Monday weigh-inWith lots of the above, almost every day, I've lost 2.2 kg (4.85 — oh, let's call it 5 lb) in three weeks and four days. I've lost 800 g (1.7 lb) since last Monday's weigh-in. Yee-ha!

:: Off to see The Police tonight — I'm so excited! Though I can't work out whether I'm as excited about tonight's concert as I am about Thursday's ... when we're off to the Hollywood Bowl to see REM! Oh I do so love living in California!

:: I have joined the 'Play it Forward' exchange, from one of my daily blog reads, Kotkarankki, written by Ulla from Finland. Here's how it works: I'll send something I've made myself to the first three people to comment saying they'd like to take part.
I don't know what it will be yet: it could be some sewing...
.... or a painting ... well, maybe not a whole restaurant window ...... or anything quite as big as this one ...... but maybe more like one of my butterflies, which are about 30 cm by 24 cm (12" by 9") ...... or perhaps you'd like something knitted, or a couple of skeins of hand-dyed wool ...... or something from one of my new projects, which I'll be posting about soon. And I won't send it this month, or even next month, but I will send you something in the next six months — I promise! What you have to do in return, then, is pay it forward by making the same promise on your blog. So just let me know!

Two of my boysCouldn't resist showing you this fantastic pic Will took of himself and Nipper on Wednesday arvo. Nipper's winning the hairy chin comp!
:: It's chilly and rainy today — wonderful! I love it. Summer can take as long as it feels like to get here, as far as I'm concerned. I had a fire last night as I phoned Mum and Dad back home (Dad's miraculously recovered and back home, phew!), spoke to Dace about her trip back to the US in the autumn, and watched the last lovely episode of Cranford; and we even had the heater on this morning when Will and I got up.
:: Dave's away still, but he gets back tomorrow night — yay! He's in New York today and keeps taunting me by ringing me every hour or so as he works his way down, floor by floor, through the Whitney Museum. 'I've just finished the fifth floor — Hoppers, Rauschenberg ... ' Oh shut up! Later today he's off to watch the Yankees play at Yankee Stadium, which is due to be demolished soon and rebuilt.
:: Will has been excellent company this week, and he's stuck close to home to study for two tests today and to complete his senior paper on Schwarzenegger's proposed $4 billion budget cuts for education for the state of California. Now there's a big spanner in the works ...
:: Nothing more to write home about. Before David left on Saturday, I made a mental list of all the projects I'd accomplish while I had the house more or less to myself. Result: nada!

Booking through Thursday

Books and films both tell stories, but what we want from a book can be different from what we want from a movie. Is this true for you? If so, what’s the difference between a book and a movie?

Books and movies can offer entertainment on such different levels. The one can be instant and short-lived, the other far more enduring.
It's a funny thing, but I rarely, if ever, read a book if I've seen the movie first (except for Jurassic Park), but I'm quite prepared to see a film version of a book I've enjoyed.
It's quite good fun — isn't it? — to pick over the film version and compare and contrast it with the book, and to see how your interpretation differed from the film's, and if the main characters looked the part, and discuss what bits were left out and why! Disappointments are infrequent.
I qualify all this by saying that now I've watched on telly the recent BBC adaptations (let's count these as movies, for the sake of this week's question) of Cranford and North and South, I'll probably read both of those — I haven't read Mrs Gaskell.
Film versions can also give you a way to familiarise yourself — even superficially — with a book you may not care to read. Or can't be bothered with! Like the Harrys and LotR. I so wish the films had come out before I hauled my way through these two!
It's a big mistake to expect a movie to be everything that a book is. The two are very different, but complement each other so well, and we're lucky to have them both.
There's a hell of a lot of dross out there on bookstore shelves — a lot of books should never have been published: do you reckon there are as many movies in that category?

My Idol
David just rang from Baltimore — which he says is a brilliant and very attractive city, but more on that later — to say he'd been watching the final of American Idol with some of the people he's been to meetings with, and now they're about to start an American Idol karaoke contest ... and Dave is playing Simon Cowell! Well, at least he doesn't have to sing, I guess ...

Apples and Oranges
This is writer Marie Brenner's intimate memoir about her brother and their incredibly complex and fraught relationship. I find myself overwhelmed with admiration for Ms Brenner, not only for accomplishing the sheer task of getting this book down, laden as it is with generations of family history and scientific and psychological research, but also for the intense struggle she documents as she attempted to forge some kind of common ground, an essential connection, with her very strange sibling.
As the title suggests, Ms Brenner and her brother, Carl, are not at all alike. Chalk and cheese, in fact.
She's an investigative journalist, highly intelligent, happy and successful. He is similarly smart and successful, but also anal and controlling, a cold fish who sends his sister a tray of fruit from his orchards every year with a note that says: 'I picked them myself. Don't give them away.'
A right-wing lawyer from Texas who has in his mid-life moved into growing apples in a big way in Washington State, he has always kept his younger, more lefty, liberal-intellectual sister at more than arm's length. It seems he has no love for her, and his attitude towards her and her smart, New York life is obnoxious and condescending. And really weird. 'You always have to show off and tell us what you know, Carl said.'
Anyone of us in the same boat, faced with such a dour character and such direct put-downs, would be forgiven for turning our back on him. Yet she doesn't cast him off as a bad egg or a black sheep, but instead, when she discovers he has cancer, she puts her life on hold and moves across the country to go into bat for him, hoping to find a way to save his life, and also to spend their last few months together and fix what ails them both.
It must be said that she probably does this as much for herself: in many ways her opinion of herself seems coloured a little by this blighted relationship:

'Why can't I just be easy with my brother, the way I am with my friends? That we are not close seems a badge of shame, a personal failure, a mark of my inabilities, bossy nature, and tendency to exaggerate. Carl thinks of me as the human flaw.
'I'm going to give you a quiz.
'This is how Carl starts many of our conversations.
'I wish I were kidding.'

Since she is a journalist as well as an author, she digs deep to get to the bottom of what ails them.

'A research study on siblings breaks down the percentages: 52 percent of all brothers and sisters have a close relationship, 12 percent have no relationship, and 21 percent are something called "borderline." I am a borderline, defined by and against my brother, locked into some ancient and immutable feud. There is a moat around our conversations. Why? Why did we spend years locked in struggle with each other? I had to believe there was a chance that some of the answers could be found in the past, in letters and facts and research, in new interpretations of patterns held up to the light. I was operating with a strtict sense of Freudian principles, that the past could yield insights and applicable truths, if only one understood the sexual rivalries, the aggression, the scant affection. I could spin out a sound bite that might make you think I knew what I was talking about, had read the experts on nurture and nature, birth order, peer influence, mirror neurons, attachment theory, DNA.'

The story of these two is a good enough by itself, but what makes this such an extraordinary work is all the other ... stuff .. that she packs into it: information about siblings in modern psychology, about her complicated family, about apples and the entire US apple industry, and about medical science.
It's also touching, a deeply moving book. I loved it.

Monday weigh-in
Late posting to day — I had a day out with my Perth friend, Adrienne, and got back late this arvo — but when I weighed myself this morning, I had put on 220 g (0.4 lb) since last Monday! Crap! Obviously need to cut back on the peppermint patties ...
:: I have two movies to recommend, both of which I watched over the weekend. The Constant Gardener, starring Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz (first time I've liked Ralph in anything), is a taut version of the John Le Carre novel, and gripping from start to finish. Really excellent.
Also Dan in Real Life, which I may have mentioned before. I watched it with Will last night and it really is a gem. It stars Steve Carell, Juliette Binoche and Dane Cook, and is set in Rhode Island.
::On telly, I'm loving Cranford, the BBC serialisation of the novel by Mrs Gaskell. And on the strength of that, I ordered North and South from Netflix — it's fantastic. I wanted to watch it all over again once it was finished. So good.
:: I'm still reading Apples and Oranges, by Marie Brenner, which was sent me to review. Lucky me! I'm really enjoying it and have nearly finished, so I hope to be writing about that one soon.
That's all folks!

Cabaret Ralph's
I can't tell you how irritating it is when you're in the supermarket, trying to get together the ingredients for minestrone from memory, and the invisible pianist is belting out Oobla-dee Oobla-dah. I love the Beatles, in fact, I always thought I'd marry Paul, but I can't stand instrumental versions of their songs. Actually, I can't stand Oobla-dee even when they 're singing it.
It is seriously weird. It plays music all by itself. The keys are moving but nobody's home. It's been there for weeks now — and why surround it with a display of wine? There are brochures on its music stand with information about how you, too, could own one of these magic pianos.
Last week it was playing Roundabout, from the 1970s Yes album, Fragile. Can it get any weirder? I've had enough.
At least at Nordstrom, over at University Towne Center (yes, that is Towne with an -e), in La Jolla, they have a real live person playing, instead of all this jiggery pokery. UTC has an ice-skating rink in its food hall, too, so you can watch precociousness in tights as you eat your tacos.
Shopping here can be an other-worldy experience sometimes!