#94: Replace one of our cars.

We decided several months ago that when it came time to replace one of our vehicles, mine would be the one to go. My loyal RAV4 (affectionately known as Ravvy) was getting on in years and would need to be put out to pasture much sooner than Tom's Camry, which is newer and still in great shape.

Well, about a month ago, Ravvy's A/C went out. Tom replaced the freon, which worked for about two days, and then the A/C was gone again. Our mechanic said the condenser would need to be replaced, along with the timing belt. Given Ravvy's age and the fact that we were already thinking about replacing her, it didn't really seem worth it to get the repairs done. So, two weeks ago we started looking for her replacement. After several days of comparison shopping (and plenty of advice from my dad), we became the proud owners of a 2008 Sienna!

Whoa. It just occurred to me that we never mentioned in this blog that we are having a BABY, hence the big round bump in my midsection. Our little girl is due on July 31!

Actually, having a baby is what prompted us to consider buying a minivan. Personally, I would've rather had a big SUV, but a van is just more practical: better gas mileage, safer to drive, and that sliding door will make it a lot easier to get Baby Dutt in and out of her car seat.

I'll probably always miss Ravvy, but I take comfort in knowing that she served me well for over 10 years. I guess all good things must come to an end. So...goodbye, Ravvy. And hello, new van that has yet to be named...!

#71. Visit 10 Louisville restaurants we've never tried before... (5/10) AND #72. write about them in our restaurant blog. (3/10)

We visited a new restaurant yesterday evening, Habana Blues. It wasn't in Louisville, but it's in New Albany, which is just on the other side of the Ohio River, so we figured it's close enough. Check out the restaurant blog for all the juicy details.

#57. Watch at least 5 out of 10 movies recommended by Esther.

For this goal, Esther and I watched Into the Wild, which is based on the true story of Christopher McCandless's trek across America and sojourn in Alaska.

Two things struck me immediately when watching the movie. The first was how it was beautifully shot. The filmmakers had some great landscapes to work with, especially for the scenes on the Colorado River and in Alaska, but they did them justice with plenty of panoramic shots set to appropriate music. These shots were sprinkled in frequently enough to help the viewers appreciate the natural beauty that so enticed McCandless, without distracting from the important human themes of the picture.

The literary nature of the film also stood ought to me. McCandless, evidentially, was a prolific reader, and his diary and letters, which the movie quotes throughout, are peppered with literary quotations. The effect is that the film's themes of isolation, self-discoverey, and community take on a more universal feel, despite the film being centered upon an individual.

Perhaps ironically, a movie that presents itself as being concerned with a young man living and dying in isolation is actually intensely concerned with community and relationships. No matter where he finds himself, McCandless falls in with people, and it is around these ad hoc communities that the film truly revolves. Even (spoiler alert!) McCandless's eventual death from starvation, alone in the Alaskan wilderness, is set in the context of relationships. Prior to his death, he is shown attempting to make his way, futilely, back to civilization, and his death scene suggests that while in isolation, McCandless found ultimate significance in his relationship with God.

This is the sort of movie where liking or disliking the film doesn't seem to matter as much as whether or not it made you think, or look at your own life differently. It did so for me, causing me to look with renewed appreciation upon my times of solitude, as well as my opprotunities to form relationships and community with the people around me.

#34. Read a new book every month, including one that Esther recommends.

By God's grace, I graduated from Southern Seminary on Friday, December 13th. This meant that, in December, I suddenly had an unusual amount of time on my hands for reading, and consequently I read three books: the second and third books of Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn trilogy, and A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens.

I'll just make a few comments about Mistborn. I originally became interested in the series from reading another set of works by the author. When Robert Jordan, author of the epic Wheel of Time series, passed away leaving that saga unfinished, Brandon Sanderson was tapped to gather Jordan's notes and deliver the conclusion fans of that series had been waiting more than twenty years to read. Sanderson did a fine job with The Gathering Storm, Towers of Midnight, and the climactic A Memory of Light, and since these books meant I'd never have another Wheel of Time tome to read, I decided to investigate his original works to see how they held up.

Comparisons across the fantasy genre are notoriously difficult; just stop into your local comic book store and wait for the inevitable fanboy disputes over Star Trek vs. Star Wars. Or don't. The point is, such comparisons inevitably reveal as much about the subjective preferences of individual readers as they do about the quality and imaginative force of a given series.

That said, the Mistborn trilogy is a happy medium between the grand, sweeping scale of a Wheel of Time or Lord of the Rings, and the smaller casts and scale of R.A. Salvatore's works, or of Harry Potter. Mistborn focuses on a small cast of characters with a single heroine, Vin, with (initially) modest goals, who are eventually swept up in events with much more at stake.

Sanderson's world is an imaginative one, primarily populated with humans, but with a few other spectacular creatures sprinkled in as well. Notably, each of these creatures has an important creation story, and are thus much more than atmospheric fluff. Perhaps most impressive of all is the magical system of Mistborn; a unique art called Allomancy, which is powered by individual magic users (called Mistings and Mistborn) consuming and then "burning" various metals to give off different effects. These are relatively simple, even unspectacular, but Sanderson has a flair for combat scenes and problem-solving episodes, and the characters of Mistborn never fail to produce some innovative new use of their powers.

Said characters are, admittedly, a mixed bag. There are few cookie-cutter good guys or bad guys, and some of the secondary characters (Marsh, Sazed, and Breeze were all favorites of mine) are satisfyingly complex. Yet Vin, around whom the entire series revolves, never really "did it" for me. Her personal struggles with trust and identity never seem to have any truly damaging consequences, and all resolve neatly at just the right time. Beyond that, Vin comes across as the typical peasant-turned-savior of the fantasy world, conveniently altruistic and self-sacrificial. Yet, despite his failings in crafting his main character, Sanderson manages an impressive, even astonishing, twist in the books final pages, that manage to elevate Mistborn above the cliche pitfalls of its genre.

Mistborn will never be spoken of in the same breath as The Lord of the Rings, but I found it an engrossing read, and I eagerly look forward to reading the rest of the Sanderson corpus as quickly as possible. That is, unless someone digs up a lost Robert Jordan novel for me to read first.

#1. Learn to sew. AND #5. Go to 3 Hard Rock Cafes I haven't visited before. (1/3) AND #14. Read a new book every month, including one that Tom recommends.

Phew! My Thanksgiving break was pretty eventful; I completed one goal, started on a new one, and made more progress on another one!

I've wanted to learn to use a sewing machine for years now. It just seems like one of those things women should know how to do, even if they just use it for fixing hems or other simple things like that. Anyway, I finally got my chance; while Tom and I were at his parents' house for Thanksgiving, my mother-in-law helped me make a pair of flannel pajama pants!

I used the fabric scraps to have some fun with Roy the cat (or, as I like to call him, Crazy Eyes LaRue).

I didn't actually wear the pants until after we got back to Louisville. The first time I wore them, I found this in our bed the next morning...

Oops! I thought I'd gotten all the pins out when we finished sewing the pants. Glad Tom and I don't have a water bed...! I'm also glad the pin got stuck in the mattress and not in, well, me.

By the way, my in-laws gave me an early birthday present while we were in Clarksville: a brand-new sewing machine! So now I have no excuse not to keep up with it.

The day after Thanksgiving, we all went to Nashville to see The Story. (After nearly two decades of fandom, I finally got to see and hear Steven Curtis Chapman live and in person. Aaaahhhh!) Before the show, we went to dinner at the Nashville Hard Rock Cafe. This was one of the cooler HRCs I've visited. The decor is clean and modern with a slightly urban feel, and the service was excellent. But what made this HRC visit really unique was that we got to share a meal with a couple of very special guests. One of Tom's professors, Dr. Coppenger, lives in Nashville; and Tom invited him and his wife to come meet up with us for dinner that evening. We had a great time with them!

And finally, I finished a great read during Thanksgiving break too: Julia Child's My Life in France. I honestly never really knew much about Julia Child until I saw the movie Julie & Julia, which quickly became one of my favorites. Then I came across this book a few years ago during a big closeout sale at our local Borders (I had to decide between this and Rue McClanahan's autobiography...a very tough call for me!). I learned that she actually didn't know much about cooking for the first half of her life, but then she and her husband Paul moved to France for his job, and her life was completely transformed. She fell in love with the people, the culture, and most importantly, the food. What made her story really interesting is that she discovered her love of French cooking during a time when France was not really at its best; she moved there shortly after the end of World War II, and the country was war-torn. Amidst all the descriptions of dishes like soufflé Grand Marnier and sole meunière were descriptions of buildings in ruins and people whose lives had been shattered by the war. But to hear Ms. Child describe the country as a whole, one would think it was the greatest place on earth. She seemed to be able to find the good in everything. She had such joie de vivre, it's no surprise that she made the most of her time there and eventually became one of the most-loved TV personalities of our time. (By the way, I really tried to come up with a non-French way of describing her personality for fear of sounding cliché, but nothing seemed as accurate as joie de vivre, which means "enjoyment of life.") I so enjoyed getting to know her through this book. She seemed like such a lovely person. And it makes me want to read other cooking-memoir books like this. It's fun to read about people who love cooking as much as I do and are more well-written than I am. :)

34. Read a new book every month, including one that Esther recommends.

Wow. I am really far behind in posting.

For Novemeber, I read James Hornfischer's Neptune's Inferno: The US Navy at Gudalcanal.

I first became acquainted with Hornfischer when I heard him speak via podcast at the Prtizker Military Library in Chicago. At that time, he was speaking about an earlier, excellent book, Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors. This I polished off a few summers ago, and immediately decided I needed to read everything this fellow ever wrote.

What sets Hornfischer apart from other World War II writers is his unique ability to combine in-depth scholarly research with first-hand accounts of battles by the combatants into a blow-by-blow account that almost reads like an historical thriller. Reading Hornfischer is more than just reliving the battles he describes; it's going inside individual shell hits, exploring the devastating effects of a torpedo on a forward magazine in slow motion, and falling to the teak deck of a destroyer with the survivors of a demolished turret. In short, his style is perhaps the most engrossing and simultaneously the most detailed I've come across in my amateur pursuit of military historical scholarship.

At times, however, this strength of Hornfischer's is also his weakness. At times he takes you so far into the battle he's describing, that it can be easy to lose sight of the big picture. The events and decisions leading up to a given action are sometimes described so much in passing that the shells are flying without the reader grasping why.

Still, a terrific read about an incredibly important campaign.