Almostgotit.com

It honestly didn’t occur to me until yesterday afternoon that there might be some connection between my love for Aga stoves and my earlier obsession with Easy-Bake Ovens.

Wow, and I call myself a feminist…

“Easy Bake Oven: Teaching girls their place since 1963″
Image: Ebaumsworld.com

I never did get an Easy-Bake Oven, no matter how much I begged for one. My exasperated mother told me I could just use the REGULAR oven if I wanted so desperately to bake something.

My mother just didn’t understand.

The clever artifice of the Easy-Bake Oven was an essential part of its charm for me: by the heat of an ordinary light bulb, one could produce a wonderful variety of cakes, cookies and pies, each a perfect miniature of the real thing. And actually edible, to boot!

The Easy-Bake oven was like a doll’s house come to life.

Nor am I the only person, nor even a member of the only sex, to suffer from an unrequited love for an Easy Bake Oven:

I cannot begin to tell you of the psychic agony of being a “sensitive” male child in the 60s (well maybe not sensitive just plain oddball) wanting and not being able to enunciate the X-Mas Love that Dare Not Speak Its Name: the EZ Bake Oven.

Five years ago, in celebration of the Easy-Bake Oven’s 40th anniversary, NPR ran a story featuring The Easy-Bake Oven Gourmet, a combination cookbook and retrospective written by David Hoffman.

With all due respect, Mr. Hoffman and NPR don’t understand, either.

Educational? Gourmet? Wild mushroom flan?

No, no, and GOOD HEAVENS no.

Easy-Bake Ovens, guys, are all about magic, Christmas, and multi-colored sugar sprinkles:

I’m 43 and I’ve just fulfilled a dream. As of a couple of weeks ago, I am the proud owner of an Easy-Bake Oven … Today, I pulled it out of my “tickle trunk” (bedroom closet) and showed it to my 4 year old nephew and informed him that we were going to bake Christmas cookies. His eyes lit up, and our day quickly shot up to a 10 on the excitement scale … I had my mini copper Christmas cookie cutters (which up until this point, had only been used with the playdough I made them — recipe off the ‘net) and sprinkles at the ready much to their delight. …Three batches later, I put the brakes on them eating anymore as their Dad would soon be here to pick them up and take them home for supper… Tomorrow for lunch, we’re going to try out the pizza recipe I found for Easy-Bake Ovens. The 4 year old is bringing some different sparkles from home for tomorrow’s afternoon session of Christmas cookie baking. Thanks for the memories Easy-Bake! Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night…   -Nadene, comment on beancounters.blogs.com

O, Sing It, Sister.

Wouldn’t you know.

No sooner had I decided to post about Karen Burns’ new book (I’m so proud!!)  than I heard about another new book, also about the world of work, and also available by pre-order discount.

(( Subliminal message: Buy, Buy, Buy!! ))

Plus also,  I’m related to one of the authors. That’s (part of) him in the photo, holding an advance copy.  Woo hoo!

Wired to Care: how companies prosper when they create widespread empathy even has its own website.  Including — OMG — a review by my absolute hero, Malcolm Gladwell.

Way to go, Pete!  And congrats to my dear friend Kathy, who happens to be his mother.

Congratulations to my bloggy pal Karen Burns over at Working Girl!

Her book, The Amazing Adventures of Working Girl: Real life career advice you can actually use is due out in March 2009 but is already available for pre-order on Amazon, for the low, low introductory price of only ten bucks for a nice hardback.  

That’s a third off the regular price.  So pre-order your copy now!

See, pre-ordering is a great way to buy books: publishers want to goose the numbers (and gauge demand) up front, so they offer discounts on pre-orders, and then raise the prices again  closer to publication time.   

For more about Karen’s Fab Book, you can go right here and read about it on her website!

Whist led to bridge-whist, which led to auction bridge, which led to contract bridge, which led, according to bridge historian Jack Olsen, to murder, divorce, suicide, mayhem, and other social evils.

- Maggy Simony, The Bridge Table, forthcoming

Since some of you have asked:  Cyn Mobley and I have been helping an 88 year old woman in Florida who is writing about the history of “ladies bridge clubs” (along with the gender food menus they created) from the 20’s to the 60’s. There are indeed murders, scandals, revolts — and also recipes. It’s quite funny. Would make a terrific play, actually…

The author plans to publish in early 2009, and I promised her I’d give her coverage on my blog.   Stay tuned!

The Almostgotits are still communing with Nature, so we thought we’d invite a much more articulate person to guest blog today. Allow me to introduce you to Isaac Bashevis Singer, a very dear man and very prolific writer in both English and Yiddish. It’s his birthday today, and these are his words:

A story to me means a plot where there is some surprise. Because that is how life is – full of surprises.

Doubt is part of all religion. All the religious thinkers were doubters.

For those who are willing to make an effort, great miracles and wonderful treasures are in store.

If Moses had been paid newspaper rates for the Ten Commandments, he might have written the Two Thousand Commandments.

Sometimes love is stronger than a man’s convictions.

The analysis of character is the highest human entertainment.

The very essence of literature is the war between emotion and intellect, between life and death. When literature becomes too intellectual – when it begins to ignore the passions, the emotions – it becomes sterile, silly, and actually without substance.

The waste basket is the writer’s best friend.

We write not only for children but also for their parents. They, too, are serious children.

What nature delivers to us is never stale. Because what nature creates has eternity in it.

When I was a little boy, they called me a liar, but now that I am grown up, they call me a writer.

I posted yesterday about the Mother-Daughter Book Club  my daughter and I have been part of for the past four years.  Here are the books we read during the last two of them:

5th Grade

• Ruby Holler by Sharon Creech
• Worst Enemies/Best Friends (Beacon Street Girls, volume 1) by Annie Bryant
• Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse
• Jacob Have I Loved by Katherine Paterson
• The Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett
• The Witches by Roald Dahl
• Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O’Dell
• Princess Academy by Shannon Hale

6th Grade

• Catherine Called Birdie by Karen Cushman
• The First Horse I See by Sally Keehn
• Hatchet Gary Paulsen
• Rachel’s Journal: the Story of a Pioneer Girl by Marissa Moss
• The Tale of Despereaux: Being the Story of a Mouse, a Princess, Some Soup and a Spool of Thread by Kate Dicamillo
• The Doll People by Ann M. M. Martin, Laura Godwin, Brian Selznick, and Ann M. Martin
• Sahara Special by Esmé Raji Codell
• Kira-Kira by Cynthia Kadohata

————
Related Posts:

Mother-Daughter Book Club List, Part 1
International Women’s Day: Toasting Pink

Smart, strong women read books.

This is the lesson I hope the daughters in our mother-daughter book club are learning.  We’ve just finished our 4th year together, and even though our daughters are growing taller than we are, we hope to continue.  We meet about once a month, and the girls take turns hosting and leading the discussion.  Moms help out by providing an activity and food. 

We’ve visited one author in her home and heard another one lecture about being a writer; we’ve marvelled over a local grandmother’s WWII rationing coupons while trying to bake without sugar; we’ve built tiny “Borrower” houses and been teased by our daughters when the books made us cry. 

These are the books we’ve read thus far.  You may recognize some old friends, but we discovered some really wonderful new ones, as well. 

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Creative Commons Photo, “Little Red”  by Flickr.com’s Aussie Patches, aka Ali J
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3rd Grade

• From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg
• Felicity (American Girls Collection Books) by assorted authors
• The Gadget Wars by Betsy Duffey
• The Magic Treehouse book #16. Hour of the Olympics by Mary Pope Osborne
• Molly (American Girls Collection Books) by assorted authors
• The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
• Emmy by Connie Jordan Green

4th Grade

• Island of the Aunts by Eva Ibbotson
• The other side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George
• Number the Stars by Lois Lowry
• Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder
• Joey Pigza Loses Control by Jack Gantos
• The Borrowers by Mary Norton
• Misty of Chincoteague by Marguerite Henry

 - To see rest of list, click here -

I’ve been tagged by Ann of Compensation Force  with a new blogging meme.

Les Rules:

1. Provide a list of the books you’re currently reading. 
2. Pick up the nearest book, and open it to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence, and post the next three sentences.
4. Tag 3-5 more people by posting comments on their blogs. 
5. Link back to the person who tagged you. (It’s nice to leave them a comment, too!)

Les Books:

1. One Thousand White Women by Jim Fergus.
   “What if” fiction based on a true event, when a prominent Cheyenne chief asked the U.S. government for the gift of one thousand white women in order to help his doomed people assimilate.
2. Why Mars & Venus Collide by John Gray
   Which recently flew across the room, causing John Gray’s Martian head to collide with the wall.  And hey, here’s a bit of John Gray intrigue…
3. Sahara Special by Esmé Raji Codell.   
   My daughter and I just finished reading this one in our Mother-Daughter Book Club  (Esmé is a certified Readiologist.  Really.  Here is her very cute website. And here’s the quote, p. 123:

I could have cried from feeling scared, and I could have cried for being so terrible, for nearly making the meanest, most special boy in school explode.

But all I could think of was how it would be at least a week before I had a chance to snoop in his journal again.  And how Miss Pointy was right: poetry is not for punks.

Les Tags:

1. Rachel at Fog to Fire  (who uses the same wordpress theme I once did)
2. Florinda at  The 3 R’s (cause she’s cool)
3. Cyn at It’s All On the Table (cause she never reads MY blog, either)
4. Stephen at The Photoshop Journal   (won’t he be surprised)
5. Zita at the Savvy Networker (because I’m NETWORKING, of course)

I’ve been tagged by Career Encourager.  Assignment: write a six word memoir.  Other rules: post your own memoir. Tag at least five more blogs. Link to them and leave comments. Acknowledge the blog that tagged YOU. Link to that blog as well. (Rules rewritten to fit my theme. You can also use original rules. Peggy’s better at rules than I!)

A terrific book inspired it all.  Not Quite What I Was Planning… Compilation from submissions to a contest.  My dad sent me a copy.  I have not thanked him yet.  You can buy one from here.   Good review in the New Yorker.   Entirely written in six word sentences.  Cleverly, they didn’t point this out. I’m not so clever, just slow.  

I liked their idea, so borrowed. 

The book is clever, funny, poignant.   Here’s a few of my favorites:

I’m my mother, and I’m fine.  
I was born. Some assembly required.
It was embarrassing, so don’t ask.
I think, therefore I am bald.

My, this is a daunting task. Tried to sum things up: failed.  Advisors say don’t think too much.  I wrote a few, can’t choose.

• How did all of this happen?
• More I live, less I know.
• Clearly I am not an earthling.
• Figured a few things out, eventually.

I choose to tag these blogs:

• Karen at Working Girl
• Paul at Original Faith
• TrueVyne at The True Vyne 
• Emily at The Rocky Road of Love and Other Great Recipes
• Ursula at Working Mother Blog

Come on now – YOU try one!

* The “Invisible Woman* essay was, indeed, written by Nicole Johnson, is fully subject to copyright, and her publicist tells me they were “deeply sad” when it “went global” without Nicole’s name on it.

* The Mommy Monk is one of several blogs which posted Nicole’s “Invisible Woman” piece without her name on it. That blog’s tagline is “MommyMonk: A woman attempting to find inner solitude in the daily self-denial of motherhood.” However, the blog’s author also claims to be a speaker/writer/teacher in addition to being a wife/mother. Not really the MOST solitary or anonymous person, then..

* Julie, who was very kind to comment here a couple of days ago, also posted Nicole’s piece without attribution. She claims this is not plagiarism as she doesn’t claim to have written it herself. Nevertheless, she also cites it as the central premise of her “Building Cathedrals” series of telecourses , for which she charges $20 per hour ($80 for the series). Which she markets under her own name. Nor does Julie seem quite so sanguine about folks resyndicating her own material: at the bottom of each page of her website it says © 2008 Julie L. Ford, All rights reserved

* It took me about 20 minutes to find the author of “Invisible Woman,” and 24 hours to contact and hear back from the author’s publicist. And I was just writing a post, not setting up a business. I’m just saying.

* My history-professor-husband tells me that we do, in fact, know many of the names of the artists, architects and builders who worked on medieval cathedrals. I am not done with this topic yet!

But I can talk about other things, too…

* I went out to lunch today. Why do waiters ask if you want “lettuce and tomato” but never if you want “tomato and lettuce?”

* It’s very funny to accidentally fall in step behind a man heading towards an adult bookstore. I did that today on my way home, and he kept turning around to look at me, nervously, almost as if *he* were the woman and *I* was a large, threatening man. When I realized where he was going, though, it all made sense. I should have followed him right into the store to see what he would do. Some day I’m going to do that, have been wanting to ever since that place opened a few blocks from my house. I think I’ll get all dressed up like a nice church lady, with a cardigan and hand bag, wander in as if by mistake, and start poking around, asking all sorts of questions, like “what is THIS is for?”