Mastering the Art of French Cooking

I'm reading a new book. It is called Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen: How one girl risked her marriage, her job and her sanity to master the art of fine living. It's non-fiction, but according to the introduction, loosely non-fiction. I read about it in Entertainment Weekly and decided that it might be a good book to give my mother-in-law for Christmas. But before I decided for real to give it to her for Christmas I thought I'd read it first, just to make sure. So I had the library acquire it for me, rather than Barnes & Noble. It's much cheaper to have your library do this - free in fact - you just have to wait a few weeks and then you also have to return it before they charge you late fees. And as far as I know, you can have your library acquire any number of books you want as often as you like. I feel a little guilty about having them do it too often so I've only done it twice. The other book was Riding the Bus With My Sister, which was unfortunately turned into a made for tv movie with Andy McDowell and Rosie O'Donnell but was a great book.

Anyway, I don't think my mother-in-law would like it. The first clue was because there is a mention of J.Lo, and I am not entirely sure my m-i-l knows what that stands for. But it was still under consideration. Then there was a line that says, "the place was lousy with Republicans." Now I know my m-i-l reads thousands of books, and I'm sure she's read a bunch that have Republican bashing themes or whatever, but I wouldn't knowingly introduce this theme to her.

See, the m-i-l and her son (my husband) are Republicans. But I'm not going to talk about that here. Like I told Gerald on our very first date, I don't talk about politics. Little did I know that coming from an Irish family means talking politics often. Very often. American politics. Irish politics. French politics. You name it. Surprisingly, he still fell in love with me. And we still find interesting things to talk about, most of the time, even if it is football.

Maybe I ruined it for myself when I decided to read the book first. Oh well. Actually she's probably the only person that I have really good ideas for in terms of gift giving. Her birthday is near Christmas, so she's going to get a knitted/felted hot water bottle cover for her 60th birthday. Then she'll get a knitted wine cozy for Christmas, filled with a bottle of wine, and two of those really cool stemless wine glasses that you can get at Williams-Sonoma.

I've felt like I've had the diarrhea of the keyboard. I'm so sorry to bore all of you, faithful readers. Please forgive me. My life will have a theme someday, and my blog will become an enjoyable recollection of something meaningful. Good day.