Monday, February 22, 2010

A Winter Weekend

Our weekend by the numbers:
  • Three days
  • 16 total hours of driving (for us)
  • Eleven people driving hundreds of miles from Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania and Washington DC
  • One ski resort -- Wisp -- in western Maryland
  • At least 3 feet of snow (or so it seemed!)
  • One gorgeous house with plenty of sleeping room for everyone
  • Approximately one ton of food (seriously, there was more food than we could ever eat in a weekend thanks to mom!)
  • Five delicious meals
  • 10+ hours of skiing
  • One funny Brian Regan DVD
  • Three tense games of marbles (boys vs. girls -- girls lost :(
One amazing family (plus some wonderful additions -- Logan and Heidi) together for a weekend that was way too short, but blessed.

And now for the visuals...

Ben and Heidi outside the house we stayed in. Watch out for the icicle above the door!

Good thing no one had any plans to use the grill on the back deck...

Out the back of the house

Getting ready to go skiing

The whole group. From left to right -- my brother Ben, his girlfriend Heidi, Luke's girlfriend Logan, my brother Luke, my first cousin Kristal, her daughter Naomi, my mom, my dad, Kristal's husband Les behind my dad and Rob

Ben and Heidi on the chair lift

The mighty skiers

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Superbowl!

It always seems like I'm a bit late in posting things that are happening in our life, but oh well, when you only have one computer and your husband does homework on it most of the time, delays are to be expected.

I had these fun Superbowl photos that I wanted to post so here goes. Not as many as I would like (I always forget to take photos of things I want to -- ie food I made -- until after it's eaten!) but oh well.

We had a pretty chill Superbowl with our friends Bethany and Andrew over for dinner and the game. Of course we were cheering hard for the Colts, but it was not to be this year. At the beginning of the game I even said it would be fun for it to be a close game (at this point we were expecting a Colts blow-out victory) but later when Rob was all tense and the Saints were ahead he said, "Is this close enough for you?" And it was too close and then too late for it to be fun anymore.

But we still had a good time and ate yummy food and talked. I made this really good homemade pizza with shrimp, lime and cilantro. You can find the recipe here. I also made this dip that was a bit like guacamole, but it had tomatillos (green tomatoes) in it. Delicious! That recipe is here. Bethany brought her famous ginger cookies with pumpkin dip which were also a big hit. (Sorry, no recipe for those).

Here are some pictures from our fun party - (minus the food of course - we gobbled that up!)

Rob helping make the food in his Colts apron he got for Christmas.

Ok, we didn't realize how creepy this photo was until after we took it -- look at the TV! Weird. Who is that guy? No idea.

So we took another one that is a little better and not so creepy.

The gang hanging out. They are not "super" fans like us with our jerseys, but we let them in anyways.

There's always next year Colts!

Monday, February 1, 2010

The Help



Working in publishing I spend a lot of time around books. I write about books. I talk about books. I read about books. I wish I read books at work, but alas, I am not in my dream job. Someday maybe someone will pay me to read books...*sigh*

One book I've seen getting a lot of hype over the past few months is Kathryn Stockett's The Help. A quick Google search will reveal over 2 million search results. It is currently #1 at the top of the New York Times Bestseller list for hardcover fiction. As a first time novelist she has what every author only dreams of - a dynamite book that is spreading because it's so powerful and it's about women who will obviously talk to other women like I'm doing right now. It's causing book groups across the country to get out their Kleenex and laugh at the same time.

Well, let me tell you, the reviews for this striking and rare book are not kidding. I just finished reading my copy of The Help on Friday night, just days after I started the 450 page tome. I literally could not stop reading it. I went to bed wayyyy too late every night (and skipped my exercise the next morning) to read this book. If I had two minutes I would sit down and read a page or two.

If you're not familiar with the premise of the book, I'll give you a quick overview. Jackson, Mississippi in the mid-1960s. Extreme black and white segregation and the beginnings of the civil rights movement. Mainly the book focuses on black domestic house servants and their relationships with the white women they work for, the ones they love and hate. The main character, Skeeter, is a white 20-something who has just graduated from college with a degree in journalism. She comes home and to her surprise her family's black maid Constantine (the woman who literally raised her) has disappeared and no one will tell her where or why she went. Skeeter starts to dig a little deeper, finds some old Jim Crow laws and has her eyes opened to what the life of a black housekeeper is really like. She takes a huge risk and befriends Aibileen, another black housekeeper, and they start writing a book, The Help, about the lives of domestic servants in Jackson. If you have any idea what that meant for a white woman and a black servant to write a book together in the 1960s in Jackson (and I really didn't) then you will get the rest of the book and the challenges they face. A host of other interesting characters and expert writing by Stockett will launch you out of your complacency and help you understand better a critical part of American history.

The book is not a true story, but is roughly based on Stockett's own life of growing up white in Jackson in the 1960s and being raised by a black woman she adored more than her own mother. When she moved to New York City after college she finally began to understand the gap in her life story when it came to her relationship with her black maid and what that woman's life must have been like.

This book is completely eye-opening. It's humbling as a white person to read and to think that at one point in our history my ancestors treated people so terribly just because they are black. And this only 25 years before I was born! This is not the Civil War, but civil rights. It's in a way a commentary on how far we've come as a country and how much further we have to go. It's amazing how Stockett writes these characters -- you feel like they are real and you know them. You are nervous for them. Anxious, excited, scared.

So there you have it, a quick review on a book that I know I will be thinking about for a long time. If you have a chance to pick this book up (or live close to me and want to borrow my copy) I suggest that you do.