A Day Off

Two weeks of overscheduling complete with annual Dr. appointments. My tail is dragging. There was an evening (for chrissakes) volunteer meeting last night. Many of them are over 80 and live out around the wheat fields here. It was not well-attended. I have today off and then tomorrow I go make breakfast for the four youngest grands and try to do something positive with their "homework" as they are home schooled.  I can teach art, am math-phobic, and they have my number anyway. So I am working up a paper mache art project. God I hope it's dry out tomorrow. Or we could go a museum, field trip!

Just read and rewrote my blogger profile. Revised my favorite film list. No Asian films on the list and I am a big fan, especially of Japanese films. I wonder why I left them out? I spent my early grade school years living in a mostly Japanese neighborhood in Honolulu (that's a story in itself). While kids on the mainland were watching Saturday westerns, I was watching Saturday Samurai flicks and other dramas. The Japanese have some of the scariest ghost stories on earth.  The original "Ring" movie was from Japan.

Hiroyui Sanada (Ujio in The Last Samurai) I loved this beautiful film. I would have loved it more with less Tom Cruise.

Both my son Chris and I have collections of Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune films. I'm a long time fan of Hiroyui Sanada and own some of his earlier Japanese films. Got a little fan crush on him. Just saw him in "Life". He's been in a lot of American TV, "Lost," "Revenge," "The Last Ship." He's a very good actor but doesn't always get great roles, a lot of stoic Japanese guy stuff. He did a wonderful Fool in "King Lear" in English in Great Britain and ended up getting a MBE from the Queen.  Then there's Daniel Day Lewis' films, "The Last of the Mohicans" still leaves me crying through the end. That wasn't on the list either. And I love indies. "The Straight Story," "Strangers in Good Company." The first about an elderly man's pilgrimage to see an estranged brother, and the second about elderly women and their broken down bus trip in the Canadian woods. Added to my list now.

I am trying to figure out how to fix my comments so I can respond to them inline without just adding a new comment. I am a blogger ignoramus. I haven't found any of their "helpful hints" helpful, pretty much. I not very patient with it either.  Can't reset the default color of my typeface either.  It's gray and I change it to black when I remember. Any suggestions would be welcome.

Happy almost spring to you lot.

So many books...

I just finished Thomas Mullen's “The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers.”  The Fireson brothers are depression era bank robbers busily removing money from mid-western banks. Then they kill someone and work their way up the wanted list.  After being trapped in a gun fight with authorities they wake up, riddled with bullets in a police morgue, but alive. It's a bizarre premise but a very readable story. Mullen has done his research on the depression. 

I liked it enough that I took out his first book, "The Last Town On Earth" from the library to read. For it Mullen won The James Fenimore Cooper Prize for the best Historical American fiction by the Society of American Historians. This is his better book and takes place in Washington State, my neck of the woods.  Again his research is great. One of the characters in it is a survivor of the Everett, WA Massacre in November of 1916, as was my grandfather who was a striking mill worker and father of my own 5 month-old father at the time. At the time of the the strikes came the "Spanish Flu" and WW1. This out-in-woods mill town builds a guarded barricades to keep all comers away. The naiveté of a couple of men on an isolated road being able to protect their inhabits unravels in many ways.

Meanwhile my sister Pam and her husband are packing to come and visit me for my 74th birthday on Thursday, yes my birthday is on St. Patrick's Day and I had two Grandmothers of Irish descent. I don't drink green beer, will have a Guinness with some fish and chips, and if I see one more d***ed Leprechaun I will scream, yup, good luck with that.  I am scuttling around sweeping up dust bunnies and cleaning the bathroom today. Tomorrow I'll clean the kitchen. Thursday I will hang up my Irish flag for the day.

It's a nice if chilly day today.  My clematis has grown up the side of the garage and out onto the phone line back  towards the house.  It the afternoons  it looks like red stained glass.  I'm going to try to catch a picture of it tomorrow, I waited until too late in the day today.

I skipped the pain pills this morning so I could drive myself to the library, a short jaunt.  I got three DVD's and Dana Stabenow's "Hunter's Moon" to read.  The films I got are "The Book of Eli," "Elizabeth - The Golden Age," with Cate Blanchett, who is one of my favorites, and "Eat, Pray, Love," which got mixed reviews but I wanted to see it, and I love watching Javier Bardem.  It's a lot better than trying to find something on daytime television.  I was surprised how tired I was when I got home so I took a little nap.  When I got up I defrosted some of my homemade chili for dinner and started in on my book.

My friend Merry offered to loan me a new book she has, the latest Louise Penny, saying they "were trying not to read them too fast."  I can sure appreciate that, if I zip through them they are gone, like old friends leaving after a visit and not to return for a long time.  So I think I will follow her lead and read more slowly.  I know I was in mourning for awhile after I read all three Steig Larsson's "Girl Who..." books, in despair that there would be no more.  The upside is if my memory gets worse in the coming decades I can probably read them all over again like new books.

The Call

I've been locked in a spell of introspection and my mind just refuses to shut up the last couple of weeks so I went online and looked up books and then went to the library.  Nothing resets the overheated brain like a good book and I got several books including Yannick Murphy's "The Call" from our library's new book shelf and filled my mind with the thoughts of someone else.  I couldn't put it down.  It's has an unusual format all inside the mind of David Appleton, husband, father of three, neighbor, and veterinarian in a small rural area.  It's a mental journal sculpted around "the calls" he gets as a vet.  "Call: horse down." And on to "What I saw coming home:"  "Things I've said to my wife."  Seemed simplistic at first but it's anything but; Murphy's writing reminded me of Cormac McCathy's lean prose.  The calls expand, someone who calls and hangs up.  Then their 12 year old son is injured in a freak hunting accident and lies in a coma. 

It's a small book but gripping and I couldn't put it down.  I read until 2am and then got up at 7am and finished it.  Time spent totally inside someone else's head.  Yannick Murphy is quite a writer and I'm looking forward to reading more of her creations.  It certainly derailed my circular thoughts of what I shoulda done or should notta done.  Yea, Yannick.

Snow in the Palouse

Snow in the Palouse

The hills here got another powdered sugar coating this week. Looks like our patch of balmy, 50 degree weather is gone and the weather trolls remembered it's still January. Got my computer up and running again and added external storage for backup, something I should have done ages ago. Now its me that's crashed and burned. The change from dry and cold to damp and windy seems to have kick started an arthritis flare or maybe it just got a mind to do that itself. All I want to do is sleep and that's not the best thing so I'm setting my alarm to get myself up after 8 hours and then taking an hour nap most afternoons. The worst is in my feet and that keeps me from walking much, not good, not good. Just nature's way of reminding me I'm not 40 anymore, or 50, 0r 60, jeez.

Being parked more than usual I've gotten a lot more reading done and some knitting. I just finished "Cane River" by Lalita Tedemy. I really liked it even though much of it was painful to read. The mores of the times are difficult to take in, and makes this family of strong women even more amazing, not just that they survived but managed to prosper. Now I'm starting "The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet," by David Mitchell. I'm only a few pages in and am totally in love with his art with words. It's set in Shogunate Japan where Jacob employed as a clerk with the Dutch East India Company is confined with other traders to an small artifical island near Nagasaki from which they pursue their business.

Life is peaceful and uneventful for the most part. A great relief after the divorce drama of the fall. My life is remaking itself. Every now and then I get some new small housewares to fit my one person household, a six hole muffin tin, a little bread pan that fits in the toaster oven I had forgotten I had. I got a new, small skillet too; not that I haven't kept all the big stuff, company is coming for spring break. Just to keep some uproar in the background I have started tearing wallpaper off both the bathrooms. I'm sure I'll have them painted by the time company gets here. Ha, ha, ha.