Old party braves cold and Freecycle

Today was still cold and windy but I walked. I put on layers and the long puffy coat I'm so glad I bought this fall. It comes to mid calf, very good against the wind and cold today.  

Not much of a walk, but about fifteen minutes outside in this weather feels like more and I was glad I'd gone out.  If you don't keep walking you can quickly lose the stamina, and I'd like to keep it a while longer. I did succeed in turning corners without tripping, always good.

Now I'm having a pot of tea while I attend to a bit of Freecycling.

Mats, acid free drawing paper in various sizes, some scraps of Arches hot press. There are quite a few artists and hobbyists in this neighborhood so I'm hoping they're claimed.

Elsewhere there was a discussion about children's emotions and how they need to be taken into account and often aren't.

Mine, as the smallest of a large family, certainly weren't by older sibs, who targeted me. My parents were too busy and harassed just supporting their family and doing all the physical work of housing feeding and clothing, to take anything else into account.

Sometimes this can result in people growing up with underdeveloped skills in recognizing and addressing emotional needs, and it can show in various ways. 

Some people simply can't cope with life responsibilities, like a couple of my sisters, who were totally dependent on their husbands, with sad results.  

Some develop the other way, with inner resources, like another sister.  Once in a while I'm briefly in the first group, but more often I live in the second, pretty self reliant. 

To the point of pigheaded, maybe..my unmarried sister certainly was. And we did share DNA.

I have a question for readers: I finished the Delderfield, which is part one of a saga, but part two isn't available right now. What's another saga you can suggest? 

I read and loved the Cazalets, and I can always turn to Trollope, but I wonder what might be more sweeping? 

Maybe I'll reread the Forsyte Saga, if I can get through the death of Philip Bosinney.  Any ideas, please? I'm thinking generations of families and events.

Happy day everyone, here it's keep warm against icy drafts, but some of you are keeping cool in blasts of heat. Reading can happen either way.

It's about tea and reading

It's the time of year when Christmas, which affects everyone including non celebrants, is over, the calendar New Year isn't here yet, it's cold and dark and raining all over the planet, so here's the plan. The setup

the current (re)reading from the complete Provincial Lady on my Kindle, still as funny as ever, and highly recommended.

Current listening while I knit, the latest Andy Carpenter and dogs mystery

 

Then a movie to be picked up on DVD from the library for viewing pleasure just unserious stuff I'm finally getting around to now that I find Emma Thompson is in it.

 

And upcoming reading

I saw him in an extended interview with Meredith Constant and was impressed by his quiet, intelligent analysis, with aspects of history, here Royal history, I hadn't thought of. 

This is a long serious book about the juncture of the current English establishment, which I think is worth some time, given the current juncture of the Western world.  It's not the gossipy froth the tabloids would like you to think. 

Meanwhile, yesterday was the follow up with my doctor who asked me to bring in my own bp cuff to check its accuracy against hers. Readings on both are high, mine higher, the little overachiever, and after she'd listened to areas all over with a stethoscope, probably in search of some sneaky problem, she concluded that we can just increase one med. She also said don't worry about measuring bp for now. See her in February.

So that's fine for now, and happy birthday, did I have a good time, she's very good on spotting potential loneliness in single seniors.  This senior is doing fine.

Happy day everyone, enjoy your reading and listening and if you have any recommendations, please mention them.

Reading, rea-ding, Gosford Park and other things

Yesterday's mammogram went okay, no technical hitches, pinchier than usual, and the reports as far as I can follow them seem okay. 

In the course of their technical updating, the radiology people have gone so transparent that, instead of the usual easy to read paper letter saying dear patient you're fine, the new online portal, they're all portal mad in the medic world, directs me to open the electronic letter. 

This is the letter that also goes to my doctor, full of technical terms and bet-hedging, and is pretty much above my pay grade. I did see the word benign here and there, so I think all's well. And the voicemail from the radiology folks , a high-speed gabble about next year, may also be good news. My own doctor's nurse will call and tell me intelligibly, I expect. Then there will be a letter in the mail.

While I was waiting in my little gown, mercifully nearer my size than last time, when I was given one which I had to hold up on my shoulders, made for a much bigger person, I read this.

By the end of it, I felt like an irritable teenager told to have a good day - "don't tell me what to do! You're not the boss of me!"

The afternoon at the movies was great. GP was as good as ever, and I saw more things in it than before.

I'd forgotten how old it was, too. Great antidote to disturbed nights and body squashing. 

The blogistas who predicted good sleep were so right. Hours and hours, lovely. I woke at six, opened the window to soft rain and birds carolling away. Life's definitely good.

And here's a reading line of thought. Came up earlier today, Josie George, brilliant writer, saying it would be great for her if she could get it everywhere, to assist with her visual reading issues. 

Quite a few people joined in a discussion about the relative usefulness of bolding syllables as a reading assist. To me, a lifelong fast and comprehending reader, the right hand passage was like having someone shouting at me and interrupting my thinking.

But to a lot of people with reading difficulties, it was great, and they were eager to find out where to get it and how to apply it.

Then someone else offered this

This was a terrible idea for folks with synaesthesia, because color carries all kinds of information different from the words, but again other people found it helpful to delineate phrases rather than individual words.

And there were explainers about why the bolding and coloring are obstacles to fast readers

A saccade is a group of simultaneously perceived letters or symbols, and it just means those readers grasp large pieces of text all at once, not bit by bit. 

Your humble blog writer learned to meaningfully grasp entire paragraphs in one pass,  in her final Uni year, when a working knowledge of over three hundred textbooks in both English and French was required to have a hope in the final exams, on which the entire degree depended. 

Anyway, back to now. And here's a new one on me. 

I read this easily at close to normal speed. Turns out that as long as you have first and last letters of the word, the order of letters inside the word isn't as important as you might think. Which I guess is why typos don't  destroy meaning, though they annoy people no end, particularly neat people.

What do you think? This is supposed to be about comprehension rather than speed, though the assist for one reader may completely trip up another.

It's not meant to be taken, in here, anyway, too seriously. Judgment free blogzone, we are. But I'd like to know your experience of these approaches all the same.

Happy day everyone. The swallows arrived back this week, swooping and spiralling and helping us with the mosquito population, lovely little friends. Swallows, not mozzies.

The new seedlings are big enough to see from the second floor  bedroom window now. It's all just very good. And I'm going to learn a new knitting stitch today.

Photo by AC

Reading and listening

While all this food prep and stitching have been going on, I've been reading and listening.

This lengthy audiobook, all about being a seaman in the 19th century, in sailing ships, comes complete with unintelligible terms and shouted commands. And it's gripping.

 Endless adventures on land and sea, interesting characters, including a captain who has to escape Bonaparte's soldiers walking hundreds of miles in a bear suit.  With his ship's surgeon acting as bear leader.. and many more capers, all of which make sense in the context. 

The history is impeccable as  is the knowledge of  life aboard the royal navy ships and the politics of the Admiralty and parliament.

 I'm not sure I could read this in print. I need the narrator who's excellent at performing the commands on board ship so that the reader gets the gist.

This has been the background to my stitching and cooking prep lately qv:

When I need to actually read words, I have a biography of Agatha Christie on my Kindle.

 It's very well researched, and uses a lot of references to her books, including the Westmacott ones which are much less well known. They're not mysteries and I find them less worthwhile. 

The writer, Laura Thompson, shows us the real life sources of a lot of the characters and plots, and Christie's business acumen. Worth a read for the social history of the early 20th century. The page I put up because I couldn't access the opening page, deals with the time after her mother's death, and the people mentioned are her parents. 

The discussion of Christie's personality isn't very flattering, but interesting.  She wasn't very skilled with people in real life, oddly, and I wonder if real people were too complex for her. Her fictional characters are so much simpler, limited motivation largely around money. In real life this reflects her own belief.

Best laid plans, mice, women, pickles and so on

The big plan for today was for my cleaners to make a triumphant return, out since March, woo-hoo. Then last night sad email, car broke down, in shop hoping to get it back for maybe tomorrow, will reschedule.

I was to absent myself as usual, always get out of their way, by going to do my library drive-by, I mean curbside pickup,then maybe take a walk.

So I did the pickup, then the new plan was to read.

Already into Eleanor Oliphant, Kindle goes by percentage not page, and Jonathan Strange and Mr Norell. And here come these additions. So I would do a reading buffet, flitting hither and yon like a literate butterfly.

Then I looked at my email and the alert about my next Bite Club Cookbook Book Club, try saying that fast, was in my inbox.

There were still borrows to go on my Hoopla account for the month. So here's what ended up happening.

carrots waiting to be peeled, as well as bread waiting to be baked and dishes to wash. The carrots won.

Pickles! Haven't made them in ages. And I had everything available. Thyme, garlic, salt, hot pepper flakes, coriander seeds, vinegars.  Made a little jar. Cold brine. 

This involved toasting coriander seeds.

As you know, if you've toasted seeds or nuts, there's a nano second between just right and stow this for a lark. But I never looked away, and it was okay.

Then bethought me of the farm asparagus spears in the freezer. Enough brine left to boil and use as a hot brine pickle.

White wine and white vinegar, sugar, water.

So that happened as well.

The bread is not baked ( though I see a nice flatbread recipe there), and the sink is still full of soapy water and dishes. But I have my Thanksgiving pickles.

Why it's good to just sit there sometimes or wander about

Last week I got finally around to thinning the pachysandra on the patio, found to my amazement a couple of lovely box planters, buried, the thinning long overdue, now planted with petunia and some shrub, and sitting on the fence.  A lot of tangential activity to that simple need to thin the pachy.

Then yesterday and the two days before, the big reward came -- first sightings in years of a hummingbird busily attending to the petunias.  Flying backwards as they miraculously do, hovering at a terrific rate, just there for a few seconds.  But I was out loafing and reading at the time and that's how I caught sight of her.  Three days in a row.  No pix, no time!

Then today, in the midst of turning out the kitchen, thinning out pots and pans for freecycling, washing the shelfy things that have been there years, amazing how much they needed doing, heavy labor,  I found cachepots and thought I should check if they needed occupants. 

Anyway, I took a break and wandered outside in case I needed to bring any houseplants to occupy them yet, fall seeming to be rushing in, and there, after three years of tlc, the dieffenbachia has thrown a flower!  

I didn't even realize they could. Noticed yesterday what I thought was a new leaf, but here it is opened up, and it's  a lovely surprise of a flower.