Category: family

rDay Five-Hundred-Forty-Three

Special day here.  Olivia came by, fresh from her weekend in Canada.  She did a stopover in Seattle to connect with Ivi, then they proceeded to a suburb of Vancouver, BC, where Olivia’s intended was coaching a football match.  Back home this afternoon, Olivia dropped off a package of goodies from Trader Joe’s that Ivi had assembled for us.  And Ivi also called to recount the details of their whirlwind foreign escapade and confirmed that they successfully passed the international border crossing interrogation and checklist.
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Later, we took the Horrendous Hound for his customary afternoon walk and mostly saw two very large piles of dirt at the school’s new construction site.  And a couple of other sights.

rDay Five-Hundred-Forty

Today, a trip out of the valley, up the mountain pass and on into Baker City, cowboy country.  Visited the St. Al’s (HQ’d in Boise) satellite at the Baker City Hospital complex, involving the usual wait, along with bad and strange art on the walls and cell phone conversations by others.  But the staff was cheerful and efficient, as we have come to expect from St. Al’s.  They did take our money.  

Returned by way of Haines (pop. 416) and Hwy 30, affording an opportunity, if you can call it that, for Windshield Photography.  

Later on, walked The Charles downtown while some shopping was addressed.  Spotted a variety of getaway vehicles, ranging from a 1985 Chevy Dolphin motor home to a T@B teardrop trailer towed by a newish Range Rover Evoque.  Kim and Charlie surveyed the grounds of a downtown church.  And back home again.

And, I converted some snaps to B&W for consideration on my photo blog’s windshield photography collection …

So Far, So Good … Read On

Here at Chez H we have embarked on a new set of reading adventures, having completed Sarah Bakewell’s hard act to follow of At The Existentialist Cafe.

how-to-live_montaigneOn my own, I am reading Bakewell’s earlier (2010) How To Live, a piece of non-fiction on 16th century essayist Michel de Montaigne.   And loving it.

But we have also been searching for a good read-aloud book (following our success in that mode with Joseph Mitchell’s Up In The Old Hotel).  Now we think we have found it in Jane Gardam’s Old Filth, fiction about a postwar retired English barrister and judge who was once a British Empire civil servant in Hong Kong.  

old-filth_coverA melancholy sort of comedy, I’d say, Old Filth might be worth a movie or series of BBC or Masterpiece Theatre ilk.   This thing is the first in a trilogy, which we will happily move on to if it continues at this rate.  You can hear an audio excerpt on this page, btw.

Collector Car Appreciation Day

Brother Dennis sends along this picture of his car (the blue 1971 Buick 455 Gran Sport white-topped convertible) in front of a clumsily-vanity-plated Ferrari.  This was an entry line for an event in celebration of “Collector Car Appreciation Day”, about which Dennis comments: “And finally, the GS, which may be the only time in its life it will hold a Ferrari Testarossa at bay.”
Ferrari Testarossa