Month: September 2019

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PNW Adventure 2019: Hiking to the Patos Island Light

Having passed on the sunset hike the first night of our trip, Steve and I definitely didn’t want to miss the next hiking opportunity – which came on the morning of our third day in the kayaks.  The night before, Ben suggested an early morning hike to a remote lighthouse out on the tip of Patos Island.  Always up for adding another lighthouse to my life list, I was especially gung-ho.

Early morning view!  The sunrise wakeup call was no hardship for Steve and me – we’re used to kids who wake up with the sunrise.  Ben was just a slightly bigger version of Nugget.  Also, when you unzip your tent flap and see this, who can complain?

We set off into the woods, and after a very short, very gentle incline, it was all level ground and smooth sailing.

Our group was small – just Ben, Steve and me, and the grandfather/grandson duo from our paddling group.  The rest of the gang decided to stay back at camp and sleep in.  Ben pointed out tree and plant varietals as we walked along this gorgeous red trail.

Before I knew it, we’d broken out from the trees and could see the top of the lighthouse, perched on a little bluff.

Ben brought his first aid kit.  I decided to believe that he brings that on every hike, and it wasn’t just because I am accident-prone.

The long approach to the lighthouse – so beautiful.

Gotta love a moody sky, amirite?

We finally made it to the lighthouse.  Most of our little band occupied themselves with exploring around the building.

Meanwhile, always on dorsal watch, I wandered over to the bluff.

The view over the rocks was gorgeous.  I sat for awhile, watching violet-green swallows swoop through the sky and harbor seals and porpoises play in the waves off the point.

It was a perfect way to start the day!  We had a short paddle ahead of us – just 5.5 nautical miles straight across from Patos to Point Doughty on Orcas Island, a far cry from the 12.5 and 13.5 of our first two paddling days – and I can’t think of a better place to spend a morning relaxing and exploring.

Next week: up close and personal with a sea star.

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Reading Round-Up: August 2019

Reading is my oldest and favorite hobby. I literally can’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t love to curl up with a good book. Here are my reads for August, 2019…

The Butterfly Mosque, by G. Willow Wilson – I’ve been a fan of Wilson’s writing since first meeting Kamala Khan as Ms. Marvel, and I’ve been curious about Wilson’s conversion to Islam and her life in Egypt for some time now.  Her memoir of moving to Cairo, converting, and falling in love with an Egyptian man was beautiful and intimate.

Pies & Prejudice (Mother-Daughter Book Club #4), by Heather Vogel Frederick – Sometimes you just need a little sweetness, and re-reading the Mother-Daughter Book Club series is definitely providing that for me – much like the pies the girls bake for their new business venture in this volume.  When the book opens, Emma and her family are moving to England for a year and the other book clubbers are facing their own growing pains.  The gang pulls together and starts a pie-baking business to earn enough money to buy Emma a plane ticket home for spring break, and they all reunite in England for a fabulous summer vacation.  It’s good fun, as always.

Silas Marner, by George Eliot – Read for the Classics Club, and I really enjoyed my third venture into Eliot’s world.  (In my review, here, I wrote that while I’d read Middlemarch a few times, I’d not tried any of Eliot’s other work – then in scanning my bookcases, I realized I’ve also read Scenes of Clerical Life.  Too many books to remember!)  I found Silas Marner slow to begin with, but it really picked up when Silas adopted Eppie – and by the end, I adored it.

To Kill a Mockingbird: The Graphic Novel, by Harper Lee and Fred Fordham – Having heard good things about Fred Fordham’s new graphic novel adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird, I grabbed it when I saw it on a library endcap.  I really enjoyed it – it was nice to experience an old favorite in a bit of a different way, and the illustrations were wonderful and really harmonized with Lee’s story and language.

Mosses & Lichens: Poems, by Devin Johnston – Grabbed on a whim from the poetry shelf at the small but wonderfully curated Old Town Books, I read Mosses & Lichens in one sitting and loved Johnston’s sensitive renderings of everyday images and experiences.

Slightly Foxed No. 62: One Man and His Pigs, ed. Gail Pirkis – Figured I should get around to the current issue of Slightly Foxed before the fall issue arrives on my doorstep!  As always, the journal was a smorgasbord of bookish delights, from the lead article on Lord Emsworth and his pigs – especially his prize pig, the Empress of Blandings – to a tribute to English food writer Jane Grigson and a struggle with Sense and Sensibility, I found plenty to enjoy (and added a few books to my to-be-acquired list).

Red, White & Royal Blue, by Casey McQuiston – Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve heard about this charming romance featuring the First Son of the United States and a younger son of the Princess of Wales – and I can tell you, it lives up to the hype.  When the book opens, Alex Claremont Diaz, son of President Ellen Claremont, is preparing for his mom’s 2020 reelection campaign when he, his sister, and a contingent from the White House attend a royal wedding across the Pond.  Alex gets into an argument with Prince Henry, younger son of Catherine, Princess of Wales, and in an effort to do some damage control, the Palace and the White House coordinate a fake friendship to convince the world’s media that the two young men are actually good pals.  What happens next, no one bargained for: Alex and Henry fall in love.  But their romance – sweet, lovely, and wistful – threatens to sink President Claremont’s reelection chances and jeopardize the Crown.  Gosh, you guys – I just loved this.  I loved Alex, Henry, Alex’s sister June and best friend Nora, Henry’s sister Bea and best friend Pez, and the constellation of characters that buzz around them in the White House and at Buckingham Palace.  It was just a delight from the first page to the last.  Go read it!

Stories, by Katherine Mansfield – Another one to check off the Classics Club list!  I’ve been meaning to read Mansfield’s classic short story The Garden Party for ages, and it was the jewel of the collection – as expected.  I also loved her long-form short stories The Prelude and At the Bay, and devoured The Stranger.  But, as with many short story collections, for every story I enjoyed there were three or four that fell flat for me.  I keep trying, but short stories just aren’t my genre.  (Fully reviewed here.)

Whisper Network, by Chandler Baker – Looming library deadlines made this mandatory reading, which is usually a recipe for not liking a book, but I loved this one.  I whipped through Whisper Network in two days and convinced the work wife to read it so we could discuss.  (She tore through it in one day and we had a good book gushing session over coffee on Monday morning.)  The story of three in-house attorneys who accuse their boss, the General Counsel, of sexual harassment just as he is poised to become CEO of their company was a total page-turner, but my favorite parts were the Greek Chorus of women who opened many chapters lamenting about the challenges of being a working woman and mother, especially in the legal field.  Those laments were all too familiar.

Love and Death Among the Cheetahs (Her Royal Spyness #13), by Rhys Bowen – When you’re looking for a reliably fun mystery novel, Lady Georgianna Rannoch delivers every time.  I loved the latest installment, featuring Georgie and Darcy, finally married, off on their honeymoon in Kenya and tracking both a notorious jewel thief and Wallis Simpson (like you do).  The mystery was satisfying, as always, but I was disappointed in one aspect of the book: all of Bowen’s references to Georgie feeling tired, headachy, and nauseous had me convinced that a little O’Mara was on the way – spoiler alert! – but the pregnancy reveal I was expecting never happened.  Maybe in the next book!  Probably not, given how long Bowen made us wait for the wedding, but hope springs eternal.  The people want a Georgie and Darcy baby!

Summer Places, by Simon Parkes and Angus Wilkie – I’ve had this art book, featuring landscape paintings by artist Simon Parkes, for years and flipped through it many times, but this was the first time I actually sat down and read it cover to cover.  Angus Wilkie’s essays about the plein air painting tradition, the Eastern shore of Long Island, and the New England hideaways Parkes favors for his paintings were ruminative and beautifully written, and in between essays, Parkes paintings beckon the reader to summer shores.  It was a perfect way to go into Labor Day weekend.

Daisy Jones and the Six, by Taylor Jenkins Reid – I kept hearing all the hype about Taylor Jenkins Reid’s new(ish – I’m late to the party) book, a fictionalized account of the rise and fall of a Fleetwood Mac-esque rock band in the late seventies.  It didn’t sound entirely like my thing – I’m not especially interested in the seventies, and I’ve never really listened to Fleetwood Mac, unless you count the Practical Magic soundtrack.  I liked the story, but didn’t love it – a bit too much drugs and angst, but I guess that’s rock ‘n roll, right?  But where it might have been a bit of a miss for me just based on the story, the audio production put the book over the top.  The audiobook is read by a full cast of unique voices (and some big names – Benjamin Bratt, Jennifer Beale…) and was absolutely wonderful.  I’d definitely recommend this one, but get the audio version – it’s worth the extra time to listen.

The Tenth Muse, by Catherine Chung – Another hyped one, I liked but didn’t love The Tenth Muse.  I was expecting something more mythical, and didn’t find the story – of a young woman coming of age as a mathematician in the 1960s – all that compelling.  It was good, but not great, and sometimes I felt that it was almost too self-consciously feminist.  (Look, I totally agree with the case the book was making about equality and the unfairness of the choices women have had to make, and the sacrifices asked of us that are not asked of the men in our professional fields – but I am already living that life, and it was a little bit exhausting to read about it on every page.)  I found the story itself decently engaging but not as compelling as I’d expected.  Solidly good, but not a home run – for me.

A pretty darn good month of reading, especially with no metro, if I do say so myself!  Vacation – a long car ride and several evenings of beach house reading definitely helped – as did the good selection this month.  I almost can’t pick highlights, because there were so many – but I suppose any visit to Atticus, Scout, Jem and Boo is bound to be one.  Whisper Network and Red, White & Royal Blue both lived up to the hype in a big way, and the Slightly Foxed Quarterly and a Lady Georgianna installment are reliably good reads, too.  Really – everything was good, and no major duds.  A successful August, indeed!  Now – on to September reading.  And I’m hoping that the metro will be up and running, and with it my commute-time reading, soon too.  Onward!

 

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It’s Labor Day Monday! What Are You Reading? (September 2, 2019)

First things first: happy Labor Day to my American friends!  I hope you all have something great planned to close out summer.  Fun story: as some longtime readers may know, I majored in Industrial and Labor Relations in college.  By Labor Day, we’d already be back on campus and while most of the colleges and major programs at Cornell didn’t do anything to celebrate the day – it was class business as usual – the ILR School would close early and throw a picnic, where there would be hot dogs and hamburgers, a union song singalong (Solidarity Forever was my favorite) and speakers, with the keynote address usually given by someone high in the ranks of international union leadership.  Solidarity forever, the Union marches on!

Anyway, this year – what I really wanted to do was go up to New York to visit my family.  I haven’t been back since last Christmas and it’s really beginning to feel like too much time has gone by between visits to my grandmother.  (I will do a better job with this in 2020.)  But when I looked at the calendar, it just couldn’t be done.  I had a court appearance on Friday, and the kids are expected at school bright and early tomorrow for a “welcome back open house.”  (The official first day is Wednesday.)  So we decided as Plan B to do some local adventuring.  On Saturday morning we drove over to Lake Burke for a hike; it had been awhile since we hit the trails at all, and even longer since we were back at this park, which is a family favorite.  Steve and I used to circumnavigate the lake before the kiddos joined us – it’s about 5.5 miles.  Now we hike segments, and this weekend we did a different one than we usually did.  There were several families out on the lake in kayaks and canoes, and Steve and I both found ourselves eyeing them jealously, so we decided a paddle is definitely in order, and soon.  On Sunday we hung around the neighborhood – rode the trolley to the waterfront, ate lunch at our favorite local pizza joint, and biked to the playground.  The only thing we didn’t manage was the pool.  Today – we’d been hoping to spend the day at Lake Anna, swimming and kayaking, but when Steve googled for directions he discovered that there has just been a harmful algae bloom, and no one is allowed in the water.  Gross!  So we’re planning a paddle in the District instead, at our old favorite spot – Fletcher’s Cove.

Reading.  I had a busy reading week – yay!  Spent the bulk of the week working my way through The Tenth Muse (in print) and Daisy Jones & the Six (on audio – which I definitely recommend).  But at some point midweek, I decided to sit down with one of my favorite art books, Summer Places, featuring Simon Parkes’ paintings of Long Island and New England, and read it cover to cover.  I’d flipped through it before but never read Angus Wilkie’s wonderful essays – about the plein air painting tradition and the summer communities in the Hamptons, Cape Cod, and coastal Maine.  It was a quick read and then I was back to my regularly scheduled reading.  Finished up the two I had on the go, then turned my attention to Louise Penny’s first Chief Inspector Gamache mystery, Still Life, which my aunt had been pressing me to read.  Finished it last night and loved it!  Now I’m trying to finish up a volume of poetry about gardens, which I’ve been picking at all summer, then it will be back to the library pile.

Watching.  I’m pleased to report that Steve and I actually finished Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, last night!  It only took us, what a month?  Steve blames our current state of parenting-induced exhaustion – not the movie itself.  There’s some good watching coming up, too – as new seasons of The Good Place and The Great British Bake-Off are set to drop on Netflix soon (or already have, don’t @ me).

Listening.  Most of my listening last week was done on Audible, as I tried to finish off Daisy Jones before the Metro opens (now they’re saying September 9th – sigh; there’s still a lot of construction around the station, and I check for progress every day).  Once I bid goodbye to Daisy, Billy, Camila, Karen, Graham and the gang, I went back to podcasts – needed something more bite-sized.  My podcatcher is always out of control, and it gets worse when I’m listening to an audiobook, so expect this category to be all podcasts, all the time, while I try to get nominally caught up.

Making.  Since grilling is required over Labor Day weekend, we made a big burger dinner on Saturday evening.  Steve and I have been loving Beyond Burgers lately – Peanut likes them too, but Nugget doesn’t, which is kind of a bummer.  He’ll come around.  I also made a batch of rice and beans, and have more food prep on the agenda for later today, after we get off the water.

Blogging.  August reading recap coming to you on Wednesday – it’s a long one, thanks to vacation reading – and a PNW lighthouse hike on Friday.  Check in with me then!

Loving.  I’m just going to leave this here:

Asking.  What are you reading this week?