Dallas Summer Musicals!

Flashdance!   So not what I'd expected.

Performances, music, and yes, dancing,

Great.

A kid's book unlike any other I've ever read

Finished Isle Of The Blue Dolphins at work today, while everyone was at a farewell luncheon for our secretary.  I like her but I just couldn't face another farewell luncheon.

Good book.  Great book.  It made me cry a little.

Based on a true story but just an outline of a story--an Indian girl is left alone when she goes back to get her brother after the rest of her people float away on a big ship.  And so she stays, alone...but for the wild dogs, sea otters, birds, and assorted other hard-working creatures.

I wonder how much Nim's Island owed to this book.

A book, just a book. Sad, isn't it?

Kenneth C. Davis' Don't Know Much About Geography was a book assignment for one of my high-school kids.  I obediently bought a copy, then I read the cover and decided I wanted to read it after he was done.   I don't think he ever opened the book, but I just did.

Good points: the famous people quotes.  The state names appendix.  The comparative measures appendix (wish it had been longer.)

 Bad points:  face it--it's boring.  It starts off with a 10-1/2 page introduction which is guaranteed to put any high-school kid to sleep.  The chapter titles are funny and the occasional joke spices it up, but in general, it didn't tell me a whole lot that I didn't already know.

In addition, the boundary between geography and history was breached so many times that I don't think it really taught the subject that it purported to teach.  Geography shapes history, molds history, and frequently even determines history--but that doesn't mean it's okay for one third of the book to recite clever historical facts that are only dubiously connected with geography.  Lots of times I'd think to myself, "Well, this is some interesting history here...but what's it doing in this book?"

So many times I wished he'd explained how geography had influenced history, social development, or even culture...but he seldom did.

Sorry not to like this better.   I hope my failure to appreciate doesn't mean that I'm such a know-it-all who I can't be taught.  I don't think so.

Still working on Don't Know Much About Geography

No book review and no food pictures to post.  Sunday's cooking was the same old shrimp spaghetti that I've made several times before.  It came out strangely bland.  On Monday I created an omelette but the filling overwhelmed the eggs.  It was more of a bacon-ham-mushroom-cheese frittata than an omelette.

Next cooking adventure--
Tacos.  Boring!

Short book; short review

It's Not The End Of The World

The other Judy Blume books have made me a fan, but I have to admit I didn't like this one. It's more dated--less relevant--and everyone was flat--even the heroine. And like so many other books I've read for this project, it's a kid book, not a teen book. Not that I don't like kid's books--it just wasn't a good kid's book.

In it's favor, it does deal with one universal theme--what does a kid do when the grownups won't tell you things? Answer, and a good one: you ask. And keep asking until you get answers. Even if you have to plop yourself down in front of the bathroom door and wait a person out.  That, I liked. It reminded me of the scared and lonely feelings I had, back when my mom went through a strange couple of years where she'd go into crying fits and hide away in her bedroom. No one mentioned menopause back then--I thought she was going crazy.

Bertie and Jeeves, my new obsession

The next two books come as a pair--The Inimitable Jeeves and Very Good, Jeeves!  I'm going to read the third one in the collection, too, but I won't take credit for it.  It would be cheating to eliminate a book (Go Ask Alice) and replace it with two more.

And all I can say about them is this: Why the heck did I never read these before?


All of that reading I used to do, classics and the what-not, and I never could pick up a single one of these?  I even read The Pickwick Papers, Tom Jones, and I tried to read Sam Johnson's autobiography.  Why not these?

The Jeeves books are collections of short tales of Bertie Wooster and his invaluable gentleman's personal gentleman (as Jeeves prefers to identify himself.)  In each so far, someone gets in a pickle--either Bertie, his friends Bingo, Tuppy, or other people including his overbearing aunt Agatha and uppity Aunt Dahlia.  Bertie comes up with a brilliant plan which almost invariably fails, and Jeeves saves the day.  Very Good, Jeeves!
Add on top of that the writing, like creamy, thick cake icing:

1. "This club," I said, "is the limit."
   "It is the eel's eyebrows," agreed young Bingo.  "I believe that old boy over by the window has been dead three days, but I don't like to mention it to anyone."

or regarding the proper tieing of neckties,

1. "What do ties matter, Jeeves, at a time like this?  Do you realize that Mr. Little's domestic happiness is hanging in the scale?"
   "There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter."

or on realizing a glitch in the plan,

1. ...and a most unpleasant feeling it was -- rather like when you take one of those express elevators in New York at the top of the building and discover, on reaching the twenty-seventh floor, that you have carelessly left all your insides up on the thirty-second, and it's too late now to stop and fetch them back.

Enough reviewing--back to reading.

Big ol' spider

Finally got out to the beans.  They're huge and turning yellow. The pods, not the plants.  They're being shaded out by the enormous clumps of grass between the rows.  Not much I can do about that tonight--well, not much I care to do about that tonight.  If they hold on until the weekend I'll get rid of the grass and pick them over..

Caught this little feller out yesterday evening.  I thought tarantulas only prowled in the fall, but this is the third or fourth one I've seen this spring.