More phantom Ashleys

Remember how I keep getting emails intended for a handful of other Ashley Bankses in the world? Well, here are a few more to add to the list. (Actually, I just like having a reason to post the above picture again and again.)

1. Some other lucky Ashley Banks became a member of PETA this week. Good for her. Sad to know she'll be missing out on all those email newsletters. Happy to read about it while I'm wearing my fur coat.

3. I've also gotten a couple evites about a totally legit bachelorette-ish party going on in Florida. Lots and lots of drinks will be involved. I almost want to RSVP and say I'll be attending. Would it be weird to accept the invitation? Sure, it wasn't exactly intended for me, but I did receive an invitation with my exact name on it so they can't turn me away, right?

2. I got another email about an online chat session another Ashley apparently scheduled with the admissions office of a college in Massachusetts. When I clicked to unsubscribe from further emails, it took me to this ominous page that told me I would never receive emails from Mount Blahblah College ever again in my whole life no matter what. It made me second guess my decision to unsubscribe, thinking that the other Ashley Banks might actually want to keep this appointment or go to college and I might be keeping her from her dreams. But then reason took over and I thought, you know what? If you can't even remember your own email address or type it in correctly, you shouldn't be going to college.

Mean, I know. But really?

Full circle(s)

Life has come full circle in two ways lately. Or two circles have come . . . full circle . . . in my life lately. (Whatever.)

First circle: The other day while at the grocery store, Anna was exuberantly looking over the jars of pickles when she knocked a big one off the shelf and it shattered all over my feet. (As a side note, when we were assessing the situation after the pickle explosion, the first thing out of her mouth was, "Well, it sure smells good!" That girl loves her some pickles.) Anyway, as I paused to reflect on this momentous occasion and shake pickle-juice glass off my feet, I reminisced about how I was also present when my very own sister broke a jar of pickles at Reams probably 25 years ago. (I think my brother broke one too when he was a kid. What is it with kids and jars of pickles—a rite of passage? (That was for you, Jen.))

Second circle: When said sister was in town recently, our oldest brother was over visiting. He was holding Jen's little boy and then he hoisted little urchin girl Anna up as well, and we took this cute picture (that's his daughter Sydnee in front):

And then THAT reminded us of this picture (I feel like I'm telling an "If You Give a Pig a Pancake" story), which was taken probably 27-ish years ago:

Ash, Dan, Jen, and another sibling's bum—anyone want to claim it?

Awwww . . .  Isn't that fun? And man alive, the fact that I'm talking about remembering things 25+ years ago sounds weird to my ears and makes me feel old. The memories are very, very vague, though, if that means anything. :D

Old Lady Name Game update

I'm trying to not be offensive, but this is kind of the image that comes to mind when I play this game.

So remember the Old Lady Name Game? Well, the fun hasn't stopped (it's always a party, reading the obits), and I have some more names to add to the list:

Unlikeable Old Lady Names

Daleene

Gladys

LaRue

Mildred (I mentioned this before, but I didn't say why it's so bad. If it needs further explanation, a name that sounds like a cross between "mildew" and "dread"? Not pleasant, folks.)

Norma

Alvera (not to be confused with the sunburn remedy)

Beulah

Verna

LuRee

LaWana

Arthella (Trying to feminize Arthur? Please, please don't.)

Pretty darn awful, right? And I think we might have found LaVolda a sister:

(drum roll please)

Ovila (!!!)

I think we can all agree that these names are pretty bad. The difficulty, for me, comes in deciding the lesser of two evils, like when my sister presented me with the choice between Melba or Bernice. What do you do when they're both so bad?

You try it. Which name would you rather have?

1. Beula vs. Verna
2. Mildred vs. Dolores
3. LaVolda vs. Ovila

It's hard, isn't it? Now you know the angst I've been experiencing with this game.

And I know in 80 years, people will probably mock me to my face for having the name Ashley, but until then...

Hola, dinner.

Yesterday, my sister and I, with our powers combined, whipped this up for dinner. It was quite tasty and couldn't have been easier. You can't be gourmet every night, you know, but this still got really high marks for taste. And after eating the leftovers tonight that were still just as good, I realized I needed to share this good news because I love easy and delicious.

Presenting . . . Mexican Chicken Corn Chowder and the best cornbread you'll ever have in your life. (Seriously. You'll never make another recipe.)

Mexican Chicken Corn Chowder
1.5 lbs boneless skinless chicken in bite-size pieces
1/2 C chopped onion
2 C half and half*

1 clove garlic, minced
3 T butter
2 cubes chicken bouillon
1 C hot water
3/4 t ground cumin
2 C shredded monterey jack cheese
1 can creamed corn
1 sm can chopped chilies
1 dash hot sauce (optional)
1 tomato chopped
fresh cilantro for garnish (optional)

In a dutch oven, brown chicken, onion and garlic in butter until chicken is done. Dissolve boullion cubes in water, pour into dutch oven and season with cumin. Bring to a boil, reduce heat, boil 5 minutes, then simmer. Stir in corn, chilies, cream, and cheese (and hot sauce if desired). Cook, stirring frequently, until cheese is melted. Stir in chopped tomato & garnish with cilantro (if desired). *Also, we added one cup of half and half and one cup of milk, and it was still sufficiently creamy.

And now for the cornbread. I've heard people say before that they don't really like cornbread because it's dry. THIS is not dry. It's moist, it follows the Law of Buttermilk that's been discussed before, and the sugar makes it just sweet enough that it could almost be called Cornbread Cake. Almost. It's still TOTALLY acceptable to serve this for dinner . . . and have something else entirely for dessert.

Heaven-sent Cornbread

1/2 c. butter

2/3 c. sugar

2 eggs

1 c. buttermilk

1/2 t. soda

1 c. cornmeal

1 c. flour

1/2 t. salt

Melt butter; add to the sugar and stir well. Add eggs and beat until well blended. Combine buttermilk and soda and stir into sugar mixture. Add cornmeal, flour, and salt. Stir until just blended. Pour into greased 8-inch square pan. Bake at 375 degrees (350 for glass pans) for 20-25 minutes until a toothpick comes out clean. Serve with obligatory honey butter.

Annacdotes 15

1. Anna has an uncle on a mission and she announced one day that she wanted to make and send him a paper-bag puppet. Complete with googly eyes. Delighted at the thought of what she might come up with, I got out some supplies and let her go to work. Here is her finished product, a Devan puppet:

A simple, yet descriptive design. She informed me that the two circles above his legs were his bum cheeks. I think this will come in handy during discussions.

2. One day a couple weeks ago, I told Anna what the word "thrice" means. She has used it maybe every day since then—and correctly, too. She also sometimes tosses "frice" (that means "four times" for you who don't speak Anna-ese) out there just for fun.

3. Anna has lately been saying "times" instead of "sometimes" or "at times" and I seriously love it. It's such a cute abbreviation. And since she rarely sounds like she has the vocabulary of a child anymore (she no longer says "meh-juss" for "message," for instance), I love anything that keeps her from growing up too fast.

Example: "Mom, you're silly times. And times, I'm silly." (That's a direct quote.)

4. I sat in on Anna's dance class a couple weeks ago and her teacher told them they were going to be a train. She went around and asked each girl what was in her train car. The first one said, "Candy." The next one said, "More candy!" And then when she asked Anna, she said, "Healthy food."

Yeah, that's right. I have the perfect child. I honestly don't even know why she said that, as she loves sweets as much as the next girl, but I still loved it. And it totally won her teacher over. Job well done, Annabelle.

Anna with her Aunt Steph. Fixing hair is one of Anna's favorite things to do right now. I think the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink headpiece look is her specialty.

5. Anna came in the kitchen one morning having dressed herself in a rather eye-catching outfit: a hot pink shirt, a purple shrug, boldly striped leggings and lots of sparkly jewelry and black and orange halloween socks. My dad told her how cute she looked, singing praises about her outfit, and then he continued complimenting her cute personality and her intelligence. At the end of his speech, he said, "Is there anything you don't have?" She looked at him for a minute and then said, "Well, I don't have a giant."

6. We were talking about the story "Little Red Riding Hood" the other night, and I said, "Hey, we could call you that—Little Red—because of your hair."Anna emphatically rejected this, saying that her name would always be Anna Summertime Banks. I said, "But even as a nickname?" "NO!" she replied. She meant business. Then I asked her, "So you like your name, then?" She emphatically agreed. I asked, "Would you rather have a different name?" She said, "No. Never ever . . . .  Well, except for Rainbow Ruby."

7. Anna's preferred exclamation these days: "Ikes!" I hear it probably 10 times a day. Refer to this link if you don't know where this coming from.

Anna really, REALLY wanted her picture taken with this orange. I was skeptical and had to be talked into it, but I should have trusted her creative vision because it's a super cute picture.

Anna and her cousin Emme

Happy Day

Today is a special day. I can't really go into detail about what I'm doing that makes it so special because I'm writing this the night before. But I can for sure tell you what I'm NOT going to be doing today.

I will not be visiting

I should totally appropriate this for my own personal logo. I love it.

I will not be having lunch with

(mostly because she's a fictional character, but otherwise...)

I will not be shopping for sofas at

I will not travel down

And I will not use this on my dry, itchy skin.

I will, however, be eating pancakes spelling out my name. Yes, I know how to do it up right. Maybe I'll post a picture as proof, maybe not. We'll see how they turn out. In other words,

Happy Ash Wednesday, everyone.*

* And for those who don't  recognize — traditionally or nontraditionally — Ash Wednesday, this means 40 days (not counting Sundays) until Easter for you. See? We can all find a reason to celebrate.

Book Tales . . . woo-ooo

I've been thinking lately about book moods and how I decide what to read next. (Yep, I'm blogging about books—again.) Since reading is a regular part of my life—we're talking the same commitment level here as brushing my teeth (I never miss a day)—this is major. I'm always reading something. I have a stack of books by my bed that are on my "To Read" list so that when I finish the one I'm currently reading, I'm ready with the next one. I don't have time for unnecessary breaks. I'm kind of a geek like that.

(You may remember my love affair with books from such posts as this top-10 list from yesteryear and this follow-up post.) [Read that with the voice of Troy McClure from The Simpsons.]

I feel a personal responsibility to read some quality mixed in with my book candy, which I'm not above. The quality, I feel, keeps me from getting Alzheimer's. That being said, I've lately been inhaling a certain lighthearted fictional series about aristocratic British spies in the early 1800s—think Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy armed with pistols and investigating a bit of espionage . . . whilst falling in love. Sickly sweet book candy, in other words. Between trips to the library for the next in the series, I have interspersed books from the Anne of Green Gables series (which I've never read until now—shocking, right?). L.M. Montgomery is pretty classic, but I'd still put Anne in the "Old But Still Fun" category.

Anyway, this is all to say that, though the last two months have been fraught with book candy in bulk, I usually make a concerted effort to mix it up a bit with a few quote-unquote classics. (I like seeing "quote-unquote" written out. It's soooo ironic.) I like to throw some oldies and some classics in with my leisure reading for the purposes of being more well read, making my brain work harder, and reading things that might be more worthwhile, if sometimes a bit more difficult, than said book candy.

But one man's candy might be another man's substance. And another man's substance might be another's unattempted classic. Or completely the other way around.

A lot of these thoughts were prompted by a conversation I had with a friend about Pride and Prejudice. She said she stopped reading it because the language was hard to get into. I was taken aback because it's a book I know and love, but this made me think that sometimes we're afraid of books—and sometimes unnecessarily so. Sometimes merely the mention of the word "classic" can make your brain instantly build a wall and moat around a piece of literature that makes you never want to attempt it. You don't see me diving head first into Ulysses or Jude the Obscure, for instance, because I've heard they're long and difficult and, well, obscure. Sometimes the wall and moat are justified, but sometimes climbing and conquering such a wall gives me a sense of accomplishment and often leads me to undiscovered treasure, made all the more worthwhile because it did not come easily.

But THAT being said, and before I sound too preachy, all classics are not created equal, in my eyes. Some, like Jane Eyre, I undoubtedly love and think deserve the label. Many are surprisingly accessible. But to others, like Wuthering Heights or Tess of the D'Urbervilles, I say, "Next." I guess I'm slightly lazy about my classics; I really only like the ones I can get into. Sometimes it takes work and barreling through the first 100 pages (as was the case with Anna Karenina or Du Maurier's Rebecca), because I know from experience that it's after that that the magic sometimes happens. As per Rebecca, I would have called the first half a bore. But after the first 100 pages, I was totally hooked and would have called it a page turner.

So what would comprise a list of classics I actually liked? How kind of you to ask.

For instance.

My Favorite Classic Novels

1. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. Obviously. (And all other Austen novels. Obviously.)
2. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë.
3. The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck.
4. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. (Blogged about this before. See links above.)
5. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.
6. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott.
7. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner.
8. Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier.
9. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.
10. A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute. (I've seen this on classic lists, but in my mind it's really just a sweet, well-written love story. But since it was on someone's official list, it's going here. It makes me look cooler.)
11. The Call of the Wild by Jack London.
12. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway.
13. Possession by A.S. Byatt. (I've seen this on numerous lists of classics too. I don't know that I would classify it as such, but I did love it.)
14. Shosha by Isaac Bashevis Singer.
15. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. (This should serve as an example for the point of this post. I was intimidated when I started it and couldn't get into it. But I kept at it, and I found something that helped—the longer my sittings were, the easier the language became. But if I read 15 minutes here or there, I was totally lost.)
16. The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett.

______________________________________

And, just for fun (and so I don't sound like a complete literary snob), to which "classics" would I give the proverbial iron fist? Some I despised, some I just couldn't get into, but here they are:

Classic Novels I Have Not Been Able to Get Behind

1. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë.
2. Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy. (To be fair, I didn't even finish it. In fact, I didn't finish most of these. But this one was so awful! I couldn't, in good conscience, finish it because it bored me to tears.)
3. Main Street by Sinclair Lewis.
4. Moby Dick by Herman Melville.
5. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad.
6. How Green Was My Valley by Richard Llewellyn.
7. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. (I found it morally offensive and therefore too hard to read.)
8. Waverly by Sir Walter Scott.

Maybe I would feel differently about some of these if I gave them a second chance, especially now that I'm older and wiser, but who knows. I'm not ready for second chances yet.

Any classics you'd like to laud or iron fist? Come on, now's the time to vent about all that high school/college English reading you had to do.