Running Away

Ricky and I are running away from home, heading to Guatemala for two weeks with our friend Bruce.  Don’t get me wrong, we love our home and our animals. It’s hard to leave them. When I told Ricky tonight that I was going to mist the bromeliads, he told me he was going to miss them, too.  Always ready with a quip, that’s my husband!

We are extremely fortunate to have two excellent house/dog/cat/plant sitters who will be living in our house and taking care of everything. One has a dog that our dog Treble is slowly warming to as long as the smaller dog stays away from Treble’s food bowl. 

Daisy Boy

The pack of cats will still be around to keep Treble company. One of our cats, the long-limbed, very vocal Loquacious “Loco” is elderly. We hope he hangs in there until we return.  Another neighborhood favorite, a male cat named Daisy, is such a sweet boy but he is losing weight and acting puny. Luckily another neighbor is as invested in him as we are, so she will monitor him. The tiny cat Lips has a skin allergy that we’ve been treating with a soothing spray, and she has been improving. Katrina, the only cat that is really ours, barely tolerates people and would be happy if all the cats except her disappeared—plus she really glares at her nemesis Treble who took over her laundry room sanctuary when he arrived at our house as a small stray puppy.

Suffice it to say that all the critters will be well cared for is our absence.

Moving along to my summer reading....

Four Michael Connelly novels showed up in the Little Free Library, and I’ve read three of them in July:

 1) The Fifth Witness, a Lincoln lawyer mystery, featuring Mickey Haller, bogged down for me in the details of the daily trial testimony, but was well-paced generally. Connelly develops his characters convincingly, and they continue to draw me in.

2) The Reversal, another mystery featuring Mickey Haller, but Harry Bosch serves as his half-brother’s investigator in this novel so I got a little Harry Bosch fix.

3) A Darkness More Than Night where Harry initially is considered a suspect in a series of murders.  Retired criminal profiler Terry McCaleb has the primary investigative role in the novel, but Harry helps solves the case.

I also read Quiet Until the Thaw, by Alexandra Fuller, one of my favorite authors.  This book, a novel, is a departure for Fuller because she generally has written autobiographical books with intriguing titles. I’ve read Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight; Scribbling the Cat; Cocktails Under the Tree of Forgetfulness; and Leaving Before the Rains Come.  The first three titles are about her growing up in Africa, while the last, Leaving Before the Rains Come, is set in Wyoming and details the end of her marriage.

Quiet Until the Thaw takes place on the Pine Ridge Reservation, a Sioux reservation, in South Dakota. It requires a separate blog post since I spent two years on the Rosebud Reservation, the Sioux Reservation next to Pine Ridge, and I have quite a bit I want to say about this book.

The other mystery I read this month is one of the Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next books, Something Rotten, published in 2004.  Fflorde, a Welsh author, creates an alternative universe where people move in and out of books, into “real life,” usually creating havoc of one sort or another until they are back where they belong—in the covers of a book.  Thursday Next, a Literary Detective with the policing agency Jurisfiction, is currently trying to protect the planet from an egomaniac politician who escaped from an obscure novel and is striving for world domination in the real world. 

Fforde seems almost clairvoyant in Something Rotten as he describes the politician Yorrick Kaine: He was a B character in an A role and had been elevated far beyond his capabilities—a child in control of a nation.  

And that, dear readers, is why Ricky and I are running away from home for a couple weeks—to escape the B character and his ilk who are currently in charge of the United States.