An ass-kickin' and a book meme

I got my ass kicked by an eleven year old yesterday. An eleven year old! Ha! That's funny!

I went over to the campout yesterday afternoon. I'd talked to my ma on her cell and she said my brother was there, and I asked if he and his wife (yes, that brother and his wife) wanted to go skating. She said he said they did. So I drove over and parked outside the campground and skated in and went to my brother's site, where his wife wouldn't look at me or talk to me at first but thawed after a few minutes, and sort of talked to the dogs to answer my questions about were they having a good time, did they get much sleep last night, where did you get that sweet-ass Eureka tent that I covet, etc. She went off toward the truck and I asked my brother if they were ready to go skating. Uh, we're going out in the canoe, he said.

Rrrrr. Then why did you say you wanted to go skating...

One of my hugest pet peeves is when someone says they'll do something and then they don't do it. Rrrr.

So, I went skating by myself at first, until my cousin showed up. She had her skates in her car (damn, we're a skatin' family...) and we went over to the trail that goes around the lake. After a while, we came across this kid skating on old-school skates--you know, the kind where the wheels aren't in a line. Dude. I didn't know they still made those. He joined us and talked our ears off about this and that, about how he skated into his aunt's pet tiger once and it scratched him, and about all the tricks he could do on his skates, and how to go faster, and blah blah blah. After a while he challenged me to a race. Okay, I thought, whatever, I'll race the eleven-year-old and let him win, it'll make him smile. So we start going, and he's going pretty fast, so I go faster, and he speeds up, and I speed up, and we're tearing down the trail, and then--that little fucker ran me right off the trail! Ha! He totally stuck his foot out and clipped my skate, which threw me off, and I spilled in the grass and bit it. I was like, WTF! Luckily I sustained no serious injuries and neither did my camera, which I had on me. I'll tell you what, if my camera had been damaged, I woulda popped that kid a good one, eleven years old or no. He was very contrite and said it was an accident, but I don't buy it. He had skills. He knew how to steer himself. He edged me. I wasn't mad at him; we just kept skating and acted like it never happened, except that my cousin kept bursting into fits of giggles at how I looked flying off the trail and getting grass stain all over the ass of my pants like that.

Genius.

In other news, Avon sucks a lot. They have this giant Avon megopolis on the other side of the highway from us and the whole compound is rigged up with this sonofabitching loud alarm system which they feel the need to test for thirty minutes straight every other Sunday starting at 8:15 a.m. I don't know why they can't do that crap later in the day. That sound can turn even a teeny little baby hangover into a monster in ten seconds flat. (Witness my throbbing head...)

Okay, so book meme, from Deputy's Wife. I've linked all the books I'm talking about to their Amazon pages, in case anyone is interested.

1. Number of books you have owned: Help! I don't understand the question! Ha ha. If it means the number of books I've owned throughout my life, the answer is mountains and mountains of them. If it means the number of books I own now, I'd say roughly in the 700 or so range. I counted two years ago when I was bored and there were 633, but I know things have expanded a bit. I'll tell you what, owning that many books makes moving a real bitch.

2. Last book I bought: Uh, let me go look. Let's see--I bought about six on my last book-buying expedition so I'll list here the one I'm planning to read first. It's called The Death of Vishnu by Manil Suri.

3. Last book I completed: Damn. I guess that would be The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. Which was really good. I've read a bunch of books since that one, but I haven't completed them.

4. Five books that mean a lot to me:

• Random Acts of Senseless Violence by Jack Womack. A look at what New York City might turn into if what happened in New Orleans happened there, only without the hurricane. Basically, a picture of societal breakdown from the eyes of a twelve-year-old girl. Watching the news this week has been like watching the pages of this book come to life, in a terrifying way. This is one of my favorite books ever because the voice is so strong and clear and good.
• London Fields or The Information, both by Martin Amis. It's a toss-up here. They're both so damned good. What I like about Martin Amis is first his humor, which is very black, very dry, and second that he makes painful, painful things almost funny, and funny, funny things almost painful, in a it's-funny-because-it's-true sort of way. Very rich stuff. Like eating Thanksgiving dinner every day.
• All Calvin and Hobbes books. No, not very literary, but shit, that is some good stuff. Any time I'm suffering some horrible malady or am ill or stuck on a long car ride, I read the huge stack of them. They are good for what ails you. I just love them.
• A Fine Balance, by Rohinton Mistry. About India in the mid-1970s under Indira Ghandi. It's important to me because it opened my eyes to a lot; it dug the hole inside me deeper, so to speak, which I don't want much to explain further. But it's a very moving book. If you don't mind being moved to anger, agony, joy, sadness, maybe even tears.
• Youth in Revolt, by C. D. Payne. This book cracks me the hell up. I laugh a lot every time I read it. It's the journal of a 14-year-old boy living with first his mother, then his sister, then his father, then as an Italian woman in California. Actually, Saphenous, if you're reading this, this book is the reason I have you blogrolled, because you remind me of the narrator. Another reason this book is important to me is what's written inside it in ink by everyone I've loaned it to. This book gets loaned out on the condition that the person who reads it has to write inside it at least three terrible ways to die. Some of the things my book has come back to me with:
• Unusually restrictive underwear
• Death by sonic overpressure at a Hanson concert (shit, remember Hanson? lol!)
  
• Crucified by the Cincinnati branch of the Right Wing Conservative Republican Gestapo
• Get stuck upside down in a coffin behind a brick wall for all eternity
• Play "hide the salami" with a shark
• Reaganomics

Ones that are important to me but didn't make this list include The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy and War Boy by Kief Hillsbery.

5. What are you currently reading? A shitload of books on South Dakota, because I'm going there in two weeks for a camping/hiking trip through the Badlands and the Black Hills (sweeeet). I like to know everything I can about a place before I go, because I like seeing the things I've read brought to life.

6. What bloggers are you passing this on to? I cheated, it was supposed to say what five bloggers. But, not everybody has time to do this stuff, so I'm only tagging two: E, because I owe her one, and Suley, because I know he's reading/has read some damned interesting stuff.

Okay. Over n' out. Final spackling and sanding awaits. Fun.