summer

Summer Vacation, Day 35: Too Many Books!

/ J. Thorp / 3 Comments

Thanks in part to the reading challenge in Jacqui’s Room, this has been a summer of books. The list of works I’m pursuing for that quest has been blogged about before – thus far I’ve managed Don Quixote, The Great Gatsby, and Slaugherhouse-Five. Still reading (and enjoying) Moby Dick – like Cervantes, it’s enjoyable (to me, anyway); it’s just taking a long time.

In the meantime, I have countless other book waiting for me. I loaned a colleague my copy of a favorite, Carter Beats the Devil, and was immediately loaned The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, with The Mulligan thrown in for good measure – a novel by a Minnesota dentist about a Minnesota dentist who leaves his “good life” and heads West (or so I gather). I also have battered copies of Leaves of Grass (which may replace Blood Meridan in my reading challenge list) and selected tales from The Arabian Nights, plus Elmer Keith’s Hell, I Was There and The Tao Te Ching waiting for me.

At work, it’s two of my boss’s favorite books, E. F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered and the Lincoln biography Team of Rivals. Plus, we went to a great day-long seminar by Yale professor emeritus Edward Tufte and received four of his beautiful books – then a friend bought me a copy of Tufte’s mom’s book Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style. And this doesn’t scratch the surface of speech writing, leadership, higher education, and public policy books growling from the shelves.

Downstairs? Susanna Clarke’s The Ladies of Grace Adieu is calling. Perhaps this winter …

Summer Vacation, Day 34: Unlike Father, Unlike Son

/ J. Thorp / 3 Comments

Brendan’s baseball team, Roger’s Radiator Repair, started the playoffs tonight as the six seed, playing St. Michael Legion, the three seed. The Radiators were up by one going into the bottom of the fifth, but couldn’t quite hold the Legion off – the score was 13-13 at the end of the fifth.

The Radiators won in the sixth inning – technically an extra inning, since no inning can start after 8:15 p.m., unless the score is tied and it’s the playoffs. Bren played the first three innings at first base, where he got three runners out, including a slow grounder which he charged and fielded, then tagged the runner.

He played catcher for the rest of the game, making a close tag at the plate to save a run in the fifth. He also had three singles, made no outs, batted in the winning run in the sixth and scored the security run himself.

The boy plays with amazing patience and poise these days. I hated catcher and first base as a player, because I never felt like I had time to breathe – always a ball coming at you …

Both he and the team are getting better every day. Go Radiators!

Summer Vacation, Day 32: Big Breakfast!

/ J. Thorp / 1 Comment

We all try to pitch in with a meal and drinks and stuff when we descend on Jodi’s folks’ house, so this morning we made breakfast: chocolate-chip-banana pancakes (with a splash of vanilla), eggs (scrambled and “cowboy” – what the young’ns call “over-easy”), bacon and orange juice.

I think there were seventeen mouths to feed; I cooked roughly a dozen and a half eggs, two pounds of bacon and nearly a gallon of pancake batter; and Jodi poured a gallon of oranges juice and multiple glasses of milk, to boot. We ran short on bacon; I cut up and browned a leftover bratwurst, and someone ate a cold chicken leg.

Left-overs? Three pancakes. All in all, we gauged it pretty well.

Summer Vacation, Day 31: Independence Day Stream of Consciousness

/ J. Thorp / 2 Comments

I was looking for the exact circumstances of a quote by Ben Franklin for today. Coincidentally, the top search return was a speech by Ron Paul on his official House of Representatives Web site. This is interesting to me, because I find myself feeling increasingly libertarian these days, and increasingly convinced that our problems must first be solved in our own backyards.

Here’s the bit, as referenced by Congressman Paul:

At the close of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia on September 18, 1787, a Mrs. Powel anxiously awaited the results, and as Benjamin Franklin emerged from the long task now finished, asked him directly: “Well Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” “A republic if you can keep it” responded Franklin.

A society as free as ours is bound to raise up various and noxious weeds among our “amber waves of grain” – but I wouldn’t live anywhere else (at least, not permanently), nor would I sacrifice these personal freedoms for a supposedly cleaner or safer society. If we are to secure both our freedoms and a safe and sane society, we must start at home. I’ll work harder at that, starting right now …

Gotta go squeeze the Thorplets – happy Independence Day, my friends!