Various and Sundry

Hello out there!  It’s been a while.

For those of us with children, especially school-aged children, May is always crazy.  Between homework and piano recitals and t-ball games and music programs and awards ceremonies and girl scout bridging and grandparent visits and organizing the teacher gift and harvesting tomatoes  and packing for vacation and pool season beginning here in south Texas and so on and so forth…it is almost impossible to come up for air.  Thus, the blog has been neglected.  I’ve been missing it, actually, but really can’t say what the summer will bring in terms of fulfilling my goal of a once-per-week post, since I’ll be on full-time mom duty again. (The summer holidays – looking forward to them with equal parts excitement and dread). 

However, I have been reading some GREAT STUFF.  Today, let’s talk books for the wee ones.  The Who Was series is amazing. 

Eloise and Owen (ages seven and almost six, respectively) each received three of these in their Easter baskets this year and devoured them in a matter of hours.  They are an excellent introduction to biographical chapter books, and are wonderfully cross-cultural as well.  (Yes, so the cover art is a bit creepy with the gigantor-head.  Avert your eyes!)  I bought them in an attempt to expand the kids’ interests in various genres (since I tend to lean heavy on the fiction when left to my own devices), and I’m happy to say that both of them loved the series. 

Another book that has been sitting next to my computer for weeks now is this one.

Again, another fantastic introduction to biography (coincidentally, the author is a contributor to the Who Was series, but this one is color-illustrated and therefore perhaps for the slightly younger child).  I read this one to Eloise and Owen and was particularly impressed by the amount of discussion it triggered.  In other words, plan on this relatively short tome taking upwards of an hour in aloud-reading time, because you’ll need Google to answer all the questions it sparks.  Discussion topics covered were as varied as feminism and the women’s rights movement, slavery and abolition, existentialism (try explaining that in twenty words or less to a couple of kids who don’t even tie their own shoes), vegetarianism, vaccination, the Civil War (also a tricky explanation for the little dudes, seeing as how we’re Southern), and mercury poisoning.  Keep your smartphone handy.

But here’s what I’m super excited about today, which we found at the library just this morning.  Have you read Alexander McCall Smith?  He of Precious Ramotswe and The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency?  Well, if you haven’t, get on it posthaste and tout de suite. 

All of his books are wonderful wonderful wonderful:  Lovely, good people doing honorable, just things.  They will restore your faith in humanity.  Plus, I believe that McCall Smith is one of the absolute best modern writers at “turning a phrase,” if you will.  The way he puts words on paper is so clever, so precise, and so utterly charming and funny – he is extremely talented, and his novels simply a pleasure.  (An aside:  The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series was made into a HBO show for one season.  It was delightful, but unfortunately cancelled.)  Anyway, now he is writing children’s literature and I am beside myself. 

It’s Precious Ramotswe, as a child!  SOLVING MYSTERIES, people.  (Mysteries involving cake, it appears.  Even better.)  Love.

In other news, I’ve been watching Downton Abbey.

I’ve discussed my detrimental television habits in the past here, so by the words “I’ve been watching” you understand that I mean “I’m completely OBSESSED with, and not in a psychologically healthy way.”  (Why do they need dinner, AGAIN?  Can’t Eloise just put some waffles in the toaster?  God, can’t they see that we’re in the throes of the 1918 Spanish Flu, here?)  I also realize that I’m possibly the last person on earth to board this particular bandwagon.  I KNOW.  Next I’m going to really step into the vanguard by, I don’t know, getting a cellular phone, or something.  There is no stopping me.

The Weird Sisters – Eleanor Brown

I loved this novel.  I guess one would classify it as “chick lit” (if one were particularly condescending) in that it centers on a trio of sisters as they return home to care for their ailing mother.  But it is smart, and funny, and warm, and while it isn’t the most earth-shattering tome you’ve ever beheld, it is just a Good Book.  I’m so glad I read this book now.  Lately I’ve been reading some mindless drivel (thank God that’s over, (uh…kind of)), and some terribly boring stuff (The Tiger’s Wife, Oprah?  Are you high?), and a bunch of stuff to my kids (the Who Was? series in particular, more on that later), and it was nice to be simply entertained by a book.  Put The Weird Sisters on your summer reading list; it’s the perfect “beach” read – not too heavy, but well-thought-out and completely absorbing.

The Weird Sisters was particularly poignant to me because lately I’ve been thinking about women, and sisters, a lot.  I don’t have sisters.  I have a lovely step-sister (who is rather recent; we didn’t grow up together) and several wonderful sisters-in-law, but no actual blood-related, room-and-hand-me-down-clothes-sharing, fighting-over-the-hairbrush-and-princess-phone sisters.*  My family and Mike’s family both run heavy on the Y chromosome.  So the sister relationship is sort of fascinating to me – like, in an anthropological sense.  And though I’m not a sister, I am wholeheartedly a “girl’s girl.”  I have lots of close girlfriends.  I have never been that girl who has “more guy friends than girl friends” or who feels more comfortable hanging out with the boys.  (In fact, men rather intimidate me.)  But the sister relationship is different.  I watch sisters interacting like a kind of voyeur, so reading a novel about them is always fun.    

My friend Kristina, the oldest of three sisters and two step-sisters, once described the sister relationship as follows:  “We can be having a huge screaming fight, and stomp off to opposite sides of the house, but then five minutes later ask the other, ‘Hey – you wanna go to the movies?’”  This completely mystifies me – the fight as well as the forgetting of it.  When you grow up with brothers, fights are just different.  Less emotional, maybe.  Less fraught.  Definitely less often, I think.  Something like that.  AND we wouldn’t want to see the same movies, anyway, so that whole episode could never even remotely happen.  Instead we’d just yell and then totally ignore each other, never bothering to apologize or make up, but instead just waiting for the storm to blow past.  Possibly because I didn’t want to borrow their shoes.

But I have a theory about female friendship, so tell me what you think.  I have noticed that many women who have sisters become childhood best friends with other women with sisters.  On the flip of that, sisterless (or sisterfree?  Is that glass half-full or half-empty?) women become childhood best friends with other sisterless women.  Of the women I’ve informally polled about this over glasses of wine, I’ve noticed this to be surprisingly widespread.  I don’t think this happens as much once women are older; I’m talking specifically about the close female friendships that begin in childhood and last throughout a woman’s life.  Have you noticed this?  If so, what do you think the reason for it is?  Do you think that it is possible that sister’ed women have slightly different needs than sister-less women in their early, close female friendships?  Like, those of us without sisters are always on the prowl for maid-of-honor potential, since our genetic pool didn’t handily provide us one?

In a different vein, another thing I appreciated about The Weird Sisters was its presentation of the act of reading as solace.  Regarding the processing of tragedy, the narrator remarks, “we’d do what we always did, the only thing we’d ever been dependably stellar at:  we’d read.”  For me, this resonates.  When in the throes of postpartum depression, I remember sitting at my breast pump, reading.  Because if I wasn’t reading, I was crying.  Or dialing hotlines.  (It was bad, y’all.)  I remember reading all the Emily Giffin books in about three days after Owen was born – and what a gift those were, not because they are especially ground-breaking, but because they provided escape.  Ten years ago, when my mother was dying, we kept a round-the-clock vigil, in which one of us (either my dad, one of my brothers, my aunt, my grandmother, any one of my mother’s best friends – she was a “girl’s girl” too – or myself) would sit next to her bed, just to be with her.  Just to be present.  And during my time watching over her, I read.  I probably read a novel a day, because it was the only way I could leave my thoughts and my grief and my problems and my misery behind.  Strikingly, it was my mother who taught me to be a reader, and I think she would’ve been happy that her gift could comfort me when she could not.  Anyway, reading – and fiction, particularly – has always been therapeutic for me.

So, that’s what I’ve been thinking about with this book.  I’d love to know your thoughts, lovely reader (whether you’ve read the book or not).

*Remember those phones?  I had a lavender one (fabulousness!).  (God, I’m OLD.)

Fifty Shades of Grey – E.L. James

FOR REAL ARE YOU SHITTING ME YES YOU MUST BE.

(Not you, dear reader.  Never you.)

Disclaimer:  The only reason I read this terrible book is because EVERYONE in my ‘hood has already read it.  If that’s not negative publicity for the suburbs, I don’t know what is.  And granted, it is sexy – I am not arguing with that.  I get it.  I do.  (But if you want sexy, read sexy that is also smart.  Like Outlander, by Diana Gabaldon.  Jamie Fraser?  Holy hell, about eleventy-gazillion times hotter than Christian Grey.  People, please.)

But, back to today’s book o’ smut. 

Here is what is not shocking, to me:

            1)  The novel’s bizarre S&M sex scenes.

2)  The fact that the book frames a dominant-submissive sexual relationship as a love story.

3)  The fact that Fifty Shades, along with the other two novels in the trilogy, presently occupy spots one, two, and three on the New York Times Bestseller List.

On the other hand. 

What is shocking is that a book that uses the phrase “sensual sexuality” actually got published.  [Weeping in despair.  Despair!]  Abandon all hope, ye who enter Fifty Shades.  Here’s another gem.  Brace yourself.

“I gaze at my mom.  She is on her fourth marriage.  Maybe she does know something about men after all.”

This is said with no irony whatsoever.

Also, an interesting factoid:  I just wiki’d the series and learned that Fifty Shades was based on a manuscript the author originally wrote as fan fiction of this esteemed novel.  Shocker.  My point?  Crap begets crap.

PEOPLE.  [stabs eyes out of head WITH SEWING SCISSORS.]

However.  This is erotica written by a woman, for women – a genre that is seemingly under-represented in contemporary fiction.  And even though the female protagonist is, well, physically abused, I wonder if there is any way to look that this as an empowering book.  (Just trying to think outside the box here.  Bear with me.)  I’m not saying that there is, but I am asking what you think.  Is this merely another terribly written book?  Or does it somehow fill a gap in women’s…uh…needs?  And in doing so, is it possible that it indirectly empowers women, making it more important than the sum of its parts?

And that is all I have to say.  Already this is too much time spent on this ridiculous book.  Especially since I’m spending valuable time here when I could be reading book two. 

Laters.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao – Junot Díaz

One thing I am learning about the sewing habit is that fabric and patterns are my stepping stones.  Gateway drugs, if you will.  Here’s the next phase.  Welcome to my world.

Buttons.  BUTTONS ARE MY CRACKROCK.  Omg, you guys.  I have a problem.  Hence, I’ve been meaning to sit down and write here for days now, but instead I’ve been making these nonstop all the time without rest constantly. 

I CANNOT CEASE, my friends.  What are they?  Why, thank you for asking!  They are fabric cuff bracelets with vintage buttons, and I’m obsessed.  (And oh yeah, they are $10, but no pressure or anything.  And free shipping!  But no pressure.)  And I’m getting much better at those pesky buttonholes, I’ll have you know.  I’m starting to think that the sewing portion of my book-deliberation is becoming mandatory.  Like I need the quiet space to process, yet still have my hands busy doing something interesting.  My thoughts need to percolate.  To stew.  Or something.  Anyway, here we go.

I really liked this book.  I’m not sure if I actually understood it, but I liked it nonetheless. 

The narrative takes place in New Jersey and the Dominican Republic and chronicles the life of our hapless hero, Oscar.  The dude just can’t catch a break – overweight, misunderstood, a sci-fi and role-playing enthusiast who had the misfortune to be born Dominican – a Latin culture that apparently places an enormous premium on physicality and cool.  So Oscar doesn’t fit in, anywhere, ever, the poor guy.  The story is told from multiple perspectives (Oscar’s, his sister Lola’s, and his sister’s boyfriend Yunior, to name a few), and what I liked best was the energy of the prose.  (Admittedly, I’ve never felt like more of a whitegirl/gringa than while reading this particular book.  Tons of Spanglish and Latin slang on every page – I was as out-of-place as Oscar.  (I grew up in rural Oklahoma, people.  I am ill-equipped.))  The shifting point-of-view served to characterize both the speaker (Yunior, for example) as well as the focus of the speaker’s story (Oscar, usually).  In this way the prose worked doubletime, making the reader privy to the various facets of each character.  While reading, I could compare Oscar’s inner life with his public persona, and in this way synthesize the information to come to a deeper understanding of Oscar’s identity.  I thought it a unique way to write, and to read, a novel.

Anyway, I think you should read it.  Then you can explain it to me.  Thanks in advance.

On a completely separate note, I’m having something of a moral dilemma about this blog, and I need to poll my readers.  On the one hand, I need to be completely honest with you about what I read.  Otherwise, what is the point of a book blog?  On the other, I don’t want to offend anyone by criticizing a book they love.  And I can be…vitriolic.  You see, most of the books I read are given to me or recommended to me by dear friends, some of whom may be very sensitive about the books they love.  The bottom line for me is - if I hate a book that you love, that doesn’t mean I’m right.  It doesn’t mean you’re wrong.  And it certainly doesn’t mean that I think any differently about you, as a person, because you love a book that I don’t – and I certainly apologize if I’ve been insensitive to anyone’s feelings.  Many beloved friends even loved Twilight.  (You know who you are.)  So what do you think?  How do I reconcile this?  How do I navigate the space of being inviting and gracious, yet still truthful to my own ideas?  

Burmese Lessons – Karen Connelly

Before we get into the next book, I just have to share the happy turn-of-events that shaped my morning.

Background situation:  My Keurig broke this weekend.  Just all of a sudden, wouldn’t turn on.  No lights, no sounds, no NOTHING.  [Cue abject mourning.]  So today, embarrassed, and at the behest of my push-the-envelope father, I walked into Bed, Bath, and Beyond with my dirty, broken Keurig, sans box, packaging, and receipt. 

Me (placing grubby appliance on counter):  This doesn’t work anymore.  I got it for a gift less than a year ago, and all of a sudden it doesn’t come on.  My mother-in-law bought it here.  [She totally bought it at Costco.]

Bedraggled yet benevolent sales associate:  Well, when was the last time you cleaned it?

Me:  Uh.  Never.

BYBSA:  Yeah.  You need to descale it every three months.

Me:  Oh.  What is this descaling, of which you speak?  Can you show me what I need to buy?

BYBSA:  Sure.  [Hands me $6 product.]

Me (reading $6 product box):  Um.  I think your machine has to actually turn on to use this.  Mine won’t turn on.

BYBSA:  You totally waited too long to descale it.  It’s broken now.  You broke it.

Me:  Oh.

BYBSA:  So, here’s a new one.  We’ll exchange it.  But next time, just descale it.

***Glitter and exploding rainbows***

Me:  [. . .]  Wow.  Thanks.  [Pays for $6 product, gets brand-new $200 Keurig for free, races giddily from store before senior manager can thwart exchange.]

Isn’t that the best morning ever?  So everyone needs to shop Bed, Bath, and Beyond right away.  Go give them some of your money.  They’re going to probably need it, since they’re giving out free Keurigs to every yahoo off the street.

Switching gears.  You with me, friends?  The book.  (How’s that for a transition?  I know.  It sucks.)

Burmese Lessons is a memoir, and it takes place in the late ‘90s in Burma and Thailand, during Connelly’s trek through the jungles of Southeast Asia to interview Burmese freedom fighters for a series of articles about the difficult political situation at the time.  (Some background:  Burma, or Myanmar, was and is ruled by a military junta and is considered to be among the worst civil rights violators in recent history.)  These interviews, along with her sizzling affair with a Burmese civil rights leader (yes in-deedy, there are some good sex scenes), ended up being the foundation for this book, which was published in 2010.

I have mixed feelings overall about memoirs.  Sometimes I love them.  I always love getting to peer into someone else’s life.  I’m a voyeur, which is why Facebook is LIKE A DRUG TO ME.  Chances are, if you’re my Facebook friend, I’ve stalked your pictures.  All of them, repeatedly.  Sorry about that, I can’t help myself.  So I do enjoy memoirs for this reason:  they invite and allow (and even require) me to be nosy.  The memoir genre depends on the audience overstepping boundaries of propriety and manners, and the reader gets it all – the grotesque, the squish, the shame, and the grit. 

But on the other hand, the writing of a memoir is intrinsically an egocentric task.  The memoirist runs the risk of coming off as mildly self-involved (at best) or whiny and narcissistic (at worst).  The problem here was that I feel like Connelly was closer to the latter, overall.  One issue was that she was 28 when she conducted her research and began the writing of the book.  A friend of mine recently said, “Don’t you have to be at least 35 to write a memoir?  Otherwise, you’re not grown-up enough to take seriously.”  At the risk of sounding ageist, I sorta agree.  Admittedly, this was part of the theme of the narrative – growing up, learning to live in the world as an adult, the casting off of an immature worldview –but Connelly was just plain irritating at times.  Also?  I felt like she was overly concerned with her whiteness.  Her awareness of the differences between “first-world” and developing countries seems as though it would be socially and globally conscious, a good thing.  But in the case of this book, Connelly’s preoccupation with her Western (spoiled) attitude, her overly apologetic approach toward the developing world, her “white guilt” – these recognitions came across as self-congratulatory.  To me it seemed false, like she was overly pleased with the realization of her privileges in the world.  I would’ve preferred for her to own her identity as a Westerner and QUIT APOLOGIZING ALREADY.  She chose to go to Asia, she chose to stay, and she chose to tell this story.  Again, this could be because Connelly was attempting to recreate her 28-year-old self – but in my opinion, her younger self just wasn’t that interesting.  Burma, on the other hand, is fabulously interesting.  Scandal and civil rights violations, house arrests and political prisoners, information control and military police opening fire on their own people:  these are everyday issues there.  I understand that the book was Connelly’s attempt to use her own experience to connect to the reader in order to inform the world about the Burmese situation, and I applaud her for this goal.  It’s a very good one.  But I guess I wanted less Connelly, more Burma. 

(An aside:  I totally get the hypocrisy, here, as well.  I’m complaining about the narcissism of someone’s memoir on my BLOG, for heaven’s sake, which could be the most narcissistic medium available.  Thank you for putting up with me.)

However, I don’t want to make it look like I didn’t enjoy the book.  I did, overall – I’m just hypercritical here of Connelly, as a writer.  Probably the best thing about it was that it imparts information into the mainstream, so readers will know what is happening on the other side of our world.  We don’t know much about Burma.  It’s a closed country, so that’s the whole point – the junta controls all information dissemination.  Many (educated!) people I’ve talked to about the book don’t know where the country is, and don’t realize that it has two names.  Personally, the only things I knew about Burma previously came from Amy Tan’s novel Saving Fish from Drowning, and from the documentary Burma VJ.  (Have you seen this?  It is one of the only documentaries to have “escaped” Burma and be released in the West.  If you haven’t seen it, do so.  It’s an education.)  So on this more important front, I’d say that Connelly absolutely succeeds.   

In other news, I just started The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and so far am loving it, so I need to go read.  Thanks, Emily, for the recommendation!

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children – Ransom Riggs

First of all, BIZNISS.  We have a giveaway winner:  Kristine G., from right here in my ‘hood!  Kristine, please contact me with your sewing request; I’m looking forward to making something for you!  Thanks for participating, lovely readers.  Now, on to the book.

People.  I haven’t been this excited about a newly-released book in a long, long while.  In fact, I actually had a completely different write-up ready for today, but just bumped it because I couldn’t wait to tell you about this one.  Go out and buy it, stat, then come back and read this review.  Priorities! 

To continue. Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children has major geek-out potential for me.  I’m one step away from one or more of the following options:

1.  Dressing up as one of the characters for the movie premiere,

2.  Photoshopping images of myself onto the bodies of the peculiar children, and using said images as Facebook profile pictures, or

3.  Creating an online chat room centered around Miss Peregrine’s loop, in which role-playing will most assuredly be involved.

It’s just that kind of book, y’all.

Miss Peregrine’s is actually another YA novel (I promise, I do read Big People Books as well).  The main character is sixteen-year-old Jacob, who, in the aftermath of his grandfather’s death, embarks upon an overseas trip in order to answer questions about said grandfather’s mysterious life.  What he finds is…well, Crazy Pants Town.  (This is so hard to write, because I don’t want to give anything away!)  But I will tell you that time travel is involved, and that Riggs sets up the book as the first of a series, which for me signifies that this is going to be The Next Big Thing.  It’s going to explode, you guys – I’m predicting Hunger Games- or Harry Potter-type madness.  If the movie rights haven’t yet been purchased, then Hollywood is even stupider than I thought, because this book would (no, will) make a spectacular movie.

An aside:  I usually hate books and movies that deal with time travel in any way, because there’s always a breakdown in the logic at some point.  Here’s a “for instance” scenario.  If character A went back in time to 1980 and didn’t get on that airplane, then she wouldn’t have met character B, which would totally change the result, but now here we are back in 2010 and character A still knows character B and their meeting is never explained.  OMG I CANNOT TAKE IT.  This kind of thing happens in this genre constantly, and it makes me insane.  (The problem here might very well be with me, though – why is it that I can completely suspend my disbelief over the concept of time travel in general, yet be completely disturbed by its outcome?  Totally irrational.  Also?  This issue of mine annoys the shit out of Mike, who adores anything sci-fi/fantasy/bending of the space-time continuum, because I am the worst movie talker in history and I just can’t shut up about the flawed mechanics of these movies.  For reals.  (An aside to the aside:  Mike’s adoration just might have something to do with the presence of Milla Jovovich in an overwhelming number of this genre of movies, but whatever.)) 

Back to the point, though – Miss Peregrine’s is one of the only time travel stories I can recall that circumvents this logistical breakdown, due to the fact that Riggs sets up the time travel on a completely separate plane, unrelated to the future action.  Perfect.  He’s a smart dude.  Another super-cool feature of the book is how the author went about creating the story.  Apparently Riggs collects old photographs via swap meets, antique stores, and the like.  For Miss Peregrine’s, he utilized these photos to create his cast of characters, and the photos became the illustrations for the book.  In the hands of a lesser writer, I think that this strategy could have proven disastrous – hokey, or contrived – like a high school creative writing assignment gone wrong.  But Riggs makes it work, and beautifully, because the plot is just so good.  Plus, the pictures are bizarro-town.  Who doesn’t love a freakshow?  Check it out:

Fabulous, huh?  Anyway, gotta run.  I must get to some Very Important Reading Material, in preparation for tonight’s festivities.  (So excited I’m salivating, just a little.)

P.S.:  Just checked imdb.com and Yes!  The movie is in pre-production to be released in 2013!

Something New and Exciting

Hey there!  Long time, no blog, I guess.  Last week was Spring Break here, so we were kickin’ it camping-style in Big Bend National Park with the kids, which meant a week of backbreaking preparation/packing/shopping/arguing, followed by a twelve-hour drive with the three wee ones (mmm-hmm), followed by a few days of roughing it with no showers and no electricity in the desert with temperatures ranging from below freezing at night to the mid-80s during the day.  Sounds like nirvana, huh?  But really, it was fun.  Actually, the car ride was surprisingly pleasant, thanks to the DVD player and the fact that we no longer have pants-poopers in our nuclear family (always a plus).  My husband and I had remembered the drive being far worse (if you’ve ever driven I-10 in west Texas you know what I’m talking about), but then I realized that our previous treks to Big Bend had been pre-kids, and therefore before we knew what real tedium actually was.  So the moral of that story is:  once you’ve sat up with a croupy child in a steamy bathroom with a nebulizer for the four hours between one and five a.m., well, west Texas driving is a piece of cake.  Anyhoo.  Moving forward.  We had a lovely time, and actually managed to locate this little chunk of history:

To explain:  Mike carved this into a bench on the “Window” hike about 14 years ago, during our first trip there (MH being his initials, SP being mine at the time, in case elucidation was needed for my two readers who do not know me in real life – TWO. WHOLE. READERS!  Btw, I love you guys).  Little did we know that it would still be there for these three little humans to view, a decade and a half later:

I know – so romantic, huh?  But before you decide to hate me for my idyllic marriage, please know that Mike and I had a terrible hissing fight a mere two nights before we left, regarding something idiotic like what kind of jar spaghetti sauce and how many granola bars were purchased for the trip.  We’re a fricking disaster, people.

So, in order to potentially increase traffic on this here blog, I’ve decided to try SOMETHING NEW AND EXCITING, and then I promise, back to the books.  I’ve read some good ones lately (omg, Miss Peregrine!  LOVE).  So…it’s a giveaway, people!  Here’s how it works:

1) Leave a comment in the comments section below.

2) For each comment, you get one chance in the drawing.

3) BONUS!  If you are a follower, or become one, you will get an additional chance in the drawing, thereby doubling your odds.  (I know you lurkers are out there.  I know you are.)

4) In a few days, like let’s say, um, Friday at midnight, I’ll draw one name out of the hat.  Wait, let’s say Friday at five p.m., because that’s when I start drinking.  (Plus, The Hunger Games!  So dorking out about this movie, you guys.)  And what will you win?  Well, get ready, because worlds are colliding!  I’m going to sew something for you, of your choice, from my limited (yet fabulous) repertoire of things I am presently able to sew.  (Okay, so this might not increase blog traffic exponentially, exactly, since I’ve only been sewing for like three months, but I promise:  you will like it.  YOU WILL.)  Here are your choices:

                A – a skirt (little girl sizes only)

                B – a cell phone charger case

                C – a fabric cuff bracelet

                D – a yoga mat bag or tote bag

Potential hiccup:  If you’re a dude, well, I hope you do yoga or have a daughter.  Otherwise, I’m not sure this giveaway is actually for you – I’ll just make something for your wife.  (I’m not really that concerned since I think I have two male readers, one of whom is my husband.)  So!  I cannot wait to witness the veritable deluge of comments that await this post.  And…GO!!!

P.S.  Blogger is being an a-hole, as usual, and I'm having trouble formatting my pictures where I want them to go.  Sorry about that.  [Growl.]