Gray and dreary day
Jun. 25th, 2006 11:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jmc_bksIt has been overcast all morning, raining intermittently. A very good day to pull the covers over your head and sleep in. I didn't do that exactly . . . although I did sit down on the couch and doze off. My strenuous morning activies (reading in bed, slicing bread) took a toll, and I needed a nap to fortify myself.
I ought to be energetic, and clean the house. If I get everything cleaned and polished and swept and mopped, I'll reward myself with a movie ticket. An Inconvenient Truth is playing, along with a couple of other movies I'd like to see sooner or later.
Speaking of movies, I saw the trailer for Superman Returns over at The Engineer's. Not interested. Same with The Devil Wears Prada -- I was thinking about if, because of Meryl Streep, but nah, don't want to see it. I am still looking forward to the second Pirates of the Caribbean movie, though.
On the book front, this morning I've been working on Barbara Samuel's Madame Mirabou's School of Love (womens fiction). I've mentioned before that Barbara Samuel/Ruth Wind is a hit or miss author for me. MMSoL isn't exactly a hit for me, but neither is it a miss yet. The story itself is good so far, but I have a hard time relating to the heroine, Nikki. The problem isn't her grief for her failed marriage or that she didn't see the divorce coming (totally understandable), it is other stuff. She has no work history, no credit history and no income of her own; she receives the house in the divorce settlement because it had a great deal of equity, and then fails to maintain it, so the furnace explodes, destroying the house. She had no idea of the cost of the things that she consumed while she was married, so there is sticker shock after the divorce.
While I understand the lack of work history and credit history, taking a house that does not produce an income stream seems kind of, well, dumb to me. Unless the plan was to sell it and use the nut to buy a smaller house and either go back to school or open a business -- but Nikki doesn't seem to have any sort of plan. And the lack of awareness about costs of living and finance seemed criminally stupid. Nikki is more or less my age (she's 11 years older) and I cannot imagine any of my contemporaries, even the SAHMs (especially the SAHMs, who are so careful to maintain their identities as someone other than mommy), being that careless (inattentive? naive? disinterested?) about finances.
I ought to be energetic, and clean the house. If I get everything cleaned and polished and swept and mopped, I'll reward myself with a movie ticket. An Inconvenient Truth is playing, along with a couple of other movies I'd like to see sooner or later.
Speaking of movies, I saw the trailer for Superman Returns over at The Engineer's. Not interested. Same with The Devil Wears Prada -- I was thinking about if, because of Meryl Streep, but nah, don't want to see it. I am still looking forward to the second Pirates of the Caribbean movie, though.
On the book front, this morning I've been working on Barbara Samuel's Madame Mirabou's School of Love (womens fiction). I've mentioned before that Barbara Samuel/Ruth Wind is a hit or miss author for me. MMSoL isn't exactly a hit for me, but neither is it a miss yet. The story itself is good so far, but I have a hard time relating to the heroine, Nikki. The problem isn't her grief for her failed marriage or that she didn't see the divorce coming (totally understandable), it is other stuff. She has no work history, no credit history and no income of her own; she receives the house in the divorce settlement because it had a great deal of equity, and then fails to maintain it, so the furnace explodes, destroying the house. She had no idea of the cost of the things that she consumed while she was married, so there is sticker shock after the divorce.
While I understand the lack of work history and credit history, taking a house that does not produce an income stream seems kind of, well, dumb to me. Unless the plan was to sell it and use the nut to buy a smaller house and either go back to school or open a business -- but Nikki doesn't seem to have any sort of plan. And the lack of awareness about costs of living and finance seemed criminally stupid. Nikki is more or less my age (she's 11 years older) and I cannot imagine any of my contemporaries, even the SAHMs (especially the SAHMs, who are so careful to maintain their identities as someone other than mommy), being that careless (inattentive? naive? disinterested?) about finances.
