Barnheart uncovered

I have finished Jenna Woginrich's memoir, Barnheart, and let me tell you, that girl has more energy than I EVER had - even when I was as young as she was.  I am NOT the get up early, dig-in-the-garden, feed-the-chickens kind.  I am the get up early, pick-up-a-book and get-lost-in-it sort.

That said, I found this book fun to read and very educational.  I never realized that sheepherding was such a widespread occupation.  Even as an avocation, I expected it to be practiced by just a handful of earthy people.  Nor, did I know that there was such a network of livestock swaps.  Now, maybe here in Jenna's native PA, these things don't exist.  Up in Pike County they might or over Bradford way along the NY/PA border in the west.

Jenna's good fortune lasts half way through the book.  When she decides she wants something, she finds a way to get it.  And it feels like things fall into her lap!  Never fear. This book is more about the struggles of the homesteading life than a crowing self-congratulation.  Raising more than half her own food, caring for chickens, geese, breeding rabbits, caring for sheep AND working a full time job does not sound like a picnic to me.  Oops, I forgot the dogs and the turkey and the ordeal of schlepping things around in a Subaru station wagon.  And then trouble looms and Jenna is faced with hard decisions, sigh!

If you like gardening; if you even once in awhile wish you had a flock of chickens - (that is more common an aspiration these days than you might think!); if you wish you knew where your food came from; AND if, like me, you prefer your adventures between the covers of a book, Barnheart is a rollicking read.  Now, I have to find a copy of her first memoir, Made from Scratch.  Hope it's as good as Barnheart.

Barnheart FOUND!!!!!!!!!!

I found the book!  I FOUND BARNHEART!!  And it was somewhere I would never have looked.  It was...ready?  You won't believe it.  It was behind the bathroom vanity.  I looked IN the bathroom vanity where I keep my cleaning supplies and trash basket and I looked in the drawers.  Until recently, our bathroom vanity was flush against the bathroom wall and nothing could fall behind it.  It's an old, inexpensive MDF vanity and it pulled away from the wall mount and, yes, I know I should get a new vanity but my sink hasn't sprung a leak or anything sooo...

This is a "reenactment" of where the book was found.

 Anyway, I was putting some towels away on the little wicker towel thingy next to the vanity and I moved it (the wicker towel thingy, not the vanity, though I can move the vanity now that I think of it), and there was something behind the vanity.  It was actually further back than the photo shows and upside down.  I just wanted you to see how nicely the book fit back there.  Could it be?  YES, it was!  I had to retrieve it from inside the vanity.  The vanity is "inexpensive" enough to have no back.

And, my replacement book just came at the end of last week.  I am half way through it and when I am done, I will give you a review.  Just know this.  The book is worth the angst I felt when I lost it. 

The original "lost" book rests on top of the replacement book - together at last.

How I Stole Johnny Depp's Alien Girlfriend and other random thoughts

Barnheart's trail is stone cold.  (So is the trail for my brown watch but no one cares about that.)  So I am going to post some random thoughts and a book review.

How I Stole Johnny Depp's Alien Girlfriend by Gary Ghislain - who wouldn't want to read about how a fourteen-year-old boy bests the "most attractive" man in the world when it comes to romance?  But is she really Johnny Depp's girlfriend?  Is she really an alien?  Is she merely criminally insane?  You will have to be the judge.

Here's the set-up: A fourteen year old boy is spending the summer with his pyscho-therapist dad in a sleepy town in the south of France - major boredom-inducing sleepy town.  Dad has only one patient living with them this summer, a seventeen year old girl who claims to be an alien searching for her one true mate.  So our hero spends most of his time eavesdropping on the therapy sessions.

When Psycho-Alien-Girl (P-A-G - my term.  Her name is Zelda.) bashes Dad on the head because he won't let her go search for her mate, Mom drives down - with Mom's boyfriend - to rescue our hero.  Surprise! P-A-G has hitched a ride. In Paris the book morphs into an action novel with amazing superhuman feats by P-A-G, quick thinking by our hero, cop chases, an abandoned chapel filled with tattooed women warriors all claiming to be aliens stranded here when their search for the One and Only (I forget what term they use for the perfect mate in this novel, sorry) failed.  Oh, and the DNA profile for this perfect mate matches Johnny Depp! Yeah.

So is she crazy?  Is HE crazy?  And does Johnny Depp even make an appearance in this book?  Read it.  The book is as much fun as the title implies.

OK.  Random thoughts:
1.  Putting candied citrus peels in a hot oven to speed up the drying time is a BAD idea.
2.  Making candied citrus peels in the summer is not too bright either.  It's too muggy for the peels to dry properly.  Too late.  I have two trays of citrus peel on the kitchen counter.

Wait until they're dipped in chocolate!!

3.  You can't just stick dried flowers on a piece of paper for a Father's Day card.  You CAN but fathers are not all that impressed with craftiness in gifts - especially after the kid has a kid of her own (and that kid is on the way to having his own kid. Tempus fugit!).  Hence the candied citrus peels.
5.  Craftiness is most appreciated if it is edible.
4.  These thoughts are not as random as I hoped.
5.  New sneakers - even the ones with the rocker-type soles - do not instantly make their wearers svelte.  Or more inclined to exercise.
6. Random thoughts race away when I sit down to share them.

Lost Book

I have lost a book.  This post is a desperate attempt to find it.  As far as I know, it never left this building but perhaps, the book, like its author, wanted a more rural setting and is now even as I type tucked inside a rucksack headed for Pike County.

The book is Barnheart.  I think the author is Jenna Woginrich.  I wish I could tell you more about it.  I had just left the author in the snow outside her new rental, a 600 square foot cabin, on a six acre lot in the woods of Vermont.  Oh wait, no she was already inside with a fire burning and she was making plans for chickens and a garden and fences and possibly geese and she felt very lucky to be where she was.

I WANT TO READ THIS BOOK!  The puzzle of its whereabouts has taken over my brain.  I blew off a committee meeting because this book is missing.  (Blew off as in totally forgot the committee, its purpose and its personnel because they can't help me find the book.)

And now, what am I doing?  Visiting my aged parents?  Sending a wedding present to a young friend? Printing out the photos I promised to send along MONTHS ago?  Weeding the garden?  Doing any of a thousand productive and necessary things I might do?  NO!!

I am fixating about a lost book.  Oh, I have other books, too many other books.  But I want to READ THIS ONE!!!  WHERE IS IT??

Worse than all of this is the fact that this book is an advanced reader's copy and doesn't even exist in cyberworld so I can't just go out and buy another copy.  (I CAN pre-order it on Amazon.  It doesn't come out until January of 2012.  Waaaahhhhhh!!)  Oh woe.  Oh woe is me. (Bangs head against metaphorical wall and moans - metaphorically.)

Can anyone help me find this book?  Please?  I want to read about barns and homesteading and sustainable living and I (grits teeth) want ...to...read...NOW!!

Thank you (sad little sigh of no hope)