Growing Things

Cindy has a wonderful eye for creating "beauty spots" all around the house. For example, there are new sliding doors in the dining area that lead out to the back porch. As you look through the sliding doors, you see this hanging basket, filled with petunias and sweet potatoes. Yes, sweet potatoes; because they have pretty dangling vines, they are perfect for this arrangement. I didn't know that. And I never would have thought about creating this pretty eye catcher.

Remember those "helicopter" maple seeds. They don't just land everywhere in the yard, they also fill up the gutters. Eric had removed the covers to the gutters for a reason I didn't understand. Today he had to climb this very long ladder to remove the new maple trees from all the gutters. It was heart stopping for those who were watching. Me. See the long drop to the ground in the picture that follows. I know, you can't see the ground, but is is one story below the porch level. I'm glad he made it down. I told him that I didn't want to delete these pictures because they were the last taken of him before his tragic fall.

Do you remember that my friend Teena was pregnant when I went to India for the last time? That was a year ago last November. Here she is with little Nihal. Too cute. He looks just like his dad. Teena tells me that her friends call him Little Shini after his dad. I'm very happy for her.

Not so happy that Clif and Lynda were asked to leave The Times last Wednesday. Yes, one more layoff. Can you cut your way to happiness? I hope those two are happy. The Times is much poorer for them leaving. I'll just keep looking at little Nihal and remember that life goes on.

Views From Two Wars

The Irregulars is a book about a group of men who did some spy work before and during America's participation in World War II. The hook is that it focuses on Roald Dahl, the writer of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and friends. The friends include Ian Fleming (James Bond writer), Roger Ogilvy (Ogilvy & Mather PR firm), Noel Coward (Design for Living - and other things, but we just saw that play), and many, many more. They were all lovely, tall, good looking Brits who had some difficulty behaving in uniform. They were sent to the US to push the British point of view, spy on German sympathizers, and plant false information. The spy stuff is very limited in this book. It is mostly about who they knew and slept with, what they drank, how they messed up. If you know any of this stuff it is not very interesting. I kept waiting for them to DO something. It is a long wait with little payoff.

The other book is In Morocco by Edith Wharton. Wharton is invited to tour Morocco during World War I. The war is not happening here, but it affects things a bit. She is there in 1917, the French are hip-deep in the war, but they are the colonizers of Morocco, so their presence is felt. It would be great to take this book on a trip to Morocco to see how things have changed or remained the same. She has interesting insights into the history, religion, culture, architecture, geography, etc. of the region. One of the reasons is that there are no travel guides of the area at that time. She says this can't be a travel guide because her circumstances are a bit different, friends in government, etc. and she is moving too fast. The moving too fast is due to the war. But she covers a lot of the country and has insightful comments. I'd love to hear from someone who has been to Morocco recently (and reads this book) to tell me how things compare now. I bet they all have Tivo and Iphones.

Crash, Bang, Ding

I got my car in late 2000, so it is by no means new.  But I take good care of it and there has been little damage to its body.  Remember the tree that fell in the rainstorm on my trip East?  The tree fell away from the car, knowing how traumatized I'd be if it did any damage.

The geezer who hit my car a couple of weeks ago didn't see me as he backed out of his parking space. OK, maybe he isn't a geezer, but he hit me, none-the-less. $2000 in damages. And no end of head aches with estimates and goofy insurance people. MY insurance agent told me about deductibles before he found out if I caused the accident. I started to get defensive. But it was clearly his fault. He hit my car behind the driver's side door. I would have had to have been cutting wheelies in the drive to smack into his car that way.

In any event, this will all be done in time. In the meantime, I am not working. No work on my books until 6/19. Once again, I am planning a trip to Vermont and New Hampshire. This time, I won't be driving up there. After getting lost in the Fall, I've decided to take a train.

Yes, I've Been Reading

And now, after a month of constant reading, it's time to update. Why do I do this? Because I am getting old and forgetful. What was the name of that book that I disliked so much because of its racism that I chucked it into a digitial bin? More often I wonder if I've already read a book in a series. Today it just reminds me of all the pulp fiction that I read


My friend, Dean, really likes John Sandford. I like him too, so when Audible offers a discount on his new book, I'm going to snap it up. Wicked Prey takes place during the time of the Republican Convention in Minnesota. The protagonist is Lucas Davenport. Lots of stuff is going on here: old foe of Davenport wants to kidnap and harm his soon to be adopted daughter, a sharpshooter is identified as someone who might shoot - who? McCain or Palin? - and a small group of bad guys are holding up big money lobbyists. This is all well done. Loose ends knit into whole cloth and you leave feeling happy. There is violence, but it is so quick that it didn't harm my psyche. And no, Palin didn't get shot, not even in fiction.
Voices of the Violin is about a murder in a small town in Sicily. Are there large ones? It's a small book, light on crime, heavy on people. Lovely. It's almost summer. This would be perfect for light summer reading. And that warm Sicilian sun was good for warming me in the chill of a Washington Spring. Somewhere in Amazon it says that if you like Italian mysteries, this series is a good one. Who purposefully likes Italian mysteries?
Do I really want to become involved in another mystery series? The Burglar Who books are a possibility. A book dealer is also a burglar on the side. This is how he supports his used book store. Heaven only knows that people like me have almost put an end to bookstores. Sure I read a lot, but it is 95% digital. I'm still reading the 800 page paper book that I got for Christmas. So what are book sellers to do? Burgle. What are newpaper publishers to do? I think Bernie Madoff would have to be involved to keep them afloat. Anyway, good premise, lightly written, good reader. Meh, okay. If I run out of Italian mystery series, this is a possibility.

Another deal, Audible had a sale on First Family. Baldacci is hit and miss. I like his Stone series. This was a one-off. Nicely written, moves along, first family not one you would recognize. She was a lot more Nancy Reagan more than Laura Bush. He is a waste of the space he's using - Bush? I guess Baldacci made them up. Enjoyable, but not worth buying new. Hey, what about a second hand book store?

An Italian mystery series! Who would have thought of that? About Face is the second I've read recently about Commissario Guido Brunetti. Wow, she's written 18 of them. I don't think I'm going to buy them all immediately, but they are a fun diversion. They take place in Venice. This one is about dumping toxic waste. Talk about something you don't want to think about because it is all too real. Many of us still have images of the barges of regular people's refuse trying to find a home after New York's dumps were full. That's bad enough, but what about all the toxic chemicals, medical waste and nuclear waste that are being created? We are so doomed. Good side - I like Brunetti.

The Dead Yard is the second book I've read by this Adrian recently. The last. Because I can't really say that I read it. I sort of scanned it because this poor Irish lad is forever being savaged. Endlessly. I love the reader, he has the best Irish accent, but it is just not worth the pain.


Oh, Peggy, do you ever read anything but those silly mysteries??? Of course I do. It's books like The Last Lion that cause me to read those mysteries. This book was so long, but so fascinating I had to break it up with a little fictional mayhem. This book is subtitled Alone. From 1932 to 1940, Winston Churchill was kinda on his own. He and his party weren't seeing eye to eye. This happened in large part because of the abdication of King Eddie for his love Ms. Simpson. Churchill liked him and figured that it was okay for him to marry her. He was certainly alone in that opinion.


He was also alone in his antipathy toward that upstart in Germany, Adolph Hitler. He railed against der Fuhrer constantly, to no avail. People admired him, but they weren't going to get mired in the mess his reputation had become. Fantastic book for helping one understand all those years of appeasement and disgrace that almost resulted in the end of Great Britain and the world as we know it. Read this, even though it ends when Churchill took over the government in 1940. Manchester died after writing this and never got to finish the series. Will England survive? Guess I'll have to read a different series of books to learn that.

Oh, Ronnie. This is called The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan. I read it as, what happens when your president is showing the first signs of Alzheimers. I really wanted to know more about this time, even though I lived through it. There are many speculations about how/why the cold war ended. James Mann does a good job of researching everything that lead up to the end. But still, one thing that becomes more and more apparent to me is how Reagan's Alzheimers was starting at this time. It was just like my dad, with his retelling of old stories and fuzzy logic. I can't believe that Reagan was always like that.


I highly recommend this book, because the Reps keep throwing Ronnie in our faces and we should know who is being tossed around. And it is always good to understand history. When I was looking on Amazon for the image of the book, I found another - Tear Down This Myth. I don't know the guy who wrote it, but it looks like he comes with strong opinion. Oops, I just checked. Bunch is a Pulitzer Prize winner who had the same uneasy feeling that I do about the myth that is Reagan. I wonder if this is in Audible

Flowers

We have a wonderful garden.  It takes a lot of work, but it is a joy to look at.  I've started an album to show the ever changing flowers and plants.  It is here.  I will include pictures of the plants as they change and the people who toil there.  There is so much toiling to be done. Eric walks in almost every day, looking like he has been kneeling at an altar of moist soil.  He does most of the weeding and much of the planting.  Cindy does the rest of the planting and is a whirlwind of clean-up and trimming.

What do I do?  Well, some.  I rake and throw stuff away usually.  Kneeling is out of the question. I don't know if that will change when I get new knees.  Now that fall is past and the leaves have decided to stay on the trees for a while I have a new task - helicopter retrieval. Helicopters are the seed pods of the maple tree. There are two maple trees here that dropped thousands of seed pods. They reminded Adrian of the ubiquitous seeds dropped by the palm trees that fronted our house on Los Robles. These are a little easier to see, but they do the same thing. If you look closely below, you can see the seed pods on the left and the resulting little maple tree on the right. They have found the garden that Cindy recently rototilled. Some day these will be gone and tomatoes will thrive instead.

Baseball X 4

Baltimore

Adrian arrived on Saturday after a very long red-eye flight. By Tuesday, we were ready for our first baseball game. This was Baltimore Orioles v The Los Angeles Angeles of Anaheim. I wanted to be a good visitor and cheer on the home team, but I was very happy that the Angels won. We had gone to the wharf area and got caught up in traffic that was horrendous due to a burst water main. These cities are very old. Their infrastructure is crumbling, since some of it is 200 years old. Their streets are all one way, since they were made for walking or horses. You can imagine my joy when we drove into our hotel before the game and it was directly across the street from the stadium.

We had wonderful seats, too. This is the view from the clubhouse level. The city looks pretty from this view. Actually, it's a nice looking city. We know from The Wire that not all parts are nice. Adrian

 and I had talked about taking a Wire tour that I found on the Internet. The trial with the water main knocked that off the agenda. Most of the downtown was re-routed for the day.

This is Adrian, wondering why his silly mother wants to take his picture. I wasn't the only silly one. Adrian wanted to try a trout sandwich. I guess the kids on The Wire were always eating those things and he said he thought it would be interesting to try something that was unique to the city. I asked around and was told we could find them at Lexington Market. Seems this is a pretty famous market.

 It's sort of like the Central Market by The Times building in LA. Lots of stalls for meat and produce and lots of little food stalls. Adrian wasn't sure his trout sandwich was authentic. My crab cake was. We ate these as we drove to Philadelphia for the next game.

Philadelphia

This time our hotel was way across town from the ball park. We drove past the stadium on our way to our hotel in the historical district. AAA maps told me to go down a narrow one way street. It was fascinating. It passed the two most famous cheese steak stand in the city. We weren't hungry andevery ingredient in the sandwich is off my diet, so we drove on to the hotel. The neighborhoods were very inviting. Old friends used to live here and missed it a lot. I can see why. No broken water mains.

We watched the Nationals of D.C. beat the Phillies. Once again I was torn between being a good visitor and cheering for a team more local to where I currently live. So I cheered all good plays. The Nationals won.  That is a rare occurance.  Or it was. They seem to be doing better now. Our seats were in the seats just above first base. People were in the aisles the whole game. Our seats were on the aisle. We saw very little of the hitting and pitching part of the game. It was freezing so we left early and saw the end of the game on TV. We had much better seats there. Or, we saw more of the pitching/hitting part of the game.

Washington, D.C. 

We went to the Nationals game against Cleveland on Sunday.  See the tarp covered field above. See the hugely bored people below. They do have the best food of any ballpark. We should know because we sampled it all as we waited for them to call the game.

Adrian, Eric and Cindy watching the Atlanta game on the TV in the clubhouse.  Oh well.

Adrian and I went back for the game on Tuesday. Hum, I can't remember who they were playing. No tarp on the field meant that the running president's could race each other. You can see them nearing the finish line. Abe won, Teddy was in last place. And no wonder. Look at the commemorative tee-shirt they handed out. It was May 5. Poor Teddy. Actually, he looks a bit like my friend, John. We were too late to get one. So sad. 

This game was called in the 10th due to rain. The score was tied 10-10. The Nationals scored 3 runs on walks when the bases were loaded. A batter was hit, scoring one of those runs. Lots of excitement and very good seats. We may do this again when Adrian returns.