Great (wee) White Shark

A few weekends ago, I took a day trip to Monterey and back to see a great white shark. The Monterey Bay Aquarium has a young male one. Before I thought sharks looked like they were smiling. Not anymore..

I heart Portland

A long weekend in Portland gave me a long list of things that make me happy...

• Friends - ones wonderful enough to fly across the country to spend a long weekend, ones fabulous enough to provide a ride to and from an delicious home cooked meal that could feed an army, and ones who hang out after work - sipping wine and sharing Thai

• Walking tours - those provided in books by Laura O. Foster and those provided by Portland Walking Tours, hill walks, a panoply of architectures, neighborhood walks, bridge walks, waterfront walks, fast walks, ambling walks

• Cupcakes - delicious from Cupcake Jones and amusing because we kept finding ourselves on the corner where the are located

• Waking up on my own schedule - sure it was too early, but after I woke up I could go back to sleep or doze, or get up - all based on what I wanted to do
  

• "Croquet" with bowling balls and sledgehammer, complete with period safari clothing

• Pouring beer for hours - it turns out I can enjoy a beer fest, I just have to pour the beer and be on the other side from the drunken hordes

I'd highly recommend walking tour books by Laura Foster,

• Portland Hill Walks: Twenty Explorations in Parks and Neighborhoods
• Portland City Walks: Twenty Explorations In and Around Town

15 books in 15 mins

The object is to name 15 books that affected you - or the first 15 books that come to mind. So, starting now, at almost 9p on a Monday...

1. Tale of Two Cities - the first classic I read twice
2. The Jungle - I renewed my vegetarianism
3. The Octopus - evils of corporations
4. Little Women - so well read it fell apart
5. Go Dog Go - I cried so much about when I lost it, my parents had to buy another one
6. Nancy Drew - don't know which one, but started my love of the mystery
7. Whatever the first Mercedes Lackey I read was - the start of reading fantasy/sci-fi
8. L.E. Modesitt - first book in the series - I recommend it way too much
9. Magicians Assistant - no idea why this came to mind
10. Bel Canto - probably related to Magician's Assistant in my head
11. Great Expectations - don't try to read this when you have mono
12. Dean Koontz comes to mind - Watchers, Lightning
13. When Rabbit Howls - why I try to donate to foster kids
14. Sister of my Heart - I think that is the title...
15. Moby Dick - never have finished it and not planning to try again

This was really hard to do without looking at the walls of books that surround me

The Buffalo Soldier - Chris Bohjalian

I liked the first Bohjalian book I read - Midwives very much. It took a difficult topic and presented it with a narrative and a variety of voices. The Buffalo Soldier is similar. As I was reading this book, I kept wondering why I hadn't read more of Bohjalian after I finished Midwives. The story moves along slowly, exploring the story from several viewpoints. Each chapter is written from a different point of view, and normally that is something that I hate. Normally, I have trouble remembering which character is in the lead at the moment. But in this book, Bohjalian brings out the character in more than what is in their head or the events they lead. The chapters have a different feel based on which character is in the lead. But the entire book feels like flowing down a stream - moving along toward the final moments - but not urgently, just drifting.

I'll be picking up more of Bohjalian either at the library or the bookstore.

Poem in your pocket day

Today is Poem in Your Pocket day - a NYC event. There have been many poems I've admired and thought about over the years. In fact, I still have a notebook a high school friend created with poems and lyrics she thought I would like. But there is one poem by e.e. cummings that has always stayed with me.

****
From 95 Poems (1958)


l(a

le
af
fa

ll

s)
one
l

iness

*****

I am not sure if it is the sentiment - loneliness - or the very visual way it shows the leaf falling, but this is the one poem I would carry in my pocket.

Tulips

I love Spring. One of my favorite things about Spring is the presence of tulips at the florist - which means I'll be bringing them home. Tulips are one of my favorite flowers - a flower you only see in Spring. Maybe it is the fleeting presence - miss those few weeks and they're gone until next year. Or maybe it's the bright colors in contrast to the gray cloudy days. When you first get them, the flowers open and close each day.

The other thing I love about tulips is the way they die like little sculptures. The flowers lean toward the light. The petals shrivel instead of just dropping. They stay interesting and on my mantle until the petals drop.

When you see those bright bulbs, you know that winter is almost over. So for as long as they are available, I'll be a filling my vases with them. And I'll smile when I see their bright colors.

(And maybe this year is the one I plant some. My old tulips ended up in the lawn when we reconfigured the yard. They are casualties of the lawn mower...)

Traveling around Facebook is a list of books that supposedly the BBC thinks you will have only read 6 of. I kept my count at the end of the line. I was doing good with 6 out of 7 to start.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (1)
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (2)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (3)
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (4)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (5)
6 The Bible - the whole thing and not just parts. (I tried and gave up, several times)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (6)
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell (7)
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (8)
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (9)
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott (10)
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller (11)
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (12)
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (13)
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger (14)
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell (15)
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (16)
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (17)
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck (18)
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (19)
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame (20)
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens (21)
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis (22)
34 Emma - Jane Austen (23)
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen (24)
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (25)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini (26)
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden (27)
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne (28)
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell (29)
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (30)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (I tried several times - 2)
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving (31)
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery (32)
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood (33)
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding (34)
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan (35)
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel (36)
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons (37)
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen (38)
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon (39)
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens (40)
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley (41)
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon (42)
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (I tried - 3)
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck (43)
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt (44)
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold (45)
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas (46)
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding (47)
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville (I tried multiple times - 4)
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens (48)
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker (49)
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett (50)
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson (51)
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno - Dante (52)
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray (53)
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens (54)
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker (55)
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro (56)
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White (57)
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom (58)
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (59)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams (60)
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare (61)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl (62)
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (63)


So out of the 100, I read 63 and 4 of them I tried to read and decided they weren't worth it.