The Sound of Butterflies

Cecropia moth

Thankfully November is over and with it my second successful year with NaNoWriMo. I spent much of my free time writing my 50,000 words which somehow assembled itself into a novel. A very rough one at that by as Anne Lamott writes in her book on writing and life, Bird by bird, you've got to write a sh@#%y first draft before you can get to the polished one. Where this nascent novel will go is anybody's guess at this point.

All writers know that in order to write better you must be an avid reader. Even though I might have spent hours jotting notes down on paper or sitting in front of the computer typing, I could not quite give up reading. As long as there is breath in me I will be reading. To that end I read Rachel King's The Sound of Butterflies during the month. I enjoyed the book for its description of a naturalist's life pursuing his passion, in this case in the form of lepidoptery, in the Amazon at the turn of the 20th Century. In the jungle this amateur naturalist learns about science, the brutality of nature within the jungle, and the dangerous behavior of man.

The photo above depicts a Cecropia moth which had been found one early morning last June outside the school building in which I work. One of my colleagues brought it into the classroom and our students were fascinated by it. As the day progressed, the moth must have warmed and once we took it out of the container in which we had it in, it slowly began to beat its wings and eventually took flight. It was drawn to the window which we opened in order to let it back outdoors. For a short time we were able to enjoy its beauty. Now on a cold December day, looking at this photo I am reminded of that warm spring day and look forward to the Winter Solstice knowing that the days will eventually begin to have longer periods of sunlight and eventually there will be a return of warm temperatures.

Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween - ceramic pumpkins and my cross-stitch
ornaments.

One of my favorite things to do is to read holiday themed stories around Christmas-time, but I don't usually think to read Halloween stories at this time of the year. However, I couldn't resist re-reading one of my all time favorites, Agatha Christie's Hallowe'en Party featuring Hercule Piorot and Ariadne Oliver.  A murder is committed at a children's party where the victim, one of the girls at the party, is drowned in the bobbing for apples bucket. I never was a fan of bobbing for apples and now I have a really good excuse not to like it.

Isn't romantic?

My wedding cake topper (Llardo),
my grandparents wedding photo,
and Galt Niederhoffer's novel
 

 The Romantics by Galt Niederhoffer, takes the reader off to the Maine coast for the August wedding of Lila and Tom. The happy couple were college sweethearts. Well they became sweethearts only after Tom stopped dating Laura, Lila's roommate. Laura is to be maid-of-honor at the wedding having stayed friends with Lila and Tom. We are then introduced to the rest of their gang of friends who have convened for the wedding. This clique of friends formed when they were all at Yale. Fellow students called the clique The Romantics as a result of their intermingling relationships.



My grandmother as a
flower girl.

To be honest, I really didn't care much for this bunch of people and Niederhoffer makes them out to be very pretentious and superficial. They certainly don't take friendship or marriage very seriously. Overall those of them that made it to the altar are very unhappy and even Tom and Lila don't seem to be well suited for each other. Marriage is depicted as a social status and a rite of passage more than the sacrament that it is meant to be. No one seems to be working hard at their relationships. And those of us who are married know that it is no picnic and requires lots of patience, endurance, compromise, desire, and love.
The story line takes place over a 24-hour time period including the arrival of the wedding party, the rehearsal dinner, the morning of the wedding, and the big moment. I won't spoil the ending. Let's just say I was a little bit surprised by it, and it lived up to the title.

The depiction of the rehearsal dinner got me to remembering my own. I will admit I was nervous, a bride wants everything to go well. When we arrived, the church was cold (married in early November in New England) and my dad was obviously worried about getting the place nice and warm in the morning in plenty of time before the guests arrived. Speaking of arrival, my in-laws were late and I was getting a little panicked and peeved. Once everyone showed up the rehearsal itself went fine. Off to dinner we went.

Now by the time we arrived at the restaurant my stomach was a little queasy. I chalked it up to being hungry as we were running behind and it had been some time since lunch. A little dinner roll and some salad should help I thought. Next thing I know I need to head to the ladies room. It was awful, before I knew it I'm vomiting and feeling miserable and every female guest knows it. I'm embarrassed because they must think it's my nerves and I know it isn't. There is something seriously wrong with me. I don't remember much more of the dinner except that I said good night to my future husband and drove home. Shortly after midnight I stopped vomiting and I knew it was over.

I managed to get a couple hours of sleep. I showered, ate a piece of toast and went to have my hair done. I came home, had another piece of toast, did my makeup and was dressed in time for the photographer's arrival. The wedding went off without a hitch. The reception was fantastic. Stopped in at home for the after party, and made our farewells to the family and took a limo to the airport hotel to spend the night before an early flight to our honeymoon cruise. Now here's the funny part, in the middle of the night I wake up all alone in bed, my new spouse is puking up his guts in the bathroom. "Okay it wasn't your nerves," he says. Of course it wasn't.  It was a fast moving stomach bug and I made sure everyone knew that fact when we got back home. I can happily say that 23 years later it's still a fun story to tell.

Nature Wars IV - last post on this topic

I promise, this is the last post on this topic. It's amazing what a reader can get from one book. Chapter Ten of Jim Sterba's Nature Wars is all about Roadkill. He begins by introducing the reader to Brewster Bartlett whose nickname is Dr. Splat because as a high school teacher looking for a way to use the fledgling Internet and e-mail system to help communicate the findings of a research project, he decided to have his students keep track of the roadkill on the roads around town. Ghoulish you might think but as a high school teacher myself I can appreciate that students especially some of the young guys would think this was a cool project.

I myself heard Bartlett speak at the New Hampshire Environmental Educators spring conference a couple of years ago. As an educator I am amazed to discover how little my students know about the world around them. Very often they are surprised when I tell them about plant life and the food that they eat. "EWWWW, fruit is the ripened ovary of the flower?" "I'm allergic to plant sperm (aka pollen)?"  I get a sense of gratification when they look through the microscope and see the beauty of cells that make up a leaf. Author, Richard Louv, in his book The Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder, makes an argument for reconnecting our children with the natural world. They spend way too much time indoors. The shame of it is, children don't get to play and explore outdoors often. After school care, living in areas that may not be deemed safe, over scheduled lives, and time spent in front of the TV or computer screen keep kids from experiencing nature.

Much of Sterba's book focused on how disconnected we all have become from Nature. We want to protect it and yet we still carry out behaviors that places the environment at risk mostly through our overwhelming consumption of resources. In the Epilogue, he points out that here in America we have an abundance of natural resources many of which we take for granted. From our abundance we wear blinders that prevent us from realizing how much we spend on repairs to damaged cars (deer and other animal strikes), replacing landscaping or crop damage, the cost of cleaning up playing fields and golf courses (geese feces), and the damage from flooding caused by beaver dams. If we were to find ourselves unable to pay for these repairs we certainly would have to change our world view. In fact I try to remind my students that when we talk about environmentalism we must realize we speak from our own cultural experiences and that for other people around the world their concept of nature is much different from our own. We've saved our own forests here in the US but if we purchase products that result in the damage or deforestation of someone else's land then shame on us. It may be time for us all to take a good look at our role in the ecosystem because we are not separate from it, we are part of the biotic factors that make it up and our possessions and lifestyles create many of the harmful abiotic factors that we all have to live with.

Nature Wars III - I'm Guilty Too!

My empty bird feeder

I am really captivated by Jim Sterba's Nature Wars, as you can tell since this is the third post I've generated based on this one book. I never thought that feeding the birds wasn't really the best thing to so, even after we were visited by a bear (one of the other animals discussed in the book) you would have thought I might have changed my behavior.

Many of us love to hang up a feeder and watch the various species that come to feed at or under the feeder. I've had chickadees, nuthatches, finches, titmice, cardinals, woodpeckers, mourning doves, and the list goes on. I've also had both red and gray squirrels. Sterba's right when he writes that these creatures can find plenty to eat on their own. In fact the many perennials that are planted in my garden provide plenty of seeds for the birds, and the fact that I leave the seed heads on long after the blooms have faded helps them to find a delicious meal.

Now granted the seed does attract other animals, as well as, the birds. I mentioned squirrels, which are really something when it comes to getting at the birdseed. I've had squirrels eat through the plastic tubes of feeders to get a meal. This summer one of them got into the garage where we stored the seed in a plastic covered container. The squirrel chewed through the cover to get at the seed. We placed the container in a garbage can with a cover on top and the darn thing chewed through that as well!

At one time I used to purchase those feed filled suet squares which were very popular with the birds in the winter. Well, they are popular with bears in the early spring. I never saw the bear but I found the damage that he or she left behind. The shepherd's crook from which the suet feeder hung was bent over (and couldn't be straightened) and the feeder itself gone. My neighbors informed me that they saw the bear in action. That put an immediate halt to feeding the birds. I read up about bear behavior and learned that they will remember where they have found food in the past and will revisit those sites. I also read about hibernation times and figured I'd put out food only during those times.

Sterba points out that feeders become a feeding site for predators of small birds. I've noticed a few cats over the years come stalking through my yard but never really thought that they might be after easy pickings from the feeder. I just hoped they'd take care of my chipmunk population. But it's the hawks who have really benefited from the smorgasbord that I''ve created. I've witnessed the hawk come swooping in for the kill. Sometimes the big bird is successful and other times I've seen a small bird take cover in a bush where the hawk could not fit.

I guess what finally got me was Sterba's statistics - 50 million Americans spending close to $3.5 billion (yes that's right billion) on bird food. On food that these birds don't need because they can fend perfectly well for themselves. Here I am donating food items and money to the local food pantry and feeding the birds. I've decided that's got to stop. I'll let nature take care of her own, and I'll use the money that I save to help support those of my own species who are struggling to feed themselves.

Nature Wars II - Oh Deer!

Deer damage - a defoliated
hosta plant in my yard

Jim Sterba in his book Nature Wars challenges the reader to think about how one relates to nature now that nature has returned. The eastern deciduous forest has rebounded and with it many species which were once threatened, the white tail deer among them. Those darn pesky deer are now so numerous that they cause huge costs to the insurance industry due to car strikes. They do quite a bit of damage to landscaped yards (mine included) and crops. But without man taking part of the ecosystem as the top predator we no longer work to keep the population in check.

My father grew up during World War II when people planted Victory Gardens for their sustenance. My grandparents bought a piece of land which at one time seemed to be in the middle of no where but today is smack dab in the middle of sprawl as Sterba calls it. But back then going to the market wasn't as easy as it is today. My grandmother preserved the vegetables that they raised along with meat from the chickens they kept, while the eggs were sold. It would be years before they'd give up that hard work as groceries became easier to obtain.

Dad learned to hunt and fish as a kid going out with his father, grandfather, or uncles to bag deer, duck, frogs, and trout. He continued his hunting and fishing into his adulthood. He taught my sister and I how to fish taking us out when he could. He even got himself a lobstering license and some pots. I remember bobbing about in a small boat near the breakwater while my father stood up in the boat and hauled his pots up from the ocean floor. It was just business as usual.

I saw Bambi as a kid and was traumatized by his mother's loss but I saw it for what it was. Hunting is one thing and the murder of a parent is another, and I think many people get the two confused. Man has always been a part of keeping other animal populations in check. Not until the mid-20th century did we take on large animal farming and decided that we would eat only chicken, beef, and pork. No wonder there are plenty of geese, turkeys, and deer available fore us to eat today and which we don't. We think of them as nuisances, our grandparents would have seen dinner. For me it was natural that people hunted, my father hunted, we had a deer head on the family room wall. Sterba's book challenges us to realize that more and more we are separated from nature and we really need to reflect on how that changes the way nature is viewed and managed. And yes we do need to take a role in managing the ecosystem for our benefit and for the health of the other organisms in it.

Nature Wars I

Striped Maple tree bark
Harvard Forest

Striped Maple tree leaves
Harvard Forest

I picked up Jim Sterba's Nature Wars: The incredible story of how wildlife comebacks turned backyards into battlegrounds, at the library recently and have been reading through it. As with many books there are things written within them that  you are very familiar with. For example, Sterba visited the Harvard Forest in Petersham, MA to learn about how the deciduous forest of North America regrew. If you go there for a visit you can view the dioramas, which really are beautiful works of art, that were created in the 1930s to depict the history of the forest from pre-settlement (1700) through 1930. Here in New England we have no concept of what it must have been like to see the land cleared of trees akin to what the mid-western states are like in topography. It makes sense when you stop to think of  all the stone walls that run through the woods. They didn't get there by themselves. Those stones were moved by the early settlers attempting to clear our glacial soil of rocks in order to plant their crops.

Once farms were abandoned in the 1800s with farmers moving to the newly opened west, or to work in the newly built mills in the every growing cities, or even to take jobs in the ever expanding whaling trade, the land was left to revert to its previous state. In ecological terms this is referred to as secondary succession (primary involves the destruction and replacement of the soil).

I too visited the Harvard Forest for a professional development workshop to learn about forest succession and how to teach this very topic to my students. It was here that I saw for the first time a striped maple as pictured above. Although their distribution covers New England I was unfamiliar with this variety of maple tree as we do not have any around my area. I love learning something new every day whether it be from a personal experience or a book.

Christie, Marsh, and Thallium

Researching murder by
poison.

As a follow up to yesterday's post about Agatha Christie's The Pale Horse, I did a little research into the poison used - Thallium. Turns out that element 81 on the periodic table of elements is one of the deadliest. According to Deborah Blum in The Poisoner's Handbook, thallium is colorless, tasteless, odorless and very soluble in a variety of liquids. Would you care for some thallium laced hot chocolate? Arsenic always had to be added to something bitter tasting to help hide the flavor.

In the 1930s, thallium could be found in many pesticides including rat poisons that were easily purchased on the open market. Turns out thallium is also an effective depilatory and was used in cosmetic preparations that would help that discerning lady remove the unwanted hair on her arms or upper lip. Unfortunately, some consumers lost more hair then they bargained for when scalps were made bald, vision was lost, or mobility was impaired. For investigators of criminal activity the classic symptom of hair loss was a key clue.

Ngaio Marsh used thallium poisoning in her novel Final Curtain. (Spoiler Alert) A preparation of thallium was used to treat a group of young children with ringworm, a common occurrence in the day before too many children were sicken or died from the treatment. The murder help him/herself to the medicine to do in the victims of this mystery.

Christie (Spoiler Alert) has the poisoner in The Pale Horse lacing personal care products or packaged foods with thallium. Here too the amateur detective, Mark Easterbrook, figures out what's going on when Ariadne Oliver points out that many of the victims have had their hair fall out. Easterbrook remembers reading about a poisoning case in the States, and finally puts two and two together. In both stories once the source of the poison is figured out the capture of the culprit isn't too far off.

As a high school teacher (I don't watch much TV but I hear this guy from Breaking Bad is giving us a bad reputation), I'm a bit of a science geek and have to admit that all three titles pictured above come from my book shelves. It's amazing what you can learn from a book. Who needs to do a Google search when you have access to great resources. Okay call me old fashioned.

Radioactivity and Agatha Christie

I love re-reading Agatha Christie novels. Better still, I've purchased many of them as audiobooks for my iPod and I listen to them over and over again while I'm doing needlepoint, housework, working out in the garden, or walking. The other day I was listening again to The Pale Horse when a particular phrase struck me. Towards the end of the story our hero, Mark Easterbrook, is summing up the evidence while sitting with Inspector Lajeune when he rattles off the line, "Because we live in fear of fallout and strontium 90 and all the rest of it, we are amendable to the suggestion along the line of scientific talk." (p. 247 in the St. Martin' Paperback edition) That made me sit up because this summer I spent some time studying up on radioactivity in anticipation of a new unit I was designing to teach this fall on nuclear chemistry.

Solution of Strontium Salt
burnt in a Bunsen Burner
Flame

All this talk of strontium-90 must have been very much on the minds of everyone during the 1950s and early 60s with the advent of the atomic bomb at the end of the Second World War, and the arms race that became the Cold War. Strontium-88 is the stable isotope and I even use a salt of strontium for a flame test when teaching chemistry. It is a component of fireworks resulting in a beautiful red color.  But strontium-90 the radioactive isotope is a by-product of Uranium-238 fission. The problem with this isotope is that the human body treats it like calcium and sequesters it in bones and teeth. In the late 50s and early 60s researchers here in the US were collecting baby teeth and testing them for the presence of strontium-90.Turns out that children born in the 60s had a higher concentration of strontium-90 in their teeth as a result of exposure from the atmospheric nuclear tests that were being conducted at that time. Eventually many countries would ban above ground testing. (Radiation: What it is, What you need to know, by Robert Peter Gale M.D. and Eric Lax, Alfred A. Knopf, c. 2013)

Of course Christie would use current events in her novels. Those details help to make her stories believable and relevant. Perhaps today's readers are very unfamiliar with the subject matter as we no longer have to fear testing as much except for those rogue nations who are trying to catch up to other nuclear states. The Cold War may be over but the threat of nuclear weaponry isn't.

It all started with a birdbath

My beautiful blue
birdbath

I fell in love with my birdbath the minute I saw it. It's rich blue color. It's lovely shape. I simply had to buy it, bring it home, and proudly display it in my garden. Over the years it has provided birds, insects, and squirrels with a much needed drink. I've only ever seen Robins bathe in it. Does my experience with a owning a birdbath make my reading of Jincy Willett's novel, Amy Falls Down more perceptive? The novel opens with Willett's character, Amy Gallup, falling in her garden and striking her head on a birdbath. The resulting head injury is but the first step on an interesting journey.

It got me thinking about how our personal experiences bring a nuance to our reading. Every reader will have a different viewpoint that they bring to the novel which the author is unaware of when he or she was writing. The author was living her own experience during the act of creation. When you stop to think about it, one novel can have a million different interpretations because no two readers are alike. Mind blowing. For example I started to wonder if you have no experience with owning a birdbath could you truly begin to understand or appreciate what it would mean to slip, fall and crack your head on the side of one? Does that even matter? Don't readers need to stretch their imaginations in order to read in the first place? Would the story have worked if she'd hit her head on a garden seat or even a patio brick? Did it need to happen outdoors? Would falling down and hitting the edge of a sink or the tub work just as well? Or am I just over thinking this? Perhaps I should just relax and enjoy the story. Which I can honestly say I did.

Now my teenagers talk about making references in conversation all of the time, things they have seen on TV or the Web that others their age have also experienced. While reading Willett's book there were several things that she mentioned that struck chords with some of my memories and I began to wonder if other readers would recognize these references. She mentions Amy's obscure books on disasters which included the Hartford Circus Fire. Now I grew up well after this event but just outside of Hartford, CT where the story still carried some fascination. My experience with this story comes from a documentary film that had been produced about this horrific event and the focus on a six-year old little girl who was never identified. If you are of an age (mid-40s) maybe you remember the film projector and its clickity-clacking noise softly in the background as the story on the screen unfolded. The movie scared me. Years later as an adult a Hartford Courant story about how new forensic techniques could help identify the unclaimed bodies, led me to explain to my parents about the bizarre movie and how it had unsettled me as a child. We even went to see the Ringling Bros. Circus for a school field trip in the Hartford Civic Center once it had been repaired after the roof collapsed in 1978.  It was just this brief comment in the book, but my mind rapidly opened up and relived those memories. A thousand other people could read the same sentence and it might mean absolutely nothing to them. See what I mean about how personal experiences shape our reading.

The Sweet Life

Bee food - Bee Balm

Very often when we are so caught up in trying to get the "big picture" we can over look the tiny bits. For example, my love of gardening. My garden wouldn't be nearly as beautiful and abundant if I didn't have the assistance of my little pollinating friends the honey bees. My vegetable garden certainly would be empty without them. Let's face it so would the supermarket shelves. We humans often forget the work that nature must carry out in order to provide us with sustenance.

Millions and millions of years ago, angiosperm plants (those that flower) evolved a form of reproduction that required a little help. The gymnosperms had been using the wind for years, but that doesn't always work effectively. Flowers began making nectar as a way of tempting bees and other pollinating insects, birds, and even bats into helping with their sexual relations. The pay off for the pollinator was the delicious nectar, the plant got genetic variety. With time both flowers and their pollinators co-evolved to have a special relationship. Along comes the human who begins to care for the honey bee and our sweet tooth is satisfied. Over the years humans have developed all kinds of tricks for "raising" bees and harvesting their product.

Hannah Nordhaus's The Beekeeper's Lament, was a fascinating read. As a biology/ecology teacher I had been keeping an eye on articles that described the concern over the death of so many bee hives over the past few years. Nordhaus follows the path of John Miller a bee keeper who trucks his hives from one field to another in aid of pollinating major fruit crops. He's not alone. The food industry which is worth billions depends on many people like John to provide bees in order to pollinate vast quantities of fruit and nut crops: almonds, apples, oranges, blueberries, cranberries, to name just a few.

The European honey bee first made it to the shores of the United States with the colonists who needed pollinators familiar with the crops they were bringing with them. The native pollinators had not evolved to pollinate these new and unfamiliar plants. It didn't take long for the European bee to expand its territory from sea to shining sea. Talk about a melting pot. Not only are we a mix of races and cultures, we've brought plants from all over the world to our country.

But it is a tough world out there for the bee. They can be victims of bacterial and fungal infections for which they receive antibiotic or fungicide treatments. Then there is the varroa mite which can over run a hive. Beetles, skunks, and bears will all take their turns raiding a hive. Bees are very susceptible to pesticides and herbicides. And the worst is Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) where bees just abandon the hive for no reason. Many blamed genetically modified crops.

What's so important about this issue? With seven billion of us on the planet and growing, we need a lot of food. In order to get a lot of food, we will need a lot of bees. So what can we do? A growing concern not just for bees but for plants themselves is monoculture. Raising large amounts of a single crop by which we are losing the biodiversity of plants. It turns out bees like variety in their diet, we could probably benefit from the same. The growing number of lawns (pun intended) results in very little food for the bee. What we need to do is to plant meadows with lots of flowering plants to encourage pollinators, and watch out for the amount of pesticides that are applied to our yards. That will benefit the quality of our ground water as well.

What we need most is to regain a sense of our role in the natural world. We spend too much time in the city, in our houses losing connection with our environment. No wonder apocalypse games and movies are so popular - people fear the end when nature will work to over come the damage we've inflicted upon it. Instead let's get out there and repair the damage we've done. As consumers we can help the shift of current agricultural practices by purchasing organic products. Even better learn to grow a vegetable or two in your yard, on the patio, or even your windowsill or front stoop. A tomato plant, cucumber, pot of fresh herbs, it's a thrill to cook up something that you've grown yourself. Nothing like it in the world. Share those excess tomatoes and zucchinis with friends and neighbors. There are plenty of tasty recipes out there on the Internet. Let's be old fashion again and get back to the soil, tend it, nurture it, and love it.

Reading as a journey

The Chinese philosopher, Lao-Tzu is quoted as saying, "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." I'm going to adapt it to "Reading a book with a thousand pages begins with the first word." Okay that's pretty cheesy and I will admit to that. The point is books can take us on all sorts of journeys. Rachel Joyce's The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry picked me up and carried me from the south of England to the northern border with Scotland. It also took me into the heart and soul of Harold Fry. I don't want to spoil this story for you so I will simply say I was absorbed, and I too journey through my own heart and soul as a result.

"Beginnings could happen more than once, or in different ways. You could think you were starting something afresh, when actually what you were doing was carrying on as before." (p. 156) I was so taken by this quote. How many times have I resolved to start something, or stop something for that matter? How many New Year's Resolutions are made with all good intentions? New diets started? New workout routines? I'm sure together you and I could come up with a huge list of the things we had decided to start or to start over with. Sometimes it works and other times it doesn't. Albert Einstein defined insanity as, "doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." The lesson for me is to look at my beginnings and to make sure I'm simply not carrying on as before. Real change is what is needed to get myself out of insane spirals that I sometimes find myself trapped within. Harold Fry started a journey of self discovery without ever meaning to. He simply walked out his front door and kept going.

Why I save quotes

Often when reading, I come across something that strikes me right to the core and I have to record it so I can reflect on it later. One such quote comes from Joan Anderson's A Weekend to change your life: find your authentic self after a lifetime of being all things to all people (httpt://www.amazon.com/Weekend-Change-Your-Life-Authentic/dp/0767920554), "When we train our bodies to sustain our dreams, then we are learning to live authentically. Authentic living is not about scaling mountain peaks or winning races. It's about acknowledging and developing the God-given strength of our bodies so that we can continue to live our lives as fully as possible." (p.139) I copied out this quote into my journal on October 29, 2012.  I see it often when I open my journal to write. I've reflected upon it. I've ignored it's advice.

New Year's has come and gone. I did not make any resolutions but thought about changes I needed to make in my life. I've known for some time that I needed to start eating better and exercising but I just didn't want to. I was being stubborn. After my annual check up and the results of my blood work came back I was relieved to hear once again that all the numbers were good all that is except for the number on the scale. I've taken Anderson's advice to heart and finally I'm doing something to train my body. Train it to need less food. Train it so I can do all the things I want to do like hike, kayak, do yoga, and garden. I desire to live life fully and I can't do that if my body lets me down. So the quote spoke to me and I've finally listened.

Books about bookstores

One of the first series of books I ever read about bookstores was Carolyn Hart's Death on Demand (http://carolynhart.com/) about a spunky young woman who inherited her uncle's bookstore which carried only murder mysteries. She and eventually the man who would become her husband set out to solve a series of real murders. The best part was how Hart dropped names of authors, characters, and titles throughout the book, I was introduced to many new books that way. I walked into the real thing when I visited Mystery on Main Street in Brattleboro, VT. I thought I had died and gone to heaven. I told the proprietor that he held my dream job, he responded that owning your own business wasn't as easy as it looked. I discovered Edmund Crispin there in a reprinting by Felony and Mayhem Press.

A couple of years ago I read The Novel Bookstore about a Paris bookstore that only stocked novels chosen by a select and secretive committee. The competition in the city heated up between the different book sellers of Paris and there was some skullduggery. Again a good way to learn about authors I was unfamiliar with.

This afternoon I finished Robin Sloan's, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, where once again we are introduced to an unusual bookstore with a twist. There's a secret society, a quest, friendship, and the search for meaning. I won't tell you more as I think you should read it for yourself. Here's a hint though, if you do get the book leave it under a light for a short while and then turn the light off. Cool isn't it?