Lugnasa New (Garlic Planting) Moon
Morning with Missing. Kate out to find sodium bisulfite, a preservative that maintains color in dried apples and pears. Not an easy product to locate.
Up late last night and early today. Sleepy.
Today’s Kate’s 68th birthday. We’re going to the track tonight to celebrate. The harness track, Running Aces. It’s in our area.
Lugnasa Hiroshima Moon
Rembrandt tour today with another group of developmentally disabled folks. This time a simpler approach. What’s a painting? What are colors? Eyes? Mouth? Ears. Can we find them? More appropriate for this group.
Update: George Leisner, shown here, got fired from his job as a real estate agent after his son posted this video on youtube and a blogger sent it to his employer.
“The lines we draw that make us who we are are potent by virtue of being non-negotiable, and even, at some level, indefensible. Sally will not wear synthetics. That’s who she is. Billy won’t touch eggs. That’s Billy for you. To apologize for your personal absolutes, for what Sandy Pinter calls your ‘Core Attachments,’ means apologizing for your very existence.”
| — | Walter Kirn | Up in the Air |
Lugnasa Hiroshima Moon
Lotta moving around today. Into the museum by 10:40 for an 11:00 am tour with a group of developmentally disabled adults. Rembrandt. Back home for a bit, then out to Lake Minnetonka for an evening boating with the Woollies. Then, swing over to the airport to pick up brother Mark, flying in from Ha’il, Saudi Arabia.
Summer Hiroshima Moon
Fortuna smiled on me tonight, but not in an excessive way. I had some hands, some good cards. Made some points. Enough to come in second this time as opposed to dead last last time.
We had a guest for sheepshead, Dave, Ed’s sort of brother-in-law. That is, he was formerly married to Ed’s wife’s sister. Dave worked in Germany for the NSA. First puzzle palace sort I’ve ever met. Majored in German, minored in Russian in college. That’s all he would say about his work. Classified. A very bright guy. Looked more like a rotund aging hippy than a former spy.
Summer Hiroshima Moon
Bought a new piece of software: Scrivener. Where has this been all my life? Well, at least the last 20 years. It makes writing, manipulating, revising and researching novels, short stories, scripts, non-fiction so much more intuitive. And, dare I say it? Fun.
Just loaded Missing into it about thirty minutes ago as well as a short story with a working title, The Protectors. I spent yesterday afternoon and most of today figuring how to use it and I passed over all the initial hurdles.
On Lughnasa I start both the first revision of Missing and the new book in the trilogy, Loki’s Children. With this tool to hand it will make the mechanics of the process much, much simpler.
Summer Hiroshima Moon
Outside. Thinning. Good to be outside in less than tropical heat. Though 81 degrees with a dewpoint of 72 is not the desert, either.
Got my new bike yesterday. Gotta take it over to Erik’s Bike Shop to have it assembled. I’m not good at such things and it requires tools I don’t have.
Summer Hiroshima Moon
Caution: air travel rant ahead.
Delta strikes again. After three delays, my 1:14 pm flight has gotten bumped back to 7:30 pm. I returned my rental car at 10, Jon got me to the airport at 10:30 and 9 hours later, all things remaining as the current Delta claims, I’ll leave here.
This is the second time in two months Delta has screwed up my return flight, the first being the flight from Schipol to Minneapolis after my trip to Romania. In both cases my return home has been delayed by many hours. Don’t count me as a fan of Delta. Or, air travel.