After a fun shopping trip through A Southern Season, the premier deli and gourmet foodstuff emporium in Chapel Hill, we brought lunch and a few other goodies. At home we spent most of our time at the computer pulling up pictures of her recent birthday celebrations – plural – and making up new digital scrapbook pages. This skill learned in recent Photoshop® classes is proving to be most useful; how to layout a page, create your own template, then crop and pull in images to layer on the template. What can I say – I am fully into Photoshopping and documenting family events. Can I do this work and still have time for summer reading?
That is the upfront question for the moment. Over recent travels I was so totally engrossed in World Without End that I literally thought it would never end. You will remember that WWE is the sequel to POTE (see below).
Beginning July 23 on Starz (USA network), is the movie I have been waiting for twenty years to see. Well almost. Author Ken Follet’s Pillars of the Earth comes to life in an eight-hour TV serial. And wouldn’t ya know - we do not subscribe to USA (?). So I will have to wait for the DVD, or Netflex, or a general release. Eight hours? Wow!
See: http://www.the-pillars-of-the-earth.tv/. Find more about Ken Follet at http://www.ken-follett.com/faq/index.html.
But having finished WWE, what to read next? I downloaded Acqua Alta by Donna Leon, the next in the Inspector Brunetti series. Acqua involves a famous opera singer, an attempted murder and who knows what will come next? Reading while I cycle at the gym makes twenty-minutes seem like nothing. Always interested in stories set in a known travel location, what should I find on the net but a “List of mysteries set in various cities," as in in Italy: see http://www.mysterylovers.com/books/book_clubs/foreign.php.”
Just returned to reading White Doves in the Morning (James Lee Burke). Once the Civil War is over in White Dove, I aim to read “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.”
A recent NY Times Magazine article has me intrigued; what’s all this fuss about the Swedish writer Stieg Larsson (side photo)? His Millennium Trilogy best sellers are making news around the world, his death in 2004 and subsequent feuding heirs have promoted further interest in his books. See:
Because DH highly recommended the books, I pulled The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo onto my Kindle2 and will begin the story as soon as the laundry is finished, the house cleaners leave, grocery shopping gets done and prep for this weekend completed. Maybe.Speaking of which, we are driving to the mountains this weekend to spend the 4th weekend with sister Jan and Rich in their recently acquired vacation home. This is Rich’s dream of a fishing cabin in the Blue Ridge mountains, but his cabin turned out to be a quite nice house, small 2-bedroom situated near a mountain steam full of trout. What could be better? A three+ hour drive from our house, maybe I’ll have time to read Larsson’s book during the drive.
The coming 4th of July: Time was when the 4th holiday meant either going to Aunt Gladys/Rosendale’s house and yard for a church ‘ice cream social,’ or heading out to Uncle Hobart’s farm for watermelon and fireworks. When my dad and his brother got together it was like 1916 all over again. Hobart was the oldest brother, dad the youngest and what trouble couldn't they find – not to mention Lester and Truman the two middle brothers, who helped all they could. For me the puny fireworks of my Missouri summers feel like the 4th, those mega productions that urbanites know from the parks & rec department seem more like political propaganda (which they are). But fireworks or no, music and watermelon are an essential part of the mid-summer celebration and we will look forward to that in the mountains.
Having Mother here for the visit recalls the summer of 1944, when dad’s sister, Zora was visiting in Rosendale and got the news that her youngest son was “missing and assumed dead,” after the invasion of Normandy. I cannot say I remember the event as I was just a toddler, but the family story continues decades after that massive maneuver onto the French coast. Nearly all my uncles were WWII veterans, DH served in Korean War, my brother and cousin’s are from the Viet Nam generation and a younger cousin recently served in the Iraqis war. We are patriotic but prefer to celebrate our freedoms of life that our ancestors dearly paid for, rather than promote the defense department’s “gung ho” attitude. Since the Civil War my family has not been idealistic about war or the aftermath of reconstruction.
DH just asked if we have time on Wednesdays for Shag lessons, in the event we head to the Grove Park Inn in Asheville for the Labor Day "Beach Music" Weekend. If we do not make it back to the mountain house this summer maybe we will see it once more in the fall – the color of the Blue Ridge mountains on a cool fall morning can be spectacular!
How did I ramble on so long? Marie’s Studio in Savannah, MO sent an E-mail showing that our family pictures proofs are online. Got to get an order together today. Then the ever present “what’s for dinner” question – ah, still have leftover from Southern Seasons shopping yesterday. Already did an hour+quarter workout at the gym this morning, so I can eat tonight.
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