Second and last for a sad, long time

Blind Search by Paula Munier

Gosh! Was I sorry to see this one end. The second in a series, and the last for a immeasurably long time. Maybe a year.

The plot was tight and twisted; the private emotions real and raw; the action unstoppable. I swear, when she sets out to write a search scene or a chase scene, she writes it so commandingly that you can NOT put it down until the end.

Unlike some books written by women--and a few by men--I believe this could be enjoyed

My new favorite author. (pretty much)

A Borrowing of Bones by Paula Munier

Mercy and Elvis #1 and many to come, I hope! Elvis is a bomb-sniffing dog, retired when his partner is killed in Afghanistan. Mercy adopts him--or is it the other way around--and tries to retire graciously in the mountains of Vermont. But she's a restless soul and can't find it easy to sit still when explosive residues keep turning up in places where they never should have been.

Ms. Munier can write action like no author I've ever read. There are chapters where you can not stop going, even if the phone rings and the kettle boils over. Mercy and Elvis are truly tortured souls and you have to love them. As mentioned in another book about rescue dog handlers, a few years of hard training to run after your dog where ever he goes makes a person a little reckless, by normal standards. Possibly that's why the real handlers I've read about typically work in teams of three--the extra person is communicator, map-reader, and all-around helper.

Still, overlook a little reckless abandon and you still have to love these guys. Great work, Ms. Munier!

Gardening in my roots, Sad April

On April 14, last Tuesday, there was a frost. Almost all of the shelling beans, green beans, and hot pepper plants were hit.  The cucumbers were dead or damaged. And a couple of tomatoes weren't looking so good. 

Note to future self in case I ever have the courage to try this endeavor again--the plants at the east side of the garden, away from the pecan tree, were hit much harder than those at the west end.

But it appears some of the beans had gotten enough sunlight to progress. Many of them, maybe two-thirds, that looked dead are now squeezing out a second set of leaves. 'Tis a miracle!





Why is there a potato plant growing in my compost bin?

A kinda sorta maybe mystery

Burials
by Mary Anna Evans

Another difficult book to review. I liked it immensely and I'm eager to read more of the series. But it didn't have that little extra whoompf which would make me give it five stars and put the next book on hold immediately.

The heroine-slash-bone detective is great. Her husband is a supporting character and doesn't have much role to play, either in the action or the character development. And there appear to be some children, offstage and ignored. And a father-in-law who seemed intriguing but never seemed to make much sense.

Yet the author creates a good plot and doesn't rely too much on silly coincidences and a perpetrator's monologue to wrap up and explain all the loose ends.

Long anticipated: I'd hoped to learn all about periods

Because Internet
Understanding the New Rules of Language

by 

Gretchen McCulloch

Not nearly as informative as I'd hoped, but good examples of some of the changes that the internet has caused in our written communications. She did a great analysis of the different types of internet users--first, the programmer generation who made and understood Lisp jokes; second, their younger colleagues who did email, blogging, and web design but didn't necessarily know what goes on under the covers; third and fourth, the generation of people who grew up with handheld devices and omnipresent web.

But the book was more a general survey, somewhat short on details. As to how our punctuation, grammar and writing style, she only gave examples--if you're expecting to learn exactly how to text like a teenager, you won't learn it here. But you get a taste of what you're up against.

And not, I did learn that the period has evolved from a seldom-noticed ending to a sentence into a signal of sarcasm, passive aggression, or irony. I love you (period) doesn't mean the same as I love you (no period).  If you're under twenty.

More more more Rainbow Rowell

Wayward Son

Rainbow Rowell has done it again. And  I'm sure I wrote that phrase last time. I feel like I've known Simon Snow forever--but it's only been three books. The first one (which was great!) introduced the Wizarding World of Watley through the words of a teenage fan fiction author. It was a blatant Harry Potter parody, yes, but somehow it was one that has its heart in the young people she created and their very real and very non-parodied emotions.

The second was instigated by people who loved the first and really wanted to see the characters finish their adventure, a completion which the first book hints at but doesn't detail. It's really good too and ends with a sense of Happily Ever After...or not. But it did, clearly, end.

And this book is the after after the happily ever after.

Good picture collection but not exactly reading material

Where We Lived: Discovering the Places We Once Called Home
by Jack Larkin

Lots of pictures--most interesting were the ones of places that no longer exist in modern times. One of the WPA projects of the thirties was to photograph and document old buildings of interesting historical aspect. So he assembled these pictures, and others, into a pictographic history of American home architecture.

Oddly enough, it was the breadth of the book that exhausted me, and at the end, I was just flipping pages. I have an interest in architecture and a great interest in building materials and an immense interest in Americana, yet still I didn't feel like I learned much of interest with this. A lot more words might have done it--for example, if he'd started with a building style, explained briefly how the "bones" were put together, why it was popular, and when and where, then the pictures would have pulled it all together. That would have been a complete reversal of how I encountered the book: instead of pictures plus captions, it would have been engaging information plus illustrative examples.

April brings a cold snap

The garden is wonderful! And guess what's coming? Torrential rains followed by a cold snap. Possibly a frost.










A late frost will kill all these lovely beans. So it better not. There's a chance of it on Tuesday night.









I was just getting ready to big up a huge patch of these in the bed I'm letting lie fallow for the year. Noxious weeds...











or not:

But not this on the left It's a head of lettuce I left in the ground last year; it's been dormant and about two inches tall all winter, and looky now!

The Cooking Gene
by Michael W Twitty

Very peculiar book. The cover implied it was about the history of Black American cooking, but there was a whole lot more about the history of Michael W Twitty than about cooking. His family history is fascinating--it's a sample and an example of a lot of other families, people coming from many backgrounds, with many stories, all all being dumped into the same morass of fear and misery in the great United States of America.

He does write--a little--of foods and cooking, only not in the detail I'd expected. Those parts seem mostly general, speaking of tripe or black-eyed peas or hominy grits as a given but not discussing their history or evolution in detail. I was quite disappointed.

One odd conclusion he reached, described in his own words:

If slavery had phased out around 1790 and gradual emancipation had spread, the whole history of America and her foodways would be markedly different. Instead, cotton ensured the growing and complete racialization of what it meant to be of African descent....if King Cotton had never reigned, we African Americans might be like any other ethnic group--stories might be passed down; names remembered; songs, words, religions, prayers, perhaps, even one might say, a sense of pride. Instead, names were changed again and again and again, as people were sold, further commoditized, dehumanized, and abused.

What he's referring to is that slavery was once common and more-or-less evenly spread out over the southern states.  It might very well have been gradually phased out--if it hadn't been for cotton. As soon as planters discovered the profit they could make in growing cotton and selling it to the mills in England, they abandoned the worn-out farms of the southeast and spread out to fresh land in Alabama, Mississippi, Texas and other unclaimed areas, taking their slaves--and more slaves--with them. That mass movement in pursuit of quick and easy fortunes didn't leave time for caring for slaves, planting gardens, or encouraging them in eating a sustaining diet so they could reproduce and raise new, healthy infants into slaver. The diet became impoverished and the lot of the enslaved became more and more hopeless. Slavery wasn't going nowhere.

Sunday at Richland-Chambers Lake

Feb 16

We had a beaver morning! He was cruising around the little bay. We never saw his paddle tail--distance--but he was clearly too big to be a muskrat and had a definite definition between head and body. Plus he had noticeable ears--doesn't that rule out nutria?

I managed 40 minutes of good jogging: through the entry drive to the road, out to the end of the point, to the road again, to the point again, repeat. I didn't have to stop to pee and there wasn't the slightest twinge of pain or urgency. Yay; thank God and Greyhound she's gone.

Then we loaded up the boat and drove to the boat ramp we'd found the day before. We fished all day around the power line poles and bridge pilings. It was chilly in the shade but perfect in the sunshine. We saw few birds and fewer fish--I caught a pretty catfish, blue I think, and Ed a blue cat and a medium-sized white bass.  (Could have been a hybrid striper? I think so.) Zack came along in his cage and wasn't especially thrilled with the adventure, but when I got tired of fishing and held him on my lap for awhile, he made a great blanket.

Eventually it was time to give up, so we headed back to the dock that wasn't a dock--it was just a thin, sheet-metal barrier at the edge of the bank alongside the boat ramp. To get onto land, you simply hopped over the metal and landed on the crumbling concrete.

Right.  Correction: Ed simply hopped over the metal and landed on the concrete. I, in my fat-bound clumsiness, chose to move carefully. I stepped  over the metal and placed my right foot firmly on the crumbling concrete. I bent my knees to throw my center of gravity forward and moved my left food into position. I was just starting to stand up from my crouch when a jerk pulled me back.  The useless dangling loop on my life jacket had caught around the front light post on the boat.  No way was I going to break that light!

I tried to pause, balance and work it loose, but all the extra lard I'm carrying on my backside caused me to fall backward. And hard. I had one hand on the boat, one elbow scraping a post, both legs folded over the metal barrier and nothing to grab hold of. Before I had a chance to figure out how to get up from the embarrassing--and painful--position, Ed walked up and gave me a hand.

The sun sets rapidly in February. We left before sundown but didn't get back until near dark, about seven o'clock. Leftovers for supper. Delicious leftovers.

Monday

We slept with the windows open and woke up to the mockingbird orchestra. If you're a bird listener, mockingbirds are killer--you can't help but try to figure out what birds it's  imitating...and once you start, you're hooked. And wide-awake.

There were no beaver that morning but I saw a couple of very tiny duck-like birds in the creek--were they grebes? My guess would be 10-12 inches long. Then I saw three normal sized ducks out in the cove.  How it the world do people tell these things apart? Grrrrr.

The morning was misty and a bit chilly--sixty-three. Not at all bad--for February--but the wind was supposed to pick up later in the day so we decided not to take the boat out. After doing my part to get ready to leave, I drove the truck over to the nearby wildlife management area we'd been passing every time we went out. From the road, it looked like there was a big pond that would surely be full of ducks. It turned out to be backwater from the river, which was high, and there were only two birds. Only two...very...big...birds.  I noticed the first Bald Eagle right off, he was at the top of a tree on the other side of the water. I also noticed a very large nest at the top of a different tree. Walking out to see if I could possible figure out a certain little "pee-pee-pee" noise (bird or frog?), I suddenly realized that the nest tree had a second eagle, less obvious to see but also near the top.

So I hightailed it out of there. If they were nesting, then I had no business messing with their business. Good luck to you!

I was just thinking I should read up on Richland-Chambers lake so I could write a bit about it, but I won't. It would make the whole trip seem like a huge anticlimax. We saw only the tiniest fraction of the lake, although the sonar depth finder gave us some intriguing glimpses into the lake bottom and the masses of drowned timber. But we really didn't come to know the lake.

That's not to mean it wasn't a marvelous trip. It was like a little appetizer of retirement life--having nowhere in particular I have to go, no time in particular I have to be anywhere. Plenty of time to sit on my butt and contemplate...I can jog or walk or wander around birdwatching for hours. Or on a misty morning like that last one, I could sit in the Mammoth and read a book. It's like...freedom. Wow.

And so we returned. Not a memorable trip...but the last camping trip of my working career. It's time to move on.

I can't wait.

NOTES:
- If we ever decide to come here again, follow the advice of the lady at the RV park--call and book directly with them and skip Rover Pass.

When I'm retired, will I still be kind of bummed out at the end of a trip? I hope not--I hope I'll be excited at finally getting back to my garden with plenty of work to do out there, plus plenty of photographs to organize and piece into a travel story. This time the travel story was kind of boring--although not the trip, the trip was fine--and there aren't very many pictures.  Next time...will we be going places? Yes!

Saturday at Richland-Chambers Lake

Saturday, Feburary 15

I slept fine but Ed was uncomfortably hot--go figure it. But I clearly didn't drink enough water the day before because I had a resurgence of my UTI or whatever it was that was making me have to go pee every five minutes. I'd had it during the week, but by Thursday had dwindled to a minor twinge before noon, and by Friday it was gone completely. So why was it back? Blah. I also broke another tooth Friday night. Was my body suddenly falling to pieces in my last month before retirement?

There were no birds at the park. "No" as in nothing but chickadees, blue jays, mockingbirds (a lot), killdeer, cormorant (I need to see that one better), and vultures. But that's okay. We were not there for birdwatching. 

Except for all the pipits! A whole flock of them! I know they're one of the commonest birds in America but I'd never noticed them before that last trip. I tried to take a picture but with my little dog helping, I failed royally and repeatedly.  When I tried again the next day, in the time-honored tradition of birds, they were gone.

Back to the retirement thingy. It's getting harder and harder to envision working for 45 more days (6-1/3 weeks). Is the stress of that what's causing my body parts to break?

Jogging was hard. With the bladder issue, I couldn't go very far or fast without returning to the RV. But I managed thirty minutes of it.

After that we went out to have lunch with my brother and sister-in-law, but first we took a jaunt around the lake in search of a boat ramp we'd heard rumor of.  It looked like a good spot for fishing, but getting there via lake would have taken away too much of our fishing time.  While driving, we discovered that Google maps considers dirt roads as appropriate routes for shortcuts. I kept having to override the navigation as it headed us off on dirt roads. It didn't help that the driver insisted in traveling at or above the posted speed limit. Every time I found the best next turn, it was too late-we'd passed it. We were also passing zebras, camels, and most likely emus and wildebeasts out there in the middle of rural Texas, but I could hardly take my eyes off the map long enough to enjoy them.

Eventually we found the boat ramp and headed back to lunch at The Harbor Restaurant. They really made an effort with the food--my bun was fresh and warm, although smeared with grease and with an awful lot of sugar in the dough. The fish inside the bun was okay, and the french fries very good--they appeared to have been made fresh, cut in interesting shapes, and double-fried to get a creamy interior and crunchy outside. If I'd had ketchup, I'd have gobbled them all down and felt sick all day.

I'd eat there again, despite it being a little on the pricey side. Lunch cost about 24 dollars for the two of us, even though I just had the fish sandwich and Ed had the small order of fried shrimp. There were a lot of build-your-own pizzas on the menu and they may have been great.
Forgot to post the coots at Fairfield Lake State Park yesterday:

They we returned and braved a chilly wind and mostly cloudy sky to go fishing. Whether or not we were going to go was touchy for a bit--it was horrid weather and the water wasn't nearly as calm as we might like. But we went, and suddenly the breeze stopped, the water stilled and it warmed up a fraction of a degree. There were lots of terns out fishing too, and at the end of the trip, I'm 98% sure I saw a loon.  Also a kingfisher, gulls sp., American Pipit for sure this time, Robin, bald eagle, and osprey.

Ed caught a big white bass--3-3/4 pounds and 19-ish inches long. Biggest I remember ever seeing outside of a mount at Bass Pro Shop.

Coming back in: