Not fair! I got the flu (or something) and had to stay home yesterday. I never take sick days–especially when I have a super busy week with a big project due on Friday–but sometimes you have no choice.
We are all sick in my family and I guess we have to point the finger at the wee babes and their new daycare lives. C’est la vie. Ironically, next week I get my flu shot!
Well, here’s to staying hydrated and washing your hands!
Thank you, Denzel Washington! Well said.
Watch the whole thing, but try not to be distracted by the woman to the left of Denzel, who is looking at her phone throughout his speech. Can you imagine not paying attention to Denzel Washington giving the commencement address? I mean really.
Denzel made this speech at Dillard University, a private, historically black, liberal arts college in New Orleans, Louisiana in 2015.
Daughter #1 breezed in on Friday night and stayed until Monday morning–such a treat! Per Friday’s blogpost, we watched The Odd Couple and enjoyed it thoroughly. Later in the weekend we watched McClintock! (1963) which I had not seen in forever, due to it usually only being available in terrible pirated form. But you can see it on Amazon Prime now in all its widescreen glory and it is worth it. One of the top-grossing films of 1963, it is John Wayne as John Wayne surrounded by familiar faces. Everyone has a lot of fun and there is a fight in a mud pit. Maureen O’Hara is on hand to be willful and stubborn and ultimately she gets spanked (as does Stephanie Powers on an earlier occasion) and everyone cheers.
We also did some estate sale-ing…
Needlepoint rescue of the week
…and local shopping and had lunch at the Women’s Exchange. We searched the house for some lost counted cross-stitch pattern books and never found what we were looking for, but we unearthed a few gems. We also made a spontaneous trip to the STL Zoo to see the new-ish bear pits. It was probably not a great idea considering it was the Labor Day weekend, but we battled the crowds and found a place to park (a mile away) and visited said pits. Sorry, I don’t have a picture of the new Grizzly bears. They were large and scary, but not as scary as the polar bear who is huge…
We rode our beloved zoo train around…
and even took an obligatory selfie…which I will not share because it is truly heinous.
The wee babes and their parents came over on Sunday and even though they were sniffly and a bit under-the-weather, they ran us ragged.
Lottie loves this little chair…
…but the stairs are just the right size for sitting and thinking and taking a moment…
(I wasn’t kidding about the runny nose)
The OM stayed out of the fray per usual…
And we did have a dance party!
Dance Party!
After daughter #1 went home to COMO, I did laundry and picked up the house and caught up on the phone with daughter #2 and ordered my Christmas cards online. Don’t kid yourself–it’ll be here before we know it!
Today I am back at the salt mine for a busy and stressful week. I’m taking it one day at a time.
Hope you all are enjoying your Labor Day holiday with dance parties and the like. The wee babes had runny noses last night so they were slowed down enough for us to keep up. The wee laddie does enjoy burning down the house, as you know, and little Lottie knows the best thing about being a woman/Is the prerogative to have a little fun.
Make good choices! (I’ll have more tomorrow.)
*”Chattahoochee” by Jim McBride/Alan Jackson
Well, I tiptoed through the first week of classes without disturbing anyone’s lingering summer reverie. I kept up with my paperwork and even managed to read Amor Towles’ The Rules of Civility, a witty and sometimes sad trip to 1938 Manhatten, in which Katey, our female protagonist, attempts to secure a place among society’s movers and shakers.
1938 Vogue cover
The book was hard to put down, and I hated to see it end. If you want a plot summary, you can read the NYT review , though in my view the article is pretty superficial. Suffice it to say that Towles writes lovingly of his fully realized characters. The Rules of Civility is not the too clever, too knowing depiction of despicable rich people that we have come to expect from modern literature.
Walter Evans photograph
There are no real villains in this book, only imperfect but fundamentally decent people making their way in the world. That some of them are rich and privileged does not prevent them from having character or depth. How refreshing.
Like his second book, A Gentleman in Moscow, Towles’s first novel offers both insight into human nature and plenty of good advice. Take, for example, this passage in which our heroine reminisces about what her father told her as as he lay dying:
“Whatever setbacks he had faced in his life, he said, however daunting or dispiriting the unfolding of events, he always knew that he would make it through, as long as when he woke in the morning he was looking forward to his first cup of coffee. Only decades later would I realize that he had been giving me a piece of advice. Uncompromising purpose and the search for eternal truth have an unquestionable sex appeal for the young and high-minded; but when a person loses the ability to take pleasure in the mundane—in the cigarette on the stoop or the gingersnap in the bath—she has probably put herself in unnecessary danger. What my father was trying to tell me, as he neared the conclusion of his own course, was that this risk should not be treated lightly: One must be prepared to fight for one’s simple pleasures and to defend them against elegance and erudition and all manner of glamorous enticements.”
Yep, it’s those simple pleasures that really make life worth living. Remember that! One also has to love a heroine who reacts this way to her first experience target-shooting (another of life’s simple pleasures!):
“If only someone had told me about the confidence-boosting nature of guns, I’d have been shooting them all my life.”
1937 skeet shooting champion — looks as if she’s been shooting all her life.
And this passage reminded me of another dear Katie…
“Katey’s the hottest bookworm you’ll ever meet. If you took all the books that she’s read and piled them in a stack, you could climb to the Milky Way.”
1930s BLOND WOMAN SITTING BY WINDOW READING MAGAZINE PROFILE VIEW PLANTS IN BACKGROUND WINDOW SEAT
Oh, yes. There’s nothing quite like a good book to boost morale when the turkeys are getting you down. Try Amor Towles — you won’t regret it.
*Johnny Burke, “Pennies from Heaven”
dual personalities 