Toto, we're not in Green Gables anymore

An ordinary week

Posted on October 12, 2025October 11, 2025 by littlealmond

-Breastfeeding my 1 year old

-Thrift store shopping for 2T clothes and something nice for me

-Professional development to keep up my teaching degree

-Bible study for me and my brother-in-law babysits

-Watch Blippi and Law and Order: SVU

-read on Kindle Unlimited and Netgalley

-reread lots of Peekaboo books and Eric Carle

-contact naps

-monitor the older cat with kidney failure

-try not to swear at the younger cat for biting my feet

-Sign language class on Mondays

-Library story time and play time on Mondays

-Aldi on Wednesdays

-Substitute teaching on Fridays

Christmas Fling by Lindsey Kelk

Posted on October 11, 2025 by littlealmond

So Lindsey Kelk answers the question “what’s your favorite Christmas movie” with a list that starts with CHRISTMAS IN CONNECTICUT? Do people even realize how many old movies have the fake dating/fake spouse trope?!?! In Christmas in Connecticut, Barbara Stanwyck is THE ditzy, can’t cook, magazine writer sensation Elizabeth Lane who has won over middle America with her lovely menus by pretending she has a farm, husband, and baby in Connecticut.

In Christmas Fling, neurosurgeon resident Laura Pearce is trying to be fake Caroline, a Swedish vegan sober masseuse with parents who are alive on vacation some place. Think of Paris Gellar actually in medical school starring in “The Princess Switch.” She offers to help her landlord Callum (whom she has met twice before, which actually isn’t ever relevant) by going home for Christmas with him, not realizing that his family lives in a beautiful Scottish castle and that his beautiful ex is still hanging around… the one he was engaged to last year. Her task becomes much harder when she gets blisters, struggles with the Scottish cold, and gets stuck in a tower behind a heavy door. She did not realize how hard all this would be without a drink, or her pants.

After losing her mom years ago, her only “family” are her friends Desi and Joel. She has been telling them (and herself) for years that her journey to becoming a doctor means that she doesn’t have time for relationships. Or maybe she is denying herself the emotional experience to avoid experiencing loss again.

At one point I was thinking, “Callum’s hot, I’d probably fake date him” and then remembered “idiot, they’re always hot, there’s no other incentive for fake dating.”
Laura is sweet and strange and an overthinker. Desi and Joel are the most deranged bffs for her.

“‘Oh, good,’ he [Joel] replied joyfully. ‘That’s actually an important part of being a feminist. Recognising that women can, on occasion, be totally shit, but still supporting equality in general. I read it somewhere.’

‘You mean you saw it on TikTok.’

He slowly, deliberately, dropped an extremely heavy slab of Christmas cake into my basket while staring me straight in the eye. ‘And your point is?'”

And thank the lord there are still romance writers who don’t use “fisting” when “grabbing” works just fine thanks.

Callum’s parents and two siblings are extra.

“I’d met a lot of disproportionately angry people in my time– Joel when Netflix recast Henry Cavill in The Witcher, Desi when faced with even the most minor inconvenience and even me when they changed the recipe of Percy Pigs– but I wasn’t sure I’d ever met anyone filled with quite so much irrational rage as Elsie McClay.”

When ridiculously tall, pastry school bound Callum starts acting sweet towards Laura, she doesn’t know if it’s for her or for “Caroline.”

“‘That’s the extent of your wildest dreams?’

‘I did also say I was planning to have a bath and read my book,’ I sniffed. ‘And I believe you have mentioned a sticky toffee pudding twice now so…’

Must be dashing to go find some more Lindsey Kelk books! She is a British writer living in LA, so she reminds me of Sophie Kinsella. One of her series is on Kindle Unlimited.
Got this one on Netgalley, yay me, where I pinky swear to post a review that the booksellers will find pleasing.

(I post reviews on Goodreads and shorter reviews, cat pictures, Gilmore Girls and Law and Order: SVU random thoughts on Threads @anneotations.)

Daughter of Genoa

Posted on September 15, 2025 by littlealmond

Daughter of Genoa by Kat Devereaux

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

An unusual viewpoint— two actually— of the Second World War and the Holocaust.
Anna is alone and afraid, a young Jewish woman in Italy. Vittorio is a Jesuit priest with a bad cough. His character made this a fascinating read for me. Not many fiction writers write about priests— or positively about priests. “Hero” would be a stretch, but he’s not a villain either— just a human.
Anna and Vittorio share parts of a mission to help Italian Jews avoid being rounded up and sent off to nobody knows where. Secrecy and discretion are vital; whom to trust? What is safe to disclose to the people around them? They rely on other people’s kindness and things start to become undone by someone’s cruelty.
Some of the other characters are fascinating historical figures, and postscripts tell us what became of them. I really appreciated this book for telling the role of Catholic priests in rescuing Jews. The Church was the most successful organization helping Jews across Europe escape the death camps. I enjoyed the realism after being disappointed by other WW2 historical fiction with bizarre errors, like the concentration camp concert featuring a concerto by Mendelssohn, a banned composer under the Third Reich.

View all my reviews

I’m alive… I guess

Posted on October 9, 2017October 9, 2017 by littlealmond

I moved. I had my little apartment in a college town for almost two years.

I have started and left three jobs.

I broke off my engagement.

I started and ended two new dating relationships.

I was busy.

Better than that, I was lost. This year I hardly read any books anymore, until a dreary job at a call center paid me to sit at a desk and wait for a phone to ring. Then I tore through a dozen books, then abruptly quit. A job dragging on one’s emotional well being is a valid reason to quit a job without two weeks’ notice. Especially when you’re an at will employee. And I know this because I read it on the Internet, where everything is true.

I’m home now at 5 pm on a Monday, doing nothing in particular. I restarted therapy this morning. I’m waiting to hear about someone coming to clean the air ducts.

I live in a four bedroom house by myself. Well, I have my cat. My baby. My darling. My Misu.

Since last October, my life has been nothing like I thought it would be, all those years spent daydreaming about adult life and getting married and being a writer.

Not that I’m married. My therapist asked me this morning if I’m married. Like he was verifying it.

I blinked. I think I blinked. It’s been a while since someone asked if I’m married. My favorite time is when I was in the ER and the doctor asked my boyfriend if he was “Mr. C” (i.e., my last name). I said no, quite sharply. Then the doctor asked about the huge bruise on my neck. I pointed to the boyfriend.

It was just a hickie. The ER visit was because of a little fender and the neck pain that started about half an hour after.

I don’t know exactly how to move on from my past relationships. How to get rid of all the emotional pain that exacerbates the tension and pain I have from my fibromyalgia.

Except to make it into a story.

Mentally ill writers: A Little Princess is born

Posted on November 24, 2015November 24, 2015 by littlealmond

The way I stay in shape while working full-time is through my power of my amazing malfunctioning mind. Last night, on my way out to the library, I forgot my phone and went back up three flights of stairs to get it. Then my gloves. Then my keys. It was cold and dark on the way to the library, but I needed my book fix.

I love free book shopping and there’s no holding me back. I picked up Catcher in the Rye, Howl’s Moving Castle, Lily’s Purple Plastic Purse and Little White Rabbit by Kevin Henkes, Franny and Zoey, The Running Dream by Wendelin Van Draanen, the author of Flipped, an audiobook of Dr. Seuss stories, and Every cloud has a silver lining, by Anne Mazer, the first in the Amazing days of Abby Hayes series, written for middle schoolers.

Meantime, I’m planning to check out eight fabulous books by Maud Hart Lovelace from the university library and Bonnie Jo Campbell’s latest short story collection, Mothers, Tell Your Daughters. It takes planning to check out this many hardcovers from the university library when it’s 0.7 miles away and you have no car, just chronic pain.

These in addition to the few dozen library books already sitting on the shelves and chairs and floor at home. Hild, Maybe You Should Write a Book, Rising Strong, 100 Years of Anne with an “E”, Joy in the Morning, Boundaries Face to Face, Bat 6, The Woman in White… and the list goes on and on. I checked out Howards End is on the landing a couple times over the summer, but realized reading it would be too hypocritical.

I’m feeling a bit rushed, since I have to read 23 books by the end of the year. That’s in 37 days.

Being absent-minded applies to every area of my life. I’m editing DLC records and I forget to check for illustrations. I’ve misplaced my engagement ring at least four times in the past four weeks. (Last place I found it was the jewelry box, oddest place yet.)

So what I forget when I posted about other Scorpio/Sagittarius female writers on Sunday was to include Frances Hodgson Burnett, whose birthday is today. She struggled with depression much of her life, after losing her father, the family business going belly up, moving to America, and having to go to work by age 16. She had two troubled marriages and lost her son to tuberculosis. In terms of personality, she was probably more like moody Mary in The Secret Garden than the sunny Sara Crewe in A Little Princess. She was high-strung and self-important and scared me. The frills and sausage curls, furs, happy endings, and strings of pearls were all part of trying to conceal her intense vulnerability, to recover the wealth and security she had experienced as a child.

burnettlittleprincess — I won’t even look at an other edition of this book #brandloyalty

She was my first favorite novelist. The primary attraction of the Kindle library was the fact that her out of print adult novels are available there.

A Little Princess was the longest book I had read up to that date, (it has forty-two chapters) and it replaced Tony’s Bread and Princess Megan and even Meet Samantha as my favorite book. I felt condescended to when my godmother gave me a ready-for-chapters copy of The Courage of Sarah Noble, a book so babyish it had illustrations every few pages. It’s only 50 pages long! Show some confidence, please! That was when our relationship started to deteriorate…

I read biographies of Burnett and Louisa May Alcott, scavenging them from the dusty, cavernous shelves of an old city library collection. Those books were probably the start of my shattered illusions. Frances and Louisa were each extremely successful, stylish, knew all the right people, traveled to Europe, wrote marvelous books, understood human nature so well and created such vivacious and uplifting characters— yet they struggled with loneliness and unhappiness.

Although maybe these biographies helped give me the idea that writing was something I could do, a venue open to the lonely and unhappy, the anxious and neurotic.

Which leaves me with the puzzling question of what could happy people possibly do with themselves? Oh right, write books like The Happiness Project, which is interesting in premise but too boring to finish. I found the robots in I, Robot more relatable.

Middlemarch: How I met Mary Ann Evans

Posted on November 22, 2015November 22, 2015 by littlealmond

I’m not sure what to think about horoscopes. In high school, I read the arguments of Augustine of Hippo against the possibility of their accuracy. However, there are instances of people I feel more drawn toward and more kindred with who are fellow “Scorpios” or fall under “Sagittarius”, if it is true that current horoscopes are a month off.

How can it be coincidence alone that George Eliot’s birthday is only four calendar days after mine? Or Selma Lagerlöf’s on the 20th? Or that Louisa May Alcott and Lucy Maud Montgomery were born on the 29th and 30th of November? My birthday is the same day as Canadian author Margaret Atwood, although I’m not sure how I feel about this. Sometime I might post my frustration with Lady Oracle, but not today.

My first exposure to George Eliot came through another book, a children’s mystery novel from the ’60s or ’70s, a tattered paperback we had from some library book sale. Through reading Silas Marner, the heroine comes to reevaluate her perception of a grouchy old man as a likely suspect. Five years ago, I read Silas Marner without being particularly moved, but made a side note to pick up Mill on the Floss sometime. Middlemarch was on the periphery of my awareness. Apart from the Brontes, I tended to find nineteenth century English novelists more work than pleasure. When I returned to school the following year, my initial resolutions to expand my reading horizons were curtailed by my absorption with my (then new) boyfriend.

I did try a couple times to get into George Eliot’s translation of Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity, which I was very excited about at the same time, but didn’t fit it in. The popular novelist on campus, after Flannery O’Connor and Jane Austen, was Trollope, although one math professor surprised me once by recommending Eliot to one of my energetic classmates. I found this recommendation even more ironic later on, when I read Middlemarch and found a handful of allusions to Thomas Aquinas in the first section. Mr. Brooke, for instance, remarks how “nobody reads” Aquinas anymore, excepting perhaps the lofty-minded Casaubon. Casaubon’s profile is compared to the medieval Italian theologian. (Dorothea also remarks that Casaubon has John Locke’s “deep eye-sockets”. It’s strange who is considered attractive in this book.)

I read Middlemarch for two reasons. The first is that I still had not found (after four years!) a novel good enough to follow up Kristin Lavransdatter. I had had high hopes for War and Peace in the summer of 2013, as for Don Quixote the summer before, but probity was lost amid blunder and diatribes and sexism. (Tolstoy and I go back a few years.) Howards End came very close, as did The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Wuthering Heights. Their scope, however, was not as sweeping as Kristin’s. Only Howards End approached in splendor Kristin’s power to evoke tumults of unsettling emotion. I came close to throwing Howards End across the room at one point.

Eliot emerged as the obvious choice. Old literary scholarship (what little of it can be found in English on my Norwegian favorite) ranks Undset and Eliot as equals. Jane Austen was not as celebrated in the ’30s as she is now as a serious novelist. I dearly love Emma, but not quite as another Kristin.

And then there is the quote from Virginia Woolf, that Middlemarch is one of few novels written in English for grown-ups– contrasting the English novel with what French and Russian authors had achieved. I would personally love to believe she had read Undset, and vice versa, but religious bias can be a strong deterrent.

It should not be so strong, however, that the reader is ignorant of different religious figures. For Eliot begins Middlemarch supposing her reader knows the story of the sixteenth century Spanish nun and mystic St. Teresa of Avila, author of her Autobiography, The Way of Perfection, and Interior Castle, fascinating woman in her use of erotic terms to describe her relationship with God and who struggled with chronic illness much of her life.

“Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt, at least briefly, on the life of Saint Theresa, has not smiled with some gentleness at the thought of the little girl walking forth one morning hand-in-hand with her still smaller brother, to go and seek martyrdom in the country of the Moors?”

Mental Illness Monday: Therapy three years ago

Posted on November 16, 2015 by littlealmond

Lately I’ve been meaning to call the counseling center about setting up an appointment. But my fingers freeze after I scroll to the entry on my phone. The experience of being misunderstood by someone I try to bare my soul to is one that I don’t relish.

The first time I saw a therapist was in December 2010. She told me she didn’t think I was depressed. So I walked away; I’m good at walking away.

The second time was in October of 2012, after more than one tearful visit to the school nurse. The school therapist was a slight white-haired man, whose oldest daughter I knew my freshman year of college. It was a family of skinny, radiant, vegetarian, musical hippies. They were old friends of my boyfriend’s family, although they had grown apart as their children got older and life got busier.

By the second appointment, Mr. Wilson was going over the tenets of CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy. I still have the handout with the list of ten common cognitive distortions. You know, somewhere. Tunnel vision, black and white thinking, perfectionism. I strongly denied being a perfectionist, maintained that my B- average didn’t bother me, and never disclosed my most pressing reason for seeking out therapy.

But you can’t get very far in therapy when you don’t tell the truth and when you don’t like the treatment method. One of my chief problems, as far as I could tell, was with ruminating and over-analyzing my thoughts. Spend MORE time evaluating my thoughts? Please no. Surely what I really needed was some strategy for getting out of my own head and doing things where I could stop overthinking every minute detail. I needed a model that didn’t involve informing myself that my thoughts were invalid. Even if my thoughts were invalid.

So that relationship faded. Final weeks, he and I said we would call the other, and neither of us did. Over Christmas break, I got some overdue blood work done and was diagnosed with a vitamin D deficiency, something parents don’t really expect their kids to get when they send them to southern California for college, but what can I say, I was a bookworm out there too. The dosage of 50,000 IUs a week made me feel a lot better for the first month; then it turned into February, a blah month even in California. I waffled over what the maintenance dose of vitamin D should be, and without the handy little bottle, got out of the habit of two pills a day Monday through Friday, which meant that in no time at all, I was as tired and irritable and listless and nauseous as before. Worse, actually, but there was another trigger for that.

My main takeaways from the experience with Mr. Wilson are the following:

I don’t like CBT
I’m really stubborn about not doing what I don’t like
I’m sometimes in denial about my faults (i.e. perfectionism)
I’m a rebel at heart, but also have a people-pleasing streak
Therapists should be comforting
I don’t find skinny men very comforting. Going to therapy shouldn’t feel like going to the dentist.
It’s not “all or nothing.” There’s in between, there’s wiggle room. The world is not full of universals, regardless of what Aristotle thought.
Go with your gut. In the first appointment, he went over what he was licensed as and could do, like prescribe antidepressants. Something I said very quickly that I didn’t want. A year later, I felt that was a hasty decision and practically begged my doctor for them. This was a big mistake for me. Medication can be a positive and life-saving decision, but it wasn’t for me.
Don’t self-diagnose. I struggle with this a lot. But the worst labels are the ones I’ve given myself.
Going to therapy is a choice. Being happy is also a choice.* But they’re not the same choice. I was going to therapy for a while without much intention of being happier, and the lack of intention definitely put a damper on the benefits I saw from the therapy. You have to know what you want. Otherwise your therapist will cross one leg over the other, hold his or her knee in their hands, and ask, “what can I do for you.” Maybe seeing a psychiatrist this time will be different. Fingers crossed. Sigh. (*Not easy choices, by any means. It’s more complicated than picking between peanut butter brands or deciding what to wear. But if it’s not a choice, then being happy isn’t up to us– in which case, who is it up to? )

Winding down the 2015 Pop Sugar Reading challenge: 48 out of 52

Posted on November 15, 2015November 15, 2015 by littlealmond

2015 Reading Challenge (52 books)

This year I’ve read 185 books so far, out of a goal for 212. I still have some books left on this list. I would really like to include Middlemarch in category 2, “a classic romance,” but Testament of Youth hasn’t beckoned me lately.

I have a strange piece of news. This morning I actually took War and Peace off the shelf and realized that my bookmark was still in there from where I left off (last year? two years ago???). There’s still over 500 pages left, so maybe I could bump Middlemarch down a notch.

Among the books I still have left: a book based on or turned into a TV show; a play; a book I was supposed to read in school; a book set in my hometown; and– oh wait, that’s it. The latest entries I’ve been able to check off since last posting an update are a book with nonhuman characters, I, Robot by one of the few writers more prolific than Agatha Christie, namely Isaac Asimov; and a book you started but never finished, The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien. If that was 50 pages longer, I could have stuck it at #1. I entered Rape: A Love Story by Joyce Carol Oates as a book that scared me. It isn’t straight-up horror or anything, but the content is violent and I felt sick to my stomach reading to it.

Also, I was able to do some shuffling around; 84, Charing Cross Road is now “a book with a number in the title” and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is in its place as “a book made into a movie.”

I thought of some categories of my own, like a book written by a person with a disability, a book by an author who shares the same birthday as you (which could be tricky), and a self-help book that actually helped you. For these, I would have Blindsided by Richard M. Cohen; Lady Oracle by Margaret Atwood; and The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo.

It’s hard to believe the year is almost over! I have some great books I’m picking my way through right over. I just finished Catch me if you can by Frank Abagnale Jr., and I hope to read another 27 books in the next seven weeks! Wish me luck, and keep reading!

~~A book with more than 500 pages~~– Middlemarch by George Eliot
A classic romance- Mansfield Park by Jane Austen or Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
A book that became a movie- A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
A book published this year (2015) Completely Clementine by Sara Pennypacker (read March 10)
~~A book with a number in the title~~–84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff (read in April, one of my top reads for this year! See my rave review)
A book written by someone under 30– It’s Kind of a Funny Story by Ned Vizzini (read February 10)
~~A book with nonhuman characters~~– I, Robot by Isaac Asimov (read in October)
A funny book Angela and the Broken Heart by Nancy K. Robinson (read April 27)
A book by a female author-Most books on this list are by women, honestly. Frances and Bernard by Carlene Bauer (read in April)
~~A mystery or thriller~~– One for the Money by Janet Evanovich (read July 24)
A book with a one-word title Forfeit by Caroline Batten (read in January on Kindle)
~~A book of short stories~~ The Girl in the Flammable Skirt by Aimee Bender
A book set in a different country Journey for a Princess by Margaret Leighton (read in November)
A nonfiction book– How to be Sick by Toni Bernhard (read in January, see review)
A popular author’s first book– Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants by Ann Brashares (read in February)
A book from an author you love that you haven’t read yet– The Axe by Sigrid Undset (read in January)
A book a friend recommended Gimmeacall by Sara Mlynowski (read March 16)
~~A Pulitzer Prize winning book~~– The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway (read in April)
~~A book based on a true story~~– Ophelia’s Muse by Rita Cameron;
~~A book at the bottom of your to-read list~~— City of Women by David R. Gillham
~~A book your mum loves~~ Eddie and the Fire Engine by Carolyn Haywood
~~A book that scares you~~ Rape: A Love Story by Joyce Carol Oates
A book more than 100 years old– Njal’s Saga translated by Carl Bayerschmidt (read in February)
~~A book based entirely on its cover~~ The Butterfly and the Violin by Kristy Cambron (read in July, my review here)
A book you were supposed to read in school but didn’t – 1984 or Brave New World?
A memoir– Is Everybody Hanging Out without Me? by Mindy Kaling (read in March)
A book you can finish in a day–Anya’s Ghost by Vera Brosgol (hanging out at the doctor on March 4)
~~A book with antonyms in the title~~– The Chemistry of Calm: A Powerful, Drug-Free Plan to Quiet Your Fears and Overcome Your Anxiety by Henry Emmons (read in March)
~~A book set somewhere you’ve always wanted to visit-~~– On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan. I love Great Britain, particularly the coast. (read April 29)
A book that came out the year you were born- Scientific Progress Goes Boink by Bill Paterson (read in February)
A book with bad reviews Jacob Have I Loved by Katherine Paterson (read in March)
~~A trilogy~~ I Have Lived a Thousand Days by Livia Bitton-Jackson (my review here)
A book from your childhood– Little Eddie by Carolyn Haywood (read in March)
~~A book with a love triangle E~~verneath by Brodi Ashton (read in June, my review here)
A book set in the future The Giver by Lois Lowry (read in February)
A book set in high school- Gimme a Call by Sarah Mlynowksi (read in March)
~~A book with a color in the title~~– Emily and the Blue Period by Cathleen Daly (read in April)
A book that made you cry– Summer by Edith Wharton (read in February)
A book with magic A Girl of Fire and Thorns by Rae Carson (read in March)
A graphic novel–This One Summer by Mariko Tamaki (read in May)
A book by an author you’ve never read before– Happy for No Reason by Marci Shimoff (read in April)
~~A book that you own but have never read~~– Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild (read in May)
A book that takes place in your hometown
A book that was originally written in a different language Therese of Lisieux: A Life of Love by Jean Chalon (read in January)
~~A book set during Christmas~~ On My Way and Country Angel Christmas by Tomie de Paola (read in July and June; see review for CAC from June here)
~~A book written by an author with your same initials~~ The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie
A play-Titus Andronicus or Twelfth Night?
A banned book The Perks of Being a Wallflower (read in January, my review for the book and film here)
A book based on or turned into a TV show
~~A book you started but never finished-~~ The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien

Birthday book buying

Posted on November 14, 2015 by littlealmond

I got my paycheck on Friday, so I started shopping today for my birthday, which is Wednesday. I really wanted to go jeans shopping, an activity I mostly dread, but I got sidetracked by an online advertisement for an indoor rummage sale only blocks away with “whole rooms full of books”! I decided to go a few blocks rather than take the bus downtown, a venture that takes an hour and a half at least because it’s just one bus making a loop.

The rummage sale, which will be open again next weekend too Friday through Sunday, is held in a former medical clinic. Downstairs, where there are dressers and desks and mattresses, you can still see signs for “allergies” and “immunology” and “if you’ve been waiting more than 15 minutes, please check in here again.” Upstairs, it was filled to the gills, dusty, and a little creepy. It lacks a certain something in presentation. I found three rooms filled with books. At first it was mostly found books like old political biographies and multiple copies of “The Crystal Cave.”

I hit a treasure trove in the second room, though: seven books by Angela Thirkell! Thirkell is an author I discovered through Goodreads. I added 29 books to my to-read shelf and despaired of ever finding any. She is ‘famous’ for her Barsetshire series, which includes 29 novels, the first published in 1933 and the last in 1961. She’s not J.K. Rowling famous or even P.G. Wodehouse famous, but she must have had some success fifty years ago.

I found the first two, High Rising and Wild Strawberries, charming hardbound copies in a lovely slipcover. The others are from all over the place in the series: Enter Sir Robert, County Chronicles, The Headmistress, Marling Hall, and Summer Half.

I don’t have a lot of collectible hardcover editions, besides The Portable Graham Greene. This is the first book I own by him. The two novels it contains are The Heart of the Matter and The Third Man. I read part of THOTM at my boyfriend’s parents’ house, so I associate it with them.

Oh yes, also a copy of The Little Lame Prince, a book I am ashamed to say I used to confuse with The Little Prince, at a time when I had read neither.

A Virago classics copy of Elizabeth von Arnim’s Elizabeth and her German Garden, first published in 1901. I have some old hardcovers by her, The Enchanted April and Mr. Skeffington (the basis of a Bette Davis film) which are attributed to “the author of Elizabeth and her German Garden” or simply to “Elizabeth.” Going by one name is not a modern phenomenon.

A purple hardbound collection of novels by Booth Tarkington: Monsieur Beaucaire, The Beautiful Lady, and His Own People. Tarkington is one of the novelists I struggled to find when I really wanted to read them back in middle school. Bob Hope was in a French Revolution-era movie also called Monsieur Beaucaire; I’m hoping the milieu is similar. His costars were the lovely Joan Caulfield and Patric Knowles, doing his best Errol Flynn impersonation.

The gamble is The Saracen Blade by Frank Yerby. This one I’ve never heard of, but I’m a sucker for medieval historical fiction. Mine is a respectable red hardcover, not a sketchy paperback like on Goodreads.

Books weren’t the only interesting items for sale. I picked up a pair of desperately needed rain boots for $3, a Snow White poster for $4, and a coat tree. It was a normal sort of shopping trip, I told myself. Normal. Like scrubbing down the kitchen walls earlier, also perfectly normal. But taking one dose of the Energy Revitalization System from Dr. Teitelbaum didn’t make me invincible; I got back from carrying the coat tree home, moved some other furniture into the house from the garage, and had to take a two-hour nap. Joined by my cat, of course. She’s a good sport about these things.

I woke up with my usually post-nap queasiness. Just like last night, my boyfriend stepped up to make dinner. He’s sitting on the couch next to me reading I, Robot by Isaac Asimov. He says he has something for me, but I don’t know what it is. I got the Energy Revitalization System in the mail today; I took the energy analysis the other day and received some serious suggestions for amping up my nutrition. Also I got what I think is a book from a secondhand bookstore address; it’s probably Zentangle in 6 Weeks, from one of my sisters.

As far as birthday presents… books by Woolf, Wharton, and Cather are very welcome; I only have To the Lighthouse, A Room of One’s Own, Glimpses of the Moon, and O Pioneers!. If you really want to go out of your way, I would love a hardcover Ida Elisabeth by Sigrid Undset or Magic for Marigold by L.M. Montgomery.

Taxi services would be nice too, it’s getting to be more of a challenge to navigate the city without a car. Two mornings in a row it was almost too windy for me to bike up the hill to work.

I’m trying to come to a way to finish this post. I’ve been having more flares lately but really miss blogging. This whole full-time work schedule thing is getting to me.

No, my not eating gluten is not a stupid fad

Posted on October 30, 2015October 30, 2015 by littlealmond

resized_winter-is-coming-meme-generator-brace-yourselves-stupid-questions-are-coming-9a528f By stupid questions, I mean bluntly asked, heartless questions about a personal detail I don’t remember telling you in the first place.

Today was the library Halloween party. I borrowed a sweater and belt from my extra tall boyfriend and went as Dopey the dwarf. Apparently my really dopey choice, though, was asking if there was wheat in the chips. The main offering of the party was sub sandwiches and cupcakes, and I wanted to eat something.

Towards the end of the party, when I was filling up my water bottle and getting ready to go, I ran into Susan. “Can you really not eat wheat?” she demanded, in a tone like I had asked for an ADA accommodation in a job taste-testing for Hostess. The tone I perceived was like this ignorant Willy Wonka meme.

“What do you mean?” I stammered. Did she wonder if I had an allergy? “I have gluten sensitivity… I really can’t eat wheat.” Was she happy with that answer? I don’t know; I was hurt and and had somewhere to be.

Did she want the longer story? I was 22 when I first cut gluten out of my diet, and almost 23 when it became a more fixed decision.

Was I gluten sensitive when I was younger? I don’t know. I had frequent stomach aches and intermittent chest pain as an adolescent. I started taking acid reflux medication at 21, but definitely had gastric problems before that. The costochondritis I developed just days after turning 22 signaled something very wrong.

It took me more than four years to make the decision to take antidepressants. Hanging on aimlessly to life with the convictions that people hate you and the only state in life you can handle is strict solitude could be called surviving.

I’ve had anxiety since I was seven. How I survived 11 years was by being homeschooled in a safe environment. If I’d gone to public school, my problems probably would have surfaced earlier.

Not taking the right action as soon as a problem surfaces doesn’t mean the problem isn’t real. It can take 20, 30 years or more to get the right diagnosis. Spoonies know this to be true. Many more people with bipolar and borderline personality disorder know this to be very painfully true.

There’s a big difference between the right diagnosis and the not-quite-right diagnosis. If your doctor says you’re iron deficient when you’re really depressed, you won’t get the help you need and the problem will persist. Depression can look like other conditions, and other conditions can look like depression. If your doctor says it’s depression, IBS, or unexplained infertility when what you have is celiac or gluten sensitivity, whatever pills or treatments she gives you won’t do much good until you stop.eating.wheat.

In some social circles, eating gluten free is totally hip. They offer steamed veggies for sides at Ruby Tuesday’s, lettuce instead of buns at Jimmy John’s and Red Robin, gluten free buns at Culver’s, an award- winning line of gluten free baking mixes at Aldi, and the biggest most beautiful gluten free section of baking goods and frozen foods at Hy-Vee, my new favorite store. But among some middle aged women in the Midwest? It’s still a sandwich and pasta salad world.

Am I strict about cutting gluten out 100%? No. I have soy sauce occasionally. A couple times a month, I go to Communion and take a wheat flour host. I experiment with flat bread, pumpernickel bread, and Ezekiel bread, to see if I can tolerate those. Results were negative. A couple weeks ago, I broke down under pressure and ate two donuts and a slice of banana bread, treats I haven’t had in forever. But when I ate them it was to punish myself, to make myself more miserable, to inflict pain, and to make my boyfriend feel sorry for me and guilty about arguing with me. It felt like a safer decision than some of my other recent ideas, like riding my bike into the lagoon or jumping in front of a car.

This afternoon I attended a two-hour optional training session about navigating resources around campus. It was more about helping students find information, which was not what I had expected from the flier. A student member of the human resources team emphasized that there is no stigma about going to the counseling center. It means you need help, not that you have a mental illness.

“Even if you do!” interjected the woman behind me. “What’s the big deal?” There were a few wry laughs, and several people murmured their agreement.

I wish that was other people’s attitude as well. It doesn’t kill you if I don’t eat your cupcakes, but who knows? It could kill me if I do. Eating wheat causes me to have neurological problems and widespread pain. Chronic pain is “second only to bipolar disorder” among “illness-related causes of suicide in the U. S.” This article highlights recent findings of correlation between chronic pain and depression. So please believe me when I say I can’t eat wheat, barley, or rye.

I got this last meme from a great post from a mom who has also gone gluten free out of necessity. Check out Amy Hale’s confession here.