Book: Full Bloom

Audio book
Full Bloom, by Janet Evanovich & Charlotte Hughes
Read by Lorelei King

This book doesn't have the laughs that Stephanie Plum brings in Evanovich's other books, but it was interesting enough.

Annie has lots of problems. She has a ghost, a wedding to plan that will be held in her bed and breakfast, a drunken hired hand, and a missing husband.

Enter Wes, a private eye who poses as a photographer. He was hired by Annie's mother-in-law, who suspects Annie killed her husband. Along the way to resolution there is a rolling pin, a body, an arrest, a drunken binge, a pair of underwear with hearts on them ... it's not a madcap but it is fun.

3.75 stars

Books: Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum series.
Audio books (mostly read by Lorelei King)

Vols. 1-12

Evanovich's Stephanie Plum books are a hoot. Stephanie Plum is bounty hunter, a rather inept one, at that.

She has two boyfriends and a grandmother who constantly crack me up.

That said, I confess I haven't "read" a one of the books; I have listened to every one of them as an audiobook. Sometimes they are so funny I have to stop the car and laugh. Sometimes I sit in the car in the driveway just to keep listening.

They are that good.

4.5 stars (all Stephanie Plum books)

Book: Trickster's Choice

Trickster's Choice, by Tamora Pierce
Copyright 2003
425 pages

Tamora Pierce writes fantasy that ends up in the teen genre, though I don't know why. I read it and thoroughly enjoy her work.

Trickster's Choice brings us young Aly, daughter of Alanna, the King's Champion. Aly needs a direction. She wants to be a spy like her father, George, but her parents frown on that. She decides to take a little adventure and gets herself kidnapped and sold into slavery.

Enter a trickster god and you have the makings of an intriguing fanciful plot to bring a new ruler to the throne. Along the way Aly realizes her skills, makes friends, and earns her freedom.

Great book.

4.5 stars (I'd give it 5 but it starts out a little slow.)

Thursday Thirteen: Being Green

Things I do in the name of being environmentally friendly:

1. Recycle old newspapers.

2. Take my magazines and old books to the library, where they are either added to the shelves or sold to fund Friends of the Library initiatives.

3. Use the energy-saver light bulbs in all my ceiling lights.

4. Have the water-saver toilets and shower heads.

5. Recycle plastics, including grocery bags (I really need to find some good canvas totes).

6. Buy veggies from the local farmers.

7. Grow my own food in a garden every year.

8. Turned down the temperature in the hot water heater.

9. Completely unplug appliances I don't use.

10. Use the library a lot instead of buying new books.

11. Put as many stops as I can into my trips, so that I am not making multiple trips in the car to run errands.

12. I drive a car that gets good gas mileage (30+ mpg).

13. I write about conservation issues in order to make people think about what they're doing.

The wind still blows

The wind took the top out of this cedar tree, which is beside my house:

Said tree top ended up in the fence, tearing out a post completely. Husband replaced it right away because otherwise the cows would be in the yard.

The winds have been tremendous for the last two days. I have had to stay indoors because the wind makes my ear hurt terribly. When I went out to take those photos, I put on earmuffs and a scarf to keep the wind from causing me pain.

As far as I'm concerned, we've come through the windstorm unscathed. A broken tree top and fence line is pretty much nothing. I know we have schools out because of power outages, and we've been quite lucky in that regard. It's blinked, but that is all.

I am hoping for warmer and calmer days.

Books: Queen of Broken Hearts, Summer Reading, the Great Far Away

Queen of Broken Hearts, by Cassandra King.

Southern women. Romance. Mystery. Good read, but long and slow.

4 stars


Summer Reading, by Hilma Wolitzer (Publication date: June 1, 2007)

(I read the galley proof). One intriguing and interesting character of three main characters.

3.5 stars


The Great Far Away, by Joan Frank.

Don't bother.

1 star

Windy Day

The wind has been blowing about 50 mph today. We've lost the top of a cedar tree and some fence.

Apparently the near-hurricane winds blew craziness across the mountains, for there has been a mass shooting at V.T. I have been watching the coverage, stunned. Everyone I know who attends or teaches there has been accounted for. Right now the numbers are 31 killed and 29 wounded, for a total of 60. The story is unfolding and more details will come.

It makes for a bad Monday, that's for sure. It's stunning news. I feel for the families.

The photo is a tom turkey that was in the backyard on Friday.

Project 99% Complete

At long last, after four months of solid work by my husband, the rental property I inherited from my mother in 2001 is ready to rent. Not only that, we think we have found someone who wants it, a process which took less time than I imagined. A lot of people are looking for a place to live.

I never imagined myself a landlord and this is not a coveted title, but four words in my mother's will has me pretty much unable to do anything with this property other than rent it. Kind of amazing, the power of four words, isn't it?

Here are some before and after photos: This is a bedroom (or just a room).
Before:

After:


This is what the kitchen looked like before:


This is what it looks like now. We still have to put in a stove, which will happen this week:



This is the hallway/furnace room before:
This is what it looks like now:


And so on and so forth. This is the work we did: new floors all over, new paint or new paneling everywhere, new toilets in both bathrooms, new shower heads, new plumbing, new vanities in the bathrooms, new light fixtures, new ceiling fans, new shelving in the kitchen cabinets, new hardware on the kitchen cabinets, one new window, part of a new wall, new ceiling tile in the kitchen/great room, new propane furnace, and an enormous amount of cleaning.

We had to take out a loan to do all of this work and spent thousands, not counting my husband's labor. It was an enormous effort by my husband to get the place clean and remodeled - he worked on it until 9:30 at night for many nights (because of course he also had to work his THREE other jobs).

Because I have bad allergies and asthma, I could not help much (I am allergic to dust and cats, and the previous tenants (who I also inherited along with the house) had cats and apparently had no idea what a vacuum cleaner was, plus I'm allergic to paint, so I am pretty much useless in a renovation project).

Anyway, the house is three bedrooms, a great room/kitchen, two baths, and an attic loft room. It is 1,500+ square feet. On the exterior it's aluminum siding, with a front porch. It is an old farmhouse that has been reworked, is what it is. It was built in the very early 1900s and the structural craftsmanship in the older part of the house is about 100 times better than what was added on in the 1970s.

This is what it looks like on the exterior (this is an old shot but we didn't make many changes outside):



When we have someone settled in the place, it will be a real load off our minds and quite a relief. I know some people would like this kind of thing, but it has been a trial for us, probably in part because it was thrust upon us. But that is another really long story.

Writer Kurt Vonnegut dies at 84

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/6547399.stm

One of the outstanding figures of modern US literature, Kurt Vonnegut, has died aged 84 in New York.

He became a cult figure among students in the 1960s and 1970s with his classics of US counterculture. He wrote plays, essays and short fiction.

The defining moment of his life was the firebombing of Dresden, in Germany, by allied forces in 1945 - an event he witnessed as a young prisoner of war.

His experience was the basis of his best-known work, Slaughterhouse Five.

It was published in 1969 against the backdrop of the war in Vietnam, racial unrest and cultural and social upheaval in the United States.

****

Thursday Thirteen

1. Today
2. I
3. Can't
4. Think
5. Of
6. Anything
7. To
8. Write
9. That
10. Has
11. Any
12. Real
13. Meaning

Mid-Week

Spring.

Photoshopped in MS Picture-It

It is raining very hard. I just got in from a budget hearing. No one spoke, well, except for school board members. The public? Eh. They could care less how their tax dollars get spent, so long as their tax rate doesn't go up much.

The rain should help with the pollen; actually, the freeze might have helped with the pollen a little. I like spring and fall the best of the seasons and I suffer through them both with my horrid allergies. I certainly don't like it when the fruit trees freeze and lose their fruit. I'll suffer through sneezes in spring for peaches in August, sure enough.

Happy Easter

I have no memory of a "first Easter" in my childhood, but I do know it was around Easter time when I learned the truth of the childhood myths perpetuated by parents.

My chores at the tender age of five (I know my because of where we lived when this happened, and we moved when I was five), consisted of washing the dishes while standing on a chair, vacuuming (which I recall finding difficult), and dusting everything within reach. My mother dusted the upper shelves.

Apparently I had graduated to dusting everything via climbing upon chairs, because on this day I was dusting upper shelving. I had recently lost a tooth, and my tongue played constantly with the new hole in my mouth. I broke the baby tooth out by falling upon the stoop on my grandmother's carport while I was shaking out a baby blanket for my doll. I stepped on a corner of the blanket and proceeded to pull it out from under myself, falling face forward. My tooth took the brunt of the fall.

(As a consequence of this, I stopped playing with dolls.)

After a trip to the dentist, the tooth fairy visited me at night and left me an entire Kennedy half dollar (which I still have). This was a small fortune for me in 1968 and also an unusual coin for our household, or so I thought.

So it was that near Easter, maybe even Easter weekend, I was dusting a new place I had not dusted before, for whatever reason. As I dusted, I came across a dish filled with a treasure of Kennedy half dollars. I remember standing on the chair and pushing the coins around with my chubby little finger, looking at the great number of them.

I am given to incremental leaps of logic and thought, so much so that I can get from A to Z without a clue how I got there and nevertheless be right (and sometimes quite wrong, too). In one of those leaps, I immediately connected the coin to the tooth fairy.

I remember my mother coming into the room as I stood holding the dish. I asked her if the coin beneath my pillow came from this dish. She hesitated, and I knew the truth. There was no tooth fairy, and I said as much. "You're the tooth fairy," I remember saying. Not accusingly, just knowingly.

Then in another great leap of thought, I made the connection that if there was no tooth fairy, there was no Easter bunny. And also no Santa.

I told this to my mother also, who did not deny that I had discovered the secrets of these mythical benefactors. So from the age of five onward, I did not believe in things I could not see, knowing there were generally explanations to which I was not privy.

I did, however, assist my parents in perpetuating the secret with my younger brother, so much so that I think he was nearly in his teens before he realized there was no Peter Rabbit. I remember his tears as he accused me, somewhat angrily, of lying to him. It seemed my hiding the truth from him bothered him more than the fact that our parents did the same.

This is not a holiday I celebrate anymore with chocolate or mythical bunnies. I celebrate it with thoughtfulness and prayer and dinner with family. I remember the reason for the celebration - those being, for me, Christ is risen and the rebirth of the earth as spring begins the renewal process anew.

Somewhere inside of me, I think, a child longs for that magic, that time of wonder and belief. I hope that this year I can renew that childish spirit, and make her soar.

Books: Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Caedmon Audio
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Audio Collection
Performed by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Features selections from: Slaughterhouse Five, Welcome to the Monkey House, Breakfast of Champions, Cat's Cradle.

A friend mentioned something to me about Vonnegut and I thought I had not read anything by him, having somehow skipped him, but I was wrong.

After checking out this audio tape from the library, I realized I was indeed familiar with his work. I just hadn't read it in about 25 years and had forgotten.

Hearing the words in the author's voice is quite interesting. In these selections, Vonnegut even sings tunes fo the listener.

I liked Welcome to the Monkey House best, I think.

I enjoy these commentaries disguised as SF. They are as true today as when written, if a little dated. Very Ray Bradbury-ish, too.

4.5 stars

Books: Rococo by Adriana Trigiani

Audio Book: Read by Mario Cantone

Adriana Trigiani gives an entertaining read in this book, which is NOT a Big Stone Gap book.

This story is set in New Jersy and tells the story of Bartolomeo di Crespi (aka "B"). B is a bachelor and interior designer who desperately wants to renovate the Catholic Church, Our Lady of Fatima, in his community. He comes from a large Italian family (lots of cousins and nephews) and has an older sister named "Toots" who cares for him. Their role eventually swaps during the novel and B. comes into his own, mostly because Toots has an affair with her ex!

B. also has a platonic fiance' who eventually marries someone else. He meets up with an international designer named Eddie who sparks him, but B. is ultimately in love with his work, not women.

This novel is more character-driven than plot-driven, and certainly nothing greatly eventful happens, but this is an entertaining glimpse into families and relationships and humanity overall.

Not quite as intriguing to me as the Big Stone Gap novels, but that could be simply because those books remind me so much of home.

3.5 stars

Thursday Thirteen

1. The moon last night was nearly blood red when I looked out the kitchen window about 8:45 p.m. I could see it through the trees and it looked quite ghostly.

2. I have an Audubon society book for the southeastern states that I refer to quite frequently. Every year I have to look up the wildflowers because I can never remember what they are.

3. I also have a book on wildflowers by Leonard Atkins called "Wildflowers of the Appalachian Trail." Atkins lives in my county and I have met him. Of course I did an article on him.

4. My mother loved wildflowers and she and a friend would walk the woods every spring and into the summer in search of unique or unusual wildflowers.

5. She could identify jack-in-the-pulpit, chicory, and floating bladderwort on site.

6. I never have been able to do that but I've also never applied myself to learning the names of the wildflowers.

7. One year in April I called Mom and asked her to come and walk with me to the back of the farm to see a patch of wildflowers.

8. The woods were full of trillium, which apparently is native to the area but not common. My mother was ecstatic at the find and I remember she was quite childlike in her delight of the flower.

9. The following year Mom was too ill to visit the trillium patch, so I walked there with my friend B., who's mother had just passed away.

10. We stood in silence a long time looking at the wildflowers, each thinking, I suppose, different thoughts of our mothers, hers having just passed away and mine not far from following.

11. I cannot visit the trillium now without thinking of my mother, who died a few months later, and my friend.

12. We are forever bound by the deaths of our mothers in the same year.

13. We're also bound by the wildflowers, my mother and B. and me.

Reposed Thoughts

Yesterday I interviewed a couple who ditched their lives in northern/eastern VA and moved here. They bought an old (very large) house and are embarking upon a restaurant/B&B adventure.

They are 43 years old. They called this their "retirement".

He has retired from a police force; she used to be in marketing. They travel to Europe two or three times a year and also across the US.

I always wonder how people can manage to do these things. Where do they get their money? Did their old house sell for millions?

Police officers do not make that kind of money, unless other cities do better than Roanoke. Roanoke's retirement packages might keep you afloat but you're not going to move forward with it.

Maybe marketing pays better than freelancing for newspapers?

When we take vacation, my husband farms and uses the time to plow or rake hay or do whatever needs doing; I just keep working on writing work. I might take a day for spring cleaning, but I don't think that really counts as recreation.

We do not go to Europe. We're lucky if we make it to Myrtle Beach for a weekend.

Is this envy? No, more like curiousity. I just want to know how it's done.

Spring

The trees are turning green.

The hyacinths are blooming

The turkeys are enjoying the greening grass.

The redbuds are in full color.

The dogwoods are showing off their white petticoats.

The Hard Choices

The problem is, no one will make the hard choices.

I was thinking about this in relation to the electic company and the news yesterday that instead of a 25 percent increase for Appalachian Power, one SCC member is recommending a 3.9 percent increase.

This SCC member has looked at the greater good (and thousands of letters from an irate public) and determined that big business doesn't need to be massively profitable.

Government can step in and control things. It could take away the excessive monies CEOs make, for instance. But government has chosen instead to take monies from those who make less and give it to the wealthy because they then make jobs. Supposedly this trickle-down economics works, but there is a growing disparity between the rich and poor in the United States.

This is not new news; the gap has been increasing marginally for years but has grown since the new millinum. I can't find where I read it, but an article I read earlier this week indicates the disparity has now reached 1920s levels and is close to what it was before the Great Depression.

In the 1940s, we had a great war. Roosevelt made some hard choices. People today, except the old folks who are nearly gone, have no idea what went on during World War II. People rationed and sacrified.

To give you an idea of how much they sacrificed and worked, I will tell you several things. Most of this comes from my husband's grandmother, who is now deceased. Some of it I looked up (in books, remember those?).

They had a hog farm here in Botetourt and during the war, the farm was mobilized for food production for the army. This was mandated and ordered by the government, not a choice. They had to produce food and the government bought it. All of their hams and corn and everything else went to feed the soldiers.

The government also stopped production of retail vehicles, etc., and the companies turned to making whatever the army needed. Soldiers were not going without the proper armor for lack of trying.

At this time, there wasn't synthetic rubber, so tires and other rubber products were severely rationed. Only medical personnel or other specific industries could get tires. The average person could not get a tire, and if a tire became slick, the car owner went before a board to ask for a retreading.

Could you imagine that happening today?

There was also a rubber drive and on average, every American donated about 7 pounds of rubber back to the government.

The government began rationing gas on the eastern seaboard on 15 May 1942. Drivers generally were granted five gallons of gas a week, unless they were doctors making rounds or something like that.

There were also ration books. A family got 48 points a month to spend on any combination of goods, including food and clothing. The president urged everyone to plant a Victory garden, and most people did.

The price of food and other necessary goods was kept in check by strict governmental controls. Price gouging was not allowed.

My husband's grandmother toiled along with the rest of the family to produce food for the soldiers. She was Rosie the Riveteer except on the farm. They were compensated for it at rates set by the government. Food prices were among those specifically stabilized by the government.

Roosevelt raised taxes and set limits on personal wealth. No individual could make more than $25,000 (which was a lot of money back then). Corporations could make so much and then the government took everything else. The tax rate on some people and corporations went as high as 95 percent.

I am not saying I want to go back to those days. I'm just pointing out that no one in government at this time, regardless of party, is prepared to come right out and ask anyone - or any corporation - to sacrifice. Not like that.

The truth is some sacrifice has been forced via stealth upon the lower and middle class while the upper classes continue to thrive. But it is not to support the war, it is to support the large corporations and the upper class. That's why there is such an income disparity.

Political leaders, regardless of party, aren't going to make hard choices. They're a bunch of wimps who would allow the vast majority to suffer because they don't want to give up their fancy dinners in Las Vegas.

The greater good is a concept so far removed from them that it may as well not exist. For that reason, I applaud the SCC hearing examiner who had the courage to stand up to a big corporation and say, essentially, you don't need to be making so much money. Now we'll see if the rest of the SCC board has courage, too.

For the last several weeks, I have been watching reruns of Buffy, The Vampire Slayer on FX while I lift weights and lunge and ride the exercise bike.

Every morning I have seen this Cesar commercial during the show. Those dogs are so cute! And the guitar plunking that goes with it is trapped in my brain! Somebody make it stop!

I have been watching Buffy because I only saw up through I guess season four. I really liked the show and the characters. When the show moved from WB to UPN, I couldn't get the channel and so I missed three seasons. I don't know how it ended. Then I realized a few weeks ago that Buffy was on in reruns and in the last of its seven seasons. So I am watching to see how it all ends, even though I am a little spotty on the details, having missed two other seasons of the show.

I have the first two seasons on DVD. Maybe eventually I will get the whole series so I will have it. Something for the Christmas list, maybe.

Anyway, when season seven winds up here in two weeks, I'll be back to watching DVDs and exercising to that. Whee.

Thursday Thirteen

1. Yesterday while I was in the city, I looked up and saw a convertible with the top down.

2. I thought a very large asparagus was driving, as all I saw was what looked to me like a green asparagus spear.

3. Later, on the other side of town, a girl with black hair on top and green hair the rest of the way around her ears appeared in the parking lot at A&N.

4. Her hair looked like feathers, and not asparagus, however.

5. I decided I was seeing things and headed home!

6. Here's a neat video about one of the major problems with today's society. (It's about the news, not asparagus.)

7. The sun is shining, the trees are budding, the world is spinning on its axis. It's time for the asparagus to grow!

8. I don't really like asparagus, but I just learned it acts like a diuretic so I might have to go buy some.

9. I did a story several years ago about a woman with an asparagus farm over in Craig County. It takes years to get asparagus to form a decent and profitable crop.

10. I have absolutely no idea why I am writing about asparagus, except that the asparagus-headed person driving the convertible really caught my attention.

11. My husband doesn't like asparagus at all. I will eat it but he won't, so if I buy some, we all know in who's tummy it will go.

12. I seem to be really desperate for a new video game.

13. I don't want a game about asparagus, though.

The Storm Front

We are having a storm. It's been grumbling and rumbling all afternoon. Sometimes it sounds like someone has dumped a load of cooking pans at my back porch.

My allergies have been grumbling and rumbling for several days now. My eyes hurt and are dry, my breathing is raspy, throat scratchy, nose stuffy.

I read this morning that the allergy season is particularly bad this year on the east coast because of lack of rain. Hopefully the current storm will ease things a tad, at least for a day or so. That might be long enough for me to gather my strength for the next onslight of budding trees.

I take Singulair constantly for my allergies and this morning went ahead and added back Zyrtec. I stopped the Zyrtec last fall because I didn't seem to need it.

These are very expensive drugs and each one costs me $50 for 30 pills. And that's with insurance.

I use eyedrops for my dry and painful eyeballs. I use Nasacort for my sinuses (it costs me $50 a month, too).

But there is nothing I can do directly to help my left ear, and it is my ear which is troubling me most at the moment. I do not have vertigo as I did last year at this time, but I do have an overall sense of feeling out of balance. It disconcerts me when this happen, and storms intensify the feeling. I actually *feel* in my ear the bolts of lightning when they are close. It is rather strange.

To all my fellow allergy suffers, God Bless You for each sneeze.