Lost in the Threads

First, a view of my favorite flower, the peony. I bought a dozen to put in front of my window. They were so much fun to watch as they unfolded into the floozies that they are. Just when you think they can't get any bigger, they find a way. Lovely. Too bad they don't grow in this climate.

I've been needling like crazy for the last month. I got tired of working on the right side of the picture, so I moved to the left. I know, impossible that I could move further to the left. I guess I was more comfortable over there because the far left is done from top to bottom. Now I need to fill in the blank top and bottom as I move to the right. Let's see if I like the right better than I did last month.

Lots of stitching means lots of listening. So many mysteries, all fun, but not worth remembering. Here's a few of the interesting books along the way.

First is The Man From Beijing by Henning Mankell. Mankell wrote the Wallender mystery series that I've enjoyed in the past. This one also takes place in Sweden, but includes a backstory involving a Chinese family. Mankell gets pretty long-winded and diatribish at times. Interesting concept, however. Almost as interesting is reading Mankell's biography on Wikipedia. Talk about moving to the left.
My friend Per is seriously ill and in the hospital. Now he's getting seriously sick listening to me talk about The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande. I've tried to visit Per regularly at the hospital because I know it has to be a drag having doctors and nurses poking and prodding and ripping flesh while removing gauzes day in and day out. But every time I go, I think about this book. Gawande has been working on ways to improve hospital and surgical routines using checklists. His previous book included a section on reducing infections in hospitals by having everyone wash their hands constantly. You can bet I was watching everyone who came in to see Per. He's been at two hospitals. The first was in Marina Del Rey and they have an excellent procedure, putting on new gloves when they walk into a patient's room, then throwing them out as they leave and then using an antiseptic cleaner. The UCLA hospital has antiseptic cleaner dispensers outside every room with a big sign to use it to prevent infections. I think I like the Marina hospital's procedure best. I never saw them not comply with their practice. Maybe the UCLA folks cleanse their hands every time they walk into a room. Gawande says that even he misses sometimes.

Then today a nurse came in to take vitals and ask about pain. This was a checklist! One of the most rudimentary checklists in a hospital is a nurse doing 4 things - blood pressure, temperature, heart rate and pain (from 1-10 rating). Some used to miss some of the 4 things and it was found that if all were done and recorded, patient recovery improved.

In other words, I liked the book.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks has helped be to be more knowledgeable about cell reproduction and uterine cancer and John Hopkins and big Pharma stealing our genes. What a good book. It actually helped me understand my cancer better. I did better than poor Henrietta Lacks. My cancer was found at the very beginning. Hers lasted through two pregnancies. More than that, the biopsy they took of her cells in the early 50's are still growing today and have helped in unbelievable research and medical discoveries. This is a fascinating slice of history.

A Visit with Maureen

My college friend, Maureen, drove down from Seattle to visit her family last week. I got to sneak in a little visit on Sunday. She is just the dearest person. We can be separated for months and it still feels like we haven't missed a beat. Who else knows all the history of the intervening 40 years? Who else can laugh when I say that Reg is finally helping to support me with his Social Security payments? Who else will send a special message to Adrian when I'm showing her how I can take movies with my still camera? She is, after all, the Maureen that Adrian named our dog after when he was little. She was such a big part of his life.

Maureen was staying at Katie's house. Katie is Mo's sister and I haven't seen her for years. Gosh, it was good to see her, too. She's the only one still working. Maureen is still playing in the stock market. Not playing. She is a very serious investor. Sorry we can't see each other today when the market is bouncing back after its heavy drop last week. I don't know if she missed her moment to buy Proctor and Gamble. She's driving home today, so I'll have to see if she bought anything later in the week.

I can see that when I move up to Albany, I'll be making a lot of trips north and I hope that she can visit me more often there.

Finished Game Change on the way to Covina to see Maureen. Poor Mo. It was too much on my mind because of that. The Dreadful Edwardses, the foul-mouthed McCain, the muddled Palin, the over-confident and flawed Clintons, the brash upstart Obama. It was all good reading. As always, the person who comes off best is Michelle. That could just be my bias. It becomes easier to see how the Reps (and Dems) could be wary of Bill Clinton lurking in the background. Tom recommended this as a good read and I agree. Remember, nothing you ever read is gospel, which is why you must read a lot. It might as well be enjoyable while you do it.

The Lusty Month of May

Or so they sang in Camelot. If not lusty, full of sunshine, flowers, strawberries and friends.Isn't that a pretty shot from my local farmers' market? The colors and smells still catch me every Saturday morning. The onion guy asked me if I wanted anything as I was standing there smelling the fresh, clean scent of young onions. It would be a great diet just to take in all these good smells.

This is pretty much how my needlepoint looked mid-April. I almost posted this picture, but somehow got busy. My life is so unbusy that surprises even me. I think I'd identified where the bottom of the picture was at that point, but still working mightily on the middle ground. What do you read while needlepointing? Cranford. Women in that era were always working on a piece of something. Look at the picture. She has knitting next to her. This book is a good antidote to raucous thrillers. Slow moving and sweet. Now I may be able to see the Masterpiece Theater shows based on the book that are saved on my DVR.
Another book to intersperse between mysteries is Villette by Charlotte Bronte. When Karen and I were at the FOB a couple of weekends ago we wrote what we were reading on a huge wall set up for just that purpose. As I was half way through Villette, I didn't feel too dishonest writing that as opposed to one of the mysteries I was reading. Not too. Villette is about the classic orphan girl managing in the world. I really liked it. I was not aware that the Bronte girls were not that prolific. Charlotte wrote Jane Eyre, this book and two others. You can get the Kindle edition of a book with all four books for just $1.00. Amazing.
And then begins my spat mysteries that deal with other genders. Other genders? Well, I've noticed that most mysteries are written from the male perspective. Women are often there to have horrible stuff done to them. The "other gender" in Dressed for Death is transvestites. Not that Venice is rampant with transvestites, but Donna Leon (whose name is much bigger than the title; hum, so are all the other names on this page; never mind) likes to write about issues affecting Venice. They are still mentioned here - huge pollution problem, corrupt politicians, oversexed Italian men. I loved that part where the protagonist's wife asks if he's ever noticed how often the men of Venice fondle themselves. Good story, despite the fondling. Darker Domain has a female Cold Case detective and a female journalist working what appear to be wildly divergent stories. This was nominated for a Times Book Prize for mysteries. The ending is a little contrived, but I liked it pretty much. Glad it didn't win the prize. Can't wait to read the one that did.
Gallow's View is about a Peeping Tom. Hum, why did I think this was from a different gender perspective? I'm not sure. It was well written. This was from the batch of books that were first books in a series. There are many more Inspector Banks books. Even though this was a classic mystery of the slow moving variety, I liked it.
Pirate is not a classic mystery of the slow moving type. It's actually pretty funny in its high testosterone, thrill a minute plot devices. Manly men, gorgeous women, unkillable heroes. Karen read a review that said it was Bond-like. Yes. Poorly plotted, yet moves like a runaway train. Can't put my iPod down. :) I must recommend this one to my brothers. I think both of them would love this. I know I'm enjoying it.

Do you think that the pace of that book is why my needlepoint has moved on so rapidly? I've also found the right side of the picture.

What a Weekend!

Karen drove down from Albany on Friday night. I don't have overnight visitors because I have no place for them to lie down. She is very resourceful and brought a mat and a futon etc. etc. etc. Good she drove. We needed to be up early so we could visit my farmers' market before going to UCLA for the beginning of the LAT extravaganza of books. I noticed that Google has a listing of all blogs that include the full and complete name of the event. I'm not usually shy, but those other guys write really well. So I'll just drop parts of the name as I type. The Times does have its own blog of the event.

Our first panel at the Festival was called Pageturners. It had four mystery writers that neither of us had heard about. I made a mistake getting these tickets. It should have been Michael Connelly, Robert Crais, and T. Jefferson Parker, but I goofed. We decided this was a good thing because we would learn about new authors. In this case David Ellis, Andrew Gross, Gregg Hurwitz, and Karin Slaughter. Thoroughly enjoyable. We were both not impressed with Ellis' latest book that we crammed into our pre-event reading, but it was fun to find that he is a Chicago lawyer who helped prosecute Illinois' old governor. Andrew Gross used to write for James Patterson and seemed to have left out of dismay at the formulaic plotting. So that was a plus. Karin Slaughter writes about children in peril, something neither of us care much for, but I may try one of her series to see if it can be read. Gregg Hurwitz told of a plot twist that he just had to include in a book - man drinking coffee on a quiet morning when he is snatched from his balcony by a Black Hawk helicopter crew. In other words, totally believable plotting.

The second and third panels of the day were held in Korn Convocation Center. The room had flags from all over the world on one wall. Neither of us knew what country was represented by the one above. Any ideas?

We saw Dave Eggers who had just won a Book Prize for Zeitoun the night before. You may recall that I read almost the whole thing. He is a very interesting man. He founded McSweeney which publishes a quarterly magazine of the unusual. And he is involved with an organization that tutors reading in school. Must check that out.

Finally, we saw Yann Martel who has a new book coming out about the holocaust. The story is retold through a fable about two dead animals, Beatrice and Virgil. He also wrote Life of Pi. The reviews in the New York Times and the Washington Post are scathing. Karen and I were considering that this might be worth a try. We'll see. Anything is possible.

Did you know it? Saudi Arabia.

Sunday we just had two panels. Karen selected both of them and they were great. First was Does the American Economy have a Future? This was with Jon Wiener, Joyce Appleby, Roger Farmer, Steven Hill and Matt Miller. I know, I'd never heard of any of them either. But it was fascinating. There is hope, but we must stop doing the same thing over and over. After seeing how hard it is to get change in health care, I'm not too sure how successful we will be in changing our financial practices. Keep your fingers crossed. Each of these folks have written books that sound interesting. I've passed the list on to Adrian, because he loves to read about the economy. I may actually buy a couple of these.

The final panel of the weekend was called Unstoppable Voices. We had five women for a change. That was very refreshing. They talked about how they find the voice for their books. The women were Jane Smiley, Marianne Wiggins, Susan Straight, Mona Simpson and Maile Meloy. I've read books by the first two and will keep an eye out of the last two. As for Ms. Straight. I now own a book with a short story of hers in it.

Karen met a guy in line for the Eggers panel who showed her a great book he'd just bought, Los Angeles Noir. The Noir books take place in cities all over the world and include short mystery stories. We looked it up Saturday night and learned that there are three books - LA Noir, L.A. Noir and Los Angeles Noir. I drove Karen crazy that night saying "remember Los Angeles, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, not LA in any form." Then we both forgot. So now we have L.A. Noir, a book that Adrian had heard about and would like to read, AND Los Angeles Noir. One of the stories in the latter book is by Susan Straight. Small city.

After the last panel we rushed down the hill so we could hear John's band playing. Murphy's Flaw has played at the FOB for several years. You may recall that I went to a coffee house to hear them a couple of months back. They are still good.

We ended the day at Tanino's in Westwood Village. Not very good overpriced food. Is it overpriced if it is really good? The company was good - John, Tom, Jim, and Karen.