The Secret Ingredient of Wishes

The Secret Ingredient of Wishes by Susan Bishop Crispell was a book I thought I was going to love. It popped up on goodreads as a recommendation, and was compared to Sarah Addison Allen.

The Secret Ingredient of Wishes features  pie, wishes, and starting over in a small town.  It also takes place in North Carolina.  It seemed like it would have a lot going for it. The comparisons to Sarah Addison Allen had me really excited to read it.  I jumped on the waiting list at the library, and eagerly waited for my copy.

It was incredibly disappointing.

I’ve loved all of Sarah Addison Allen’s books except Lost Lake (that one wasn’t horrible, just definitely nowhere near as wonderful as her other books).  I think the comparison to her writing had me starting this book with higher expectations than I would have had otherwise.  Honestly, that probably colored my opinion some.  I think I was expecting something like Garden Spells (I highly recommend reading it now if you haven’t read it yet)  Even without the comparison I still think I would have been disappointed.

The names of the characters drove me a little crazy.  The older, wiser, magic pie baking female character is named Catch.  There’s never any explanation as to whether that’s a nickname, some old family name, or just weird for the sake of being weird.  The hunky love interest next door is named Ashe, which doesn’t seem to fit at all.  For some reason, the two names sound a lot alike in my head, and it kind of drove me insane.  The other name issue I had was that, with the exception of Catch and Ashe, pretty much everyone went by some abbreviation of their name most of the time; Ray for Rachel, Ev for Everley, Mae or Maeby for Mary Beth.  It just seemed overdone.  I know, that’s a relatively small issue, but it adds up over the course of an entire book.

The dialogue wasn’t great.  The conversations just seemed a little stilted.  Catch had an annoying habit of saying things like “Miss-I-Got-All-Dolled-Up-and-Now-Everyone-Else-Looks-Like-Crap,”. There was something like that from her constantly.  It got old, and seemed like a lazy way to get a bunch of dialogue out of the way at once.

I had hoped the pies would at least be interesting, but even the baking parts of the book were disappointing.  There wasn’t much detail about the pie making, and there wasn’t anything particularly interesting about the pies.

Overall, it was an incredibly disappointing read.

So what about you?  Have you read The Secret Ingredient of Wishes?  What did you think of it?  Do you go into a book with high expectations if the author is compared to an author you really enjoy?

Three Legs, Ninety-Five Pounds, and Zero Limitations

You may remember if you’ve been around for a while that our dog, Duke, “only” has three legs (or as some like to say, is a tripaw).

Duke

You might think that a three-legged dog might have some difficulty getting around.  Or that at least you wouldn’t have to worry about a three-legged dog going over a fence.  You would be wrong, however.

You might also think that a ninety-five pound dog certainly wouldn’t be able to go under a fence.  Again, you’d be wrong.

On a side note (and if you’re looking for something to be right about) you might think that ninety-five pounds is more than Duke should weigh.  In that case, you would be absolutely right. We’re working on it.

Anyway, when we first moved into our house, and we adopted Duke, we didn’t have a fence.  We were finally able to get the backyard fenced in a couple of years ago.  (If you’re still keeping score, and you think that fences are expensive, you’d be right.)  We had a choice between the traditional (and slightly cheaper) four foot fence, or going with a five foot fence.

The first escape area, fixed

We opted for the five foot fence.  My parents’ yard had the traditional four foot fence, and we had all seen Duke stand up and drape his one front leg over the fence.  He never jumped my parents’ fence, but also never had any real incentive to.  Their backyard is easily four times the size of ours, and they don’t live close enough to restaurants for Duke to smell them.  We do.  We live just behind a main road.  On a windy day, it smells like Burger King is grilling in our backyard.  Duke adores food, so we thought he might jump a four foot fence in pursuit of fast food.

We never leave Duke in the backyard for very long, and we never leave him outside when we’re not at home.  He loves playing outside.  He rolls in the grass, chases (and sometimes catches) birds and rodents, steals the occasional vegetable from the garden, and generally seems to have a great time in the backyard.  There’s no real reason for him to want to leave.

During the summer he added digging to his repertoire of backyard activities.  He dug near the back porch, he dug near the raised beds, and a few weeks ago he started digging at the fence.  We weren’t thrilled about the digging, especially not the digging near the fence, but we really didn’t think he’d be able to dig a hole large enough to squeeze himself out of.  Especially not with one front leg!  We were wrong.

Duke’s first escape was a few weeks ago.  He dug, and used brute force to mangle the bottom of the fence enough to squeeze himself out of.  He just ran around to the front of the house, and met Nick on the front porch.

That night we went to Lowe’s and bought some wrought iron fencing (the kind that gets buried on the bottom).  Nick put that up over the hole, and zip-tied it to the fence to secure it.  We thought the problem was solved.  Surely a three-legged, ninety-five pound dog wouldn’t dig out of the fence twice.  We were wrong.  Again.

Duke’s second escape was scarier.  He ran off into some woods near our house.  We both walked the neighborhood looking for him.  When we came back to the house to get the car to go drive and look for him, he was just sitting in the carport waiting for us.

We found the new hole the next day.  It was in a different section of the fence, but he had done basically the same thing; dug a hole and mangled the bottom of the fence enough to squeeze himself out.  The second one had to have been a really tight squeeze, but he managed it somehow.

We fixed the second hole with the same wrought iron fencing and zip ties.  It seems to hold, but it’s not a viable solution for the entire fence.  We walked the fence and stacked bricks in any areas that looked like they might be conducive to Duke’s digging/mangling escape plan.  It’s a temporary fix at best, though.

The second escape area, fixed

We’re not letting Duke play in the backyard unsupervised until we come up with a better solution to keep him from digging out.  We haven’t decided for sure what we’re going to do.  We really thought a five foot chain length fence would be enough to keep a three-legged dog in.

We’ve thrown around the idea of some kind of electric fence on the bottom, but that’s likely to be cost prohibitive.  We’re considering planting roses along the fence line, but aren’t sure that would be enough of a deterrent.  We’re also throwing around the idea of putting concrete along the bottom of the fence, so he can’t dig out.  Doesn’t that sound like a fun project?

So what about you?  Do you have any brilliant ideas to keep a dog from digging out from under a fence?  Is there an obvious solution we’re just missing?  And, if you meet a three-legged dog, don’t pity them, as long as they seem happy and well cared for.  S/he probably gets around better than you think!

Book Lovers Day

Books!  And a Joey photobomb.

According to Holiday Insights, there are actually two different dates for Books Lovers Day.  I love books, so the idea of two separate Book Lovers Days makes me really happy, and it seems like a great day to talk about the amazing Friends of the Library Book Sale we went to recently.

The Friends of the Library have a few book sales throughout the year.  There’s a separate building (I guess they don’t want people trying to buy books off of the library shelves), and they have a great selection of books.  The sales usually run a few weeks or weekends in a row, and everything is more and more discounted as the sale goes on.  It’s well organized, and there’s a huge selection.  It’s kind of a book lover’s paradise.

This year they did something a little different.  The last Saturday in October was the Monster Book Sale, or as I like to call it, a dream come true.  It was $5.00 per adult.  Not $5.00 per bag, box, or X number of books. $5.00 for all of the books you wanted to take with you.  You walked in, paid your $5.00, got your hand stamped, and then had the privilege of taking all of the books you wanted.  If you filled a box, they wrote your name on it, stashed it behind a counter, and handed you another box.

Nick and I both love books, and we have a small house.  We have lots of books, pretty much everywhere.  But we decided that the Monster Sale was an opportunity not to be missed.  Unlimited books was more temptation than we could resist, and it supported the library.  We decided to go, and limit ourselves to one box each.

I think the one box limit lasted about 45 minutes.  Maybe.  We read completely different things; I’m pretty much all about fiction, cookbooks, and the occasional biography.  Nick is all about non-fiction.  He actually loves getting his hands on text books.  So we split up as soon as we were stamped and in the door.  Somehow, we usually mange to finish up at about the same time, and both come wandering out of our sections at about the same time, and run into each other.  I’m not sure how, but it works.

We both wandered out with our first box completely full, and we hadn’t even looked at everything, so we agreed to two boxes each.  We actually stuck to the two boxes each limit.  The boxes were packed full, and incredibly heavy, but we did leave with “only” four boxes between the two of us.

It was so much fun.  I put books I might not normally have bought in my boxes to try.  Everyone seemed to be recommending books, and there was a lot of “if you like this, you’ll love that” going on.  At one point I was part of a group of women all just putting books in each other’s boxes.  I can’t wait to try some of the newly recommended authors.

So what about you?  Are you a book lover?  Have you lost control buying books?  Have you read anything good lately?

Thanksgiving Plans

Now that we’re well into the first week of November I think it’s socially acceptable to start talking about Thanksgiving plans.  I love Thanksgiving.  It is, by far, my absolute favorite holiday.  I love cooking for people, so I think a holiday that’s all about being thankful you have food to cook and people you love to cook it for is perfect.

Thanksgiving this year wasn’t looking good, though.  Nick works in a branch of the emergency services, and has to work on Thanksgiving. That’s not unusual.  I  think he’s had one Thanksgiving off in the nine years we’ve been together, so we’ve become pretty good at working around him having to work.  In years past, he has gotten a two hour lunch break, so we’ve had Thanksgiving then.  It worked.  I had everything ready, and people always showed up on time.  Other years we’ve had dinner a little later, when he gets off of work.  This year, though, he’s on-call starting the day after Thanksgiving.  The likelihood of him being called in to work early Friday morning is high.  A late celebration at our house just didn’t seem like a wise plan.  I was pretty upset by the idea of not being able to have some kind of Thanksgiving celebration at least close to Thanksgiving.

This has been a really, really bad year, and I’ve been kind of floundering lately.  Part of me wants to cry myself to sleep and hibernate until 2017 because it has to be a better year than this one has been.  Please.  Part of me also wants to try to do something to somehow try to improve the rest of 2016; maybe the last little bit of it can be a little better.  I just haven’t really been able to come up with a good plan, one that felt right, or that I could get really excited about.  That’s when we came up with our plans for Thanksgiving.

The hospice house that GrandMommy was in is very close to us.  They have a kitchen so family members can cook meals there, and they have a nice big dining room table so people can eat together.

Hospice is an incredible organization, and they’re very welcoming to people who want to do something to volunteer.  We thought about it, and decided to ask the hospice house here if I could cook them Thanksgiving dinner and bring it for whoever might want it.  Losing a loved one is never easy, but I can’t imagine how painful it must be to face that during the holidays.  From a practical standpoint, restaurant choices are somewhat limited on a holiday.

I called the hospice house the day we came up with the idea to ask if I could do it.  I wasn’t sure if they might want references or some kind of background check or something, so I wanted to allow plenty of time for that.  The lady who answered the phone was incredibly nice.  It took a few minutes to explain that, yes, I wanted to bring an entire Thanksgiving meal.  She told me that would be fine, wonderful in fact, but suggested that I talk to the volunteer coordinator just to make sure, and to make things official.

The volunteer coordinator wasn’t going to be in for a few days, so I left my contact information and waited to hear back from her.  Meanwhile, I panicked a little bit.  Cooking Thanksgiving dinner for the hospice house seemed like the perfect plan.  I was very worried that there would be some issue, and I started making lists of people I could ask for references if I needed to plead my case.  Nick promised me he would find me someone to cook Thanksgiving dinner for if the hospice house said no for any reason.

I finally talked to the volunteer coordinator, Elaine, about a week later.  She and I ended up playing phone tag for a couple of days, but it was worth the wait.  She was incredibly nice!  She confirmed, again, that I did mean the whole meal, and we came up with a good time for me to bring it.  The plan is for me to call a few days ahead of time to get a rough idea of how many people might be there.  Elaine reminded me that some families may have other plans, and that some people don’t eat very much when they’re upset.  She also said that the staff will definitely appreciate it, and that surely some family members will too.

So now I’m cooking Thanksgiving dinner for a crowd, and getting to pay it forward a little bit too.  Honestly, I’m hoping there aren’t very many people in hospice care on Thanksgiving.  I’m more than happy to cook for a crowd, but I hope it’s a happier Thanksgiving than that for most people.

Now, it’s time for the fun part of this post!  The food!  I’m trying to go ahead and plan the menu; partly so I can buy things ahead of time on sale, and partly because that’s just how I am with Thanksgiving.  We close at work at noon the Wednesday before, so my plan is to come home from work that day and start cooking and baking.

Obviously, the turkey is the main part of the meal.  Depending on what they tell me as far as the number of people, I may also cook a turkey breast along with the turkey.  Dressing is a must, as are mashed potatoes, and sweet potato casserole.  I’m a good southerner, so gravy (lots and lots of gravy) goes almost without saying.  And more gravy.  Definitely macaroni and cheese.  Cranberry sauce is another must.  Definitely some green bean casserole.  I can’t stand it, but the rest of the world seems to love it.  I always make rice (with pan drippings in place of some of the water, and a package of vegetable soup mix, it’s delicious!) with our Thanksgiving dinner, so I’ll do that too.  I also usually make some sort of greens with Thanksgiving dinner.  Partly because I really like them, and partly because I can feel better about gorging on Thanksgiving food because, hey, I’m eating leafy green vegetables too.  And of course dinner rolls, because you need something else to mop up the gravy with.

For desserts, pumpkin pie is a must.  Depending on the number of people they tell me, maybe more than one.  I’m also planning to make chocolate cupcakes.  Maybe a pound cake.

Now here’s the part where I ask for your ideas and suggestions:

Is there something else I should make?  I didn’t grow up celebrating Thanksgiving.  I’ve embraced it wholeheartedly, but sometimes I still feel like a novice.  I make the foods that Nick and I like, and that the people we’re celebrating with that particular year like.  Is there some traditional/must have Thanksgiving item that I’m missing?  What makes it special for you?  When it comes to greens, do you prefer collard greens, turnip greens, or mustard greens?  I like them all, but I know some people have strong preferences.  I’m open to menu suggestions and ideas.

Now here’s the part where it gets really complicated.  I cannot properly carve a turkey.  Not even close!  Any tips on that?  I’m hoping I can get a friend to stop by and do it for me.  I’m willing to bribe someone with a pie or something.  Any ideas on what a good bribe might be to get someone to come over and carve the turkey for me?

I’ve even considered taking it whole, but I’m afraid that might be inconvenient for the hospice house.  What are your thoughts on that?  Any compelling reasons why you think I should take it whole?

So what about you?  Do you love Thanksgiving?  What are your plans?

Sandwich Day

It’s Sandwich Day.  You can read more about it here, but it’s basically a day to celebrate sandwiches, by eating your favorite sandwich, or trying a new one.

Here are a couple of my favorite sandwiches:

A Different Kind of BLT
This one is probably my favorite sandwich right now!  Slightly different flavors, amazingly delicious.

Chicken Salad Sandwich

So what about you?  Are sandwiches on the menu today?  What’s your favorite kind of sandwich?