Sunday Sunshine: Home, Sweet Home Edition

You may have noticed that I missed a week of Sunday Sunshine (I mean, or maybe you didn't notice, but I did).  That's because, last Sunday, I was looking at this:

The view from Fort Worden State Park.

I flew out to Seattle last week for the wedding of a dear friend from college.  Because she is a really awesome, funky, strange, wonderful performer, and her husband seems to be all of those things as well (he's a shadow puppeteer, y'all!) they had this totally unique, homegrown, potluck style wedding up at a state park in Washington that used to be a military fort.

Can you spot the deer?  They turned out to be really okay with people creeping up to them and watching them eat.

The food was made by family and friends (it was definitely the most delicious AND the most healthy food I've ever had at a wedding) and at the rehearsal dinner, the entertainment was a series of performances by the many, many talented people who love the happy couple.  At the hall where the wedding and reception were held, there was a whole table of typewriters on which guests could type messages and paste them into a guestbook.  There was decoupage and a DIY photo booth and drinks served in mason jars.  And the thing that made it extra-amazing for me was that the place was packed with friends from college, some of whom I hadn't seen since we graduated.  It was an incredible weekend, and as you can see from the photos, the famous Seattle rain held off and we had great weather for exploring the park and surrounding areas.

Plus, while I was in Seattle proper relatively briefly, I still got a chance to go for my all-time favorite doughnut in the whole world:

Maple old-fashioned.  I would have gotten an old-fashioned and a maple bar, separately, but then I would have died.

President Obama has eaten these doughnuts; an NFL player actually got into a little trouble for going in after hours to grab a few of their maple bars.  I totally understand how he felt.

And then, because I'm not in college anymore but I spent two days acting like I was, plus two cross-country flights, I got knocked back by a gross cough/cold/sore throat thing that basically made me want to do nothing but sleep for several days.  Totally worth it, but that also contributed to my lack of blogginess.  And my lack of reading-ness.

So, in brief, here's what I've missed:

Congrats to the very cool Rebecca Behrens: I feel like I'm late to the party of spreading this awesome news, but her book When Audrey Meets Alice will be published by Sourcebooks in 2014!  You can read about it here; I was hooked as soon as I read the premise and the first line, so I was double-excited to hear her good news (as a blog pal but also as a reader!)

I will be doing NaNoWriMo in November!  I know people have lots of Opinions about NaNo, but here's my reason: I want to build some habits that I can continue through the rest of this year away from full-time work.  If I can't get into some writerly habits now, without a job outside the home to worry about, then I may have to come to terms with the fact that I don't have a novel in me.  I'm spending the next two weeks making some very, VERY rough outlines of projects I might want to tackle, as well as trying to get things in good working order around the home so that I will really be able to give as much time as I can over to writing during November.  My username is SilversteinELA so if you're NaNoing, look me up!

And finally:

What I Read This Week:

Let it Snow by John Green
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

If you think it's the wrong season to read a Christmas book, think again! It's always the right season to read a collection of work by these three crazy authors. Maureen Johnson might be the funniest author I've read this year (or at least she's neck and neck with Libba Bray for the title.) Her story opens the book with a blizzard, a ceramics-related arrest, a microwaveable pizza disc, and a whole stew of other unusual ingredients. John Green picks up the middle section, weaving in a few elements from the first story while introducing a new and excellently Green-y set of characters, and then Lauren Myracle ties it all together with a Very Starbucks Christmas (seriously, did Starbucks sponsor this book?) This was just the right read to cheer me up during a day of traveling that started at 4am Eastern and ended with me crashing on a friend's sofa at something like 10pm Pacific Time. It would, of course, also be a fabulous book to read during the winter holiday season. Or if you're in a Starbucks.


Please Ignore Vera Dietz by A.S. King
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Wow. The pieces of this book must have taken a lot of time and effort to put together. First of all, Vera is the main narrator, but there are small segments in the voice of her dad, her dead best friend, and a local landmark. Second of all, there are a lot of temporal transitions--the story builds in a roundabout way, jumping back to whatever pieces of Vera and Charlie's history are relevant at the moment. It's done in a way that feels exactly like remembering--it's perfectly easy to follow and is logically non-linear. The voices of all the characters--down to the inanimate one--are clear and distinct and funny (usually, unless they're heartbreaking.) I was initially skeptical of a plot description that sounded like a mystery (not my usual genre) but really this is a coming-of-age story, I think. Or a family story. Whatever it is, it's a unique contemporary story, told well.

View all my reviews