Jenyfer Matthews

I have been lucky to read more than my share of good books recently, most of which have been recommended or passed along by friends so I thought I’d share the titles in case anyone was looking for something to read.

Little Bitty Lies by Mary Kay Andrews Light, frothy, silly and lots of fun – like mango sorbet on a hot day.

Hissy Fit by Mary Kay Andrews
Another fun novel by the same author – HGTV meets Antiques Road Show with a dash of Southern manners, humidity, and mystery.

Bed of Roses (The Bride Quartet, Book 2) by Nora Roberts
I knew I would like this book going into it – I’m not sure there have been any Nora Roberts books that I’ve read that I didn’t enjoy. This is the second book in the quartet and though she always writes a book so it can stand alone she also manages to make you want to know more! I’ll be looking for the other three in this series.

The Search by Nora Roberts
I really loved this book, particularly the details on dog training and search and rescue training. I did find the ending slightly anti-climatic given all the build-up but overall, it was still very enjoyable.

Mennonite in a Little Black Dress: A Memoir of Going Home by Rhoda Janzen
I really like reading memoirs, and particularly like memoirs that include glimpses of new cultures. This book was both interesting and funny. Who knew that Mennonites could be so quirky?

Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali
A friend of mine read this book and insisted that I read it. I admit to being a little reluctant to read it because it seemed like it might be a bit heavy and somewhat of a downer. Once I finally did get started, the story was so compelling that I read it in a matter of days. The author has a definite political agenda in her presentation, but whether or not you agree with that it is simply a remarkable story of the author’s journey from a childhood in a tribal society in Africa, escaping an arranged marriage, and becoming a citizen and legislator in Holland. Wow.

I’m in the middle of another good book I’ll tell you about when I finish it. Getting books from friends can be great – I read things I’d probably never have run across otherwise.

Just a reminder that the sitewide Smashwords.com book sale is still going on and all of my books are 25% off – just use the code SSW25 at checkout. Offer good thru July 31, 2011!

Today’s post was delayed by rain.

Yesterday was a hot, still day. The only attractive activity was to go swimming. Lake Superior was so flat and calm that even I got in for a while.

Okay, I’m only in up to my knees, but I stood there for close to 45 minutes! A personal record!

And look how clear it is. Rarely have I seen the big lake so utterly calm. It looks more like I’m standing in a big puddle than a Great Lake!

I guess I should have known by the way the lake was behaving that something was going to happen. There was a tremendous thunder storm last night – my dad’s rain gauge measured 3 1/2″ in a few hours.

This is how the county road to his house looks on a good day – and I still managed to rip off the dirt guards on the bottom of my car.

This is how the county road looks after a hard, thorough rain. There was no way I was getting out this morning in my little car. There were a couple of creeks washing it out in a few places!

Is it any wonder I didn’t get out as early this morning as I normally would have? I am only lucky that the vigilant and conscientious county grader was out early to come and try and smooth out the worse of the run off before I did actually venture out.

There is more rain in the forecast but fingers crossed it will pass us by this time and give us a little time to dry out!

My husband rejoined our family this weekend – first time we’ve seen him since February. He and I honeymooned at my dad’s place before my father built the house that he has now, staying in a rather decrepit cabin at the front of the property. My husband hasn’t been up here since then, so the children and I were looking forward to showing him all of the beautiful scenery that we’ve been enjoying every summer.

What should arrive when he does but a heat wave and a blanket of fog.

Anxious to be out and about after sitting on planes for two days, we went out anyway. The fog gave an interesting layer of mystery to places I’ve seen many times in clearer weather.

(Click any image to enlarge)

Though it was damp, it was quite a lot cooler down by the lake in the swirling fog.

It was actually a bit foggier in person than this picture would give you to believe!

It’s always amazing to me to find plants and flowers growing out of stone in what is a rather harsh environment. These must be hardier flowers than they look to be!

You know it’s been a wet year when there are not only flowers but wild strawberries growing on the rocks!

They were pretty plump and juicy for having grown on a rock too – yum!

Saw this gorgeous flower out there too but have no idea what it is. Anyone?

It’s not supposed to rain so I guess we’ll just go about our business and enjoy ourselves. I doubt the children will complain it our plans center around swimming rather than hiking!

As much as I enjoy driving and the freedom that owning a car gives you to go where you want to go when you want to go there, I didn’t really miss owning a car for the nearly six years we lived in Egypt.

I am quite proud of myself for (mostly) mastering the art of driving a five-speed manual transmission though I still don’t love coming to a stop at the top of a hill (or even a small incline!) but I still prefer to walk to my destination when possible. Walking not only keeps you in shape, but you can also go a lot of places on foot you can’t get to in a car with the added bonus of never having to worry about finding parking. Walking also burns calories while driving burns fuel – which is getting more expensive by the week.

I particularly didn’t miss the maintenance and repair aspects of car ownership. I bought myself a car in Ohio because we didn’t live in a place that was totally walkable (which is pretty much most of the US) but I bought an older car because I didn’t know how long we’d be staying. I am really quite pleased with my little car, in spite of its advancing years. If you had seen what I was being shown when I was shopping, you would be impressed to!

There will be maintenance issues with any car, but particularly one that is a decade old. The first quirk I noticed was the car’s insatiable appetite for oil. It doesn’t burn oil, it just sort of absorbs it. I checked with the mechanic where I’d had the oil changed and apparently Volkswagon issued a technical bulletin saying that it is normal for the car to use 1/2 quart of oil every 600 miles. Hmmm… that is a definitely a quirk to be aware of! However, in the process of being a responsible car owner and checking my oil level after my long drive to Minnesota, the plastic sleeve of the oil dipstick snapped off. It would happen while I’m far from civilization! I’m now driving around with a wooden dowel plugging the dipstick hole until I get the part sent up to me.

All in all, if it were practical, I think I’d stick to using a kayak for transportation: no fuel costs and only two parts to worry about – the paddle and the body of the boat. Very simple to maintain on the whole. If you are in a kayak, you’re not likely to end up driving over a large hump of gravel left behind by the county grader and rip off a plastic dirt shield from under the engine, which in turn will lead to several days of picking up pieces of plastic from the ditch along the road to find the parts serial number. Nope, not likely to happen in a kayak.

Now all I need to do is buy a house by a large body of water in a town on a harbor…

Regardless of state budget crisises and the closure of state offices, when it’s a nice day, you just want to take advantage and spend some time outside – which is what we did on Friday.

I admit that my years living in the Middle East have left an impression on me – I don’t always follow the rules if there is no one around to enforce them! In my defense, I wasn’t the only one parking on the side of the highway and walking into the park around the barrier.

We’ve been to this park a number of times but I never get tired of visiting. What could be more pleasant on a warm day than a walk along a river?

It’s been a wet year so far and the river is really high. This spot, at the lower falls, is normally a place we’d spend a little time, rock hopping and exploring, but many of the rocks were submerged and the mist was flying thick off the waterfall. It was difficult to take any pictures before the camera lens was covered!

The upper falls along the river is called the Devil’s Kettle – so called because the river plunges down a hole on the left side and, so they say, no one knows where it goes. In years past I’ve been able to walk on the rocks right up to the edge of the hole and look down. Not this year!

There is always something new and interesting to see, like this butterfly buffet!

I don’t know what kind of butterfly this is, but it sure is pretty.

The trail in the park area isn’t so very long (though you could keep following it – eventually you’d end up either in Duluth or Canada!) but it can be challenging. You basically walk in and out on the same trail. The stairs don’t seem so bad going down, but going back up all 176 of them is a bit more work on the way out!

I know there are 176 because I had my daughter count them – 2x! Mwhahahahaha…

What could be better after a long walk at a river than lunch and then a swim in Lake Superior? Not much, particularly on a day when the lake was still and fairly warm. It was up to about 60F where we were. The kids ran in and splashed happily for about an hour while I sat on shore on a large, hot rock.

Our outing on Friday was made that much more sweet by a weekend filled with rain. I’m glad my car has heated seats, but I never expected to still be using them in July!

I arrived in Minnesota last week just in time to participate in a local arts festival last weekend. In other circumstances I might have brought along some quilts to sell, but since all my quilts are stuck in Egypt at present, I sold books instead.

It was my first time to stand next to a table displaying all my books and it was both a thrilling and uncomfortable experience. Thrilling because I think my books are beautiful and I’m proud of them and seeing them all on display together at long last was wonderful, and uncomfortable because I’m not used to putting myself out there next to them in the flesh, particularly among people I know in real life. It’s not a nice feeling when someone glances at your books and keeps walking, or picks one up and reads the blurb and then moves on.

Fortunately, I kept my expectations pretty low so any time I sold a copy it was a thrill. It was an even bigger thrill when a woman made a beeline for my table and told me she’d seen my book Separation Anxiety reviewed in the local paper and she’d come out to the festival to look for me.

Of course, I went looking for a newspaper as soon as I could. I will link to the online article as soon as it’s available, but in the meantime you can click the image below and read the review below.

I don’t know if it was the review or the display or a combination of both, but I did pretty well at the sale. I sold out of Separation Anxiety and I’m still coasting on the high of the good review.

My children were selling bottle cap magnets and pet rocks and they made a bundle. They nearly sold out of magnets the first day. When you can sell lake rocks in rock country then you know you’re either a born salesman or very, very cute.

I won’t be able to sign them for you, but all of my books are available on a summer sale at Smashwords.com. Available in multiple digital formats just use the code SSW25 at checkout for 26% off during the site-wide promotion! (Offer good thru July 31, 2011)

Think about how much junk mail you might get in a typical week – maybe even in a typical day. If you take the time to open it all, how long does it take you? A couple of minutes? Now imagine how long it would take you to open it all if you only did it once a year like I do.

Ridiculous.

My step-mother dutifully saves every piece of mail that I get at their address and stacks it up for me all year for when I come back in the summer time. You might wonder why she doesn’t recycle some of it before I get here: she’s the Post Mistress. It’s against her sacred duty to discard someone else’s mail.

Most of what I get are catalogs and solicitations for money. Once you make a donation to one charitable organization, you can be sure that they will be back in touch along with at least a dozen more organizations to whom they have sold your information. Even more than the time that it takes me to go through it all, it’s appalling what a waste of resources it is – resources that you would think could be put to better use supporting whatever cause for which they are trying to raise money.

It’s not only the paper and postage they use to send out the requests, it’s the free gifts that they include to try and guilt people into contributing. I do the majority of my correspondence and bill paying online these days – as I suspect many others do as well – so who is using all of the address labels that are sent out? I could never get through all of the labels that even one organization sent me before the next lot started to roll in. I also got two free calendars, six sheets of wrapping paper (Christmas and all occasion), plus a nice stack of note cards. The March of Dimes even sent me an actual dime. How much did they spend sending out actual money? It makes much more sense to me to just tell me what gift will be sent if I contribute – and to give me the option to donate and say “no thanks – keep the gift”. Chances are that if I can afford to donate money, I can also afford to buy an umbrella or a shopping bag and I’d rather the money I send be used for the cause for which it is intended.

The free gifts are not entirely ineffective – I’ll probably make a donation to at least one of the groups that solicited me. But I almost wish I could manage to do it anonymously so that I could avoid getting another big stack of desperate solicitations. I know that my FIL also gets mail for me at his address, but since he has no ties to the post office he has no scruples about recycling it as it arrives!

Whenever I’ve taken long road trips in America via the interstate I am often left feeling slight disoriented. America looks disconcerting the same from the interstate wherever you go: the same gas stations, the same strip malls, the same restaurants. I’ve had moments when I’ve been driving along in a daze and suddenly looked around and panicked because I forgot where I was and had no way to tell from looking at the sights around me. One Cracker Barrel looks much like another as you zoom along at 70mph.

I have planned my last couple of long state-to-state road trips with the express purpose of avoiding large metropolitan areas which has had the unexpected benefit of not only avoiding large sections of interstates but also in rediscovering small town America. It’s surprising how many really well maintained state highways are out there.

I drove from Ohio up through Michigan to get to Minnesota just to avoid Chicago. I succeeded in spades: I didn’t see one big city, one traffic jam, and had next to no construction delays.

Sure, you may have to slow down while passing through a town once in a while, but what’s the big rush anyway? Slowing down gives you more opportunity to really look around and appreciate the scenery. Where else are you going to see thriving mom and pop restaurants advertising homemade pies and award winning pasties? Where else might you encounter a gas pump that still has flip numbers (do you even remember how to work one of those? I do) and when you walk inside to pay, find that they have a deli counter where they sell freshly made fish jerky and homemade jam? There are more small hotels out there proudly advertising color TVs and showers than you’d think. (What more do you really need for a night or two?)

I have also discovered that I’m not a huge fan of driving across bridges – particularly impressive suspension bridges with steel decks {shudder} but I digress.

It’s nice to know that while my world traveling days are at least temporarily on hold, there is still plenty to see and explore and appreciate in everyday life – all you need to do is choose the right path. Or perhaps it is more a matter of appreciating the path you take…

Happy 4th of July, America

For anyone who is keeping track, I officially gave up on my diet plan a couple of weeks ago. I liked the concept of the Lose It! site, but also found it a bit demoralizing. Food just has too many calories in it!!!

On the up side, keeping track of my food and liquid (that is the real downfall for me) intake for a week was a great reminder to be more aware of consumption and thinking about how many calories I was consuming was a good incentive to get out and get active. I even started walking 4 miles a day which certainly didn’t hurt a thing. I lost a couple of pounds and I felt better both physically and mentally.

Realistically, I am not going to keep track of every item I put in my mouth when I’m traveling and on a dial-up internet connection. In truth, I guess I just don’t care enough.

I told my sister my tale of woe and she suggested I just buy bigger pants. It’s a good thing that I left some of my larger jeans there last year because I have the feeling they are going to come in handy…

While the children were outside playing tag and chasing fireflies at the Wigwam Village, I took advantage of the quiet and watched a few episodes of Extreme Couponing on TLC (they were running some sort of marathon). I admit it: I love a good deal and if I end up moving back to the US, I’d love to learn a bit more about taking advantage of coupons.

The show was interesting, but ultimately I was disappointed by it. I am sure that the people who were featured are very good at getting a good deal at the grocery store, but the way the show was presented left a lot to be desired in my opinion.

First of all, you didn’t really learn anything about *how* the people figured out which coupons to use when and there is definitely timing involved in getting the most bang out of them. Second, the people on the show had obviously been told they should set themselves some sort of challenge for the benefit of the show – which was fairly extreme and not necessarily how they would shop on a normal basis. Third, by showing the sometimes bordering on absurd stockpiles of merchandise these people had already accumulated, the show was not so much showing how rewarding saving money with coupons could be, but instead made the people look a bit like lunatics. Who wants to see open shelving for groceries all through the house? Storing 4000+ rolls of toilet paper under every piece of furniture does not come across as sensible or desirable.

One woman set herself a challenge to purchase $1800 worth of groceries for nothing. She actually achieved her goal, in fact she made $.31 on the transaction, but she also spent almost 2 HOURS at the register! A man who was on one episode I watched had a goal to buy supplies to put in care packages for soldiers in Afghanistan – a noble cause, but he already had 1000 tubes of toothpaste in his basement in addition to countless other things. Why not just use some of that??? Surely it will expire before he gets to it himself. There was also a set of twins on the program, one of whom had bought enough diapers to last a baby nearly 2 years and yet neither had any children. Crazy. Why buy more than you can actually use? Even if you get it for free, isn’t it a waste of time and energy and space in your house?

The only woman on the show who made any sense to me was one who was buying things with a goal of making a big donation to a food bank. She knew how to get stuff for free so she wanted to do it, but she wasn’t warped enough to think she herself needed 50+ bottles of mustard.

The show has a compelling voyeuristic quality, but instead of promoting couponing, it seems to subtlety denigrate it as a pursuit for borderline hoarding types.

In fact, you don’t actually have to spend 8 hours clipping coupons or make your shopping list in a spreadsheet. The friend that I’ve been living with for the last few months is great at using coupons. She looks at the weekly ads for her area stores, compares it to the coupons she’s collected from the newspaper and online, and combines coupons and sales when she can to get the biggest benefit. Sometimes that means she divides her list to get some things at one store and other things at a different store. She has a quick mind for math and a good memory for which store charges what for various items she buys regularly – and she doesn’t have a basement full of things she isn’t going to use but ‘were too good a deal to pass up.’

Her method doesn’t make for as good a TV show but watching her get $200 of groceries for $85 was still impressive… and inspiring.