Book Review- Melissa Kite's The Art of Not Having it All

As regular readers of my blog already know, I've spent the fall taking a memoir writing class and I'm also on a kick with reading memoirs. I saw Melissa Kite's The Art of Not Having it All on Netgalley and it caught my eye. Thank you to St. Martin's Press for approving me for an advanced copy of this entertaining memoir.

Plot - Forty-something conservative columnist Melissa Kite writes about her wild adventures in her pursuit of love. After jilting her fiancé, Kite finds herself having trouble nailing down her perfect man.

She is a strong woman, but she would love to have a man who can fix her plumbing and program her remote control, in addition to being her soul mate. Through the course of the book, Kite begins to realize the differences between what she thinks she needs and what she really requires in a partner. One of the biggest telling moments is when she finds herself on a helicopter being whisked off to a fancy lunch with an eccentric married millionaire and she realizes that this is making her uncomfortable.

Kite's books is filled with many colorful characters, including the men she dates and her female friends. She is clearly the sane one in the bunch. My favorite part of the book is when Kite recounts going on a girls weekend riding holiday and they get completely lost. The women are loathe to admit that they are clueless, which makes the situation even funnier. I laughed out-loud several times and I enjoyed the mention of Newbury, my husband's hometown.

Like - Kite is genuinely funny. She comes from a serious journalistic background, but this book reminds me more of something Chelsea Handler might write. I had not previously heard of Kite, but when I looked her up, I was surprised that she isn't a comedienne. Kite comes across as an "everywoman" and although she is looking for a partner, she is a modern single-girl, going on vacations with her friends and generally living a fabulous life. She is strong and even if she doesn't find love, you know that she will be okay. She's somewhat of a real-world hybrid of Carrie Bradshaw and Brigitte Jones. The strong characters, crazy scenarios and funny writing, kept me reading.

Dislike - Occasionally the stories ran long and by the end of the chapter, my interest was waning. As with many memoir or anthology books, some stories were more entertaining than others. I really favored the stories where Kite was vacationing with friends, but less so when she was going on dates. My dislikes in no way eclipsed my overall enjoyment of Kite's book.

Recommend - Yes. This is a fun, lighthearted memoir and I'd especially recommend it to single-women looking to commiserate. Kite has more bad dates than any single woman should ever have to endure. I connected with Kite's general message of "Having it all comes in different packages" and really, nobody "has it all". What does it mean to "have it all" anyways? Shape your life that way you want it, live it and be happy.

Europe 2014- Vacation Disaster (Part Five)

Guess what came in the middle of the night?

That's right, rain. Lots and lots of rain.

We woke up in the morning to grey skies and sheets of rain pounding the boat.

It wasn't going to ease-up anytime soon.

We headed to the St. Ives Lock, where we found ourselves in a queue. I went on the deck and looped a rope around a cleat, to hold our spot in the line. Even though I was wearing a rain jacket, it was so windy that the rain was blowing sideways and I was soaked through to my underwear as I was stood holding the rope.

It was miserable.

After speaking with other boaters, we found out that the river was flooded and that it would be dangerous to continue.

It was without a doubt, the best news that I received on the entire trip.

Dan called the weekend emergency line for the Bridge Shipyard in Ely and explained our situation. It took a few hours to sort out, but we were directed to bring the boat to a shipyard in St. Ives.

The owner of the boat company drove over and picked Dan up, so that Dan could get our car from Ely. Zoe and I gleefully packed up our luggage. The owner was going to be driving the boat back to Ely, so we left him all of our unused groceries. This was another piece of good news, as packing up the groceries would have been a huge hassle and we would have likely thrown much of it out. I hope that he used it, but even if he didn't, at least we didn't have to bother with the clean up.

I was so happy to get out of spending a third night on the boat. The whole time that we were packing up, I was thinking about the warm shower that I was going to take and how were were going to be sleeping in a comfortable hotel bed, that was dry and didn't have spiders or mold. Heaven.

Boating holidays are not for everyone. They are certainly not for me. Truthfully, I can't imagine who would like them. If you're reading this and you're a fan of boating holidays, please leave a comment and let me know what you like about them. I'm genuinely curious!

Here is the apocalyptic sky as we were leaving St. Ives.

It rained off and on during our drive back to Newbury.

On a previous trip to England, we ate at a Little Chef, which is kind of like a English version of Denny's. It was terrible. Maybe I was still basking in my post-boat glow, but our lunch at Little Chef wasn't too bad this time. They even gave us a whole handful of complimentary lollipops when we paid our bill. Score.

The rain had stopped when we were passing the legendary Silverstone Circuit. It was late in the afternoon, but since my stepson, Felix, is such a huge fan of race cars, we thought that it couldn't hurt to try to see the track.

We went to the gift shop and a nice employee told us that there was a race going on and that if we asked the guard, he might let us watch. We went to the guard, prepared with a story of a little kid and his dreams of racing, but the guard just waved us through without a hassle. We arrived in time to see the last race of the day and we were the only visitors in the stands. The whole stadium was empty, except for those people directly involved in the race. We couldn't believe our luck!

The track is enormous and when the cars whizzed by us, it was deafening. The best part was watching how excited Felix was to see his first race. He was transfixed.

We continued to the Hilton Newbury, where we traded in our last night on the boat, for an extra night in a family suite.

England March 2013- Final Trip Report

I've finally reached the last in my blog series of trip reports from our March trip to England. I'm left with pictures that simply didn't fit in with the other posts, but ones that I still wanted to share.

During my visit, we stayed with Dan's parents in the lovely town of Newbury. Newbury was fantastic. It's filled with many gorgeous Historic buildings, yet is modern enough to have a plethora of shopping, dining and entertainment options. The center of town is a short walk from Dan's parent's home making it easy to go explore.

Here are a few pictures of the snow in the front garden of their home.

Our rental van also got covered in snow. It only really snowed on our last morning, but the weather was cold througout our entire visit.

I liked the neighborhood watch stickers. Many years ago, I was working at Universal Studios and a group of police officers from London visited the park. While I was assisting them on the Jurassic Park ride, they handed me a sticker that said "I met the Met" and it had a similar picture and logo.

Neighborhood (neighborhood) Watch Sticker

On my first morning in Newbury, we drove over to the nearby Highclere Castle. Fans of the show Downton Abbey will recognize Highclere as the home of the Crawley family. Unfortunately it was closed for the season (and filming), but Dan took this picture of me with a Highclere road sign that was located right across the street from the estate.

One of the more interesting aspects of traveling in a foreign country is checking out the local grocery store. England has several major grocery chains and on our trip, we visited two of them. Waitrose is the more upscale chain. They sell organic food, offer free coffee in their cafe and Pippa Middleton writes a hostess column for their newsletter. It's nice and similar to Gelsons or Whole Foods.

Tesco is more like Walmart. They sell a little bit of everything and although it isn't bad per-se, it's definitely downmarket from Waitrose. One thing that Tesco had that I've never seen in America, is a service where the store slices your bread for you.

I spent the first afternoon of our trip walking around Newbury with Dan's mom. I was so busy absorbing and enjoying the sights, that I really didn't take very many pictures. Here are a few snaps.

Followers of my blog might recognize the following location from my series on British candy. Dan's niece sent us a box with several items from Mr. SImms. We went inside to get to the bottom of the banana candy that they sell. The banana candy is good, but has a strange taste, almost fizzy and taffy at the same time. The nice girl working behind the counter looked up the ingredients, but alas, we couldn't figure out the source of the bizarre taste.

The town has a new outdoor shopping mall with a big underground parking lot that we used to go to the nearby Victoria Park. The park was huge with a playground that the kids really enjoyed. The park also had a shallow pond that is used for sailing model boats.

No matter where I travel, if I see ducks, I'm a happy camper. Newbury has a canal running through the town and the canal is home to loads of ducks and swans.

I had a wonderful first trip to England and I'm happy to report that I'm going back! The tickets have been booked and we will be traveling at the end of the summer. The England adventure, to be continued...