Wednesday 30 July 2008

TBR August

  • Ein Mann wie Mr. Darcy (Jane Austen’s Guide to Dating)
  • Vermiss mein nicht (A place called here)
  • Die Bücherdiebin (The Book Thief)
  • Cost of Freedom (didn't make it in the last months, sorry Carol!)

Wednesday 23 July 2008

How to Think Sideways

I have decided to join the How To Think Sideways course by Holly Listle.

Am I crazy? Maybe :)

You can find all info here.

I hopefully will make a lot of progress (yeah, sure, knowing me) and will post about it here.

Monday 21 July 2008

Names

So, where do you find the names for your characters? Do you flip through books with baby names? Search the internet?

My characters usually name themselves. They know their names better than I do anyhow ;) Ella has always been Ella and Anna was immediately Anna Carr.
What I have trouble with afterwards is to rename characters that definitively need to be renamed. Abosaa couldn’t keep his name for obvious reasons (it’s an abbreviation for “A Breath of Snow and Ashes” a book by Diana Gabaldon). I like Edan well enough (as it means fire, and he is a dragon person) but he’ll always be Abosaa for me.
As Jo’s Annique will always be Anneka to me and many others.

What I do when I need a name that isn’t coming to me and when I don’t have time to think up one, is to just insert some random name. Captain Jim Knopf is named after this fellow (he’s the little black one – a string puppet). Lt. Commander John Doe’s name needs no explanation.

And for everyone wondering who the heck these people are: I’ll post some snips later on. :)

Monday 14 July 2008

Origami Gift

Here are pictures of how the gift looked in the end (wrapped the whole thing in transparent gift wrapper and ribbons after taking the photos)





Friday 11 July 2008

Wordle

Found this on Jo's blog

For Before and After:




For my blog:

Thursday 10 July 2008

Origami Book

No, this is not actually a How To book, but a origami book.

I'm making a gift certificate for books and was cruising the internet for some ideas (I actually thought about origami, but never believed to find something as neat as this). This is perfect!









Lustige Videos – Gratis Fun Video – Deine funny Videos bei Clipfish

Monday 7 July 2008

Review - Everything is Illuminated

I don't know where to begin with this one. Maybe here: I love it!

It all started when I made a list of the movies the four Hobbits and Legolas (that being Elijah Wood, Dominic Monaghan, Billy Boyd, Sean Astin and Orlando Bloom) stared in after The Lord of the Rings.
Some time later I was in a multimedia shop and there the DVDs were marked down. I went looking of course. And found the movie "Everything is Illuminated" for about 5€. OK so far. I didn't know anything about this one, exept that the cover was Elijah nerdy looking, standing in a field of sunflowers.
Brought it home, watched it, loved it. My mom said "It's so typical of you to like a strange movie like this. With so many layers of meaning and so much to think about."
Well, the book is the same.

The story is about a young man (Jonathan Safran Foer) in search of the woman that saved his grandfather's life in WWII. He's an American Jew and traveling to the Ukraine to find her. He hires a Heritage Tour Guide (Alex, about the same age - the surname beats me right now - and his "blind" grandfather, who's driver. Ah. Not to forget the Officious Seeing Eye Bitch. A dog named Sammy Davis Jr. Jr.)
The book alternates between letters from Alex to Jonathan, Alex's "travelogue" and the history of Jonathan's ancestors (this part is a bit strange, so I won't talk about it here).
Alex's use of words is funny and rather tragic at times. Over the course of the story you learn that Jonathan told him to use a Thesaurus to broaden his vocabulary. And he does. All the time. Like "It was hard to climb the steps" (I'm making that up here), he'd say "It was rigid to climb the steps". As I said, this sometimes effects greatly what he’s talking about and I was close to tears not only once.
Alex first tries to give off the impression that he’s this very cool person from this very cool city, Odessa. Both nothing short of any cool guy and city in America. But by and by you see that not all is cool in his world and that Jonathan seems to have had some impact on his way of thinking about his life. And I was surprised sometimes (though I really shouldn’t have been) by the depth of some of his thoughts.
I haven’t mentioned Grandfather. And I won’t, because I don’t want to give anything away.


Rent or buy? Buy!

Review - The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters

Three people meet by chance and try to solve a riddle and to not lose their life.

How's that for a one sentence synopsis? ;)

I must admit, I don't like writing reviews very much. But I want to try and learn, and that's why I will anyhow. Although this one will be brief.

The story was like the finale of the European World Cup. Analogy: the first five minutes where great, then there was nothing going on really, around the 60th minute there came another great 5 minutes but a disappointing finish followed.
I couldn't really relate to the characters, and I don't understand Ms Temple at all. Doctor Svenson and Cardinal Chang being the other people of the trio had their moments where you could get a gimpse at what keeps them going. But that woman was just ridiculous.

And maybe I'm just stupid, but I didn't understand the whole business with the glassbooks. I of course understood the righout explanations but beside that...


Rent or buy? Rent, if you're curious still.

Thursday 3 July 2008

My birthday

is still one and a half month away, but I need your help.

For dinner I had planned lasagna and some kind of turkey/chicken goulash (with yoghurt sauce).

But - usually - it's rather hot in August and I fear that people won't only want to eat hot food.

So I abandoned the goulash. But what to make instead? Something that can be eaten lukewarm or cold would be good. Any ideas?
I will also have a cheese platter and self-made brown soda bread, but I want to have another "main course"

I already cruised several cooking sites, but they offer so many recipes that I cannot decide (or even narrow them down).

And if anyone is interested, for the coffee party in the afternoon I will have my Mom's cheesecake with fruit, white Death by Chocolate (white because I've done the "brown" one so many times and people still demand it, but I thought white would be a nice variation) and Claire's Plum Coconut Cake.