Reading--It's Made Me Who I Am

 Someday I would like to write a post about how certain beloved books have defined the way I think about things. Two that come to mind are the "Little House" books and the "Anne" books. That would take the time that I haven't had or prioritized this summer.

I just finished reading "The Questions That Matter Most", by Jane Smiley, or rather most of it. 

This Jane Smiley has written loads of novels and I have never heard of her. I mostly read non-fiction and this one was in the new non-fiction shelf in the library. It's a book of 'essays', and the ones I enjoyed where of authors or books that I knew. I didn't read the ones that I had never heard of. 

There are a few pieces of the book that resonate with my feelings of books and I want to keep them...

Quotes from "The Questions That Matter Most": 

Page 232..."The moments are what come to mind when I think about thee books I like best --moments that stick in my mind as pictures. When you're deep into reading a book that you're very fond of, the images pass through your mind and leave a permanent impression."

Page 233..."The reader has to have images to feel oriented in the world of the novel....Your images may not be the same as my images--different readers will perceive a novel's world differently depending on what they notice and respond to in the descriptions--..."

Page 238..."To read a book is...an act of freedom--at any point I could say, I'm done with (whatever book I'm reading), I'm moving on to (another one). As long as you're reading you're there voluntarily." 

There is another piece of this book that I liked on page 74, but not because of what is written down. The paragraph is about the author's take on the difference between movies and books.

I don't make a habit of watching movies, and after the few I have seen about some favorite books that don't match up with what I have in my head, I'm not interested in seeing anymore of those. 

Leaves Much To Be Desired

I'm seeing the last days of October approaching on the calendar and the effects of the little bit of snow we got this afternoon.

I'm cleaning up my photos for the month, it was a busy month for me.  Lynette and Anthony stopped in for a couple nights on their way home from a big trip from Texas, up the west coast and down through Montana and Wyoming, so we had a family dinner.  My folks were here for a few days and we had a family dinner.  We went to Texas to see Lynette and Anthony at their house.  We had other company that didn't require a family dinner. 

We had Lorene and family over again to play in the leaves. 

 At the very end of last month we took Christian on his trip to the SAC Museum and Wild Safari Park and had the other two boys overnight the next two weekends. (See further blog post for pictures from Christian's trip and the Texas trip. I'm getting too tired tonight. 

I was growing celery, until I let it dry out after I put it in dirt.  Re-watering hasn't revived. it.  

Barry wanted to make a dessert and I was desperate for ideas, but he was happy with a layer cake.  There are 9 candles, 8 for him and one for me. He chose the color of the frosting. 

Dad entered the flag afghan I made for him several years ago into the county fair.  

I didn't make it fair quality, but a second place  and $3.25 will get me some ice cream. 

This is a book about the history and current status of immunotherapy for the treatment of cancer.  

It seems like the non-fiction books I have been reading are so in depth that they the complete history of every scientist involved and where even the most minor things started.

My take-away is that in order for immunotherapy to be effective it needs to be tailored to each patient, is very, very expensive and can have very serious side effects. 

Boys and the pumpkin patch.

Photo Shoot

Leafy fun.

All The Gallant Men

I've always enjoyed reading non-fiction more than fiction, if I'm not reading children's books.

I found this one.

It tells the story of a man who survived the bombing of the Arizona during the attack on Pearl Harbor.

. It tells his story, the attack, his recovery, his re-enlisting, a synopsis of the war in the Pacific, the atomic bombs, and his take on how the attack could have been prevented.  He’s 94 years old and the guy that wrote up his story did a really good job.  It’s a collaboration effort.

It tells an amazing story.

Lest we forget.

Here are some quotes:

"Don Stratton is one of the last of the greatest generation. Being around him and his wife was a gift, too. Not just the story.  Them.  It felt so good to be able to use my skills as a writer to serve such a man and to tell such a story.  In the process, I was touched by both, the story and the man. 

I am so grateful.  

When I asked what message he would like to leave behind, he said: 'That people would remember Pearl Harbor so that it would never happen again.'  I truly hope Don's story does that."

"We were so young, those of us who enlisted--eighteen, nineteen, twenty years old.  Too young to go through what we endured that day, I can tell you that.  If we were not quite men on December 6, by mid-morning of the 7th we were."

"This is my story. It is just one of the thousands from those who shared that fateful day.  And only on of hundreds of thousands from other sailors, soldiers, and airmen who joined the fight in the fateful days that followed.  But it was mine to live, ....  And now, I figure, it is time to tell it." 

"On the home front, a surge of patriotism filled the country with resolve.  By Sunday evening, after news of the attack was broadcast on radios across the country, phones rang off the hook at the various recruiting stations."

"We were sitting ducks.  Not just the Arizona, but every ship in the harbor.  And there was nothing we could do about it.  The dive bombers were too low for our guns, and, almost two miles above, the horizontal bombers were too high.  With few exceptions, our planes, which the Japanese strategically hit first, never got a chance to get off the ground.  We couldn't even make a run for it into open waters, because it took two and a half hours for the boilers of a battle ship to fire up." 

" 'In an hour,' someone commented, 'boys had become men and men heroes.' That was true not only of the sailors in the harbor but also of the men and women in the hospital.  There were heroics in that hospital that never made the headlines.  People there who would not have a monument erected in their honor.  Who never got a medal for their valor.  Or a promotion for their service.  They were wond of the most heroic people I have ever met.  And I don't even remember their names."

From President Roosevelt's Speech.

"The American people rose of teh occasion, ready to fight.  What Japan had done at Pearl Harbor was despicable in the eyes of every American.  The Japanese had violated every code of honor that had been ingrained in us since childhood.  Since my childhood, anyway.  You didn't sneak up on someone and hit him in the back of the head, without warming. ...and no self-respecting kid did it.  If you had a quarrel with someone, you squared off, the two of you and you diked it out.  You fought with your fists, and you fought fairly.  And you never kicked him while he was down either. You let him get up and defend hiself.  What Japa did in violating our code of honor riled an entire nation. "

In my opinion, war is not fair. Ever.

"In a desperate attempt to half another foreign invasion, they devised a modern version of the Divine Wind*--powered not by the gods of nature but by thousands of young Japanese zealots eager to sacrifice themselves for the emperor.  

The first successful kamikaze attack happened on October 25, 1944, at the battle of Leyte Gulf."

*Japan was saved twice from invasion by strong winds in the 13th Century

"In the sky, kamikaze pilots flew to their deaths as they ravaged the U.S. fleet.  On the land, Japanese soldiers fought to the death rather ran surrender."

"Controversy continues to surround our use of the atomic bomb on  Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For many it is an emotionally charged issue.  No on understands the rawness of those emotions more than the men and women who servied in World War II.  We saw so much.  There were things we didn't talk about when we came home. It was just too horrendous to go back to some of the places we had been.  For those of us who fought and suffered in the war and who saw the horrors of combat, the end of the war couldn't come soon enough."

"Here I should add a postscript for those who think less of America for resorting to such extreme measured.  Before releasing the bomb on Hiroshima, U.S. aircraft dropped leaflets that warmed of the bombing.  Five Million of them. They dropped them on Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and thirty-three other cities that were potential targets. The leaflet, printed in Japanese, is translated as follows:

Read this carefully as it may save you life of the life of a relative or friend. In the next few days, some or all of the cities...."   

"Even if you believe America shouldn't have used to atomic bomb on Japan, you should know that we tired nearly everything, short of an invasion, so we would not have to use it.  It was a reluctant last resort.

One more thing you should know...

None of us at Pearl Harbor got leaflets like that from the Japanese."

It also states in the book, and these statistics could be found elsewhere, of tremendous loss of life, some estimated millions, that would have been lost both of Allied and Japanese military and Japanese  civilians during an invasion. As stated earlier, the Japanese soldiers were prepared to fight to the death rather than surrender. 

"Before [General Douglas] MacArther formally accepted Japan's surrender, he made this statement; 'It is my earnest hope--indeed the hope of all mankind--that form this solemn occasion a better world shall emerge out of the blood and carnage of the past, a world founded upon faith and understanding, a world dedicated to the dignity of man and the fulfillment of his ost cherished wish for freedom, tolerance and justice."

There is no such thing as security for any nation--or any individual--in a world ruled by the principles of gangsterism.

There is no such things as impregnable defense against powerful aggressors who sneak up in the dark and strike without warning.  

We have learned that our ocean-girt hemisphere is not immune from severe attack--that we cannot measure our safety in terms of miles on any map anymore.

--President Franklin Roosevelt

"Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet, and General Walter short, commanding general of the Hawaiian Department, were both found to be in 'dereliction of duty' and were promptly demoted to lesser ranks and retired.  

The buck didn't stop there. As it turned out, there was lots of blame to go around.  Each investigation shed a little more light on who was culpable, and gingers ahve been pointing every since."

"The great lesson we too often learn from history, however, is that we are so prone to forget the past.  And there is a price we pay for our forgetfulness.  

That is why Pearl Harbor matters. It reminds us how we too, are a target, how vulnerable we are, how it could happen again, at a moment when we least expect it."

"Brute force was the native tongue fo the Japanese military.  It was the language they used when they marched across China, when they attacked Pear Harbor without warning, when they overran the islands in the South Pacific."

"... at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel with other officers, enjoying the night's festivities, when the band played, 'The Star-Spangled Banner,' As everyone sand along, he later roucounted that he ahd a terrible urge to jump up and hsout, "Wake up, America!' 

'On December 6, no one on Oahu was more overconfident than the military, ' write historian Thurston Clarke, summarizing the attitude on the eve of December 7. Clarke quotes Richard Sutton, a young ensign attached to Admiral Claude Bloch: "We had the supreme overconfidence a great athlete has who ahs never been beaten--we all thought we were invincible."

"Have some been healed? Yes, Year by merciful, year.  But all? No.  And that is true for so manuy who have survived trauma, not just those who have survived the horror of war."   

Perhaps this is the most important. 

"When I go back to the memorial, I visit to pay my respects. I  have no animosity for the Japanese people.  The Japanese military, well, that's another thing."

Learning New Things

One thing that happens weekly is a visit from Lorene and the two little boys, since Zane is in school.  Lorene left them with me for a hour while she was off and those boys must have had spring fever, since they were inside and outside and wanting to play one game for 5 minutes, and then another game for 5 minutes, then perhaps this toy would be the right thing....and on and on.  

I let them spray my plants with a little hand sprayer and that was the biggest mistake because then they went on to the windows and the kitchen floor, which is all well and good because they were all cleaner than when they started, but since they were willing enough to help wipe at first, that idea was much less appealing that running around spraying things.  I finally shoved them outside and they could spray anything out there except the windows.  

Before Lorene left Barry brought up my small stepladder from the basement,  (how he can manage that since it is taller than he is I don't know), with the intent of get the marshmallows I keep on the top shelf.  He can't get up there so I got the marshmallows and during this time the timer on the microwave rang to remind me I had clothes in the washer, but I forgot them because Christian grabbed the microwave door which didn't open and he was pulling it toward the edge of the counter! (He was on the stepladder.) Lorene jumped as only a mother can when her child is in danger and in the kerfluffle an egg full of glitter left over from Lynette's senior Spanish class crashed to the floor and we had glitter all over.  I was glad to be done with the thing floating around.  Poor Christian thought he was in trouble, but we were just all excited over the microwave incident.  

I'm sweeping up the mess while the boys finished their ice cream cones.  This was the first time they've ever eaten ice cream this way, so Lorene had to help them out by showing them how to take a bite and pretty soon they were all gone!

There is no much cuter than a little boy with a flower for his gramma.  One time while the kids were outside that morning, I was in the basement attending to the forgotten laundry when I saw Christian running full tilt to the house with something in his hand.  I went back upstairs so he could find and he held out his dandelion (with a long stem) for me.  I put it with the other flowers on my counter.  

I transplanted these dutch irises last year and I'm so pleased with the way they are thriving.  There were some of my favorite spring flowers when I was a kid and I took some roots of Mom's when I had a place of my own to plant them.

Yesterday I took a trip to Omaha again.  This time it wasn't because I had an infection.  This time it was because it actually looked like I would be able to have that BAHA evaluation done at last.  I was scheduled to have the evaluation done two months ago, but I had that horrible swelling mastoid infection and surgery instead.

The evaluation consisted of finding a foundation hearing level in my left ear by blocking sound in the right ear by putting noise in it.  In the first test I pushed a button when I could hear sounds; in the second test I was supposed to repeat words.  I couldn't hear half the words so I knew I wasn't doing well on that test.  

The next part of the test the audiologist put a headband type thing where the transmitter rests on the bone behind my ear and the other end just rest on the other side of my head.  Then I go through the same tests again, beeps and words and I did a much better job.  The audiologist said I improved from 50% to 88% using that headband which makes me a good candidate for the bone anchored hearing aid (BAHA).  As long as she kept the headband on my head could hear her speak plainly, but when she took it off, I was back to hearing the way I always do, like my head is covered in a pillow. 

The next step is to schedule surgery to have the titanium rod inserted into the bone.  But, first they have to talk to the insurance company.  

I'm reading this book.  I was interested because I was sure this massacre was mentioned in Janice Holt Giles book, "Six-Horse Hitch" a fictionalized novel the includes the Overland Trail, that ran a stage coach and freight lines.  It is basically a compilation of newspaper articles, personal stories from witnesses, stories that came from ancestors, investigations of the site and other historical articles  and insights that relate to the surrounding area and times.  

The next thing that is going to happen on this computer is that Windows 10 is going to install whether I want it to or not.  It's happening either because the mouse I use has a side button that clicks things sometimes that I don't want clicked or else I had 'automatic updates' clicked on my computer and windows is now automatically updating it and I can't stop it.  My computer guy thinks that latter is what is going on.  I will have 30 days to reverse it if I choose.  It will all depend on if my business accounting software will still work with Windows 10 installed.  

Arrgh.  

However, I don't see any little windows open and ready to pounce, so who knows?

Thoughts for the day:

"When your values are clear to you, making decisions comes easier." -- Roy Disney

"Although no one can go back and make a brand new start, anyone can start from now and make a brand new ending." -- Carl Bard

Take Time to Write

I love this book.

This man wrote an essay for the Sunday Omaha World Herald every week for over 30 years from the 1940s to the 1970s.

He was a great reader and his commentary on books, life, and his own history ring true even today.

This is the kind of book I love to read and the kind I'd love to write.  

It's just vignettes of his own life. He writes about his family, social issues, his memories, his books.  

Some things I enjoyed:

"Gentlemen, babble not to me about the 'weaker sex'. ....Follow your wife around some day if you would know the meaning of work."

"The 'perfect reader'--if there be such a person--is the reader that strikes the balance between the old and the new." 

"I reflected that no place on earth has the magnetic pull of home. Here, surely, is where the heart is. Here are family, warmth, shelter, tranquility, food, drink, restoration, ease, comfort, and the assurance of security."

"For me at least, home is the touchstone, the spring to which you cannot go too many times to drink and be refreshed. It is a refuge, and haven, a retreat from mankind's bloody follies, a calm harbor in a disordered world."

"'When,' another woman asked my wife the other day, 'are you going to use your university education?' Gladie was shocked, 'Use it!" she exclaimed, 'I have used it every waking moment for 31 years!'"

"...a university-educated woman is not wasting that education by remaining a housewife. It is evident in everything about her, from the raising of her children to the decorating of her home to her very personality."

From the 70s
"The sociologists keep yattering that we no longer are communicating as between the young and the old."

"... the home is the heart of any society."

"Nothing that the President can say, or the Pentagon's generals or the business magnates..., has a fraction of importance of what a father and a mother can say in the privacy of the home they have made for themselves and their children."

"How old fashioned I sound! Yet I believe it is true that previous generations worked at being parents. They begot children and had this quaint notion that they were then responsible for them. They provided food and shelter and clothing, they loved their children without being showy about it, they expected discipline and got it, and along with it they got honor and respect."

"Among the disciplines was the dinner table. .... It was the time when all the members of the family sat down--as a family!--belonging to each other."

"What we seem to have lost track of is the dignity of labor and of the fact that college is not the only place in which a person can acquire an education."

"Families are what nations are made of."

Bad Spellers of the World Untie...

Okay, so this isn't a book about spelling, it's a book about punctuation.  Punctuation is as necessary as good spelling, which both are going the way of the dinosaur, due to email and texting, according to the author of this book.  I'm inclined to agree with her, which is why I read this book. 

On the back cover is this joke:

A panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.

"Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes toward the exit.  The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

"I'm a panda," he says, at the door. "Look it up."

The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.

"Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China.  Eats, shoots and leaves."

So, punctuation really does matter, even if it in only occasionally a matter of life and death.

I find myself thinking about the proper uses of various punctuation marks, as I type these days.  I already knew most of the rules, and I'm sure my punctuation will pass most people's scrutiny.  I wouldn't want a real expert looking on. 

This book is for all those people who cringe at the sight of usages of "your" instead of "you're" and a whole bunch of other punctuation errors.  It is also a how-to book, to tell you when to use commas, quotation marks, dashes, semi-colons, and colons, all put together with some spicy commentary, along with her biggest pet peeve, the apostrophe.  It does have some very special uses, especially in possessive noun situations, and a great many exceptions.  It's a useful book, since everybody wants to know the right way to use punctuation marks  

She is especially virulent on the subject of misplaced apostrophe's. It was originally invented to take the place of removed letters.  One of my favorite tips in any contraction, and especially the "its", "it's" conundrum, and she also uses, is if the word represents, "it is", use the one with the apostrophe.  This works for "you are",  for your're, and others.  She has another bone to pick with those that done know where to use them with possessive nouns.  For example: Anastacia's book, as opposed to Anastacias' book, unless there are more than one Anastacia, in the family, or room, or school, which I doubt. 

I would love to tell all the rules and mistakes and tips right here, but that is stealing Lynne Truss's (that's correct, look it up in her book) thunder.

If you want to be able to write the King's English, and shudder every time you walk by a badly pnuncuated sign, (and correct this post) READ THIS BOOK!!

Enjoy!

And here's columnist Reg Henry's take on proper writing etiquette.

Another thing I've learned after writing this post, is that I don't know how to spell punctuation. Every time I typed it, spell check flagged it.

Sequels

I don't know what you think about sequels. I mean the ones where an author takes a book I love and after a hundred years writes one. I'm not usually a fan of sequels, or rewrites, but it depends on the book and the author, and how well the book is written. 

I did like this book, it doesn't take Sarah Crewe any farther in life, although she does make an appearance.  It is about life at Miss Minchin's after Sarah is gone.  I don't think it has quite the charm of the original book, nor the depth, but it is a well written book, and very good read, and kept me interested to the end.  In fact, the ending was VERY unexpected.  I think you'll enjoy it if you like books about girls.  I did.

The More Things Change...

...the more they stay the same.

These days, I've been browsing the new non-fiction shelf at the library to find something to read, and this week, it is this little book, 74 pages long.  Nearly half of it is taken up with the introduction, which is as interesting a read as the story itself. 

If you've ever read anything by Nathaniel Hawthorne, if you are like me, you don't want to read anything by him again.  I read "House of Seven Gables" when I was in college.not as a assignment of course, but because it was a classic, or he is a classic author, or something.  After all, he's on the Author's cards.

His style is long, involved and with vocabulary that nobody of this generation has ever heard of, and very few of my generation, and even then only the people who love books, words, and reading the dictionary, "for a bit of light reading".

This book is different.  It is the story of a father looking after his 5 year son, while his wife and two daughters are away visiting her mother.  It is a quick and easy read, and deals with the age old story, of a father, who has never taken care of a child on his own before, now is, all by himself. 

You can also get a glimpse of the family's parenting style, which is way ahead of his time.  He isn't the only one of his time to treat children as people, very early in their lives.  Another one I can think of off the top of my head is Branson Alcott, father of Louisa May Alcott. 

The introduction, by Paul Auster, starts out by saying, "[this book] is one of the least-known works by a well-known writer in all of literature.  Buried in the seventh folio of Hawthorne's American Notebooks--that massive, little-read tome of treasures and revelations--.....With no intention other than to record the doings in the household during his wife's absence, he had inadvertently embarked on something that no writer had ever attempted before him: a meticulous, blow-by-blow account of a man taking care of a young child by himself."

It makes me want to find out if there are any other neat things hidden in that American Notebook thing.

Here are a couple of other quotes from the introduction that I found interesting.

"Twenty Days" is a humorous work by a notoriously melancholic man, and anyone who has ever spent an extended length of time in the company of a small child will surely respond to the accuracy and honesty of Hawthorne's account.

Una and Julian [Hawthorne] were raised in an unorthodox manner, even by the standards of mid-nineteenth-century Transcendentalist New England.  Although they reached school age during their time in Lenox (when this story is written), neither one was send to school, and they spent their days at home with their mother, who took charge of their education and rarely allowed them to mingle with other children. 

That is the beauty of Hawthorne's little piece of notebook-writing.   Throughout all the drudgery of tedium of his constant companionship with the five-year-old boy, Hawthorne was able to glance at him often enough to capture something of his essence, to bring him to life in words.  A century and a half later, we do it by taking snapshots and following them around with video cameras.  But word are better, I think, if only because they don't face with time.  It takes more effort to write a truthful sentence than to focus a lens and push a bottom, of course, but words go deeper than pictures do--which can rarely record anything more than the surfaces of things, whether landscapes or the faces of children.  In all but the best or luckiest photographs the soul is missing.

I really enjoyed reading this book, and I know some others who would enjoy it also.  The only thing wrong with it, is the author of the introduction, he uses too many hyphens. 

Time Changes All Things

I just finished reading "Bead on an Anthill, A Lakota Childhood" by Delphine Red Shirt. My dad recommended this one to me, being a fan of anything Native American.  This one was especially interesting since she is a Nebraska author, living here the greater share of her life so far. 

I enjoy reading stories about real life, most especially the kind of real life where it is just a simple story about the way people live their lives, especially when they are children. 

The theme of the story is the loss of the Lakota way of life, the loss of traditions, songs, language, and the way of life, interwoven in between how she lived as a girl.  What I found most disturbing is the role of the government in this loss in the 1960s and 1970s.  It isn't mentioned very much, but you can get the idea very clearly.  It seems rather too close to modern times for that kind of control to be allowed. 

My overall impression of the idea of the loss of "the old ways", is that it happens all the time.  The way we are living now isn't anything like living two generations ago, and very, very different from the way we lived 150 years ago, even to several hundred years ago.  This subject could be very well worked up into a medium sized paper, or even a book. 

In thinking about the topic of losing what we know of the old ways, I was thinking especially about the pioneers, since just off the top of my head they are the group of people I know most about.  This piece isn't intended to be a well documented piece of work, but a work on a few of my impressions.

We no longer get around using horses or other animals.  Most of us don't know anything about horse and wagon lore, care and keeping.  We don't know how to cook on the ground with wood or whatever fuel was available.  We don't know how to kill and clean meat.  We don't know how to make soap, render lard, identify edible plants growing wild, or make cloth.  Many of us don't have any idea how to make do with what we have. We don't know how to build oruselves a house or furniture.  Many of us, would think even making clothes an extreme hardship.  We don't know how to manage our money; we think using something that someone else has used is unthinkable. 

And sure, we don't HAVE to do any of those things.  Some people do know how to, and sell their knowlege and ability to the rest of us.  I for one, though, am sad that many of these skills are gone.  There are a few people who care enough about these skills, that they want to learn and pass them on.  There are people who make soap, bread, meals from scratch, spin, weave, sew, knit, crochet, build, plant, grow, harvest, preserve, and more.  They are teaching others because they don't want these old skills to die out. 

It works the same way with any set of skills for any people.  Every kind of people has special foods, skills, traditions, language, clothing.  When many people come to the United States, they are eager to lose their traditions and embrace new ones.  Then a couple of generations go by, and they are disappionted those tradtions are being lost.  Many people blame the culture of the United States itself for their loss.  It is the responsibility of each individual to decide what is important to remember and what isn't, and then take the time and the effort for those things to be remmebered. 

The sad thing about the Native American loss, is that the government thought of them as a people that needed to be "managed."  I believe, that if the reservation system had not been instituted, that after assimilating into the popular culture, like any other group of peoples have done, they would have had the resources to revive old traditions.  Some of that is happening now, but I believe it would have happened a lot sooner, and with less bitterness.

I don't know how far out into the world of cyber space, this little piece will go, but I am reminding those that read it, that this is an undoeumented opinion piece, and I am not inviting rude comments. 

One last comment about the reseveration system, if it is beneficial in perserving some native lands and special areas, that is a good thing, Perhaps some of those lands could have been made into National Parks and designated as such.

What I'm Reading...

Eden's Outcasts, by John Matteson


I've never read much non-fiction, but I always go look at the new books in the library, and since I'm a big fan of Louisa May Alcott, I picked this one up and really enjoyed it.  It was an interesting way to get information into my head; I feel like I'm learning something when I read non-fiction.

I feel it is good for my brain to read "information" books, and I don't tend to think I need to sit down and read and can't get up and get anything done.  For one thing, they are usually too long to do that, and for another I usually already know the ending.

And I am learning things, in this book, I looked up calomel , since I didn't know what it was.  It's mercury and was used for fighting infections.

I especially enjoy learning new words.