My Ace of Cakes

Yep, my man is a rocket scientist. He'd have to be to make a cake like this. It's an "Island Theme" with a working water fall! He even created the cake stand and the palm trees.

He told me that I didn't need to go to cake decorating class. Anyone can make a cake. I told him he was nuts and it was harder than it looked, but apparantly I was wrong. The construction alone on the cake was pretty impressive. I dared him to make me one for my birthday and this is what he came up with.

He is my:

ACE OF CAKES

The Little Mako . . . a Fish Story

Okay, I am still reading The Lord of the Flies, BUT . . . Had to share!

Just went on a sailing trip to Catalina Island on a 35 foot catamaran with my Dad,
brother and his family and my husband. We had a great time and all the girls got
lots of reading done while the boys were trolling for fish on the way over there.

The fish story first . . . then an update on my reading, or lack there of.

On the way to Catalina, my brother threw out his line and trolled while we sailed across
to Catalina. He caught a couple Mackeral, but then he caught something a little stronger.
This fish had some fight to it. We were all wondering what it could be. Most of us thought
it was sea weed as we caught some VERY LARGE sea weed clumps on the way. As he is
reeling in this fish, we finally see the white underbelly of whatever it is and all of us get excited. We rush to the end of the boat where he is reeling as fast as he can.

About this time, the sea gets the better of my niece and she "chums" the water for us. She is on the back platform of the boat (Close to the water) tossing the Bear Claw she had for breakfast when all of a sudden she screams AND SO DOES MY BROTHER!!! The fish was about 5 feet from the boat at this time and by now we can tell that it is a shark, a small shark, but a shark nonetheless. I am looking through the lens of my camera trying to capture my brother's triumphant catch, so I don't see too much of what happens next. After the screaming, I dropped my camera from my face to see what was going on and saw the last bit of a huge, HUGE shark decend back into the depths of the open water. While my brother was reeling in a small Mako Shark (we figured this out later after consulting our fish book and the photos), a larger shark must have decided that he either wanted to eat the small Mako or he really liked Bear Claw Vomit, and came up to the surface to scare the crap out of everyone. I am not sure if the screaming did it or the boat or what, but he got within about 5 feet of breaking the surface and then took off. Just going off this shark's girth alone, he was probably a 10-12 footer. Needless to say, my sister-in-law was not to anxious to get in the water once we got to Catalina.

Okay, now for the book update:
I started reading The Lord of The Flies (even though I have definitely read it before. I read it, for some odd reason, while I was pregnant with my oldest son) at home and took it with me to finish up on the boat. It was slow going to say the least. I got to page 62 and then decided that I wanted to read some fluff. There was fluff on the boat. YIPEE!!!! So I read Nights of Rodanthe, because it is coming out as a movie really soon. It was about the same number of pages as The Lord of the Flies, but it just was dragging along. R-E-A-L-L-Y S-L-O-W! So I read the other one. It was good to read fluff. Does that make me a cheater? After I finished the fluff book, I did revert back to The Lord of the Flies and am now up to page 80! WOO HOO!!!

Once a cheater, always a cheater. I will cheat again. I promise you!

Book 2: Lord of the Flies

Seeing how there are so many flies around this summer (more so than ever before), it is only fitting that I read Lord of the Flies as my next book.

My cousin's daughter (what does that make her to me?? Anyone know? 2nd cousins??) is reading that in high school so why not read along.

I just wasn't up for Crime and Punishment or War and Peace.

Is it bad that part of the other reason I picked it is that it is 202 pages long which is less than half of the 502 pages I read for Native Son?

I know . . . I am going to start keeping track of ALL the pages I read! FOREVER!!!! I have 502 at the moment and it's going to climb!

Oh, yeah! See if you can keep up!

Bigger Gets the Chair!

After a long, VERY LONG, drawn out court scene in which Richard Wright uses the last third of the book as his soapbox for everything from blacks vs. whites to rich vs. poor to communism (He was a Communist), Bigger is sentenced to death by the electric chair. Bigger goes to his death thinking he killed for a reason, but the reader is not that convinced.

The book is a good action filled book for the first 2 thirds. Bigger kills in the first book, is hunted and pursued in the second book and then tried in the last book. The last 1/3 of the book is the lawyers waxing poetically for or against the way Bigger was treated in his life. It fizzled out at the end and I was happy to be done with the 502 page book.

I am actually happy that I finished it. I am happy because I can now say I have actually read it cover to cover, but also happy to be done with it. Sad as that sounds. I know that I won't love every book that I read on my TOP 100 list, but this one was l-o-n-g.

I found it interesting that I the first 2/3 of the book (the action packed part, the story, not the point) read really fast. I zoomed through it. But when I got to the court scene and, through the lawyers, the point of the book was made, I had trouble getting to the end. What does that say about me?? Hmmm . . .

On to a different book . . . a shorter book!

Still Reading . . .

Okay, I should have been done by now, but I am not. I only have less than 100 pages to go . . . okay, I have 98 pages to go.

This book was 500+ pages. I was chugging along at 50 pages a day. Ambitious? Yes. Almost done.

What shall we read next??

On the Table:

My friend Lisa (went to high school with her and she is still a close friend) says:

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD by Harper Lee.

My Cousin's Daughter, Gracie is reading:

THE LORD OF THE FLIES (Pssst . . . It's short). So I thought maybe I would read it with her.

My Niece says she wants to read:

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT because it is sitting on her bookshelf, and like me, she only read part of it.

Hmmmmmm . . .

Any suggestions??

First one to comment wins (Please don't let it be my Crime and Punishment Niece!!!!) I am going to email my friend LISA right now!

Bigger Thomas Does the Deed . . . Not that Deed

This is what I imagine Bigger Thomas would look like if Native Son was a movie.

Okay, so Native Son is divided up into three books, the first book being FEAR. It takes up the first 100 or so pages.

SYNOPSIS:

Bigger, a 20 year old black loafer living with his mother, sister and brother in a one room apartment, gets a job as a chauffeur for a rich white family. On his first job, he drives Mary, the daughter, to pick up her boyfriend, Jan, a Communist and then out for some Soul food on the wrong side of the tracks. Mary gets really, REALLY drunk and when Bigger gets her home, she needs help up to her bedroom. Things get out of hand and when the blind mother walks in, Bigger freaks out and covers Mary’s face with a pillow so the blind mother will not know he is there. In the process of covering her face with the pillow he smothers her and kills her. Not wanting to go to jail, he stuffs Mary’s body in a trunk with the intent on taking it to the train station which he was supposed to do in the morning anyway. However, he decided that it would be better to burn her up in the furnace in the basement to hide the evidence. She was supposed to be going on a trip in the morning to Boston for a couple of days anyway. No one would miss her right away. Bigger shoves her in feet first, but she doesn’t quite fit, her head left hanging out of the door. He tries to hack Mary’s head off with his pocketknife to no avail so he finishes the job with a hatchet and throws the head in after the body, dumping coal on top to hide it.
It’s about 4 in the morning, when he decided to go home and go to bed.

This whole first part sets the stage for the rest of the novel. Racism is apparent where ever Bigger turns and in part, is responsible for his actions – SORT OF. I know a lot of you will disagree with this statement, but it is the crux of the novel later on. I know the novel was set in the 50’s so racism is prevalent, but it is just as shocking to know that racism still exists today, maybe not as prevalent, but it is still there.

They say everyone has a little racism in them. I will agree with that statement. When I see a black man dressed like a gang banger, I am prejudiced against him. I will walk on the other side of the street to avoid him. That man might not even be a gang member, but the mere fact that he is dressed the way he is, makes me afraid. On the flip side of this, however, I have had the same reaction to the WHITE kids dressed the same way. They make me nervous too. So I am equal opportunity prejudice, I guess.

The one thing I have never been is prejudiced against someone because of their race. I live and grew up in a suburb of LA and LA has been a melting pot of all races since FOREVER!!! I have never known a classroom without black kids, white kids, Chinese kids, kids from Iran during the Iran Hostage Crisis etc. Normal stuff for me. So, racism, seems like a foreign concept to me. I really didn’t think anything of it until I took a trip to Alabama with my husband for work. We stayed at a hotel in Alabama where all the staff was black. In fact, it seemed like everywhere we went, all the service staff were black. This “coincidence” was not lost on me.

There was actually a black couple staying at the hotel where we were staying in Alabama. They looked like they were feeling out of place. They stuck to themselves and kept their eyes down in the all white (very white – no other nationalities) dining-room where we were all eating our continental breakfast. The black man bumped into me on the way back from the buffet line and was overly apologetic like I was going to have him lynched or something. It was crazy. I told him “No worries,” and meant it. But I found his reaction very strange. This was my first exposure to the Deep South. When I got back to California, I coincidentally read a little tidbit on CNN.com that reinforced my reaction to Alabama. I read that the first EVER integrated prom happened just that year (2002 or so) and it wasn’t a result of the adults getting together and deciding that it would be a good idea. It was the kids who decided that they were going to do this. I was appalled that this could be happening in this day and age. I was clueless to all of this. Living in my own little multicultural bubble in California, I really had no perception that attitudes like this still existed. I was cognizant of these attitudes, but thought “Aren’t we done with that. Didn’t Martin Luther King settle some of this in the 60’s??” Gave me something to think about.

It was eye opening to say the least.

Native Son: What I Remember from Grad School

Well, I must have read some of it, because there are notations in the margins in my handwriting up through page 100. I find it interesting that I actually only remember one thing about Native Son. I remember that Bigger Thomas, the lead character who is black (I am not going to try and be PC here), put a dead woman in a furnace. That’s all I remember. I don’t remember the circumstances up to the furnace or anything after the furnace. All I remember is that he put her in the furnace, which is why when presented with the 3 choices of books above, I thought “Native Son should be interesting. He shoves a girl into the furnace.” However, the only thing I remember about Crime and Punishment is something about the landlady getting an axe in the head, but that’s a whole different blog. Wow! What does that say about me?

Native Son was a book I was supposed to read in Grad School. I was taking a class on African American (I am only being PC here, because that is actually what it was called) Literature. I loved the stuff that I had read (actually read) previously and was even considering doing my comprehensive exams on it, but was stifled by the professor believe it or not. I enjoyed Black lit and thought that I might like to teach ethnic lit after Grad school. My black professor said that no one would take me seriously because I was not black. WOW!!! I was stunned. I found that sooo hard to believe. While I respected her for her knowledge and scholarship, I felt like I had been discriminated against. I couldn’t do a good job just because I was white?? Hmmm . . . that sounds familiar. Isn’t that exactly what we were studying and reading about?? Racial prejudice? I can’t help but think that that is the reason I didn’t finish Native Son. I did write a paper on it and I did receive a B—Good considering I didn’t read the whole book.