reading — Page 47

Color

February 9, 2019 at 9:25 am by Claudia

I’ve been so bored with all my downtime lately that I’ve taken to adding color to my laptop screen. There’s a new color combination on the WordPress dashboard (purple and green!), I’m using dark mode on my MacOS, which eliminates the ever-present boring gray of Safari and the dock and provides a dramatic black background. And my ‘desktop’ is a photo from the NY Times with vivid colors.

Too much down time. Too many days with gray skies and bare branches and wind and coughing and blowing my nose. I needed some color!

I am slowly getting better. Mornings are hard. Evenings, as are often the case, bring on coughing. But in the middle? Longer stretches with something close to normalcy. It’s definitely heading on out, but not as quickly as I’d like.

I finished the latest Lee Child yesterday morning and now I’ve started Less by Andrew Sean Greer, which won the Pulitzer Prize last year.

Thank you for all your lovely messages on the anniversary of Scout’s death. She was a big part of this blog and her absence is felt here, as well as in our home. I once said that she would have had her own Instagram account, had she lived. She was a star.

Don’s going to run some errands today – he’s still under the weather, but he’s restless. He also tends to recover from these things more quickly than I do. We need to recycle and replenish our larder. I’m going to bag up the remaining items that I’m throwing out and then I should be officially finished with the office. And I’m going to return the Lee Child to the library – maybe I’ll find something interesting to check out.

Boring. I know.

I need and want spring. But, Tuesday’s forecast calls for 3 – 5 inches of snow and ice.

Oh, goody.

Happy Saturday.

Sunday Thoughts

January 27, 2019 at 11:03 am by Claudia

• I promised to show you this ornament up close and completely forgot about it until now:

This is it. Don gave me this for Christmas. The lovebirds reminded him of our mourning doves. The egg is a real egg – ostrich egg, I think? – and it’s absolutely lovely.

• I finished Something Of His Art: Walking To Lübeck With J. S. Bach yesterday. It’s absolutely charming. It’s also short, about 91 pages or so. The author manages to weave together both journeys, past and present, beautifully. He shares a lot of information about the young Bach and what the journey would have been like in his day; what he would have seen, where he might have stayed, the flora and the fauna that would have surrounded him. The text is so evocative. At the end, I felt like I had taken two journeys – one with J. S. Bach hundreds of years ago, and one with the author and his BBC crew in the present. I recommend it highly. I’m interested in reading more of Horatio Clare’s work.

Now I’m reading Wrecked by Joe Ide, the third in his IQ series. I picked up Lee Child’s latest from the library yesterday so that will be next up in the queue. And I think I’m about ready to continue my cleaning and sorting in the office.

• Can I say that I’m over reading captions like, “I Marie Kondo-ed this room” (or closet, or panty, or…) on Instagram? In other words, you cleaned and got rid of stuff? Is this a new concept? Haven’t we been doing this for hundreds, even thousands, of years? We get in the mood, we sort through everything, making piles to donate or throw away and we clean out the clutter? And then we feel better.

And the whole get rid of anything that doesn’t ‘spark joy?’ My toilet plunger doesn’t ‘spark joy,’ but I need it nonetheless.

Okay. End of rant. It’s just driving me a wee bit crazy.

It’s a gray day today. And cold. But not nearly as cold as the wind chills in the Midwest! Stay warm, my friends. Stay inside!

Happy Sunday.

Brrrrrrr!

January 21, 2019 at 11:16 am by Claudia

Right now, it feels like 14 below zero out there and it’s 11 am. We have a wind chill advisory until 6 pm. We have entered into that phase I call “Ice Station Zebra,” where the faucets in the house have a drip going constantly, where we are wearing more than one layer of clothing, and where we’re still waiting for an oil delivery and we’re nearly on the zero line. We’re not quite there, and we have heat, but I must admit that this ‘hoping against hope’ for a timely oil delivery is wearing thin.

We’re told they’ll be here this afternoon. Today, of course, is the coldest day we’ve had this winter, maybe the coldest day we’ll have all winter long. I know Don and I have a flair for the dramatic, but there’s such a thing as too much drama!

We had the lights blink on and off several times last night, but – so far – we haven’t lost power.

Shoveling yesterday was exhausting. The snow had compacted, so there was about 5 inches on the ground with a 1/2 inch layer of ice on top. We had to chop up the ice as we went. We ended up shoveling in two sessions, with a break in between. At the end of the second session, I cut out early because I had torqued my body the wrong way and had some lower back pain. I felt it this morning, but it’s much better today. I’m usually very careful when I shovel, but when it’s very cold out and you’re tired and trying to finish the job, you can get careless. Anyway, all is well.

So today is about hunkering down, counting the minutes until our oil delivery, wearing a shawl over my flannel pajamas, making sure the drip is going, and taking advantage of the time and space for reading.

I’m going to start reading my book from John Sandoe later today. I spent this morning reading one of my copies of Slightly Foxed, a Literary Quarterly. If you remember, I purchased two copies of Slightly Foxed when I was in London. I really love it. I may subscribe to it. We’ll see.

The one plus? It may be windy, but it’s sunny out there.

Happy Monday.

Color

Sunday Thoughts

Brrrrrrr!

Lambs Like to Party

A Note

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