helpful hint, kindle in the bath edition

HELPFUL HINT FOR READING WITH A KINDLE IN THE BATH

Ziplock bag! It probably wouldn't work (or at least not as well) with a touchscreen e-reader, but with my keyboard kindle (which has buttons), the quart sized ziplock bag works GREAT. I can see through to read and it's protected from my wet hands and accidental dozing/dropping. Plus, I love not having to constantly dry my hands on my hair in order to turn the page! 

Speaking of reading (dig my artful segue), right now I'm reading Beautiful Creatures by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl. I'm enjoying it. The book is long, but I appreciate the set up work they're doing to build this world. This is the first of a YA series that I've been seeing around, but it wasn't until I saw the trailer for the movie (with Emma Thompson and Jeremy Irons chewing up the spanish moss and swampy scenery with outrageous southern accents) that I decided to move the first book in the series up my to-read list. (there are 4 books - I'm not sure if that's total, or so far.) 

Now that I'm poking around online I find a lot of people making snarky "Twilight with witches" remarks, to which I say "whatever"  -  it's such a lazy insult. If you must sniff dismissively at something, at least do it with a little imagination and panache.

I find it interesting that this story (which as you can see from the trailer below has a strong romantic element) is told from the boy's point of view. I'm right in the middle and things are starting to get super-bananas (which as we all know is part of Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey monomyth). SUPER BANANAS (comes after the call to adventure, but before the return) with supernatural libraries, wrought iron, swamps, mean cheerleaders, creepy yet appealing mansions, annoying relatives and unexplored teenage witchy superpowers.

Ooh - BONUS: as you can see, the movie has (in addition to the aforementioned E.Thompson and J. Irons chewing it up with their foghorn leghorn / scarlet o'hara souther'en accents)  Viola Davis, who I like in everything because she is wonderful. 

hello, foxy

This has been a strange week! More on that soon -- in the meantime, here's a picture of currently blooming foxglove. I am crazy about them so I am spamming the internet (here and my garden blog) with this photo. So there.

And now, to make up for my photo-spamming ways, I shall share the almost magical Helpful Household Hint I learned last week. Brasso metal polish really does work on scratched CDs! A CD I really wanted to hear had deep, deep scratches across the first three songs. This made it unlistenable -- I was mondo irritated but determined to solve this problem. I did some online research and figured I didn't have anything to lose by attempting the Brasso Cure...and it totally worked! It buffs out scratches without ruining the CD. (I know it seems counterintuitive, but it really did work.) All you have to do is put some Brasso on a soft cloth and wax on/ wax off Mr. Miyagi style and voila! listenable CD. MAGIC!