Hoot of a series start

 Crime and Punctuation
by Kaitlynn Dunnett

How is it that I have to read four or five boring mysteries before I find one I really like?  Like this one, which was very amusing.  But how to find another? I already screen by ratings in the 4-star range, certainly no lower than 3.9.  Then I do a quick scan of other people's reviews. So why do so many people rave about mystery series that I find meh?

Sadly, the author doesn't have any more in the series. She has some other series, but none seem to appeal to me. They don't seem as highly rated, for one thing, and they don't seem to have a heroine I can identify with.

Like "recently widowed Mikki Lincoln." She's rather elderly (60-something) but extremely sprightly. And she's a hoot!

Gardening in my Roots--can it be spring?

Quick hurrah!  Three snap peas are up!

Funny and not so inspiring, thank heavens

   

Operation Ironman:
One Man's Four Month Journey from Hospital Bed to Ironman Triathlon
George Mahood

Funny; touching; a little scary. It's a thrilling ride on which he takes us, and I for one enjoyed every minute. His hospital stories made me chuckle despite the scary aspect of doctors finding a "mass" on his spinal cord but wanting him to just wait and see if it grows. Which is odd, because in general I approve of the wait-and-see approach to doctoring. But maybe not as much as I thought.

Then his training stories are a hoot, of course. But the one surprising thing I found that made me love this book were the occasional snippets of family life that came out. Like his kids preferring him to Mommy on the trampoline, because he was more "bouncy". More fat, didn't you mean? No...more bouncy.  (Whew--they spared his feelings)

A dark and spooky moor

The Crossing Places

by Ellie Griffiths


Mysterious AND full of detection. And creepy to boot. The heroine--a forensic archaeologist (or is that anthropologist? I forget)--

Anyway, she's an expert on old bones, so she gets called in when the police detective needs to know the age of a set of bones found buried in on a lonely beach. The boggy, spooky, tidal marshes with quicksand, mud and sticky ooze. And, it just so happens, the home of a long-dead civilization who revered the place and marked it as magical--the boundary between land and sea, a place where spirits ruled.

As to the book, the pacing and action are great. And the history, too--I hope she got most of it right. I won't fidget on her making up a detail or two, such as the specific burial and the trappings thereof, but I assume the general history of the iron age civilization and their burial rites and the sacrificial offerings is somewhat accurate.

If so, then this is a winner for me. It didn't get especially good reviews, mostly due to bad writing. And yeah, when I skimmed through what other people had to say just now, I have to agree. There were places where her writing irritated me, too. I'm hoping that as she advances at her craft she'll clean that up, so I'll give her another try. I also notice at least one person objected to her digs at religion--and probably others did, too, but were too cowardly to admit it. There are some narrow-minded readers who absolutely won't approve a book that disagrees with their beliefs even in the slightest. All I can say to that is that your faith must be pretty precarious if it can't endure a minor snub.  Very minor, in fact, and not so much about religion in general as the annoying behavior of her parents in particular. Give me a break.

Ahhhhhhh

 Sagebrush Country
The American Wilderness/Time-Life Books
by Donald Dale Jackson


Gorgeous and thoughtful book about the Great Basin area of the U.S. It encompasses all of Nevada and parts of the surrounding states, and it's almost all desert. A beautiful place, if you like deserts and I do. And a beautiful book.

Gardening in my Roots--Not Yet

We made wood chips yesterday--doesn't it look nice?  

But there is nothing growing (except for garlic, which has been there all winter) yet. A bitter freeze is coming down tomorrow and Thursday, so it's best if all the little plants stay safely dormant and under the soil. Except for lettuce and dill, which are planted on top of the soil. Keep fingers crossed!

Best memoir of the year and then some

The Sound of Gravel
by Ruth Wariner

I picked this out of the Best Memoir and Autobiography awards on Goodreads, and wow! Did it ever deserve to be there! Her life in a small renegade Mormon community in Mexico is mind-bogglingly weird. As the oldest girl of sound mind in the family, she gives up any personal dreams she might have had to become her mother's mainstay, the person who takes care of all the kids that her mother continues bearing, long past any point of reason.

It kind of puts a finger on the kind of screwed-up logic a lot of religious people follow. In their case, they have a very strong belief that plural marriages are the direct route to heaven, and having lots of children is part of it. So the husband (I hesitate to call him a father), spawns child after child with little thought of how he's going to take care of them. The lord will provide. And, of course, the U.S. government--all of the three wives live off welfare and food stamps. They are American citizens even though they live in Mexico, and they are single mothers because their marriages are not considered valid.

Of all the important things in the Christian theology that a person might choose to believe, the men (the father, who is dead, and the mother's husband) seem to fixate on the whole multiple wives thing. In fact, that's why they've broken from the rest of the Mormon church. But it could just be that's the one issue that affected the author's life so much and all the other points of doctrinal difference don't come into the story.

But in the case of the mother's husband, best I can tell it's all about the sex. And a little about power, too. And in the case of her mother, there seems to be a sick sense of worthlessness that rules her life. Without her husband, she's nothing. She truly believes that the only path into heaven is through loving service to a worthless man.

As I read the story of the little girl slowly working herself into adulthood, I wanted to cry so much at so many lost opportunities.  The book isn't all sad and definitely not pitying, it's absorbing--and very hard to put down. Many stars to this.

Late talking -- is it a thing?

The Einstein Syndrome
Bright Children Who Talk Late
Thomas Sowell

People knocked this book because it did exactly what it set out to do--tell stories. Story after story after enough already story, of children who were unable or unwilling to talk until they were well past the age of concern. Most of the children seemed to be about three years old when their lack of talking worried parents so much that they showed up in his research, conducted very, very informally on people he found by word of mouth, best I could tell.

But he never said this was science, and even though he draws a lot of "conclusions" (aka associations) about the factors that seemed to precipitate the syndrome, you wouldn't dare to call it science.

People didn't like that he did what he said--told stories, drew a few associations, and left it as an interesting phenomenon that ought to be studied someday.

I liked it, though. Other than the tedium of reading the same story over and over again. I liked that it reminded me that people are different from each other and children even more so.

On my shelf a long time, and finally not

 Yes Sister, No Sister
by Jennifer Craig

Fun and educational tale of a nursing apprentice in the 1950s, as it says on the cover. At first I thought it was going to be superb, because it started off well and had lots of medical stuff mixed in with the fun, fear and tedium of nursing. There are amusing bedpan and urinal stories here, as well as the kind of detail that make you really appreciate the nursing profession. Yes, it seems silly to have to make and remake beds until the corners are mathematically tight and the two nurses working as a pair are like a well-oiled machine. But it's not at all silly to bandage a wound so the strips are neither too tight or too loose and overlap perfectly at the edges.

But the book is never funny enough to laugh outright and never sad enough to make you cry. She described sad things but with the kind of distance in her voice that reminds you of a person writing a letter. In fact, she switched the narration to letters from time to time--I assume she wrote this several years after the fact and found letters a way to give you the "here and now" feeling she was unable to conjure in her writing.

Gardening in my Roots, invisible

Yesterday I planted two rows of carrots with radishes for a nurse crop, two rows of beets and collards, plus one row each of spinach, lettuce and mesclun. And thereby committed myself to an every day sentence--dragging a hose out to the garden to sprinkle the seedlings.

Today it's windy and cloudy and there's a hint of spit in the air. Just possibly it will rain and I'll get a reprieve.

Since there's nothing growing in the garden, there's nothing for a picture except this--

my darling little broccoli and bok choy seedlings. I need to get them inside and under lights, but the grow light bulb I bought doesn't work in the fixture I have.

I saw five huge deer moseying along the edge of the fence across the field yesterday. They better stay away from my garden!

Mammoth has a new, enlarged gravel parking pad.

Not so much worth a third try?

 Circle of Influence
by Annette Dashofy

A mystery with a main character (Zoe) who is a paramedic and long-time resident in a small township in a mostly rural area. The mystery was all caught up in township politics and seem to involve an endless stream of Zoe's former husbands, friends, enemies and lovers.

I got kind of bored with that, sorry. In my mind if an author's first book has to kill off, or have arrested, close associates of the detective, then where does she have to go from there?  I don't want to keep reading about <ital> new former love partners in new crimes forever.

The paramedic part of of the story was very interesting. I might read a second one--but wait!  I just looked, and I'd already read the second book in the series. This is the first. And in reading the second book, I had the exact same complaint I did about this one.

Not what I wanted to read but worth reading anyway

 First: Sandra Day O'Connor
by Evan Thomas

It's wonderfully well-written, and happily entertaining. But the author left out a whole slice of the pie!  She writes about what happened, when, politics and old-boy cronyism of the time, feminism, the ERA, people Justice O'Connor knew and influenced and loathed, but--

    What about her big thoughts?

I'm halfway through the book and she's just been nominated for Supreme Court Justice. I know a lot about her opinions on women's rights, but very little on all the other big issues facing or soon to be facing our nation. How did she feel about affirmative action? About property rights, abortion, mandatory sentences for drug offenses, capital punishment?  I have no idea!

So, sadly, I think the author did the subject a great disservice by not trying to find out what issues were deep on Justice O'Connor's mind and heart. While reading, I felt like I knew Ms. O'Connor socially, but not intellectually.

By the way, every single time the author mentioned Roe vs Wade, she had to explain it--"The 1973 decision granting women the right to an abortion". The editor should have caught that.

Ok, I'm later on in the book and I do know more about her big actions...but still not as much as I'd like. For every page the  biographer spends on cases, she spends five on personal interactions--other justices, politicians, clerks, and so on. It's a very "gossipy" biography and as such, I'm not liking it.

Toward the end, getting more into cases. Good.  I'm liking it much, much better.

Time travel is tops

 A Symphony of Echoes
by Jodi Taylor

The second in the time-traveling St. Mary's series, and wow--it was as roller-coaster exciting as the first one was. The author really goes overboard with the wish-fulfilling, "badass female takes on the world" theme, for sure. I loved it!

Not to imply a guy wouldn't love it too. She's not a misogynist--quite the opposite--but let me only say that when Max gets rejected by a lover, she doesn't hold it all inside. She, shall we say, lets her feelings show.

As before I got confused in the time-travel plot. But time travel is complicated and I'll forgive myself that. I do understand the most important rule--don't accidentally prevent yourself from being born. Or in the case of St. Mary's, from being established.  

Cooking (mis)adventures

 I've had this recipe for a long time and never got around to trying it, so here it is!  

Vegan Hot Cauliflower Bites

by veganricha.com

The batter mostly fell off, but they were decently spicy and fairly good. It took almost twice the cooking time she said...recipes usually do. Or maybe she likes 'em crunchy.

I don't. But anything that gives you an excuse to binge on ranch dressing is a good thing.

Still catching up on reviews of books from a few weeks ago

 Northbound: Tales From the Continental Divide
by Bridget Portmann

How do long distance travelers make themselves make notes on the trail? Enough notes to reconstruct a months-long trip afterwards, and write a book?

I don't know, but she did it. And well. Some scenes were so immediate that they made me shiver, imagining myself there. I'd feel the blisters on my feet, and feel the bone-weary tiredness she felt after a long and roundabout day.

Despite the awesome adventures and good writing, I was a little let down at the end. I felt like I'd traveled through an awesome environment but didn't experience it--I wanted animals, plants, rocks and trees, but got trail companions, restocking stops, bad motels and cheap eateries. All that was fun, but not what I wanted.

 But that's just me. She wrote about what was important to her, and I understand that at the end of a week living on bland oatmeal and protein bars, a hot meal in a burger joint is important indeed.

A YA, historical (sort of)

 Under a Painted Sky
by Stacey Lee

Very peculiar and somehow, quite enjoyable, young adult fantasy. In the bookstores it might be classified as historical fiction, but she's taken so many liberties with historical fact that I find it hard to apply that label. Call it "historical fantasy".

The heroine is a Chinese girl transplanted to Missouri (I think) in the days of the westward migration. She gets swept up in it after accidentally killing a would-be rapist/procurer and making friends with a black slave planning to escape. And so they head west. And I don't want to give away any more of the plot by saying more.

The heroine is a world-class violinist despite never practicing; she speaks about four languages without having traveled enough to learnt hem; and she has extensive knowledge of history and philosophy without any way to have learned them. I couldn't quite figure her out. Her companion on the journey is much more believable and slightly more enjoyable.

But all that is just me being picky. It's a lot of fun and not too dark, despite the scary subjects upon which it touches--murder, slavery, prostitution, and so on.

Wow, so much stuff

The Eternal Frontier
by Tim Flannery

Pretty darn sweeping account of North America--and a little of South America--from before birth to today with a bit of speculation about tomorrow. Cool stuff awaits.

He goes into so much detail about so many things that I felt lost at times, and in some chapters he jumped from species to species so rapidly I felt really lost. Not that I expected this from him, but iti would be really interesting to read a book that went into great depth about all that is known of some of the prehistoric mammals--the horses, the sabre-toothed cat, the wooly mammoth, the short-faced bear....

Also in his discussion of plants was just a jumping off place for a hundred explorations of individual plants and whole ecosystems. In fact, that may be what was lacking to make the story complete. To describe an ecosystem in a way you know it and feel it...wow. That would have made this an awfully big book and I would never have tried to read it. So never mind.

It's best as it is. Sweeping, grand, and marvelous. It's a cool place we live in. Hope we can go on living here.

An okay Maisie is still better than lots of other books

 A Lesson in Secrets (Maisie Dobbs, #8)
by Jacqueline Winspear

For reasons I can't explain, I liked this one more than the last couple of Maisies. There just seemed to be more stuff in it.  So I heartily recommend this one, along with the first one I read,
An Incomplete Revenge. That one was great.

Mystery buried

Pruning the Dead (A Garden Squad Mystery)
by Julia Henry

Gosh, what to say? It had a lot of interesting people in it and it had a good, quirky mystery. Of course I guessed the culprit early on, but it was still good watching the evidence pull together.

But as a reader, I didn't engage. It was food for the mind but not the heart, and I never really cared much about any of the characters. Possibly that was a first-in-the-series issue...maybe the author was trying so hard to keep the story light and of general appeal that she was afraid of rubbing into any real emotion.

I see that other fans of the series really like it, though. I'm thinking I'll try book 2.

Gardening in my Roots, Late January

Last weekend I fought battles with sod. I'm trying to dig up beds for asparagus, strawberries, and all those stupid zinnia seeds I saved from last year. But even with my new tiller

I'm having trouble making the grass go away.  The best way seems to be to double dig it, like I did for the asparagus bed

which is fine as far as "load-bearing exercise" goes but takes a short forever. It took me two hours to dig this out.
So in between bouts with the tiller, which makes my hands cramp like crazy, I cleared out the trenches between the garden beds.

And discovered that I'd planted the snap peas in the wrong bed. My strategy is to rotate the five beds, moving each one up each year. This is supposed to distribute fertility and prevent insect pests from building up in the soil. My order of rotation is greens (lettuce, spinach, brocolli); fruits (tomatoes and peppers); roots (carrots, radishes, beets),;legumes (peas and beans); and leave one fallow for a season, planting cover crops like Hairy Vetch and Winter Daikon. Although the fallow bed usually ends up being a place to put things that wouldn't fit in the other beds.

Luckily I hadn't planted too many of the snap peas--just about 20 of them--so I was able to move the cages that I use for trellises and replant, If any of the 20 come up, I'll gently move them to the new place.

Cooking Adventures (and not so much)

This is a Thai Red Curry with Vegetables I got from the Cookie and Kate recipe site. It was pretty good, especially after dashed with a bit of soy sauce.  But the vegetable combo, bell pepper, carrots, and kale, was a little blah.  I definitely wouldn't call it--as she did--"the best curry I ever had".

Next time I make it, I'll sub cauliflower or garbanzos for the bell pepper and use collards or spinach instead of kale. My kale was the grocery store kind, which is tough and tasteless and has lots of big stems in it. Some fresh dinosaur kale from the CSA would be much better.

And I finally tried out my new InstaPot by making Rajma Masala.  Not bad at all except that I really hate the variety of Garam Masala spice I have. It's exceedingly cinnamony, which I hate.

But the InstaPot worked fine...or would have. I overrode its programmed time for "bean/rice"--it said 20 minutes but the recipe said 30. I changed it to 25 and it was too long. Mushy beans!  I'll leave it alone in future.

Mammoth Goes to Matagorda, Day 10 return

Wednesday 19 January 2020

Bastrop State park to home
Actual time: 4:21

The drive wasn't too awfully suckish--I routed us onto the Pickle Parkway so we could zoom north at eighty miles per hour and then feed directly into I-35. For once google map routed us on west I-35 instead of east, so I didn't even have to do an override to take the route I preferred. There must have been some huge slowdowns on the shorter route.

deep thoughts during the drive:
As I age, I seem to be acquiring the ability to disassociate during an RV drive for long periods of time. I honestly don't remember any part of the road between Frisco and McKinney, and I was surprised when he started up MacDonald Street to cut through town. I don't think I was asleep, either.

Home, when it's cold outside and the place isn't too junked up, is a nice place to be. Except I have four envelopes from Blue Cross/Blue Shield dinging me for the first payment on my new Dental Insurance plan, plus one from the health plan. Didn't they ever hear of paperless?  I got all that in email, too.

The cats missed me but they got along just fine. And it's really nice having a house-sitter you can trust. The yard is full of butterbutts and birds of many descriptions, which wouldn't be true if my visitor hadn't kept the bird feeders full. I need to pay her when I go out.

But when i wasn't asleep during the drive, I kept thinking of how much I wanted to go somewhere else again, soon. Someplace cool--like Alaska, Costa Rica, or Hawaii. Maybe in July when it's too hot to go anywhere around home and the campsites are full of families and kids. And I wanted to get started planning an RV-ing trip for May. A long one.

So maybe that's the answer to how trips get started--as soon as I end one, I soothe away the feelings of letdown by starting to plan another.

Notes
1. When planning, remember that after the highlight of the trip is over, you won't be very interested in lingering in boring placing on the route back. Put the lingering steps of the trip up front.
2. Heed my urgent directive to  plan all routes up front and write them down. Google will take you on rods you don't want to travel.

Mammoth Goes to Matagorda, Day 9

Tuesday 18 January 2022

Falcon Lake State Park to Lake Bastrop State Park

At Falcon Lake, I saw a Black-chinned sparrow at site; also a probable long-billed thrasher but in retrospect it might have been a curve-billed thrasher. I just didn't get that good a look at it. There is some kind of birding law that states you always see birds on the day you're going to leave a site and don't have time to chase them down.

The route stunk. On the first leg, google wanted to take me on a county road and a road with no number, so I nixed that and headed a few miles over to get on a state highway. But after than, Google got me on an FM which wasn't all that bad, but not at all necessary. After that we stayed mostly on state highway 80 which wasn't a "bad" road, but it went through little towns and was alternately bumpy, lumpy and curvy,  It may have been the shortest route--google said it was thirty minutes faster that way--but it sucked.

Long before we got to Bastrop we could see smoke rising in the distance. We both speculated (independently) that the campground might be on fire. And when we finally arrived, we learned we weren't all that off-base. At the office I had to wait behind an older lady who was there to visit a friend who was already camping and she wanted to make a one-night stay. The ranger said no--they'd been told not to let any more day-0use visitors into the park in case they had to evacuate it.  The poor lady also wanted to renew her park pass, but the lady said they weren't set up to do that there. That part I don't understand, unless she was talking about a federal pass, not a state one.  All state parks are supposed to be able tissue state passes.

Anyway, the ranger eventually let the lady in for a short visit, and proceeded to check me in. The reservation I'd changed was good--thank Texas for a well-designed, well-working reservation system!  She said the fire was not contained but it didn't seem to be moving our way, so we were probably good.

Whew. But when we got parked and tried to level the RV, the levelers malfunctioned. They jacked us up really high on the right-hand site until it looked like the RV was about to tip over. Of course I knew that was impossible, but it was still scary. Ed tried a second time with the same results. And then they wouldn't go down. So we were stuck, immobile, and wildly unlevel.

I panicked, thinking we were in for a costly and time-consuming on-the-road repair using our Good Sam RV insurance, but I needn't. Ed got his tools out and managed to retract them manually. So we were able to move again, if we needed to. But we were still unlevel (in the other direction), and you're not supposed to open the slideouts when unlevel.

So we camped for the night with the slides in. With them out, Mammoth is roomy and delightful inside. With them in, it's cramped. Feels like a bus. Or a car. Blah.