prep day

We marveled at how big this egg was, the biggest chicken egg we had ever seen. Cracked it open…a double yolk. Do double yolk eggs produce twin chicks? Must be awful crowded in that egg.

I am reminded on mornings I feel resistant, like this morning, that the hardest part of yoga is rolling out your mat, or getting your butt to class. 

This week has been prepping for Thanksgiving. My standard contribution is the dressing, a butternut squash casserole, and cranberry sauce. Monday I roasted the butternuts, scooped out the cooked flesh from the skin and put it in a container and set out the bread to get stale. Yesterday I cut the crusts off the bread and cut it into cubes. Today I fry the bacon, make the cornbread and set it out to get stale (which I should have done yesterday but just now remembered), cut up all the vegetable stuff for the dressing, and make the cranberry sauce. Tomorrow it all gets put together and baked before taking it over to my daughter’s house for our late afternoon meal with family.

I was surprised to find I have 13 books on my list that I have not posted so while I’m doing all that here are the first five to consider.

The Last One At The Wedding by Jason Rekulak - Frank has been estranged from his daughter for three years when he gets a phone call from her. She’s getting married and wants him to attend. First of all, this guy Frank is a real jerk, never happy about anything and still trying to control his daughter. He doesn’t turn into any kind of decent until close to the end. His daughter Margaret is marrying into a wealthy and influential family and Frank is suspicious from the beginning since she and her fiancé Aiden have only known each other for 6 months. The weekend of the wedding arrives at their private camp in New Hampshire and the day before Frank leaves he receives an anonymous photo of Aiden with another girl asking what Aiden knows about the girl who went missing. When one of the guests at the camp is found drowned Frank, suspicious that something nefarious is going on, spends the few days trying to convince Maggie to call off the wedding and leave with him but Maggie is unconcerned but Frank is determined to unravel the truth and save his daughter.

Beautiful Ugly by Alice Feeny - Grady Green is an author with four books under his belt and the day he learns his most recent is a New York Times best seller his wife Abby goes missing. She was on the phone with him when she saw a body laying in the road and stopped to see if she could render aid and that was the last time Grady had any contact with her. The next year proves to be disastrous for Grady. He can’t write, he can’t sleep, he can’t think about anything but his missing wife, how much he loved her, how she was his whole world, how everything has fallen apart since she disappeared. He runs out of money, he loses his house, he’s losing his sanity, and fears he is about to lose his agent, Kitty, when she calls him into her office. Kitty proposes Grady go live on a small Scottish island with a total of 25 residents for three months in a little cabin she has inherited from one of her other authors hoping that the change of scene and the solitude will enable Grady to get his act together and write another book. She even fronts him money to live on so Grady and his dog Columbo travel to Amberly Island because he really doesn’t have any other choices and because solitude is what he needs and desires to write. Let me just say that Grady is a thoroughly unlikable man and the first three fourths of the book is him whining over and over about all that he has lost (and it was getting tedious). But weird things happen on the island, all the residents that he encounters seem to already know who he is, and he is convinced that he is seeing glimpses of his wife or else he’s hallucinating from lack of sleep. When he finds an unpublished manuscript written by a previous inhabitant of the cabin he concocts a plan that he hopes will give him back his life but then things really start to unravel for him. The last fourth, though, when as they say, the plot thickens, had me staying up late at night to finish.

Sleeping Worlds Have No Memory by Yaroslav Barsukov - Shea is a minister to the Queen sent to supervise the building of a tower ostensibly for defensive purposes against the neighboring country and it’s Crown Prince. It is being built with the aid of unstable high tech brought by the Drakiri refugees. He meets a Drakiri woman who tells him of an ancient legend about a Mimic Tower, the destruction it caused, the mounting danger the tower being built represents. When he discovers a portal to a dead world, Shea must decide what should be done to save the world he knows, what is real, what is a reflection of what was real, even the nature of reality. The author has a very flowery writing style that took some getting used to. I don’t know if I recommend this book or not. There’s one section about one of the characters that really didn’t have anything to do with the continuation of the story, I thought.

Death Of A Snob by M. C. Beaton -  a Hamish Macbeth novel. Hamish declines to go to his family’s home for Christmas because his aunt who lives in America and who he doesn’t get along with will be there. Instead he is talked into spending the holiday at a health resort on a small Scottish island by the owner Jane who thinks someone may be trying to kill her. Someone does die but it’s one of the other guests and Hamish must convince the detective from Inverness that it is indeed a murder and not an accidental death and solves the murder in the process.

By The Light Of Dead Stars by Andrew Van Wey - Thirteen year old Zelda’s parents are killed in a car crash, one that she survives. Her uncle Mark who lives in Spain sees an apparition of his sister returns to the US. Zelda’s parent specified in their will that it was their desire for Zelda to be cared for by her uncle instead of her paternal grandparents. Now the two of them find they are both facing very different lives while learning to trust and depend on each other and move to the small community of Greenwood Bay in northern California for a fresh start but something evil lurks in Graywood Bay, something that thrives on pain and suffering and is trying once again to become manifest in the real world. In summer school making up a failing math grade Zelda makes immediate friends with Ali and Maura and it falls to the three friends and an old eccentric man in his creepy falling down house and creepy sculptures in his junkyard to save their community.