Monday, February 23, 2026

Monday, Monday

                                                La Jolla Sunset from the window
 

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10 comments:

Jerry House said...

Newercat Rose is still be very shy and standoffish, ensconced in the spare room where she feels safe. Walt and Christina spend a lot of time in the room to help her to get used to people. Once or twice she has ventured to the doorway and has even stepped a few inches out of her room. Our other cat, Sage, has taken to laying outside the closed door at night and giving it the stink eye. The other animals couldn't care less about Newercat. But now Sage has realized that she can enter the room safely because Newercat is afraid of her and hides. Thus, Sage has been spending a lot of time in the room, establishing it as her newest domain while Newercat cowers under a chair. Acclimatizing Newercat to the family looks to be a long process.

Mark has been down with a bad case of flu this week and has spent most of his time sleeping. He had enough strength to go back to work on Saturday but he's still not at 100%. Amy met with the orthopedic surgeon Friday who scheduled for her operation for this coming Thursday. They need to repair some tendons and ligaments and insert a metal plate. She will be out of commission for about six weeks. Friday was also the 20th anniversary of Michael's death so it was a fairly sober day.

Christina is up in the air about what she wants to do for employment. Thursday she applied for several different jobs and got an immediate call (within two hours) to schedule a preliminary interview as a police dispatcher for the city. She has worked in the past for about fifteen years as an ambulance driver, paramedic, and an emergency room tech, so she has relevant experience. Again, they called her within two hours to move the process up to the next stage and to give her a detailed 16-page application.

Saturday was the monthly Sister Day and Christina and Jessie spent waaay too much money shopping, so Christina feels that she had better get a paying job soon. Erin, Kaylee, and Amy have taken a cue from their mothers and are now having a monthly Cousins Day.

Sunday was Erin's Family Book Club Day and we all had a great time tearing part our February selection, THE FEAR INDEX by Robert Harris. Harris is a good writer with a lot of best-sellers behind him, but this book was a mess. Touted to be a financial thriller, it was actually a rather trite exploration of AI taking over the world. Plot hooks were never resolved, characterization was sketchy at best with the characters both unbelievable and unlikeable, and the pacing was tortoise-y slow. The first few pages read well, then the book bogged down until the last third, when it went roaring down to s conventional and entirely predictable "twist" ending. It's not often that you have eight people in complete agreement about a book, but Harris made it easy with this novel. For March we will be reading MY BROTHER MICHAEL by Mary Stewart, a 65-year novel that helped popularize the romantic suspense genre back then. The book was my suggestion and I offered it only because March was Kitty's birthday month and this was one of her favorite novels when she was in high school. I suspect that it will be too dated and old-fashioned for today's readers.

7:00 AM
Margot Kinberg said...

Thank you for sharing that lovely picture, Patti! Some of the sunrises and sunsets in this part of the world really are gorgeous.

7:20 AM
Jerry House said...

And there's more...

Airplane and hotel reservation have been made for our trip to visit my brother and his family during the first week of March. We will just have to wait and see if the Homeland Security government shutdown will have an effect on our travel plans. Because we are schedule to return on Kitty's birthday, we have moved our annual 6m6emorial high tea to later in the month.

Again, not much television...just FATHER BOWN and GRACE; enjoying the later far much more than the former. The Olympics (which I did not watch) preempted most of the late night talk shows, but Stephen Colbert is getting feistier the close his cancellation date come and I am enjoying him tremendously. The same holds true for the US version of HAVE I GOT NEWS FOR YOU, which continues to be bright spot on cable news.

I really tried to get into TOM'S CROSSING because it is so well written but it defeated me. I seldom DNF a book and this is one of the rare times; I hope to take it up again in the future when I am more in the mood. What I did read was THE HADEROL BOOGIE, the latest Dave Robicheaux novel. Age has not diminished Burke's powerful and poetic prose -- a top-notch read. Another great read (re-read, actually) was Leonard Wibberley's THE MOUSE ON THE MOON, which once again made me want to move to Grand Fenwick when I grow up. It was my FFB this week. CARDULA AND THE LOCKED ROOMS collected all of Jack Ritchie's stories about the vampire detective and added six locked room stories to the volume. Ritchie's clever, concise tales are always a treat and this book really brightened my day. Max Allan Collins' THE RETURN OF THE MALTESE FALCON marked the welcome return of Sam Spade; MAC did a fantastic job channeling Hammett. I also read to science fiction juveniles from the Sixties -- juveniles only because "young adult" was not a category back then, although one had been actually labeled as a book for young readers. Donald A. Wollheim's THE SECRET OF SATURN'S RINGS was one of the fondly remembered Winston "Adventures in Science Fiction" series; this one was a slam-bang space opera example of Coincidence Theater which brought me back to my junior high school days. Wollheim's ONE AGAINST THE MOON was not part of the Winston series, but it could have been. A fast-moving, action-oriented story of underground caverns on the moon and strange alien creatures, this one relied even more heavily (and more unbelievingly) on coincidence. Perhaps the kind of story E.E. Smith would have written if he had stuck merely Earth and the moon. Again, the inner kid in me was released. Currently reading Mick Herron's SLOW HORSES, showing again how late I usually am to the party.

I hope you are partying on happily further south of me, Patti. Although we are not getting the fearful blizzard that is due to hit the East Coast, a major cold wave is coming to the Panhandle. Stay warm, stay safe, and don't do anything that may be reported in the major newspapers that could upset your kids.

7:44 AM
George said...

Patrick ran a marathon in Vegas over the weekend but then he was told his Monday flight back to NYC was canceled because of the blizzard. So, he's spending another day in Vegas and flying back to Brooklyn on Tuesday...maybe.

Boston is getting bombed with snow, too. Katie and the rest of the citizens of that fair city have been told to "shelter in place" as Boston gets hit with over a foot of snow.

Western NY has a few snow flurries and temps are back into the 20s again after a nice warm weekend. More snow later this week. February is going out with a snow flourish. Stay safe!

9:36 AM
Jeff Meyerson said...

Jackie is watching UNFAMILIAR, a German TV series much like THE AMERICANS - undercover Russian agents in Germany.

We're watching much the same shows as in previous weeks. We did not watch any of the Olympics. After the first series of THE MORNING SHOW, it seemed impossible to find any sympathy for Mitch Kessler, but Jennifer Aniston's self-pitying Alex Levy managed it. To me, she's an awful character.

The new GRACE (series 5) and SHETLAND ( series 10) are on, plus the next (for us) GREAT BRITISH BAKING SHOW (#8 here, #12 ocerall). At least SILENT WITNESS (series 21) is dealing with the trauma Nikki faced after being buried alive in Mexico in the previous series, rather than ignoring it as is typical. We're also watching the second SLOW HORSES series.

11:29 AM
Jeff Meyerson said...

#11 rather than 12 on the Baking Show.

11:30 AM
Todd Mason said...

Because both of my parents came from huge families, we were able to tote up something like a hundred first cousins for me and my sister, though we have met perhaps forty or fifty of them at most, mostly in our younger years (I don't think Clair has met too many if any more than I have since moving out of our parents' house in the '80s and '90s). And then through Facebook, I started correspondence with one of my cousins at some remove, the granddaughter of my paternal grandfather, who had abandoned his New Hampshire family to move to Vermont with a new wife, my grandmother. Ah, the really bad decisions we can make and then make in new if related ways. And neither Clair nor I are very likely to have children at this point. Families rather haunted by a fair amount of avoidable and unavoidable tragedy can go like that. But there will be plenty of Rocchis and Masons and all the other surnames to carry some variants of the genome forward. (And Ratcliffs and Thorpes...and Wheelers and...).

I am enjoying a six year old Max series, DOOM PATROL, based on the surreal reworked 1980s/90s revival of the DC Comics magazine scripted in that more-sophisticated revival by Grant Morrison and then Rachel Pollack (I met her once, interviewing her and two fellow writers as they visited George Mason University for the campus paper and some other project I was working on). And continuing to enjoy both the US and UK original episodes of the comic news-quiz programs HAVE I GOT NEWS FOR YOU...the UK version having, as I've noted before, a fewf decades of episodes up on YouTube.

3:38 PM
TracyK said...

Today we had to take the car to the Dealer for a checkup. We got out again for a breakfast, and I am taking care to keep my food intake low, since I am still having problems with my digestion.

Watching: The same shows, mostly, but we did get back to the third season of PROFESSOR T. We are rewatching THE PRETENDER for the second time. There are so many actors in that series that we like.

Glen is reading ME TALK PRETTY SOMEDAY by David Sedaris. It is the first time he has read anything by Sedaris. The essays are funny and he is liking it.

I recently finished reading MURDER OF A LADY by Anthony Wynne, a locked-room mystery published originally in 1931, reissued by British Library Crime Classics. I am prejudiced against locked-room mystery novels, although I have read some I have liked. This one spent too much time on the puzzle, but it was interesting at times, and the murderer was not obvious at all. I think I would like locked-room short stories though and I will have to test that out.

Now I am reading SHANGHAI by Joseph Kanon. It is about pre-World War II Shanghai at the time when the only place taking European Jews who want to emigrate was Shanghai. I have read about half of it and the story is good. I had recently read a book by S.J. Rozan partially set in Shanghai at the same time, and wanted to read this book because it is focused even more on Shanghai at that time.

5:29 PM
Todd Mason said...

Better luck with food, Tracy...haven't sought PROFESSOR T episodes recently...and I should follow up on why Shanghai was nearly if not completely unique thus then.

12:24 PM
Anonymous said...

Two days and all we have done is shop for food! And eat!

5:37 PM

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