For once, work has not been crazy busy, but life has been a lot.
On May 27th, Mosey tore her right cranial crucial ligament (the canine version of the ACL). She already had her annual vet visit scheduled for May 29th, and they were able to do the x-ray along with the regular vaccinations etc. Surgery is the recommended option, but I don't think that she would adhere to the post-surgery recovery plan, which includes at least a month of, basically, crate or pen confinement except for trips outside to urinate/defecate. She still jumps up on the sofa to sit next to me and runs down the deck stairs to bark at things, even though it must be pretty painful. I haven't taken her on "walks" (she only ever went up and down our block), and I've been sleeping on the main floor to limit her use of stairs, but she's still bored and restless. I also increased her anti-anxiety med (gabapentin) for a couple of weeks to try to keep her calm, but higher doses tend to backfire at some point.
Sleeping on the couch has been hard on my back and hips, so I might get an inflatable mattress. On the other hand, she's had a few nights when she was willing to sleep in her own bed instead of next to me, so maybe she'd sleep on the floor next to our bed. I'll try that in 10 days or so.
Because we also scheduled the contractor to renovate our upstairs area, which previous owners converted into a living space from the attic. We're hoping an attic fan behind one of the gable vents will help cool the upstairs, which is often 10 degrees warmer than the rest of the house in the summer. The contractor also mentioned that the previous owners used fiberboard for the walls and ceilings, instead of drywall, and fiberboard is more porous, likely also contributing to the heat. They'll also replace the access panel to the air conditioner, paint, and install recessed lights--nice mostly cosmetic updates.
We're staying at an AirBnB for five nights (starting tomorrow) to avoid most of the noise etc. It's the basement apartment of a house a couple of towns over. I've never stayed in an AirBnB, so I'm a little nervous. The owners (who live in the rest of the house) seem nice via messages, but the backyard is shared between neighbors, and Mo is not great with other dogs (or change or etc.). We also have an in-person book club Monday evening, so we'll have to leave Mo by herself for a few hours. There's a kitchenette with a hot plate; we're bringing sandwich stuff and leftovers, plus ingredients for a couple of one-pot meals. In true diva fashion, I am bringing my usual breakfast stuff, Mosey's bed, and assorted toys and treats.
We hired movers to stash the furniture in the rest of the house. We tried to move my desk downstairs and quickly realized that we are old and feeble. I thought they were coming on Wednesday, but I had the wrong day. Fortunately, they're able to come tomorrow. I hired the same company to come back in two weeks and put everything back upstairs. My clothes are scattered in luggage and boxes all over the house; getting dressed has become unusually adventurous.
We'll be back here Friday morning; we're both off for Juneteenth, so even if they're still working on the house it should be fine. We'll be sleeping on the mattress in the living room for several more days, so I won't have to sleep on the couch.
I've been following the San Antonio Spurs' improbable NBA playoff run, including the excruciating loss on Wednesday. Nearly every game there have been moments that I realize just how young the team is. The star, Wembenyama, is 22. The coach is 38. This isn't their year, but I still want to watch. It'll make their eventual championship even sweeter.
Nothing like a week off from work to get the book count up. The only problem is remembering all of them.
Familia, Lauren E. Rico
The first novel of the month featuring an adoption. Gabby DiMarco works for a New York magazine that asks its staff take DNA tests for a feature. DiMarco is an only child whose parents were also only children and now deceased, so she does the test with the hope of finding a lost relative. Of course this sets off a chain of events when the result is a 50% match to a woman in Puerto Rico, Isabella Ruiz. DiMarco travels to Puerto Rico, supposedly for a story, and of course nothing goes as planned. I enjoyed the book even though there were parts that dragged.
Nuclear Family, Joseph Han
This library selection for AAPINH (Asian American, Pacific Islander, Native Hawaiian) Heritage month follows the Cho family, who immigrated to Hawaii from Korea and operate a few plate lunch diners with a dream of franchising. The son moves to Seoul to teach English and becomes possessed by his grandfather, who is obsessed with finding a way to enter North Korea to look for the wife and son he left behind. That's right, the border is impenetrable even in the afterlife, or perhaps purgatory. This was a bit hard to read as the grandfather grows frustrated and causes his grandson (a la Being John Malkovich) to engage in self-destructive behaviors (why is never explored). I gave it three stars on Goodreads because it's a debut novel. I also liked learning about Hawaii and the waves of immigration over the past 100 years or so.
Clark and Division (Japantown no. 1), Naomi Hirahara
Another AAPINH selection from the library that follows a Japanese American family living in southern California in the 1930s. They are sent to a camp after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and then select inmates are released to help fill labor shortages due to the draft. The oldest daughter is released to Chicago, and the rest of the family follows six months later. The day that they arrive, they find out that the daughter is dead, and her younger sister investigates. Clark and Division refers to the train station where the sister died. There are interesting historical details, but the story is bogged down by repeated expositions on feeling like outsiders and recovering from the trauma of internment.
Little Fires Everywhere, Celeste Ng
It was smart of Ng to start at the end with the little fires of the title; otherwise I might have wondered why I should care about the story, which is about two families, the Richardsons (outwardly perfect) and the Warrens (mysterious, strange) in the Shaker Heights neighborhood of Cleveland. The Warrens (mom and daughter) are new to town and renting a small house from the Richardsons. The younger Richardson son befriends the Warren daughter, and soon she is treated as part of the family until it all falls apart. The most surprising thing is that it's an adoption, not involving either family, that drives them apart. Secrets come out, sides are chosen, and there's no happily ever after.
The Rainmaker, John Grisham
This was one of the titles when I searched my library's collection for Memphis. I read several of Grisham's novels back in the '90s (though I haven't seen any of the movie adaptations). Like Michael Crichton, his stuff was annoyingly ubiquitous, but I was reminded that he did (perhaps still does) know how to spin a story. This was set in Memphis but mentioned very few local landmarks; it could have been any city in the American South.
The Chitlin' Circuit and the Road to Rock 'n' Roll, Preston Lauterbach
I picked up this book at a store across the street from our hotel. Lauterbach lives in Memphis, so there's a fair amount about the second Beale Street era (after Prohibition), but his main focus is on two entrepreneurs, Denver Ferguson in Indianapolis and Don Robey in Houston, who organized tours for Black musicians throughout the South on what was called the chitlin' circuit (also the "one-night circuit," because artists performed in a different small town or rural area each night). I agree with Lauterbach that the roots of rock and roll are African American (though I have no opinion on what the first rock 'n' roll record was) and appreciated learning more about pioneers like Walter Barnes and Wynonie Harris. There are lots of great trivia about life on the road and who played with whom where, but I found myself wishing for a better writer. I'd love to see Elijah Wald tackle this intersection of vice and music (much like he did in Narcocorridos). Also, Lauterbach wrote something to the effect that it's Tina Turner's fault that Ike Turner's role in music history has been largely forgotten. The book was published in 2011.
Beer: A Global Journey Through the Past and Present, John Wood Arthur
Like Lauterbach, Arthur clearly did a lot of research about his subject, and the book is full of interesting tidbits about ancient and indigenous beer, both production and consumption. However, it's incredibly repetitive, even within the same sentence. There was a sentence about a church in the main plaza with a path leading to the main plaza. Chicha (indigenous beer of Central and South America) is mixed with the juice of a psychoactive juice. I was shocked that the book was published by Oxford University Press.
The Seamstress of New Orleans, Diane C. McPhail
This was the other purchase at the Memphis bookstore--I'm not quite sure why they had it. The author doesn't live there, and there's only one Memphis scene in the whole book. This was a nothing-special read about two women who lose their husbands and have to make lives for themselves and their children in New Orleans. Spoiler alert: They were married to the same man! I was kind of hoping for more sewing, to be honest. Kind of felt like YA fiction.
I'm back at work, so it's time to wrap up the vacation photos. Thanks for reading the modern equivalent of the vacation slide show.
There was a fair amount of graffiti and street art. These were right next door to each other.
This museum is located in the Lorraine Motel, which is most famous for being the site of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination.
Unlike Sun Studio, the Stax Recording Studios building (originally a theater) was torn down. The Stax museum sits on a small campus with the Stax Music Academy and the Soulsville Charter School.
I took over 400 photos in Memphis and promise not to post them all here. There are slightly more in my Flickr album.
Sun Studio bills itself as the birthplace of rock and roll, which isn't true, but I can't blame them for trying. It brought people from England, Australia, and Alaska (plus a Francophone couple) to the same guided tour that we saw. For me, it's enough to have been the place that gave Johnny Cash and Jerry Lee Lewis their starts.
The original building still stands
I got some puzzled looks and awkward silences when I told people we were going to Memphis for a vacation. [Similar to the responses to our Kansas City trip, now that I think about it. East Coast snobbery is alive and well.] Memphis has a lot of history, especially music history. It's not a wealthy city, which shows in its roads and rundown buildings, but it didn't feel dangerous, at least not to two boring tourists who were in our hotel by 8 p.m.
We stayed at the Central Station Hotel, which was south of downtown.
Even though I've had to take allergy medicine every day (sometimes more than once a day) for the past two months, spring is still my favorite season. The weather gets more erratic with each year, and so the orderly procession of crocuses, redbuds, cherry blossoms, daffodils, etc. is more chaotic, but they do all eventually appear. [I didn't see many dogwoods, my favorite of the flowering trees, this year.]
Last year I broke up a clump of tulip bulbs and spread them out a bit. This photo is from last month.
If this site ever goes dark, you can find me over at https://microbie.dreamwidth.org/
I forgot one book in last month's roundup, and I'm going to include a book I finished today.
Carthage: A New History, Eve MacDonald
I was excited to hear about this book, so Brent bought it for me. I don't think that there's really much new compared with Carthage: A History, by Serge Lancel, but MacDonald's book is about 1000 times easier to read than Lancel's. It also helped to skip over Hannibal's military campaign. The part that was new to me was a bit more about Carthage after Rome destroyed it in 146 BCE--about 100 years later it was the most important Roman city in north Africa. Well worth a read for ancient history fans.
The Lying Life of Adults, Elena Ferrante (translated by Ann Goldstein)
I sort of lost track of Ferrante after the My Brilliant Friend series, but she has not been idle. This was a bit of a slog for me (definitely Literature), and I just don't have the attention span after work. It didn't help that the protagonist is not very likable. Admittedly, most teenage girls are probably annoying. Her parents split up because her father declares that he's in love with his best friend's wife, so she's navigating that as well as her own hormones. To make matters worse, her own best friends are the children of her father's best friend, and they move to a new apartment with their mother and her father. There's some lovely prose in here, and the city of Naples is probably the most interesting character in the book. I might have gotten more out of it if I had been less tired, but it may also just not be that good.
Mornings in Jenin, Susan Abulhawa
This was part of my library's collection celebrating Arab American Heritage Month. Morning follows a Palestinian family from the 1930s through to the present day (the book was published in 2006). The family loses their home and their land after the state of Israel is formed, ultimately settling in the Jenin refugee camp. Abulhawa said that she was inspired to write the book after doing humanitarian work in the Jenin camp after it was destroyed by Israeli forces in 2000 or 2001. It's terribly sad (no one dies of old age) but worth a read for the Palestinian perspective alone. My favorite character was the Irish guy who came to do humanitarian work in 1967 and never left.
Augustine the African, Catherine Conybeare
This was also in the Arab American heritage collection, and I couldn't figure out why. Augustine's mother was Berber, so maybe Arab-ish? Conybeare is British. I suppose that I read it because Hippo (where Augustine spent most of his professional career) is not far from Carthage. Conybeare's main thesis is that St. Augustine was profoundly shaped by his north African upbringing, and the book offers multiple examples of how he felt like a foreigner when he went to Rome and Milan. Latin was his native language, but he spoke it with an accent, and his parents were solidly middle class. I read Confessions in my medieval history class in college, and the only thing that I remember is that I was completely bored. It might be worth revisiting, though. Conybeare makes a good case for it, and it sounds more manageable than City of God. I had to skip the second half of a theological crisis because the arguments didn't hold my interest, but otherwise I enjoyed this book a lot considering I'm a very lapsed Catholic.
Less (Arthur Less no. 1), Andrew Sean Greer
I'm probably the last person to have read this book, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018, so you can skip my surprise that a rom-com, essentially, won a Pulitzer. It is a very good romantic comedy, with some gorgeous writing (Greer is very good at crafting moments of quiet beauty). I could easily see this being a movie or limited t.v. series. Arthur Less is a writer of one successful novel, and his ex-boyfriend is getting married the day before his 50th birthday, so he decides to avoid the wedding by taking a trip around the world, stringing together offers to speak or lecture at various places. We are supposed to believe that Less is ugly, not particularly smart, and awkward, yet somehow he finds someone to sleep with in the first four places he visits. It's like trying to believe that Julia Roberts is unattractive in Eat, Pray, Love. Still, this book made me chuckle and had lovely writing--can't ask for much more than that.
I complain a lot about DC, but there are advantages to being here. I only go into town one day a week (Monday), and I still see something interesting almost every time. Here's a mobile billboard outside my usual (when I don't bring my own) lunch place:
Ugh, I hate that I don't have the energy to post here often. Maybe in the second half of the year?
James, Percival Everett
Finally got around to reading this one and thought it was excellent, though I think some of the critiques (e.g., no substantive female characters) are fair. I read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn so long ago that I don't really remember it and don't feel the need to go back to it.
Behind You Is the Sea, Susan Muaddi Darraj
More a series of interlocking short stories than a novel, this book centers on a group of Palestinian-Americans living in Baltimore. The overriding theme, though, is shame, specifically female shame. Many are too fertile (unwed) or not enough (married without children), struggling to conform to American and Palestinian cultural norms (which sometimes contradict). There's a Christian Palestinian family that constantly has to convince others that they're not Muslim. The title of the book is supposedly from a speech a general gave to an army--they could either drown or fight. This was a really good book but a hard read in ways that might be personal to me.
Circle of Days, Ken Follett
This is another in Follett's series of historical fiction about people who built things that have stood the test of time, in this case, Stonehenge. It was not as good as Pillars of the Earth, of course, but fine until about 80% of the way through (after he describes how they moved the stones down to Salisbury Plain). At that point I can only guess that an LLM finished the book and no one edited it: 2nd-grade sentences, characters doing things that didn't make sense in the world that had been built up to that point, simplistic emotions.
The Banned Bookshop of Maggie Banks, Shauna Robinson
A perfect popcorn (or beach, if you prefer) read. Banks is the typical adrift college student who agrees to take care of her best friend's bookstore while the friend is on maternity leave. The catch is that the bookstore is half-owned by the grandson of the local celebrity, a writer who died in 1968, and the bookstore isn't allowed to sell anything that the famous writer wouldn't have read. So not only is it limited to books published before 1968, it's also limited to classics. Through various hijinks, Banks ends up selling contemporary books on the sly. She also starts a series where contemporary writers riff on a classic (the first is a romance writer with a presentation called Hunting for Dick--yes it spoofs Moby Dick). Very fun, and I want to read more of her books, but I'll probably just get them on Kindle. I finished this one in an evening after work.
The good:
- Scott Joplin wanted to write an opera and did (two, actually, but the first has not survived).
- The audience was hyped. This was the first performance for the WNO since leaving the Kennedy Center, and the artistic director, Francesca Zambello, and general manager, Timothy O'Leary, received a standing ovation when they came out before the performance to give their standard welcome. The WNO had to arrange for new venues, a new ticketing system, and a new website all in the middle of the season. I still think Zambello has terrible taste in sets (or likes to hire directors or designers who do), but even I got out of my seat for them.
It's amazing what color and pattern can do:
The set was not lavish, but the detailed patterns and clever lighting did a lot to enliven the stage on a budget.
- The director (Denyce Graves), conductor (Kedrick Armstrong), composer (Scott Joplin), and principal singers and dancers were all Black. This was clearly a labor of love for everyone involved, and they looked like they were having a good time.
- I liked the choreography, and there was a lot of variation in styles throughout. The dancers were also very good.
- In general there was a sense of joy that I'm not sure I've felt at a WNO performance, not even the gala.
The perfectly fine:
( Read more...Collapse )I had the week off from work (though I did some work most days) and was able to catch up a bit on chores and sleep. I saw my optometrist, who confirmed that my prescription has changed, which is probably why I can't read for more than an hour without getting a headache. I scheduled an appointment with a new dentist. I took three bags of clothing and shoes to our local recycling center donated a trunk full of household items to a thrift store. I think one sign of a tougher economy is the selection at thrift stores--there really wasn't much that tempted me, and it was easy to leave empty handed. I left my garden shears at the small engine repair place to be sharpened (gotta pick 'em up tomorrow).
I napped every day but yesterday. We have a mouse problem, so I finally scheduled to have someone give an estimate for work to seal the house against entry. [The previous vendor put down snap traps but never seemed to completely seal the entry points.] Then in the afternoon I had a work call and spent some time cleaning items to donate.
It's been a while since my last visit to a thrift store. I still like seeing what people are giving away; e.g., "smores makers" are still taking up shelf space, and most of the kitchen utensils were black plastic, probably from that study claiming that black plastic kitchen utensils cause cancer. I did a lot of shopping this week, and one thing I still believe is that there's entirely too much stuff in the world. If we stopped manufacturing mugs (beer, coffee, soup), I bet we wouldn't notice for a couple of years. Same thing for flimsy but ostensibly reusable tote/shopping bags and costume jewelry.
The other work call I attended this week was for our next alt-text pilot. This time we have a blind scientist who uses screen readers helping us evaluate the vendor's work, and the call was to meet her. She was very nice and kept thanking us for doing the pilot, which was a little embarrassing. It's only a step up from the least we could do. Still, it was nice to see a real reminder of why we should be making our content more accessible.
We also booked an actual vacation: we're going to Memphis in May for three days. We want to see Sun Studios and Stax Studios and possibly one of the music museums. We're staying at a hotel that has a vinyl lounge; we're hoping it's like the Tokyo record bar we visited, where talking is discouraged and the jacket of the album that's playing is displayed on the bar.
February is usually the worst month, but March is not off to a great start.
There Are Rivers in the Sky, Elif Shafak
Shafak is a good writer, and there are some lovely sentences in this novel that links three lives--Arthur Smith, living in Victorian London; Narin, a Yazidi girl in Turkey in the 2010s; and Zaleeka, a hydrologist living in London in the 2010s who grew up in Iraq. Water is one link; Nineveh is another. All three characters have tough lives, albeit for very different reasons. The ending is not as depressing as I was expecting, but it's definitely not happy. Shafak does explain a lot of the book in the book, which is a little laborious, and the thread about whether water has memory is more fiction than science, but I still enjoyed it.
Richard Strauss: An Intimate Portrait, Kurt Wilhelm
Strauss is my favorite opera composer (I've liked all four I've seen--Ariadne auf Naxos, Capriccio, Elektra, and Salome), but I didn't know much about him. I picked up this in a used book store on a whim. There isn't much music analysis in this biography (apparently there are other books focused on his work); Wilhelm focuses more on Strauss' life and times. One thing that I found interesting is that he lived through several political transformations, from a king of Bavaria in childhood to seeing the Allies defeat the Nazis. Wilhelm seemed at his happiest when dishing about what other musicians and composers thought of one another, which was largely negative. He has a lot of anecdotes about Strauss being at the same party as, say, Berlioz, but the composers never spoke. So much tea! I also learned that "strauss" means "ostrich," and Strauss was frequently shown as an ostrich in caricatures of the time. Strauss wasn't a Nazi, but he did serve the Nazi government in a couple of ways, particularly overseeing the Bayreuth festival after Toscanini dropped out in protest. According to Wilhelm, after a year or so of appeasement, Goebbels showed up at Strauss' house, shouted at him for an hour, then issued a warrant for his arrest that was never executed.
Forgot to mention that Discourse Blog gave me three one-month gift subscriptions--let me know if you'd like one.
I am not a sophisticated reader or news consumer, but I did become an adult at a time when people advised subscribing to the local paper as a way to settle into a new city. I had a Sunday NY Times subscription when I was in grad school, and I bought a Sunday Washington Post subscription once I had a steady income here. I kept that subscription for decades, even as the Sunday edition shrank to almost nothing. I didn't go digital-only until the Post stopped including Parade magazine a few years ago.
I never read the OpEd section of any paper, so the immediate changes after Bezos bought the Post didn't bother me that much. The parts that justified the subscription were the Food section and a couple of columnists in the Business section (Michelle Singletary (personal finance), Karla Miller (workplace advice), Geoffrey Fowler (personal tech), and Andrew Van Dam (Department of Data)). In December, I got an email that the cost of a digital subscription was going up by almost 50%. That convinced me it was time to pull the plug.
I already subscribe to The 51st State (a local news outlet), Defector (mostly sports), Discourse (mostly politics), and Flaming Hydra (everything from journalism to poetry). Note that this doesn't mean that I actually read all (or any) of their content. Nevertheless, I'd like to send my former Post subscription money somewhere. Wired, Pro Publica, Associated Press, and Texas Observer are at the top of the list, but I haven't made up my mind.
We got about 5 inches of snow and 5 inches of sleet last weekend. Here's a view from our front door this past week:
Some random thoughts collected to make a post.
We went the Archie Edwards Blues Heritage Foundation a week ago to see Cheick Hamala Diabaté perform with four other musicians. Archie Edwards was a barber who also played Piedmont blues; he held a jam session every Saturday afternoon at his barbershop in northeast DC; there's still a Saturday afternoon jam session at the foundation. Diabaté plays a variety of string instruments from the ngoni to 10-string guitars.
The week of Christmas, a warning appeared in our car that the brake pads needed to be replaced. I'm sure we replaced the brake pads once in the nine years we've had the car, but I can't remember when exactly. Anyway, considering most of the driving is urban and drivers are increasingly aggressive, it seemed worthwhile to check the brakes. Because of the holidays we had to wait 10 days for the shop to have an opening. On Monday two more warnings appeared: the battery was no longer charging, and the engine temperature was high (after about 10 or 15 minutes of normal city driving).
We needed a car for the days the shop would have ours, so we rented one. The rental outpost within walking distance only had SUVs (convenient--they also cost more to rent), so we ended up with a Ford Escape. Quite a size difference from a Mini Cooper. Obviously a few days isn't enough time to get used to an SUV, and a Ford Escape is considered on the smaller side. Still, I didn't see a lot of advantage in riding in one. We even took it to Costco, which is made for SUV owners.
I've hated SUVs for a long time. I associate their rise in popularity with auto manufacturers evading fuel efficiency standards set by the Clinton administration. They're another example of companies selling people stuff they don't need for more than they can afford, and they set off a race where everyone feels like they have to drive a tank to feel safe. There are some SUVs now that are built on compact or sedan platforms, so I guess the SUV label is just marketing?
Anyway, even with the horrible start to the new year and having to go back to a full five-day work week, it's nice to have our car back. The brake pads are fine, but the sensor was broken. The alternator (and a pulley?!) had to be repaired. Nice to have one thing fixed.
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