More rain. Oh, please, how tired I am of this rain! How tired I am of the soft sound it makes all night long. How tired I am of watching it hit the ground, small points of water bouncing and jumping. How boring the smell, the fresh smell of new water and cold air. How annoying it is that my feet get wet, that the dog gets wet and I must stoop to his level to dry him off. How bothersome this rain is. How I wish it would simply morph into ........
I hope it goes on for another month. I am in love with this weather. The sight, the sound, the feel of it, the wet smell, almost the taste of it. All the senses. It's almost like going to the ocean, only better because it can go on all day long. The only thing I miss is the ability to stay home, curl up with a good book and the dog and do nothing. I don't even mind driving in it that much. I must have some ocean rising in my Gemini sign. Or something.
No matter.
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Yes, an odd pair.
Even odder, I realized recently that I had never read anything by Jane Austen. Many, many people love her books and many movies have been made from those books but I have neither seen one of those movies or read one of her books! How could this be! In order to remedy this, I began reading "Pride and Prejudice" and now I am stymied. What is her appeal? I find this book to be vacuous and trite, all about getting a husband and going to balls and talking about people behind their backs. I know that this book was written two hundred years ago but unless I hear otherwise from some learned person, I doubt that I will be reading any of her other books in the near future. This book is simply not moving me. I may try one of the movies. Any suggestions?
Moving on: the North Bay Rowing Club is in Petaluma and is, of all things, a rowing club! northbayrowing.org A friend of mine from West Marin mentioned taking a rowing lesson and since that has always been a secret dream of mine, to be in good enough shape to take a scull (not a skull) out on the water and row, I thought I would look into it. Now, we all know I am not in very good shape but hey, one lesson, how terrible would one lesson be. My teacher was a cool woman named Kris who has rowed for years. Excellent teach. I, on the other hand, not an excellent pupil.
Rowing in one of those long, thin sculls is very tricky, not because you think you are going to tip over (although that thought crossed my mind several times) but because it's as much mental work as physical. Since my mental agility is on par with my physical agility, it was quite a struggle on both levels. There is a pattern to rowing, very specific things to do with your body at each second of the rowing action. Legs, hands, arms, back, up, down, wrist turning, oar maneuvering...... you have to get into the sequence mantra or you flail at the water in a most ineffective manner. Quite embarrassing.
Watch this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyKZ9-mOGSE it is 30 seconds. Note how their arms cross over each other, how their hands deftly turn the oars, how they are all perfectly synchronized. Note to self: practice, practice, practice! Years and years of practice. They are in a quad scull. I was in a two person scull. I could have very well have been in a huge skull with crossbones on it. Totally not graceful, that's for sure. Even getting into the tiny boat is daunting. Getting out is easy, you can just roll onto the dock like a floppy, boneless cow, which was my method.
Needless to say it was an adventure. Will I join the NBRC? I don't know yet. Will I go back for a second lesson? Probably. You will be the first to know!
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ACK! It appears I have not written a blog in more than a week! Whatever can I be doing that precludes that? Nothing, actually. Just working, walking the dog and wondering about the future.
But now it is raining and there isn't much more to be said. I love the rain. Love, love, love it. I don't mind getting soggy, don't mind wet feet, don't mind a messy house because of a damp dog. Everything about the rain makes me happy, so I am currently happy.
Cooper, on the other hand, not so happy. We still go out for walks and he gets pretty wet. But walk we must. This morning we were out for about 20 minutes, back and he got dried off and had breakfast. When it was time to leave for work here in Healdsburg, he was willing to come with me until he stepped out onto the porch, remembered that it was wet outside, made a u-turn and jumped back on the bed. No way was he going to be subjected to wetness twice in the same morning! So he is at home, lounging the morning away.
Will try to keep in better contact, even if I have nothing of merit to say.
I have a couple of books to report on, all very different from each other but all very good.
RAYLAN by Elmore Leonard
If you are familiar with the TV series "Justified" you will recognize the name Raylan. Played by the incredibly hot Timothy Oliphant, the character Raylan Givens is a US Marshall currently working in Harlan County, Kentucky. As US Marshalls usually do, Raylan is always in pursuit of some criminal or sniffing out criminal activity. Raylan is a crack shot, sometimes works a little outside the boundaries of the rule book. There are a couple plot lines working here so the book is quick and jumpy and greatly entertaining, especially if you like Leonard to begin with. Raylan is a wise-cracking guy but he also speaks with a sincere economy of words. The book is one of Leonard's best, in my opinion, not the least because I imagined Oliphant on every page, not a bad thing at all.
YOU KNOW WHEN THE MEN ARE GONE by Siobhan Fallon is a collection of short stories about women and men stationed at Ft. Hood, Texas. Most of the stories deal with the women and families left behind when the men are off to war in Iraq or Afghanistan. Fallon lived on the base for a time as an army wife and her first-hand knowledge of that experience is obvious in the emotion and detail she brings to her characters. Each story seems so real, they could almost be small biographies of every-day people just trying to slog through the mire. If you like short stories, check this collection out. I am more of a novel person but Fallon was interviewed on NPR and that interview led me to the book. Sad, sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes infuriating and now and then hopeful, these are meaningful stories.
THE GRIEF OF OTHERS by Leah Hager Cohen is a beautiful, almost lyrical novel about grief, hope and healing. At the heart of the story is the Ryrie family, dealing with a tragedy no one wants to talk about but which is present every single day. Enter a couple of other characters who connect in accidental ways. Every character is deeply flawed in emotional ways and each one is desparate to hide within that emotional armor, trying to wrap themselves in solitude in order to avoid pain. It sounds depressing but it isn't. The climb out of the pain is slow for each person but you, the reader, have hope that they will all succeed. For each time you want to yell at one of them, there are two times you want to hold them. Cohen's writing is sometimes gut-piercing but never untrue, never maudlin and always compelling.
THE FEAR INDEX by Robert Harris is a cross between a sci-fi book and a crime novel. It's a fast-paced book of intrigue and suspense (that sounds like a back-of-the-book blurb) about artificial intelligence and hedge funds. Now, to be honest, those two subjects don't really seem to go together but Harris has created Alex Hoffman, a mathematical genius who invented a computer with the ability to independently analyze the stock market and make automatic trades that no human broker would be willing or able to make. The hedge fund is wildly profitable but in a 24 hour period the computer seems to be out to destroy not only the world financial market but Alex as well. Is the computer really thinking and acting like a person? Is it really intrinsically evil, manipulating humans with fear and determined to destroy its creator? Will things end badly? A good read, a great ride, even if a bit far-fetched for this non sci-fi fan. But I enjoyed it anyway.
All these books and more are available for FREE! At your local library.
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It's been a good day. First piece of good news is that my daughter is starting a new job on Monday, a regular salary, gets to buy some professional clothes other than cool chefs coats. That news started my day off quite nicely.
Second, met with the CEO of the corporation that owns the inn in Healdsburg and got a raise and a promise of partial payment of my health insurance, a huge step for me. It was a good meeting and I left feeling confident in my place in the company for now.
Third, I came home to my ROKU player device that I ordered from Amazon. I don't have regular broadcast TV because it is too expensive but this little ROKU thing, the size of an english muffin, lets me stream movies, videos, music from Netflix, Amazon, Pandora, Hulu, etc. Already I love it and it was less than $40.00, including shipping. Hours of entertainment await me, at last I have a chance of being a couch potato. Sitting on the couch and reading books is great, but I don't think that qualifies as potato-like. More like couch literary critic, which doesn't have nearly the cache as the simple phrase "couch potato." (Why potato, I do not know. Could have been "couch pepper" or "couch okra" but those never caught on. But I digress.)
Finally, my excellent friend Martha gave me a gift card to a local Santa Rosa restaurant, Rendez Vous, where I went for dinner tonight. Sat at the bar, very friendly, had a lovely and large Manhattan, a Salad Nicoise, and brought home a slice of lemon cream tart which was gone in about thirty seconds. Good restaurant, I will go back and thanks to Martha, it made me realize that yes, I can just go out to a real dinner by myself. Take out is an option but there is something nice about being there and eating there and almost being social.
All in all, a good day. Very good day.
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