Piper and I give Kimberly Akimbo a “Meh+” but Legally Blonde is not only one of my favorite shows, but Village Theater produced it particularly well.
January Musicals
Wes Is No Longer 14!
That’s a long way to say that Wes turned 15 today, with Driver’s Ed class starting in about a week. Piper made him an Oreo ice cream cake and Catniss didn’t scratch him. His fellow alpaca haircut friends celebrated with videos and junk food.
Happy Birthday, my beloved son! You are kind and even-keeled and smart and huggable. It’s a delight to watch you grow up.
Best Husband Ever, Evidence 001 in 2025
Dwayne and equally-wonderful human, Keith, installed a railing on my parents’ front porch this weekend. I was very, very, very impressed.
“It Can Only Get Better”
Top 20 Reads for 2024
Of the 160 books I consumed this year, these rose to the top, somewhat in order and split between fiction and nonfiction. I want to know what you loved this year!
| Fiction | |||
| 1 | Just for the Summer | Abby Jimenez | Even better than a good Emily Henry story (and she is one of the best) is a new Abby Jimenez novel. Again, supposedly a romance (and in this case, a bold romance where they actually really like each other, without contrived plot twists) but really, this is about how to be a better human, recognizing brokenness, working both with repairing relationships and rejecting harmful one and putting yourself first sometimes. Best when read after Part of Your World. |
| 2 | Funny Story | Emily Henry | A reread, for the lovely social-emotional learning and insight and good romance story, dealing with trauma, assumptions, families. |
| 3 | The Women | Kristin Hannah | This made the list because I know little about the Vietnam War but, as is Hannah’s magic, I was immersed in this field nurse’s experience, both during and after her service. I didn’t relate much to this character, but I learned more about the Unites States in context of recent-ish history. |
| 4 | Not in Love | Ali Hazelwood | As Ali says in her intro, this is more erotic than romantic, but I love her complex (spectrum, likely, heroine) characters and how they bravely try to translate their feelings into communications skills. |
| 5 | Warrior Girl Unearthed | Angeline Boulley | Sequel to Firekeeper’s Daughter, loved it. I feel like this is a place I’ve visited now, a quality shared with Kristin Hannah, but Boulley has better, realistic characters. |
| 6 | The Secret Diary of Hendrik Groen, 83 1/4 Years Old | Hendrik Groen | Supposedly observations of an elderly man in an assisted living home in Amsterdam, but Hendrik comes to life and even becomes a model of how to get older and better. This is the first in a series that is thoughtful, mundane, funny, morose, bittersweet, and all the other reflections of a good human life. And I will be starting my own “Old But Not Dead Yet” club someday. |
| 7 | The Running Grave | Robert Galbraith | I love the Cormoran Strike series but hate some of the books. The latest brought our gumshoes into a UK cult, which paired well with my NF readings about fundamentalism in the US. Not only a good story, but an excellent continuation of the story arc. She is an excellent writer. |
| 8 | The Fragile Threads of Power | V.E. Schwab | Yes! The first book in a series that takes place 7 years after the Shades of Magic trilogy. Love the old characters and adore the new ones. |
| 9 | Plan A | Deb Caletti | Wow, what a heartbreaking story of a bright girl in small town, TX, who gets pregnant (neither by having sex or by consenting) and the difficulty of getting an abortion on this side of the overturning of Roe v Wade. I was fully immersed in the story, even when I had look away because the treatment this girl received was beyond my capacity to witness. I want all my kids to read this book. I will need to read more by this author. |
| 10 | A Ruse of Shadows (Charlotte Holmes, #8) | Sherry Thomas | Considering this was the 8th book, I was very surprised when I finished and immediately had to reread it to unravel the story once I knew the ending. Bravo, Sherry, bravo! |
| Bonus | Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone | Benjamin Stevenson | Picked it up for the title, stayed for the narrator’s voice. I’ll read more of him. |
| Bonus | A Line to Kill | Anthony Horowitz | This is the third Hawthorne book, and the clever narration still amuses me through the entire novel. And, no, I did not guess the ending before poor Horowitz had it unraveled for him. |
| NonFiction | |||
| 1 | A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s plot to take over America, and the woman who stopped them. | Timothy Egan | A book that rattled me the most, which, considering #4-6 on this list, is quite a feat. The title says enough. |
| 2 | Revenge of the Tipping Point | Malcolm Gladwell | Possibly his best yet. Opioids & triplicate prescriptions; college admissions–race v. athletics; gay marriage and Will & Grace; Miami’s outrageous Medicaid fraud culture; how the Holocaust came to be remembered decades and decades after the end of WWII. Gladwell tackles all this, and suicide clusters in high achieving high schools and how this relates to cheetahs, this in his inimitable style. I want to listen a few more times to get a good grasp on his bigger ideas. Oh, and a tipping point, such as women in the board room, is about 1/3 to go from token to part of the community. |
| 3 | The Small and the Mighty | Sharon McMahon | Profiles-in-courage-esque, but really focusing on Americans overlooked in history, usually because of their gender, skin color, or religion. Even if the topic were dull (and it’s not!), McHahon is gripping in her storytelling. But she is very much an educator (history prof, actually), and describes events and remarkable people in the context that they should be appreciated. She really needs to write more books, or I need to start listening to podcasts. This is the American History that we’re not taught in school. |
| 4 | A Well-Trained Wife | Tia Levings | Remembering scenes from this escaped-from-fundamentalist (ok, completely un-Christ-like) marriage still makes my stomach knot. But it gave me a chance to walk in shoes I would never willingly wear, and when the 2024 election cycle made voting differently than your husband an issue, I understood it better than I wanted to. |
| 5 | Baptistland | Christa Brown | “When Christa Brown first spoke out about the sexual abuse she endured in her Texas childhood church, she never imagined it would expose the ethical chasm at the core of the Southern Baptist male religious leaders so focused on institutional protection that they sacrifice the safety of children. A book about speaking out and speaking up, Baptistland weaves together Christa’s revealing story of hope amid Southern patriarchy and religious fundamentalism.” |
| 6 | Disobedient Women: How a small group of faithful women exposed abuse, brought down powerful pasters, and ignited an evangelical reckoning | Sarah Stankorb | More reason to hate fundamentalist Christianity, or any system deliberately made to benefit the powerful few and oppress women. This was a good summary of earlier reading I did by Christa Brown and Tia Levings. Yes, there was a theme to my reading this year. |
| 7 | Maybe You Should Talk to Someone | Lori Gottlieb | Full of, well, gentle truth bombs, as this therapist sees patients and is a patient. I underlined many passages to continue to reflect on. She also writes an “Ask the Therapist” for The Atlantic. |
| 8 | Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma | Claire Dederer | Premise: What do you do about art you love when the artist (author, musician) is someone you abhor? Is there a difference between ethical thoughts and moral feelings? The author delves in to genius and Lolita and Little House on the Prairie. and monstrousness as a stain that can’t easily be removed. And people aren’t just a product of their time–often they had the opportunity to know better but chose otherwise. “If male crime is rape, the female crime is failure to nurture” (abandoning children). “I wondered: wasn’t calling them monsters, writing about their monstrousness, enumerating their monster sins, just a way of keeping them at the center of the story?” (p 45). End thought: With so many options, we can avoid what we naturally dislike and as humans, justify what we do; however, how we consume art is not morally good or bad. |
| 9 | Shortest Way Home | Pete Buttigieg | Read by author— wow, I need to vote for this guy for Pres someday! Excellently written memoir of his life into his 2nd term of mayor, with plenty of admitting of mistakes, learning from them, matter-of-fact thoughtfulness and intelligence. |
| 10 | The Salt Path | Raynor Winn | I did not think I’d like this as much as I did. She somehow did not get bogged down in the travelog nature, not dwelling on the best or worst of the hike itself but wove her tale together with social and political realism/commentary. They hiked because they were homeless and broke– and were treated differently depending upon what they’re fellow travelers knew about them. She truly is an excellent, later-in-life writer. |
Have An Ungrumpy Christmas!
We are!
(Well, I probably need to apologize for my less social children’s hosting ability, but I tried to apologize thoroughly enough when they were younger to cover for many, many years.)
Thanks for the friends and family who trek it out to our place each year and bring food, frolic, and fun.
Christmas Letter 2024
Nov. 26: I can’t write this letter because I’m reading Michael Sullivan’s latest, and I am not putting it down.
Nov. 29: National Swearing Day dictates that the family finds the tree, cuts the tree, sets up the tree, decorates the tree, and then collapses by the tree. It’s tradition.
Dec 3: I’m finishing The Art of Racing in the Rain and I need to cry all the tears.
Dec. 4-10: I am making poor decisions about Christmas rom-coms on Kindle Unlimited.
Dec. 6-16: I’ve been working with a real estate lawyer and I’ve temporarily lost my humanity… and writing style.
Dearest Friends and Family,
I am running out of both excuses and time, as I self-inflict my annual reframing of the past year to my own satisfaction.
Beloveds, my maternity leave had her 18th birthday this year! I tried to celebrate that I now have two kids and a grown up, but Kyla’s look of horror of not being a kid anymore stopped me quickly. We celebrated her adult responsibilities with an RV trip to Silverwood Theme Park. She was officially diagnosed with mild autism last winter, which stopped her not at all in continuing to straddle both high school and community college, working the same job for four years, and generally adulting. She still loves metal design and is figuring out how to balance that with earning a living wage someday. (Believe you me, Kyla’s mother has been very annoying about that.) I breathlessly anticipate next year’s newsletter so I know what she’s doing after graduation.
Parenting is never dull. I keep telling the kids that if they don’t want to see me naked, they shouldn’t barge into my room. Now the middle one barges in while covering her eyes. Me-thinks the correct lesson has not been learned here.
When Piper turned 16, she got her driver’s license, was nearly eaten by a camel, and kissed an alpaca. These are mostly unrelated, but for someone who sleeps like (and with) a cat, she leads a fairly interesting life. Piper gave all of us a rough spring and summer with numerous and inconvenient medical therapies. Once we got back to school, the appointments became even more onerous. After one that was book-ended by Seattle rush hour traffic, I told her that if she was cured, we could stop all the appointments. Before I even finished, she threw her hands in the air, and declared in her most chipper voice, “I’m CURED!”. And honestly, it’s been easy since then. We have finally found the payoff of raising a very stubborn and determined changeling.
Wes is almost 15!! That is not a “can you believe my baby is almost in driver’s ed?” wonderment. That is Dwayne and me happy-dancing that he is nearly not 14. For those who followed us in 2022, Piper was 14 on our Big World Adventure. This household is almost done with fourteen-year-olds.[1] In addition to virtual-reality-video-game-life, Wes continues building an incredible machine body that lifts weights, rock climbs like it’s a horizontal surface, and my proudest moment, learned to front flip, which is probably not surprising for a kid who learned to walk on a trampoline. (After he first learned to trampoline on my bladder.) It was hilarious when he grew taller than his sisters, not so funny when he shot past me, mildly amusing when he started looking down on his beloved Papa, and terrifying when he could outlift him.
Under the category of why we can’t have nice things: I was so excited by my almost-new car last year. Since then, each kid has put their own special mark on it, even my too-young-to-drive Wes, when he dropped a bike on the front and scratched both the windshield and hood. Sigh. And you should see what the girls have done to the kids’ car! Luckily, the replacement minivan came pre-dented.
This is my Golden Year. Not only did I turn 50 last month, but all three kids (ahem, both kids and my grown child) are in high school together. I love having only one PTSA in my life, and it’s always fun to sub at their school. My goal was to read 180 books this year, so unless I can read twenty more books in the next two weeks, I’ll maintain my perfect not-meeting-goals streak. I regularly horrify myself by hunting down cat pee in the dark with a blacklight and opening Piper’s bedroom door. Also, I got to remodel the kids’ bathroom this year. Twice.[2]
Dwayne looks back on this year and can’t remember doing any big projects. That could be his turning 50 this year[3] or he’s still in the computer modeling stage of the projects he wants to do. Last April, he and a friend flew to Tennessee to see the eclipse. I tagged along because I love new city adventures astrophysics, and I was pleased when I was able to spend the afternoon reading in the sun watching the moon. He is a month away from his 28th Microsoft anniversary, and will soon have three kids in college, or jail, so he’s not retiring yet.
I think of this year as another year of not traveling, but pictures prove otherwise. Dwayne and I celebrated a friend’s birthday in Victoria, BC, traveled separately to family in CA and OR, camped in the different corners of WA and ID, embraced the Parthenon replica in Nashville, and tramped all over San Juan Island. In August, Dwayne and I took the kids to NYC for our Big Apple adventure. Piper and I saw lots of shows and only a fraction of what we wanted. Kyla joined us for all the museums, and Wes walked for miles to earn gaming time back at the flat. New York is surreal. We found ourselves getting gelato in Times Square at 11pm on a Saturday night after seeing The Lion King, and none of the introverts were freaking out, in spite of being surrounded by the biggest crowds of our life.
Less fun, we broke our 12-year 4th of July at the cabin streak and changed plans for others when all five of us got COVID for the first time this summer. It was like watching a tidal wave come for me in slo-mo while I scurried to get groceries, medicines, and tests before I succumbed last.
We have not done well with small, adorable animals in the past (Exhibit A: Hamsters 1-3, and all cats before Timmy and Rosie), so it gives my family sincere pleasure that Nugget the Bearded Dragon still lives. Piper’s emotional support reptile enjoys his pampered lifestyle and is such a blank slate that, like a good crush, thinks and says everything we wish him to, and he objects not to wearing hats as dictated by fashion and season. We wish you fun hats, too, this holiday.
Merry, Merry Everything!
Denise, with no blame to Dwayne,
Kyla (18), Piper (16) or Wes (14)
PS Damn it, I’ve finished the letter and didn’t swear or mention penises. I’ll do better in 2025.
[1] Read that any way you want to.
[2] Query: Is breaking a wall-sized mirror seven years of regular bad luck or extra bad luck? Asking for a friend. Regardless, it was Timmy Cat’s fault.
[3] My even-keeled, easy-going, wonderful husband was a tiny bit whiny about this birthday. He is still very, very cute.
Introducing the Newest Octogenarians!
Mom/Grandma and Aunt Janet turned almost-80 today, a convenient party day before the official turning. All but one daughter-in-law (who was very much missed) was able to celebrate, with a catered dinner at The Grandparents’. Piper prepared a cake that she, Cecily and Amber turned into an aesthetic wonderland of love and frosting.
Having the family together was gift enough (and shout out to Brian who made the quick trip up with no back up driver and not enough sleep!) but we managed to fit in an ornament exchange to round out food and fun.
So Fun, It Should Be … Illegally Blonde
The movie was good, yah, yah, but turn it into a musical? Brilliantly Blonde. And yes, I am doing the Bend and Snap. Turns out, it works.
What Wes Did Instead
Splendid Grandma took Wes to his parkour champion games this afternoon, and he came home with 3rd place! This is a big deal because I got to go last time and these are the best of the best– Wes hadn’t anticipated getting to crack the top 3 anytime soon; he came in 4th last spring.
In fact, this is what Wes was able to do last month. He has been practicing in the parkour gym for months, and finally felt confident to show us in the backyard. I honestly probably have never been prouder.
That’s my boy!
Needopedia 