The Bookity Book & Tall Grass Salon

I'm with Maryn. Hi all.

Shakey you made me laugh twice - once with your hellish garden, then with your TV story. We also didn't have a TV until I was in high school. My parents thought the money better spent on travel.

We went on a lot of trips. Every spring Daddy would ask if we'd rather have a swimming pool put into the back yard or take a long summer trip. We three girls always voted for the pool, but parents' votes count twice, dontcha know, so we got the trips.

Now I'm incredibly grateful, although I sometimes my foot is too damn itchy. Trained up to go places.

traveling > pool

We only took two vacations in our childhood because Dad owned a business and didn't want to get any farther than Colorado. Once we had a great time in the mountains around Colorado Springs. I saw Helen Hunt Jackson's grave and & 7 Falls. I remember that part well because Ramona was Grandma's favorite novel and Grandma went along.

We tried for another Colorado vacation when I was eleven but had car trouble in Scott City, Kansas. Not Fort Scott, home of Gordon Parks and The Learning Tree and having trees and green stuff, but Scott City-- near Scott Lake-- in the middle of dusty godforsaken nowhere.

We were stuck in Scott City for almost a week. De Soto parts were hard to get in a town that small. It wasn't too bad. The motel had a swimming pool so my sibs and I went swimming every afternoon. Our great grandmother was along this time. She was always a lot of fun. Two cafes in walking distance so we got to eat out every meal.

When the car was finally fixed Dad said we could do some sightseeing that afternoon and then we had to leave. So, despite the town thermometer saying it was 112* and the fact that the De Soto had no A/C, we took off for the main tourist attractions of Scott County Kansas: The Famous Sphinx of the Plains and El Cuartelejo--a swear to God Indian Pueblo that I was dying to see. In my mind it was five stories high and the ladders and pots were still kicking around just waiting for a kid to pick them up.

After 3 centuries it was really only a bump in the ground but I didn't know that. I did know the history and i was all fired up. (Public Library in Scott city was just down the block--once a nerd always a nerd!) In 1664 the Pueblo Indians fled Taos and crossed the unforgiving prairie, on foot, until they found water. They lived in northern Kansas for almost twenty years before deciding that New Spain was better than Kansas drought and the Pawnee, so they headed back to Taos and left El Quartelejo to the coyotes.

I have since spent many tranquil hours on Scott Lake but we didn't make it that particular vacation. The Park had a $1 admission fee and my old man wasn't about to pay a whole dollar to see anything besides a rodeo or the Kansas City Athletics!--s6

Sorry about the almanac link. No idea what that's about. If I were more inspired by the one today I'd go try to fetch it again, but, meh.

We traveled a lot, road trips,when I was growing up. It was some kind of a thing in our family from somewhere, and even the grandparents' generation had done this. We also did go on vacations every year but it was always either to the NC coast where there was a family fish camp sort of house, or to the NC mountains to camp.

We'd camp not with the (other) tourists in a regular campsite, but would go off into the woods where my dad would locate a good spot, and we would use rocks for a fire circle, and carefully dig a trench around the tent so rain wouldn't seep in, and take a shovel into the woods for relieving ourselves. My dad had grown up camping out in West Texas and he loved to do this kind of stuff.

I remember when we would move, though, which we also did fairly often in the early years, and we'd get to stay in motels with pools. That was very special. Nobody I knew back then had their own pool. Later when we lived in neighborhoods where someone did have a pool, they were always people we didn't socialize with because they were not "our kind of people" -- which usually meant they had enough more money than we did and enough less education than my dad did, that they were uninteresting to my parents.

So, motel pools were magical places to me. For a little while.

My parents had terrible travel itches. It was their main entertainment - we seldom went to movies or concerts. My daddy was an architect with projects in several states - we visited Rifle, Meeker and Walden - real hot spots, although in Meeker the hotel had a double headed calf mounted on the wall. We didn't stay there though - we mostly camped.

Daddy loved to fish - so those places were all just fine. Then there were the relatives in Kansas, California, Missouri and Wisconsin - mostly on farms and glad to see us. I once dumped my sister off the back of a Clydesdale Around the time we finally got a TV, my dad's business had taken off and we took longer trips. Some pseudo disasters with a trailer. I was (am) such a lucky girl!!

Love reading about you guys' travel or not. And yes, motels with swimming pools and getting to eat out in a restaurant. Such treats.

We never traveled much when I was a kid either. By the time I started grad school I had only been in seven states. Even into grad school I only traveled to conferences and stuff, where I rarely left the hotels (I've been to San Diego TWICE and didn't make it to the ocean either time). Shoot, I was 30 before I even went to the ocean! The travel bug finally got me in my late thirties, and although I find travel exhausting, I get suffocaty when I think about spending too much time in one place.

Wow. I love hearing your stories. The camping? K-belle and Swanny--you are so lucky. I used to read library books about camping. I knew how to ring the campfire with rocks, dig the trench around the tent. Never got to actually camp but I was well versed!

I have been many places now but unlike you, Chris, I never like to stray too far from the homestead. This summer I lived in the same town I grew up in, the same town my great grandparents lived in. My sister took me to a barbecue place. Looking around I realized that it had once been the sporting goods store where I bought my first tennis racket. Wooden of course. I like to travel but i love to come home. Uganda amazes me. Can't believe you did it. --s6

Meeker--think my sister and i passed near it once on our way to Ucon, Idaho, where she lived. Double headed calf? Probably would have passed that up even if I had known about it. Saw one in a jar of formaldy-hide once. Had nightmares for a month afterwards. --s6

Good morning.

Let me see if I can get it right today.

The Writer's Almanac for September 2, 2014

The poem is by Wendell Berry, one of my very favorite poets.

And it's the birthday of Eugene Field, who wrote the children's poem, Wynken, Blynken, and Nod, which I utterly adore. Anyone else remember that one? (Speaking of traveling....)

And speaking of traveling, Chris, last night I watched your movie on Youtube about your Uganda time. How delightful! Some fabuous pictures, and it's nice to see you in the midst of all that Africa.

Good morning.
The birthday of the Cirque du Soliel founder, which we are going to see tonight - fun coincidence. I love Cirque. It is so visceral. Sends me out into the parking lot cavorting and shouting yay, yay, yay!

Heya, Ferret, how's by you?

Train trips can be fun. Or not, if you happen to be on one that gets stuck somewhere, like the last one I took.

Good morning.

The Writer's Almanac for September 3, 2014

Some days, and this is one, I post the almanac in here, and then considering what to say about it feels very like what today's poem invokes in me. There's a distance between things and between me and those things, and it's all that's really reliable.

"Form follows function." The man who said that, Louis Henry Sullivan, was born on this date as was Malcolm Gladwell who gave us The Tipping Point, a concept I hear more and more about lately, as in, is this it? Are we in one? I guess the thing about it is like the fish in water -- we wouldn't know, necessarily, while we're immersed in a tipping point....

Traveling on for awhile, I'll catch you later.

I didn't care much for Tipping Point. I thought it was a real stretch and was a lot more anecdotal than I liked. I did love Outliers, though. I thought it made a lot of sense -- and became a great thing for me to tell my kids about putting in effort -- even with talent, it takes 10,000 hours to become a master at anything.

Hope everyone is having a good morning. My book goes back to the world today, so I'm trying to contain my anxiousness and try to revisit some of my old stuff to see if there's anything worth continuing. got to get those 10,000 hours in somehow.

Maryn, not even any new mosquito bites?

Matt, thanks for the update about your book. We're rooting for you! (I have to check that, maybe I am spelling it rong. "routing"? )

I haven't read Tipping Point, only somewhat familiar with the concept. Outliers sounds fascinating, though.

I just ordered a mosquito control thing I hope is going to work. They love me, mosquitoes do, and I often have numerous bites when I come in from a short time working outside.

The product is a powder made of various biodegradable ingredients including citronella and geraniol which are natural repellants. The use is to sprinkle it on the whole area where you want the skeeters to back off from. Reviews say it works well. Personally I can't tolerate deet or any of that, so I do hope this works.

Let me know how it works, Kyla. I did work with natural repellents as a grad student, and there is a real divide between the scientific researchers and product marketers on spatial.repellents, especially naturally based ones. Each time they get popular we seem to have advanced some in both sides' understanding, so that's progress at least.

I notice today's also the b'day of Sarah Orne Jewitt. I have long loved her "Country of the Pointed Firs." A very quiet novel, full of allusion and nature.

10,000 hours seems about right. They say it takes 10 years to become a ballet dancer - I parsed it out (using the calculator - my math sucks) and that's about 3 hours per day for 10 years. Suspect I'm nearing my hours in writing now, but just because you master it, doesn't mean it will sell. As Jewett wrote:
"Sometimes, the business part of writing grows very noxious to me, and I wonder if in heaven our best thoughts — poet's thoughts, especially — will not be flowers, somehow, or some sort of beautiful live things that stand about and grow, and don't have to be chaffered over and bought and sold."
Good luck with your book Shakey!

Chris, I sure will. I'd forgotten you did that kind of work (though now I recall you posted about that some.)

I've tried a number of things that don't work very well. I had a credit with this company and decided to use part of it to try this out. And as I said, those reviewing it spoke positive things. When I was a little girl we used citronella candles and lately I've been wishing to try those out again but haven't found any. Not that I've looked very hard.