A quick entertainment and a slow serious

Enforcing the Paw
by Diane Kelly

Still very formula; still entertaining. This time I just skipped every third chapter where the bad guy tells the story from his perspective. I didn't miss anything important that way, and I didn't have to listen to his stupid.

We Are the Luckiest
The Surprising Magic of a Sober Life
by Laura McKowen

She really has a knack for writing truth. It's painful sometimes, to read, when she's describing her own personal story. But the truth is obvious even if we don't want to admit it.
1. There is no hard line between "normal" drinkers and "problem" drinkers.
2. All so-called problem drinkers started out as normal drinkers.
3. The label "alcoholic" is meaningless. It's used either to apologize for a choice that shouldn't need to be apologized for (sorry; I can't drink because I have a self-control problem) or else to excuse a problem behavior (Yeah, I fall down drunk at parties but that's okay because I'm not an alcoholic).
4. There's a whole lot of alcohol in our society. Start noticing and you'll see it everywhere. More even than bacon. Or cookies.

Very good book. Very sad society in which we live. My gut feeling is that there are a whole lot of people out there who have a problem. It's not something we talk about. But we ought to.

Freakishing weird memoir

The Glass Castle

by Jeannette Walls


I listened to this on audiobook, and frequently kept on listening after my designated activity (jogging, dishwashing, folding laundry) was over. It was just that hard to stop.

So I can't say something bad about a book that encouraged me to catch up on the mindlessly boring tasks of everyday life. And I won't--but oh, how much I wanted some well-meaning adult to step in and take the kids away from their fruitcake parents. Two people with classic cases if narcissistic personality disorder and maybe a touch of schizophrenia got married and had four kids, then left them to raise themselves. It made strong people out of the kids--but only because they banded together and took care of each other.

Their life adventures were amusing when they weren't scary as hell or sick as heck. The author starts off with a tale of being badly burned because she was cooking hot dogs for herself in a pan of boiling water, alone in the kitchen. She was three years old at the time.

Stockton Dog Mysteries #7-9

High in Trial
Double Dog Dare
Home of the Brave

by Donna Ball

These books are great, absolutely great. Each has a uniquely formulated plot, so while the humans and dogs are the same in each, the criminals and bit characters are all different and convincing in the roles they have to play. They're a little too short sometimes--I want more, more more!  And they're extremely fast moving, so they just don't last long enough for me.

I can only think of one tiny suggestion for the author--don't telegraph the bad stuff with little one-line teasers. You know the sort--if only I had known then....  Little did I know that might be my last chance. Blah. They're irritating and purposeless. Frankly, she writes too well to need that sort of nonsense. Luckily, she only does it once per book that I've noticed.

So good a way to fill in jogging time

 So Done

by Paula Chase

Okay, I'm clearly not the target audience for this book. But I needed an audiobook for jogging and my audible.com monthly subscription book wasn't due for another week. So I did something I seldom need to do--browse the library's available ebooks with a very broad search criteria.

I came up with the YA book, So Done. It's simply a teenage coming of age story about a couple of best friends who grow apart over the summer. It's told in alternating points of view, from each of them. And it's very well written, with people you absolutely love and hate and feel like you've known them all your life.

But as much as I enjoyed it at the time, it left me feeling empty. The ending was too sweet and easy, and there wasn't any meat to the tale. I might do another of her books if I'm every hard up for listening material, but probably not.

All over the place book, and great. (on camping)

Under the Stars
by Dan White

This book is good in a lot of different ways and great in a few. He does what he sets out to do and treats every aspect of camping with equal love, humor and respect. From the early days of "woodcraft", when the sign of a true adventurer was how deeply he might leave his mark on the wilderness, to the modern days of "leave no trace" even when it means hauling poop bags down Mount Shasta, he studies it all. And whenever possible, experiences it first hand.

It's hard to even hint at the adventures told in the fourteen chapters of this book. Let's just mention that he spends a night emulating John Knowles, who went out into the woods naked and weaponless and vowed to return well fed and wearing a bear skin. He may have been a charlatan, but his adventure inspired Mr. White to do the same--if only for a single night.

He writes much about John Muir, of course, and Teddy Roosevelt. He finds stories of the intrepid women of camping, including Victorian ladies who hitched up their ankle-length skirts and climbed mountains with east. He writes of Edward Abbey and mentions Colin Fletcher and his "feel how" books of instruction.

And to my surprise, he rents a Class-C motorhome and takes his wife and daughter out on the roads--which was scary--and then to a campground where he plans to speak to everyone there, just to find out what kind of folk do such an unnatural thing as to haul the trappings of civilization along behind them in their quest to get away from it all.  He is pleasantly surprised at what he finds--

And no more telling. Read the book--it's great. It seemed really long at times, but it still ended too soon.

Gardening in my Roots, mid-December

(written Dec 11)
We've had a string of unseasonably warm days--low seventies in the afternoon--so I determined to get my garden in order. You can't tell it from the picture here, but I can--the five rows are staked out evenly, all five feet wide by 29 feet long with a one-foot trench between them. They are supposed to be 30 feet long, but I put the stakes in at 30' and started digging the trenches without thinking that in order to get the full 30' of garden space, I needed to dig outside the line of stakes.

But I don't care. It's beautiful. After I finished I dug and hauled about six wheelbarrow loads of compost that had been making for the last couple of years. Also I pulled up all the roots that I dug out and filled up three new compost piles. My compost piles are circles of screen wire placed on the ground. I've not been good at "layering" the greens and browns to make a scientifically precise mixture; nor do I ever get around to turning them. I just let the grass clumps, vegetable stalks, and food scraps rot in a loose pile for a couple of years.

Given enough time, they turn into crumbly black gold.

Sadly leaving San Angelo State Park

 Sunday, Nov 8 returning home

Bye bye, mesquite!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bye, bye, lake!

 

 

 

 

My typical picture of a water bird looks like this:

I was really sorry to say good-bye to the Harris' Hawks, but not so sorry to be going home. It had been a record long trip--seven days!--and I was ready to see my kitty cats again.

On the way we crossed the Leon River. Out there, it was tiny. (as in, creek) But down at Belton it becomes a marvelous lake, and past that a decent-sized river where I-35 crosses it.

We stopped for gas at a truck stop, which should have been a quick and unmemorable thing but ended up being a short nightmare. Stickers in the grass alongside the driveway! I set Zack down in the grass and immediately had to pick him up and carry him back to the RV, hollering for my glasses and the scissors. I sat on the RV step and cut out burs for ten minutes.
Stupid Texas.

I need to research the topic of grades, such as what is the cutoff point between a "hill" and a "grade". If a grade is listed as 7%, what makes it different from some of the hills we went down that I'd have sworn were a 10 or 15% slope? (It turns out, a 7% grade means the road drops/rises seven feet over a 100' length)

NOTES:
1. Always take a good, postable picture of each campsite.
2. Always write down three paragraphs of summary every day, no matter how tired you are.
3. Seriously plan lunches for travel days. Especially the last one. Peanut butter and crackers, hummus, rice balls, cold noodles. Even veggie dogs.
4. Don't bother printing the state park parking "stickers." The people at the gate always reprint them anyway,
5. On multi-stop strips, plan the complete route ahead of time and make sure it avoids small towns and FM roads.
6. When planning trips to state parks, always read through the TPWD website carefully. We'd assumed there was no where we'd want to go--any place that looked interesting would have too many people around to visit safely during the pandemic.  Otherwise we'd have gone to historic Fort Concho, went shopping along Concho Avenue, and strolled the Riverwalk. But the state park website has this note: Lake Nasworthy and Twin Buttes Reservoir offer swimming and fishing about 10 minutes from the park. We could have gone to those places.