Vicki Lane's Blog, page 51

Paddlers

A good way to cool off in this hot weather.

The river is low, but the experienced guides know where to aim the rafts. 

The section these folks are embarking on can be pretty exciting in places, when there's more water.

 

Taking a Page from Mrs. Alito's Book

 

                                                                             

Grim and perilous times . . . a Supreme Court bought and paid for, Big Money and Big Business set to have it all their own way. . . a nation in distress. 

A Musical and So Much More

                                                                                   

Monday at Meema and Grumpy's.  While we waited for pancakes, I read my new Humpty Dumpty magazine.
I can read it all without having to ask Meema what a word is because now I know how to sound out words.                                                                                  

I put on a musical for Meema. It was about a princess in a castle. I made it up myself and I sang the whole thing.  The princess had to go up and down the stairs of the castle a lot.

There was a big finale and Meema clapped a long time. 
Next time, I think she should make a video of my musical.



I brought up three of my big dolls and they traded clothes with Margo and Dolly. Margo loved the fancy bell bottoms and made a fuss when she had to give them back. 

She is such a brat!

I made a house for some of the Castle People on the dining room table. This is the mama in her bedroom.

This is the living room. There is a pink toy and a long sofa and a houseplant.

This is he kitchen. The baskets are the pantry and the box is the cabinets. The two mugs are the refrigerator.
There are more rooms for the Daddy and the kids and there is a bathroom. Hamsie is there. He is being a giant stuffie.
I also did a little embroidery and read lots more books out loud and watched a video. 
On Wednesday I will go with Meema while she gets her hair cut. Then we will go to the library and get more books. I hope some kids will be there to play with. 
Last of all Meema will take me to my school for extra math from 4:30 t0 5:30. I am actually good at math, but this is a fun thing to do. There are crafts and stuff.

The Blessing of Rain

Over three days, we were blessed with more than three inches of rain--a great relief to our parched pastures and sweating selves.
Such a delight to sit on the porch after the rain and watch the mists rise and a rainbow form.
Simple pleasures.

 

Rabbit Rabbit Tomato Time!

                                                                             

                                                                                        


Time for the perfect summer sandwich!

Hard Decisions

                                                                               

thought
I took advantage of a cooler day to attack my workroom, the place where I've made many quilts and the place where I wrote all six Elizabeth Goodweather novels. These days I tend to be mostly downstairs, unless Josie insists we go up to what she calls her 'office.'
Drifts of dead lady bugs, wasps, and stink bugs were on the desk surfaces. Everything was dusty. So I began--removing everything and cleaning. And, thought I, time to get rid of some stuff. I mean, really, your grandmother's badly chipped and worn sugar bowl, sitting here on the windowsill, filled with paper clips, bits of string, and desiccated bugs. . . it looks like a crazy old lady lives here.
Well, yes. But that sugar bowl has history. It was probably a treasured wedding gift with its silver overlay. But by the time I knew it, it was coverless and chipped and lived in the warming oven of the stove, keeping the sugar dry. It came to the table and went back to the warming oven daily.
But that matters to no one but me. I imagine my sons and DILs shaking their heads as they toss it in the trash.
So I'll do it for them--but keep a picture for myself--maybe try to do a watercolor.
This pitcher is another survival from my grandmother's kitchen. But it's in perfect condition. Nope, not tossing this. Putting the pencils back in, after cleaning out the dead bugs.
A Rolodex. Between my cell phone and my laptop, I have all this. Still, a quick flip through--yikes, how many of these people are dead!  Office supplies. Wite-Out? C'mon. Into the garbage bag along with the rock-hard erasers. I moved on to the immediate file folders, finding much to discard. Odds and ends and ideas that never came to pass--out they go.  Outdated business cards--mine and those I collected from other authors, goodbye.
There was one perfect jewel of a memory-- a note from the Graham County, NC Sheriff's office.
It was January or February, back before we all had cell phones. Justin was farm-sitting near Chapel Hill and I got a sad call from him. A snowstorm was in progress, driving was unsafe, and he was out of food. 
Not sure what I could do about this, I suggested he break into the absent owners house ad scavenge. Or maybe there were some potatoes still in the ground.
He assured me he would be fine. So I waited till the next day to call him (landline.) 
No answer. I decided he was probably out digging for potatoes. 
No answer the next day. Now I began to have visions of him lying in the potato patch, felled by a tree limb that had collapsed under the weight of snow.
I began to email or call those of his Chapel Hill friends who might have heard from him. No joy. He might have fallen off the edge of the world, as far as they knew.
In a last desperate move, I called the Sheriff's office in his county. The woman who answered and to whom I told my story was kind and sympathetic. She promised to send a deputy out to make sure Justin was okay, if he was there.
Not too long after that, I got a call from Justin. Shortly after talking to me three days before, he'd braved the elements and driven to a girl friend's house where he was safe and warm and enjoying the authentic Thai food her mother prepared.
He'd been alerted to my distress by a number of his friends calling, Dude! Call your mother!

 






                                                                                      



                 

Evening Clouds in Walnut

 

Rhinoplasty Needed

In what Claui called 'an unfortunate series of events,' Josie's beautiful rhino, crocheted by her Aunt Aileen, was the victim of two too- playful dogs. 
I don't crochet so I asked Aileen for advice. How to prevent unraveling and loss of stuffing is the first consideration. Then, how to make Rero/Rere? look better.

Aileen to the rescue! She will crochet another flower which I can affix, after taking care of the preventative measures.

Speaking of dogs, it was Otter and Domino who perpetrated this badness. Meanwhile, closer to home, my bad Jenny pulled one of two unbaked strombolis off the baking sheet I'd foolishly left on the counter while waiting for the stove to preheat. I'd gone to set the table (we had folks coming for lunch) and returned to the kitchen, thank goodness, in time to save the second one from going the same way.  Fortunately, the one stromboli was enough. 

She was not repentant.

 

Reading in Hot Weather

Josie is attending day camp all this week, thanks to her other grandmother, and my schedule is suddenly quite open. The heat, hovering around 90, leaves me little inclination for much more than reading. So I plunged into the Big Bag o' Books my friend left for me and came up with Nick.
Nick is the story of the narrator of The Great Gatsby. In Gatsby, Nick is a bonds salesman, renting a small place near the wealthy and mysterious Jay Gatsby. Nick's role is mainly that of an observer and we know little of his past--Yale and from the mid-west.
With no more than that to adhere to, Michael Farris Smith has given Nick a rich backstory, replete with the horrors of trench warfare in WWI, the ache of lost love in Paris, and a wander through the brothels and bars of a very wild post war New Orleans.
Smith is a terrific writer who brings Nick to vivid life--but after my two previous reads (pre-Vietnam War and WWII,) I determined to study war no more and turned to the quiet sensibilities of Kazuo Ishiguro.

Not war as such, but this is the story of an artist in post war Japan. Masuji Ono made his name with popular patriotic paintings that supported Japan's imperialism. In the wake of defeat and the changing political environment, he finds himself in a delicate position, especially as he has a daughter for whom he is trying to arrange a marriage and whose parents will be, as is usual, looking into his background.
This novel reminds me a great deal of Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day despite the very different settings. There is the same preoccupation with self, with facades, and with the perceptions of others. And, of course, the same beautiful writing. A nice change from trench warfare.
And now, for something completely different.  I had not been aware of Samantha Irby until Book Bub offered her book of essays and something about the blurb convinced me to give it a shot.
I loved it! The woman is a self-deprecating, self-aware, non-filtered, raunchy observer of life. She is a Black, Bi, city-girl, comfortable with disclosing the most outrageous parts of her life. I am none of those things, as well as being of a very different generation. (Nothing outrageous to disclose, even if I wanted to.)
 But I found myself nodding and grinning and muttering, yeah, boy! time after time. 
Now to find her other books... 

 

A Distant View