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Every once in awhile, I'll get in these book hoarding moods. I'm so not joking. It's just so many books catch my eye, and I feel like if I don't get them now then I'll forget what the title of it. I wish I could be a speedy reader, so my queue of books (as my hubster calls it) wouldn't be so long. Right now I have my eye on:
A Sense of the World: How a Blind Man Became History's Greatest Traveler
Galileo's Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love 
Power of Kindness
A fine quotation is a diamond on the finger of a man of wit, and a pebble in the hand of a fool.
- Joseph Roux
We've been working on teaching the kiddos how to put words in ABC order. I hated this as a kid, especially when it came to alphabetizing based on the second or third letter of the word. It just felt so tedious. Anyway, the worksheet that I had to help them with involved alphabetizing by third letter. Mr. JB is a super clever kid. He figured out a shortcut to the worksheet. For the "M" section of the worksheet, he would first write:
mi
mi
mi
mi
mi
Then, he would fill in the rest of the word. That's pretty good thinking! I was pretty impressed.
We got the Illusionist because by chance I saw the preview on Netflix. When the movie started, my hubster gave me the what-did-you-get-me-into-face. Then I turned and told him, "This is a movie I would totally watch and you would never watch." I loved it! He ended up liking it too. It's a romantic movie with a suspenseful twist. I don't want to give too much away because that would totally ruin it. I must say that I'm still thinking about the different twists of the movie even though we watched it on Sunday. After watching this movie and Painted Veil, I'm slowly becoming an Edward Norton fan. My hubster was really impressed with Paul Giamatti's performance. We were only really disappointed with the the prince's totally fake mustache. Like Painted Veil, the Illusionist is one of my new favorites.
I didn't get to celebrate Valentine's Day with the kiddos because I had that horrible flu floating around. When I got to work the next week, there was a cute bag filled with valentine stuff on my desk. Here are some the cute homemade ones I got:
Recently, I've rekindled my love for foodie bios. What is a foodie bio exactly? It's a biography about someone whose life revolves around food. I first got into this genre when I read Peter Mayle's A Year in Provence for my French Humanities class while I was at Cal Poly. Lately, I devoured Julia Child's My Life in France right after we got back from our honeymoon. Now, I'm onto Bill Buford's Heat. The subtitle for Heat is: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany.
I just had to read it when I read the part about the "Dante-Quoting Butcher." Dante has been a big part of my collegiate life. I learned in my first hardcore literature class that Dante was obsessed with a woman named Beatrice and wrote her a series of love poems. She also reappears in the Divine Comedy. I had to read the entire Divine Comedy along with other medieval literature while having a full course load that quarter. Talk about intense. I'm so glad that I read it though. It's amazing. Then another quarter, I had a philosophy teacher that would say every morning (class started at 7:10am) when he called my name for role, "Dante would be very happy you're here." When we went to Italy last year, I saw his tomb in the Santa Croce church in Florence. That's my whole Dante shpeal.
Of course I previewed the book before I bought it, the preface begins with this quotation from George Orwell:
A human being is primarily a bag for putting food into; the other functions and faculties may be more godlike, but in point of time they come afterwards. A man dies and is buried, and all his words and actions are forgotten, but the food he has eaten lives after him in the sound or rotten bones of his children. I think it could be plausibly argued that changes of diet are more important than changes of dynasty or even of religion. The Great War, for instance, could never have happened if tinned food had not been invented. [...] Yet is curious how seldom the all-importance of food is recognized. You see statues everywhere to politicians, poets, bishops, but none to cooks or bacon-curers or market gardeners.
I love the 30+ pages I've read so far. I know it's no Odyssey or Ivanhoe, but I think I put in my dues already. I can read some non-serious literature for awhile. :) But seriously, each of these foodie bios talk about people rediscovering themselves and following their true passions. For this reason, I love these books. Yes, it sounds somewhat corny and overly idealistic; however, it's something that is easy to connect with and aspire to.
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