April 9, 2021 at 6:05 am (Links, Places, postaday, Sayings)
Tags: history, humor, Redwood City
The host of this challenge is The Life of B.
Love her A bright evening.
For her 9th picture of BRIGHT SQUARES, self chose (1) a picture of another of her buttons, and (2) an umbrella on Courthouse Square, Redwood City, directly across from the historic Fox Theatre, sadly still closed due to the pandemic.
Stay safe, dear blog readers. Stay safe.
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April 2, 2021 at 7:21 pm (Artists and Writers, Family, Links, postaday, Recommended, Sayings)
Tags: art, Fridays, Irish artists
Self will try to post a bright square (or two) a day through April. Thank you, The Life of B, for hosting this very interesting photo challenge!
Square # 1: Bruce Lee Postcard in son’s room
Square # 2: Variations on a Field, by Irish print artist Pam de Brie
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March 31, 2021 at 8:51 pm (Books, Recommended, Sayings)
Tags: anticipation, COVID Reading, English writers, fantasy, Grimdark, mysteries, novel, reading lists
Big battle scene coming!
“No plan survives contact with the enemy.” — Helmuth von Moltke
— The Trouble with Peace, p. 353
Self has the rest of the day to read. She might be able to finish TTWP as early as tonight.
Next on her reading list: All the Devils are Here, by Louise Penny.
Exciting. Self has never read a Chief Inspector Armand Ganache mystery before. Of course it is set in Paris. There is a picture of the Eiffel Tower right on the cover, that’s how she knows.
Self memorably spent Christmas 2017 in Paris. And shared the hotel with a Filipino family (with three small kids) on their way to spend the holidays in Iceland. (Self will never get over this, but Filipinos have a real hankering for extreme cold. It’s a THING) Because self was all surly and anti-holiday, she never spoke to this family, not even when she and they were the only ones in the hotel restaurant for breakfast. She pretended she was Chinese, couldn’t understand Tagalog, didn’t want to know why they were going to Iceland, or where they were staying.
Stay safe, dear blog readers. Stay safe.
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February 14, 2021 at 6:06 pm (Holidays, Recommended, Sayings, Sundays)
Tags: causes, Events, politics
So what if Donald Trump got acquitted AGAIN, and Mitch gave the most self-serving speech in the history of self-serving speeches (It’s all Donald’s fault, see? Don’t blame ANY of this on me or the Republican Party!) It’s the beginning of a new Lunar Calendar!
People born in the Year of the Ox are “honest and sincere and don’t want to be the centre of attention nor look for praise. Their recognition comes from their diligent, hard work. They are logical thinkers, too, and so make great world leaders, just what the world needs right now!” (Thank you, Atlantis Bookshop in London for this description!)
Stay safe, dear blog readers. Stay safe.
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November 16, 2020 at 10:48 pm (Artists and Writers, Camarote de Marinero, Filipino Writers, Philippine History, Places, Sayings, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: historical fiction, Iloilo, Mondays, novel, The Philippines, work-in-progress
Translation: I am the Voice of God.
These words are carved into a massive bell in a church in the Philippine province of Iloilo (just across a narrow strait from Dear Departed Dad’s home province, Negros, in the central Philippines) The bell weighs 10.4 tons, don’t even ask self how workers managed to get it up into the bell tower. Can you imagine that ringing for every mass? The sound is very deep.
Self decided to write a new chapter for Camarote de Marinero today.
It begins:
When he first met Ta-hum, who was his cook, his factotum, who cared for him the way a mother cares for a child, even though she was 10 years younger, he himself had been a young man, with all the imperfections of youth.
Now?
Soy la voz de Dios, he intoned.
Tahum is a Hiligaynon word meaning “beautiful.”
Stay safe, dear blog readers. Stay safe.
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April 4, 2020 at 2:43 pm (Artists and Writers, Food and Drink, Personal Bookshelf, plans, Recommended, Sayings)
Tags: COVID Reading, inspiration, poetry, Saturday
We ate well and
cheaply and drank
well and cheaply
and slept well and
warm together and
loved each other
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February 1, 2020 at 2:07 am (Books, Lists, Personal Bookshelf, Recommended, Sayings, short story collections)
Tags: book lists, favorites, Fridays, reading lists
The short story self is reading today is Lunch With the Person Who Dumped You.
At the rate self is going, she’ll never finish Raphael Bob-Waksberg’s collection, never! Which is a pity, as she’s got two meaty fantasy reads lined up to read next: Philip Pullman’s The Secret Commonwealth, and Katherine Addison’s The Goblin Emperor (which was recommended to her by her seatmate on a recent flight to London: a Stanford grad on his way to deliver a paper at a conference in Glasgow)
An excerpt from Bob-Waksberg’s story:
Remember, the one who laughs last laughs longest, so make sure you laugh last and when you do you laugh heartily but with a detached air of none-of-this-really-matters-I-haven’t-been-lying-awake-at-night-staring-at-the-ceiling-regurgitating-all-this-pain coolness.
Which is an attitude that really helps, especially today. Given what’s just gone down in the Senate.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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December 1, 2019 at 3:48 pm (Artists and Writers, Sayings, Sundays, Surprises)
Tags: humor, London, museum, Twitter
next time you see a man three times your size riding a lion in the forest in the festive period do not doff your cap — call the police
— Royal Academy @royalacademy
BOOM!
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October 11, 2019 at 8:47 am (Conversations, Food and Drink, Recommended, Sayings, Surprises, television)
Tags: favorites, Fridays, humor, Ireland, v
- “This pub’s come to our attention for its lack of ice.”
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May 26, 2019 at 3:13 pm (Artists and Writers, Books, Recommended, Sayings, Sundays, Traveling)
Tags: English writers, environment, nonfiction, Prague, reading lists
Beginning a new book deserves some kind of pause, a marker.
The new book would have been Diane Setterfield’s Once Upon a River if she had managed to snag a copy in Prague (Self has always got to be reading something; she feels bereft if she lets a day go by without having a book she can say she is “currently reading”).
Instead, she’s reading Tim Dee’s Landfill: Notes on Gull Watching and Trash Picking in the Anthropocene. So far, she’s only on p. 1 but she keeps getting distracted (last afternoon tea with Irene! A walk to the Spanish Synagogue for a concert).
She also likes the drawings that start each new chapter. The bookmark she’s using is a quote she copied from a restaurant in Fowey (Dear Fowey: What a special thing it is that she was able to attend this year’s Festival of Art and Literature!). It’s by, of all people, Ernest Hemingway, who she hasn’t read in AGES. But it is written like a prose poem. Don’t dear blog readers agree?
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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