little anti-vampire council having a little meeting. And I was intrigued. Just when I think I’m out…. they pull me back in! – to quote The Godfather, part III… or in my case, Veronica Mars.

7. Flash Forward: So fakeLost has been okay so far… not brilliant, but even Gossip Girl needed a couple of episodes to get started, so I’ll keep watching for a while.

Ahhh stupid tv. So much on my plate right now. Oh, and also, I want this dress.

is roger ebert joking?

Seriously?

Now, I LOVE Alexis Bledel. Probably a bit too much. In fact, I’ve probably said on occasion that I would pay money to watch her eat a sandwich, which is probably why the gods conspired against me to make Post-Grad the WORST MOVIE EVER. Wow. Here are some things I thought about while watching this horrible movie:

1. I wish I were watching Gilmore Girls.
2. How did they get Jane Lynch wrapped into this?
3. Is there seriously a 15+ year age gap between Alexis and her brother?
4. Or is that Alexis’s character’s son and Jane Lynch is just raising him?
5. I can’t believe I spent 12 dollars on this.
6. I’d rather be watching (500) Days of Summer again.
7. I’d rather be watching Bandslam again.
8. I’d rather be watching anything else in the world but this movie.
9. Damn, it’s after 11pm, and we’ll have to take the PATH through Hoboken.
10. The best thing about this movie are the pretzel chips I’m currently eating.
11. Did I just fall asleep?

I honestly don’t even know what happened with this movie. It started off with Rory (I think she had a different name in this movie, but really, who cares) posting a video blog (YAY!) on her myspace (kill me now), and it basically went downhill from there. I mean, this movie is pretty much my life story, minus the whole “hooking up with your Brazilian neighbor for no apparent reason” thing and the “man I wish this annoying kid I’ve known forever wasn’t in love with me because it’s major inconvenient” plotline. But then of course she falls in love with Mr. guitar-carrying-should-I-go-to-law-school-or-stay-home-and-continue-to-mack-on-my-best-friend and decides to fly to NYC (probably a good career move for her, considering she wants to work in PUBLISHING) to live with him (in his dorm room, I’m guessing… who is she, Lane?), just because she “misses” him. YOU MISS HIM? Call him on the effing phone, woman.

Seriously, considering this movie is about a girl who graduated from college with a degree in English and who wants to work in the publishing industry but can’t seem to get a job (why hello, me!), this movie could have been fantastic. I mean, we could have had a scene where Rory spends three hours printing out her resume in 15 different fonts and forces people to rate them, or we could have watched her stumble through an interview that ends with her saying that her favorite book of all time is The Unbearable Likeness of Seeing by Milan Kundera, only to come home and find out that it’s actually called The Unbearable Lightness of Being and well, that’s what happens when you try to class up your “currently reading” list from vampire romances and Sarah Dessen novels.

I mean, HELLO, if that isn’t MTV Movie Award winning material I don’t know what is. But this movie was so awkward, with parts of it trying to be Little Miss Sunshine “We’re a weird family!” and one scene where Rory has a breakdown in a luggage store that I would say is on par with everyone’s favorite poor little rich Orange County girl throwing the lawn furniture in the pool. Also, I think they killed a cat and tried to make it funny. I’m not even an animal person (aka last week at work a woman asked me for books for adults on “coping with the loss of a pet” and I definitely raised my eyebrows when she wasn’t looking), and I found that scene painful.

Basically, I saw Bandslam last weekend, and by that I mean the high school flick about a battle of the bands starring Aly of Aly and AJ and Vanessa “We’re Breaking Free” Hudgens, and it was better than Post-Grad.

Also, how did Rory manage to intern at both Random House and Penguin without going to New York?

getting the girl

So I just finished the book Getting the Girl by Susan Juby, and I have a couple of things to say.

1. It should have been called Defiled.
2. The cover should have looked like this:

That’s all.

Edited because:
SUSAN JUBY COMMENTED!!! Awww, Susan Juby. I love you. I really liked Alice, I Think and I LOVED Getting the Girl! The problem that I have with the cover is that while it’s a fine cover, it looks like a Susane Colasanti book. Now I don’t have anything against Susane Colasanti, but in my opinion, I think Getting the Girl could have been a really great YA book for boys, and as it stands, the title and the cover make the book out to be a romantic comedy, which I think is misleading (as I feel it’s a comedy/mystery with some romance on the side). Basically, I think this is a book my brother would enjoy reading, but wouldn’t want to be seen holding in public. Which kinda sucks.

Also, I’ve been having fun remaking covers of the books I read, and I was particularly proud of this one so I decided to post it.

on health and shiving

So this is the equivalent to if I asked for ice cream, and LHA sent me a Pomeranian.

Today’s prompt: I’ve listed two obscure words below, along with some etymology and definition from the online Oxford English Dictionary. Your assignment, if you choose to accept it, is to write a riff on one or both words, or figure out a way to incorporate whatever you’re writing.

TO SHIVE: “[f. SHIVE n.1 Cf. ON. skífa.] trans. To cut (bread) into slices.
1570 LEVINS Manip. 152/39 To shiue, dissecare. 1629 GAULE Holy Madn. 343 He shiues out his Bread by weight or measure.

DWALE: [In sense 1, a variant of DWELE n., = OE. *dwela, dweola, dwola, dwala, error, heresy, madness; in sense 2 app. aphetic for OE. {asg}edweola, -dwola, etc. error, heresy, madness, also heretic, deceiver; f. ablaut-series dwel-, dwal-, dwol-: see DWELL v. Cf. OE. dwol- in comb. ‘erring, heretical’, and Goth. dwals ‘foolish’.]

I think I should start off by admitting that I just googled “riff” because I didn’t actually know what she meant just then. LHA: 1, Summer: 0. Also… it took me far too long to figure out what WFMAD stood for. I was like “Woman in the Forest… comma… MAD?”

*facepalm* (It stands for Write Fifteen Minutes A Day, for those of you riding my bus.)

So this first word is a bit of a challenge, because I mean… WHEN would I need to slice bread? Isn’t sliced bread itself the GREATEST THING EVER? So great in fact, that we always refer to new great things as the “greatest thing SINCE sliced bread” because clearly the new thing CAN’T BEAT pre-sliced bread? So really, anyone still shiving has clearly missed the most revered invention of our time. It’s like people who don’t use wikipedia. Speaking of sliced bread though, I had toast this morning for breakfast.

This is worth mentioning, because I never actually prepare breakfast. I usually have either a Nutrigrain bar I grab out of the cabinet on my way out the door, or three vanilla bean scones at Starbucks. (BTW, those scones are AMAZING. I’m obsessed with them. If you’ve never had the vanilla bean scones at Starbucks, you are missing out big time. You are basically still shiving while the rest of us are using that precious slicing time to do things like stick the bread in the toaster and spread butter on it. Did I kill that metaphor yet?) And the toast was amazing! I also had a glass of orange juice with it, which is worth mentioning because my mom reads this blog. Hi Mom! I drink orange juice! I’m healthy!

In other food related news, I learned two days ago that if a recipe says “melt butter in pan with garlic powder and then add pasta” that is NOT the same as “melt butter in pan and then add garlic powder and pasta.” Raw garlic powder is disgusting. And that’s coming from me who went through a container of garlic powder in 2 months. I’m fairly certain it’s still coming out of my pores.

Anyway, the garlic butter pasta recipe is right here and it’s actually amazing when you make it correctly.

Oh and I didn’t use the second word: dwale. Oh well. That’s what LHA gets for not giving me ice cream.

thank you laurie halse anderson

(for many things, the least of which is my email address from high school: soursugar
which is from a line in Speak)

So today I noticed that Laurie Halse Anderson is doing this BEDA (blog every day in AUGUST) thing, except she’s calling it something different, as you are only supposed to write for fifteen minutes and she’s including prompts. PROMPTS! Like for writing! What fun.

I’ll try this out. We’ll see how long this lasts.

Today’s prompt (from Laurie’s blog): Describe your writing space. Focus on the smallest details possible, not the big ones. Don’t say there is a chair in the room; give details about the wear patterns of the rug under the chair, or the paint chips, or the dog hair in the cushion. Go small to tell big.

HAHAHAHA. My writing space? Oh Laurie Halse Anderson. You crack me up. And not just because you have three names and I’m envious. My writing space is also my eating space, and my reading space, and my television space, and my movie space… basically it’s my everything space. To sum up: I have one table. And one chair.

Wow I already violated the first rule. “Don’t say there is a chair in the room-” DAMN IT. Well… actually, maybe I didn’t because I didn’t specify that the chair was IN THE ROOM. It’s actually not. Little known fact, but in New Jersey, we are actually short on gravity. Seriously. It’s MAJOR annoying. Every month we have to pay a gravity bill, otherwise our possessions just start floating about. This wouldn’t really be a problem in and of itself, because I hear those astronauts get a HELL of a good night’s sleep out there in space. Can’t you picture it? The floating around and all that, I mean. It would be oh so soothing! But unfortunately… living without gravity has it’s downfalls. Like sometimes our chairs float out the window.

Seeing as we only have one chair per person in this lovely place I call home, this is MAJOR inconvenient. (I apologize for the excessive use of the word “major” in this post. I watch too much Zenon. Although she would say “inconvenient MAJOR.”) So we always try to pay the bill on time. But just in case we don’t, we keep our chairs in the closet at all times. And as we learned from Sorcerer’s Stone, a closet is not a real room, therefore, THE CHAIR IS NOT IN THE ROOM. HEY-O!

Okay fine, I don’t have a writing space. Wait! I got one! My writing space isn’t a PHYSICAL SPACE, IT’S A SPACE IN MY MIND! HA!

No. That’s lame. And I kind of feel like a tool.

FIFTEEN MINUTES! Ugh. I give up on this writing challenge, Laurie Halse Anderson. Better luck tomorrow. Ask me about ice cream. I am a PROFESSIONAL at ice cream.