7 book reviews

The Cabinet Of Dr. Leng by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child - The latest in the FBI Special Agent Pendergast novels. At the end of the last book, Constance, rebuffed by Pendergast, uses the time machine to go in the past of an alternate universe/timeline to save her siblings Mary and Joe and kill the evil Dr. Leng, destroying the machine in the process so that Pendergast cannot follow her. But he has other plans and locates a man brilliant enough to be able to reconstruct it and enlists the aid of friend and sometimes partner D’Agosta to help him save Constance from a mission doomed to failure. I really like these books and read it fairly quickly and got to the last page and dammit…to be continued. Now I have to wait til the end of August when the conclusion is released.

The Guest by B. A. Paris - Iris and Gabriel return home to find their friend Laure, wife of Pierre and their best friends who live in Paris, has moved into their home in London while they were gone for a hopefully romantic weekend. Laure and Pierre are childless by choice while Iris and Gabriel have a 20 year old daughter. They met at a resort during a first anniversary vacation for Iris and Gabriel and a honeymoon for Laure and Pierre and hit it off immediately and became fast friends. Laure had left Pierre when he confesses he just found out he has a daughter from a one night stand years ago while they were married. Pierre refuses all communication from best friend Gabriel, Laure overstays her welcome by months and gets involved with the part-time gardener Joseph and disappears after Iris heard them arguing. A murder mystery when a search finds Laure dead and the investigation proceeds. It’s an engaging story which kept me guessing until the end when the murderer reveals all musing about the past four months.

Dirty Thirty by Janet Evanovich - The further adventures of Stephanie Plum, bounty hunter and her sidekick Lula and the two men in her life Morelli and Ranger. Typical fun read with an ending I did not expect.

She’s Not Sorry by Mary Kubica - The way this is written it’s as if it’s a straight timeline but it actually jumps back and forth between the recent past and the present which doesn’t become apparent until near the end. Meghan, a nurse, is a divorced single mom of a 16 year old daughter, Sienna. Meghan is assigned to a woman, an apparent attempted suicide from jumping off a bridge and miraculously survived and who is in a coma, in the ICU where she works and it’s doubtful the woman, Caitlin, will survive. One day Meghan, who is something of a bleeding heart, runs into a friend, Natalie, from high school who needs rescuing from an abusive husband and Meghan responds, caring for Nat and confiding in her her own secrets. Things start to unravel as these two story lines eventually merge. Was Caitlin pushed, is Meghan being targeted? Then one day, Caitlin opens her eyes.

The Berry Pickers by Amanda Peters - Joe and Ruthie are the youngest of five siblings from the M’ic Maw indigenous in Canada. Every summer the family travels to the blueberry fields in Maine to pick berries. The summer Joe is six and Ruthie is four and the rest of the family is out of sight elsewhere, Ruthie is sitting on a big rock not far from their small cabin eating her sandwich while Joe wanders down to the lake out of sight of Ruthie. When Joe comes back, Ruthie is gone. The family searches but she is never found. In Maine, Norma is growing up the only child of a very restrictive but loving mother and father, not allowed out to play, who dreams for years of another mother and another life until they finally start to fade. The story is told alternately by Joe and Norma as they grow up and reminisce, Joe who carries the guilt of Ruthie’s disappearance and how it affected his life and Norma who comes to realize that there is a family secret that she eventually thinks she knows until she learns the full truth. This is a really good book, the story well told and I really enjoyed it.

The Frozen River by Ariel Lawson - Martha Ballard is a midwife and healer in her 50s in a small community in Maine on the Kennebek River in the late 1700s and as such she is privy to the lives and secrets of the townspeople which she records in her daily diary. One November a body is discovered in the frozen river. It is hacked out and brought into town and Martha is called to come examine the body. She declares him murdered, beaten, hung, and thrown in the still running part of the river where it floated downstream until it became caught at the bend and encased in the ice. The new Harvard educated doctor in town disagrees with her assessment, calls it accidental drowning, no investigation is begun. When a local woman accuses the dead man and the leading citizen and judge in town of rape, Martha becomes an important witness to the injuries and is determined that justice be done. Her insistence puts herself in danger as well as a member of her family as she investigates the murder and rape on her own. I really liked this book as Martha relates the births in the town, the herbal remedies she provides, the flashbacks of her own life, the lives of the women in a society ruled by men and the laws that punish women but rarely men. 

Angel Of Vengeance by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child - the conclusion to The Cabinet Of Dr. Leng. Just as it seems Constance, Pendergast, and D’Agosta have failed with Leng having killed her sister Mary and abducted Joe and her younger self, Pendergast’s evil brother Diogenes, who they all thought had dies when Constance pushed him into a volcano, walks through the door claiming to be their salvation. He informs them that the man who reworked the time machine has come through and got himself arrested, that Diogenes was the last to come through as it self destructed having been left on maximum for too long. Constance, Pendergast, D’Agosta, and Diogenes, seemingly trapped forever in the past of this alternate timeline, plot to deprive Leng of his victims and kill Leng in the process and then once again all seems lost. I’m going to stop here in case you are a fan of these books.

 

fall bloomers and WTF

While it still gets in the low 90s during the day, mornings and evenings are cool and all the fall bloomers are, well, blooming. I don’t usually take pictures of the whole expanse of these plants so I am plus the close ups of the flowers I usually post.

I planted the rangoon creeper on the section of fence beside the drive into the shop yard where it can get all the sun it wants.

The pink trumpet flower, also planted in the shop yard for the same reason, it’s the only place that gets full sun. It’s just starting its bloom cycle and later will have more flowers.

Pam did not want the cutting from my morning glory bush, also a sun lover, which I thought she could plant in front of her house so I planted it last spring. It is glorious.

The white phillipine lilies are really kind of invasive sprouting up everywhere and after they finish blooming I’ll probably dig some of them up.

The next two are just coming into bloom. The shrimp plant has really taken over this section of the yard.

And the orange cosmos. In a couple of weeks it will be covered with flowers and I’ll post another picture of it when it is.

The mist flower doesn’t look like much in the big picture but it’s one of my favorites. 

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This post was just supposed to be about flowers but things are getting more extreme by the day and I have to add, just what the fuck is wrong with people in this country. 

Meteorologists are now getting death threats for explaining why hurricanes and the weather in general is getting more extreme. Mention global warming or climate change and the MAGAts just go insane because violence is the only way to deal with anything they don’t like and they don't like people talking about climate change.

Over the weekend FEMA had to pause their recovery efforts in two counties in North Carolina, the areas hardest hit, because of threats to the workers helping people on site. In one instance FEMA personnel were ordered out of the area after National Guard members reported encountering 2 trucks of militia members out ‘hunting FEMA’. Btw, FEMA does not have the power to either condemn your storm damaged property or confiscate it. 

And finally, Trump held a rally in Coachella, CA on Saturday in which he went full on fascist informing us of his intention to denaturalize citizen immigrants and using the armed forces, if necessary (and of course he, or rather Steven Miller, will find it necessary) to round up illegal and legal residents as well as anyone he considers a ‘radical left lunatic’, you know the Hitleresque ‘enemy within’. This rally was held in the desert five miles from the parking lot. He had attendees bussed in only when it was over, there were no busses to take people back. Report is that the bus drivers were only paid to take people to the rally. Trump left without a backward glance stranding all those people in the desert in the dark. So who are his supporters blaming? The democrat mayor of Coachella and democrats in general.

long day and rummaging through more tubs

Monday I called two people and another on Tuesday for bids on cutting down, cutting up, and hauling away the hanging limbs on the two pecan trees. One Monday and the one on Tuesday came out the day I called. The second guy I called on Monday didn’t return my call until Wednesday afternoon after I had the work done Wednesday morning. He called again yesterday evening. Too late guy, should have returned my call on Monday.

The man I hired and his two helpers did an excellent job and very reasonable. The one limb hanging by a shred of bark came down quickly and was cut up in minutes. It probably took the about 30 minutes of discussion and moving the extension ladder around to finally decide how to approach the more dangerous dangling limbs on the other tree though Tuesday afternoon the two limbs that were detached but hung had fallen on their own.

When those two limbs came down with a whump I guess I jumped because John looked over at me and asked was I nervous; yup, little bit. This is what the trees look like now. I hope the one closest to the house will regenerate because I’d hate to lose it completely.

Wednesday was a long day. After the crew drove off with the trailer full of more than half my pecan tree 

I went ahead and emptied the truck onto the now really big burn pile (went wide instead of tall) and Marc went out to run some errands. I got a phone call later…car trouble, car wouldn’t start. After a series of phone calls between Marc, myself, Robin, and car mechanic grandson Mikey, Mikey’s domestic partner Audra showed up to jump the battery with the fancy little battery charger gizmo and then followed Marc home with Paisleigh and waited until Mikey got off work so I got a nice little visit with my great granddaughter. When Mikey got here he and Marc went off to get a new battery and he switched it out for us so, car fixed.

Earlier this week I was looking through more of the tubs in my sister’s shed and found more christmas ornaments, a fancy elf or fairy as the case may be, 

her antique plastic Mr. Snowman that you can put a light inside, 

a tub full of santas and nutcrackers, all of which will go to SHARE. I pulled out these crocheted and starched snowflakes that Pam made to see if anyone in blogland wants them.

Also found her soap making stuff and another tub full of her genealogy research…documents and pictures. Her younger daughter took all the binders of the family lines that were in the house right after Pam’s death and she’s coming to get the rest of the genealogy stuff today. The soap making stuff I’m going to post on the local chat page on FB free for the taking. 

Now that the weather has cooled off somewhat, key word here ‘somewhat’ since it’s still getting into low 90s during the day but the mornings are nice and cool, the shrimp plant, the white philippine lilies, the rangoon creeper, the morning glory bush, and the pink trumpet flower are all blooming but this post is already heavy on images so can wait until the next post.

dinner disaster, done all I can do, drawing dissatisfaction

Back to more pleasant topics, sort of. I fixed dinner Friday night, my night. I bought a little eggplant Tuesday and decided on the spot to make eggplant parmesan so Friday when I got out my recipe I had to go back and get another one and the mozzarella plus the tomato sauce since I lost all my homemade sauce when we lost power for three days during hurricane Beryl. The recipe I have is for baking the eggplant beforehand in stead of frying it and calls for chunky tomato sauce. Anyway, it’s a process and I started early. There’s no such thing as commercially available ‘chunky’ tomato sauce so I also bought a can of diced tomatoes to add in which turned out to be a big mistake because the end result at dinner was terrible. I should have use either stewed tomatoes or just plain spaghetti sauce. Anyway, I not only threw out the leftovers but also the recipe. I need a new recipe for eggplant parmesan.

Last Wednesday I got out the big boy chainsaw and worked on the pecan tree by the back of the barn cutting up the fallen big stuff and what I could reach that wasn’t weight bearing and made this neat stack of cut logs.

Then Saturday I went to work on the tree close to the house. There wasn’t nearly as much to deal with since none of the big stuff has fallen, still dangling, and made this not so neat pile. If I could carry it, I didn’t cut it up into smaller stackable pieces. 

Now I need to get someone who does tree work to get those big hanging limbs on both trees down, cut up, and hauled away.

Yesterday I mowed the little backyard and around the tree fingers holding up the limbs on the tree closest to the house, cut to the ground all the hackberry, and pecan trees that had sprouted up this summer in amongst other shrubbery some of which I swear I cut last spring and poisoned the stumps. I still come in hot and sweaty even though it’s not getting as hot. Now that I’ve done all I can do on the trees I can turn my attention to the overgrown flower beds.

Speaking of overgrown, this is the half acre next to me that belongs to the Wicked Bitch of the West. I think this lot has only been mowed twice this whole year. It’s easily thigh high.

A week or so ago the wind knocked the bird feeder off the platform which has happened several times but this time the bird feeder broke. I went to the feed store for a new one and the cheapest ones they had were $44 and not that attractive. So I went to Tractor Supply and got one for $15. 

I put four little nails around the perimeter into the platform to keep it from falling off. I like this one but the four slots that feed the seed into the little circular tray aren’t high enough to let the spanish peanuts and the bigger sunflower seeds easily pass through so I’m going to take my dremel tool and grind the openings a little larger.

I finished the butterfly and penciled in the scrappy leaves in the background. My original thought was to do the leaves in watercolor but the paper in my sketchbook is not very heavy so I decided watercolor wasn’t a good idea and went back to colored pencil but after I got one and a half leaves done, I very much didn’t like it and erased as much as I could so that now it’s faint which I like better but still not best pleased. Now I’m trying to decide how to proceed, I could probably get more of the colored pencil off if I continued to use the erasure. I’m going to sit with it a couple of days. I’ll have to finish the other half of the one leaf and maybe pick a third and then darken the pencil lines and maybe I’ll call it done.

the photo I’m working from

the finished butterfly

where it stands now

lies, dirty lies, dangerous lies

This is long, folks, sorry. I’ve been writing this for about a week and a half and every day it just gets worse, the things Trump says, the lies and false accusations he and his rabid followers make about Harris and the Biden administration, they are just plain nasty and frankly, unbelievable and yet a large part of the population believes them.

Trump, self proclaimed sexual abuser and adjudicated rapist is now claiming to be the protector of women saying we will be happy, healthy, confident, free, and no longer thinking about abortion if elected. He’s also getting more and more extreme, advocating that a day or ‘one rough hour’ of intense police brutality will put an end to crime, you know, because the message will get around. Aaron Rupar, a journalist I follow on social media, basically called a Trump’s rally in Wisconsin a hate fest laden with heinous dangerous lies against immigrants, legal and undocumented, saying with relish “getting them out will be a bloody story”. And of course after the disaster in North Carolina Trump is lying that the governor, a democrat, is refusing to send aid to the republican areas of the state (which is something Trump did to various democrat regions asking for federal aid after a disaster, California after wildfires and Puerto Rico after the devastating hurricane Maria for example), that President Biden has refused to take Georgia’s governor’s call when in fact Biden has talked to him several times, has accused Biden and Harris of ignoring the devastation when Biden already had FEMA personnel on the ground before Helene hit. 

Since I wrote the above about a week ago Trump’s rhetoric and campaign against immigrants has gotten even worse. He intends to not only deport illegal residents, he will revoke the legal status of other immigrants and deport them as well. His lies about Biden’s hurricane response now include accusing Biden of stealing all the money from FEMA and using it on illegal migrants. What he’s referring to is a separately funded program, the Shelter and Services Program, part of Customs and Border Protection but administered by FEMA, set up under his own term as president. Secretary Mayorkas has called out Trump’s lie saying that FEMA has all the resources it needs to help those affected by hurricane Helene.

The fallout from his and Vance’s lies about the Haitian community in Springfield OH that has resulted in bomb threats and hate towards the small legal Haitian community that helped revitalize the town has now been directed at one businessman who defended his 30 Haitian employees as being the best he has. Jaime McGregor, a two time Trump voter, who owns a factory making tractor parts is getting graphic death threats directed at him, his family, and his business, credible enough that the FBI showed up and directed him to start taking certain precautions. McGregor, who has never owned a gun, now does and he and his family have been taking shooting lessons. Story here. 

MAGAts are spreading malicious memes about Harris’ proposal to give a $25,000 down payment credit to qualified first time home buyers with an emphasis on first generation home buyers claiming that if any member of your family; parents, grandparents, siblings, aunts, uncles; own a home you are ineligible, a claim that is patently false, and that your tax money will go to allow illegal immigrants to buy homes instead when it is against the law for illegal residents to access any government aid programs.

MAGA republicans are also lying about the excellent economy…continued job growth, record low unemployment, rising wages, inflation down, stock market at an all time high (and yes I know a lot of people are still struggling but that's as it ever was)…with Marco Rubio calling the just released report fake and when Trump was asked if he would acknowledge that the economy was improving replied, ’no, it’s not’.

All this is just a drop in the bucket of Trump’s vileness. I haven’t even touched his disastrous plan to increase tariffs on all imports which economists say will be devastating to the economy as will his mass deportation plans, his continued and increasing incoherence, his litany of complaints about how poorly he is treated, his refusal or inability answer questions replying instead with a word salad that has nothing to do with the question, his support of Putin and other heavy handed authoritarians, his intention to refuse to come to the aid of our allies, his desire to abandon South Korea, his denial of the brain damage sustained by 100 of our service members in Iraq when Iran bombed our base there calling the attack during his presidency ‘a very good thing’, and on and on. 

And while we mostly focus on how unfit and old at 78 Trump is to be president, and rightly so, what we need to be talking about as well is how fucking scary J D Vance is if Trump is elected and becomes completely senile or dies in office.  Besides his archaic opinion of women that their only role in the human experience should be childbearing and homemaking, his dismissal of women who work and their contributions to leadership, education, medicine, science, technology, the arts, etc.; his belief that people without children, who he calls sociopathic, psychotic, and deranged, should not be able to vote and should have their taxes raised and should be punished; he demonizes immigrants and supports Trump's plan to rid the country of them, is a christian nationalist and absolutely will implement Project 2025. The republican party has already requested information from different departments about employees in a bid to determine who won't be loyal to Trump. 

I have no doubt that if Trump gets elected republicans will do everything they can to shitcan him and install Vance.

When it comes right down to it, Republicans are more about power than the country, more about staying in power than the will of the people and they fully intend to force their unpopular world view if they gain the presidency and majority in Congress and will engage in threats of violence, voter suppression, and intimidation at the polls to achieve that end.

Once again, I urge everyone to check your voter registration to make sure it’s active, understand the assignment, and get out there and vote.

 

another truckload, anoles and toads, I visit

Last weekend I finally got all the debris piles off the ground and in the truck ready to be dumped on the burn pile if and when we can burn again, cut the rest of the canopy and small non weight bearing branches that I could reach on the second damaged tree cut up with my baby chainsaw and also in the truck. 

Now I’m ready to get out the big boy chainsaw and go after the big fallen limbs and the bigger non weight bearing dangling limbs. Once I get that done then it will be time to get more qualified help to get the dangling limbs cut loose and on the ground. Once on the ground, I can deal with them.

Saturday while Robin and I were out walking Minnie and we got to the end of the street, my friend’s 8 year old granddaughter was out in the yard. Miss Ellen! She came running over, look what I have.

These two anoles were quietly just sitting in her palm, making no effort to escape. The day before she showed me two toads in a glass jar half full of water she had scooped out of the little pool in their front yard. I told her not to leave them in the jar as they would drown but to let them go after she was through watching them which she did.

Sunday afternoon I went out to my daughter’s place about 20 minutes from here out in the county to visit and to get some fresh eggs. 

My grandson Mikey and Audra and their daughter, my great granddaughter Paisleigh moved back here from Arkansas in August and they recently bought a 35’ travel trailer, two bedroom and 1 1/2 bath, to live in until they get more permanent living quarters built on the property. This gets them out of Sarah’s house and gives them and Sarah and Mike personal and private space. So I drove out to visit and see the new trailer. Paisleigh gave me a grand tour and then wanted me to color with her.

Later Sarah and I and Paisleigh were sitting out under the canopy when Paisleigh announced she had to go fix her hair. She ran into Sarah’s house and came out with this bow on her head and her little pick bead bracelet on. 

Then she announced she was going to fix my hair and she put the bow and bracelet on me.

After about five minutes I took it off. Oh no, Gramma, she says, you have to wear it so I dutifully put it back on.

A few miscellaneous pictures. Current progress on the drawing.

My neighbor’s Halloween display. It’s been up since mid September.

The top part of the yellow bells shrub over at the shop yard that gets full sun. It’s as tall as the banana trees next to it.