Set in the last half of the 14th century, World Without End by Ken Follet is the story of the lives of the citizens of the imaginary town of Kingsbridge in England, the setting of his previous epic, Pillars of the Earth. WWE follows the lives of some of the descendants of his previous tome. I wished it hadn’t been so long since I read Pillars. Some of my details are foggy, but the feel of the two books were the same.

I remember wondering if the sex and violence in Pillars were gratuitous or necessary. Follet continues as a master of vivid description, which can be startling in the sex and violence scenes. The battles and fights, with their knives and swords and arrows, seem much more disturbing than gunshots, the damage done more horrific. And the punishments dispensed by the priests! I wanted to look away, but it was a book. I hated to keep reading, but I couldn’t put it down.

I think those details, however grisly, are necessary to the character development. It is one thing to say she fought off the attacker and won. It is another to hear the knife slicing through sinews, feel how hard she thrust, see where it came out, and what came out with it. I feel much more impressed with her ferocious self-preservation. I doubt I could do that. The description of the Great Plague was nightmarish and exhausting. The details, however revolting, create a more visceral reaction from the reader. By contrast the love and the beauty were more inspiring, more of an oasis.

I also think the details, although fictional, are historically accurate. How miserable life was 700 years ago! How dangerous! As humans, we have been mistaken about so many things. We have come a long way, but I’m sure we are still mistaken about much in our world.

The other thought I had after reading the book was about extremism in religious and social structures. This book follows the lives of four people: two caught in the extremes of society and two struggling away from those extremes in religion. It seems that the Earl and the peasant were both helpless against the injustice of class and obedience. They could not foment any change. It was the merchant class characters who made any lasting social impact. Their struggles and visions ultimately improved society. Makes me wonder what that says about us – about me.

I really enjoyed this book and recommend it, although it is not for the squeamish. Any of you who like horror books & movies with probably think it is nothing. I just hate to witness evil and brutality. However, the book is not about evil so much as the triumph of hope over it.

Sorry for the long gap.
I finally finished that long book, World Without End by Ken Follet last night at 12:30. I have several observations to share, but first, I have to catch up on everything that went by the wayside while I was reading.

So,I'll tell you my Urban Word of the Day: Choreplay. Can you guess what it is?

This picture is from last week.
It is so cold today. When I first looked at the thermometer this morning it was 8 degrees. Brrr! Great day for a mug of coffee, a blanket, and my book!

I have started a 1000 page book. I almost didn't because I knew what would happen. The laundry stacks up. The kids have to cook for themselves. I unintentionally stay up too late.

I am reading Ken Follet's "World Without End." Nothing was "the good old days" about the 12th century. What mean times they were. Kids and women were rarely treated with any dignity and expected abuse.

I think we are evolving as humans into a more compassionate humanity. The question is, is the part of us that is evolving going to survive the part of us that is using up all our resources? At least I'll have time to finish my book first.

Friday night I did an odd combination of events. I had to go to a singles dance as part of my job as a singles columnist for a local magazine. (What a job, right?) I knew it would be fun, and I was right. But just before we went, I felt compelled to stop in at the funeral home for a viewing. It was quite a contrast of emotions.

A man in my community, just a little older than me, was killed in a motorcycle accident. Initial reports didn't indicate drugs or alcohol were involved on either party's part. The man was wearing his helmet. I don't think excessive speed was involved. Someone just didn't see him and pulled out into the road where he was driving.

I have encountered his wife several times in our community. She worked at the pre-school where my daughter went. I taught her daughters in Sunday school 6 or 7 years ago. My oldest daughter and her youngest daughter have become friends and slept over each other's houses this fall.

The funeral home was packed. Although I am not close to the widow, I can't imagine the trauma and fear and worry she is feeling and I felt compelled to go hug her. I'm glad we have the tradition of a viewing for just such a purpose.

Because we have never been close, I'm not sure how to help in the months to come. I have talked to other widows who said they just appreciated it when someone came and did something, like walk the dog or mow the grass. I suppose I can just keep my door open for her daughter who is my daughter's friend and watch and listen for something we can do.


Does being reminded of the fragility of life make you enjoy yours more? I think it is easy to ignore the fact that we're all going to die. We don't know when. Better make the most of things now. Some people think it is morbid to dwell on our mortality, but I find it a bit motivating.

Another sweaty attic improvement shift has produced some archival treasures. I found my 8th & 9th grade yearbooks, and various old snapshots that are an interesting comment on the pre-digital days of photography.

The first inscription in my 9th grade yearbook is from someone named Karen who I'm not sure if I remember. She wrote,
"It was nice knowing you in school, but it was kind of weird..."

Some of the signatures admonish me to remember cryptic, inside jokes that must've been funny 28 years ago.

"We really should get together and make another Hoffman cake sometime."
"We finally got rid of Mims & Zocks, but look at all the trouble you got into with Duck."
"Too bad I had to hear all your stories from Ann-Margaret, Mary, & Sange. They really gave me a bad impression of you!"
"Remember the tin soldier and 'Where's your passport?'"

I see I haven't grown up at all in 28 years.

The holiday season has passed and now I'm into the first new season of the year: science fair season.

I did have a wonderful Christmas and a warm, lovely New Year. I got my last present in the mail yesterday - a stuffed, two-headed calf from our dear friends in Boise. My kids were delighted.

Now, however, my kitchen is a temporary lab - testing the effect of varied glycerin levels on the longevity of bubbles. I think that after at least a dozen of these projects I am finally getting better at the selection and procrastination part of the project.

My daughter's entrepreneurial spirit popped up when she was mixing her varied solutions and trying one out with her homemade, ineffectual, wire wand.

"We should market this stuff!" she exclaimed. I hated to burst her bubble but I explained that she was a little behind the curve on that idea.

Right now we are currently having a "delay in the lab" due to the lack of a normal bubble wand. Ironically, despite the perhaps gallon of homemade bubble solution on my kitchen counter, I'm going to have to go buy some bubbles for the wand. Figures.

I love bubbles - the perfect introduction to the ephemeral nature of beauty. I remember my 2 year old son drinking a couple of big chugs before he registered that they didn't taste good and his wide eyes when he burped a bubble. They had an ill effect on him over then next day.

Is it Christmas yet?
(By the time I hit publish it will be)

I'm working on a bottle of wine from my ex, biding my time for the kids to be really asleep before I start my elfish ruckus.



I enjoyed a few firsts this Christmas.
Last night I was invited to watch my friend Peggy's daughter receive her two new kittens for Christmas. What better moments are there than a nine year old girl finding two ginger kittens under the Christmas tree?







And tonight in church, I was Mary. (Sorry if you just sprayed egg nog or coffee on your computer.)
I think it was a combination of "They must not know me very well" and "Let's ask Ann. She doesn't know how to say No!"
The good part was that I didn't have any lines. The hard part was not cracking up when my Joseph called me "Queen of Heaven" to the Innkeeper.
Who ever heard of a Mary in her 40's? But apparently a teenage Joseph was hard to find. Mine was pushing 60. And mercifully, I was not required to stuff a pillow up my dress. I was really reluctant to have anyone associate me with pregnancy in any form.

It just goes to show you that you never know what will come next. I thought my pageant days were long gone.


I wish you all warm new memories that you can pull out and wrap yourselves up in when you are cold.
Merry Christmas!
Love,
Ann

I keep encountering reminders of the sadness everywhere in the world while I’m trying to float into the Christmas Spirit - some darker thoughts for the Winter Solstice.

Last week I saw a frightening billow of dark black smoke. Something huge and unplanned was burning. I hoped no one was hurt, but radical changes were certainly happening in people’s lives that day.

A young man was killed in a freak car accident with his widowed mother as witness to the tragedy. I drive by the cross and flowers on the side of the road almost every day.

I bought a friend a coffee table book of Pulitzer Prize winning photos. When I got home and looked closer at the book before wrapping it, I flipped through the photos: stark evidence of the suffering and cruelty in the world at the hands of fellow human beings and capricious Mother Nature. I couldn’t bear to put Christmas wrapping paper on such a sobering collection of photos.

On my morning walk I got bit in the arm by a leashed neighborhood dog that I have greeted many times before. Maybe with my hood up he didn’t recognize me. I haven’t been walking in a while. I had to go in for a tetanus shot today. It hurts and the wound is ugly.

There is such beauty and joy possible, but sometimes it is hard to see.
It’s like the bunny I saw hopping across the road tonight: a bit of freedom we haven’t paved over yet. It better be agile to survive. But nature is still wild. Even on a leash, it can’t be expected not to be wild.

I went to yoga to try to catch up with that bunny tonight. It helped. I need to find that balance.

Maybe I needed to remember all the sorrow and tragedy to appreciate the Christmas Spirit. Love came to a crushed world. Love came in a package that we were to wrap in softness and nuzzle up close to, full of potential and tragedy.

After Christmas, I collect all the Christmas story books and put them away. It is fun to pull out the basket again and see our old favorites. Even my big kids enjoy the old picture books.

One of our favorites is "How Murray Saved Christmas" by Mike Reiss. It is set in the rhythm of "Twas the Night". It is the story of a Jewish deli owner who substitutes for a sick Santa.

"Polar Express" and "Alabaster's Song" are basically the same story, but they both choke me up in the end.

I love Jan Brett's illustrations in the famous "Twas the Night" by Clement Moore.

Which Christmas stories do you enjoy?

I have begun a little Construction Girl revival in my attic.

After getting a contractor’s bid on upgrading my attic insulation, I decided to consider doing it myself. My twenty year old house has a mere six inches of insulation, which was to code at the time. Now the standard is 15 inches. We are cold.

I needed nine more inches and Mark was happy to volunteer.

The first order of business is clearing the attic floor, no small task. I hadn’t realized how personal that would be. I hadn’t thought of what Mark might learn about me by helping me organize and purge my attic. It was personal archeology. Why did I save that?

We went to the hardware store for supplies to build shelves in the rafters to get some of the residential clutter permanently off the floor. Before too long, we were screwing in the attic.

There are so many variables when screwing, even on a fairly simple project like ours. Even if, in theory, each shelf was identical, no two screws are alike. One board is curved. One screw gets stuck in a knot hole. I got a minor injury when I didn’t bother with the proper protective precautions. And the angles had to be adjusted to make sure everything came out level. One screw in the wrong place could send years of my collection crashing through the ceiling.

But you guys already know this.

Mark and I have reached a serious point of commitment in our relationship: we mixed our tools into one toolbox. Between us, we have quite an impressive collection.

What is up with that plastic armor so many products are wrapped in?

I took my daughter to her school's Skate Night tonight. Normally, I would have put on the skates and joined them, happy to join my children in play. But I'm still too nervous about my ankle to take the chance, especially given my skill level at the roller rink. (John, do you remember the those Franconia skate nights?)

I hate being the spectator. Well, that's not totally true. I like watching people who excel at a sport or art perform. I love to watch my children play and perform. I was impressed with my friends' performances in the Nutcracker Sunday afternoon. I like riding shotgun so I can gawk at the scenery.

I hate feeling afraid of getting hurt. It makes me feel old. That pain is still too vivid in my memory. I still feel twinges of pain in sudden movements, or after a long day.

I think, soon, I will be ready to take a chance again. Healing takes longer than I realized, longer than I hoped. I'm tired of limping.

Damn those Butter Trefoils.
The first time I opened the sleeve of cookies, I only ate 3 or 4. But this time, I have a cup of my Yogi Breathe Deep Tea to help alleviate my annoying head cold and before I knew it, there were only four left. You know, there's no point just saving four.
In a moment of weakness, I agreed to be Girl Scout Cookie Mom this year. What have I done?

My son makes his first attempt to merge the new and old outdoor decorations.



As punishment for putting Georgie on the tree in Harold the angel's place, I made my sweetie snip off all the malfunctioning lights that were clipped onto my lovely fake tree.






My kids still enjoy putting on their box of decorations - and our friend & neighbor, the rabbi's daughter, joined us for some cross-cultural collaboration.


Save the polar bears!

Here are some pics of my pleasant and quiet Thanksgiving.


Anne's son helping chop mushrooms for stuffing.






The rocket scientist planning his turkey carving skills.






The moms and their wine.

My son off to a quick start against Grandpa, a formidable opponent.

I was reading "Traveling Mercies" by Anne Lamott while waiting for my maintenance check-up on my Prius in a waiting room of all women. It occurs to me that auto mechanics would have an easy time meeting women.

Anyway, three of the waiting women were deep in an animated conversation about Christmas shopping and the pathetic stories on some scandal courtroom show playing for our unnecessary entertainment. I had planned ahead and was looking forward to 45 minutes of reading time, although the cheerful women and sorry stories unraveling on the little television were quite distracting.

I am reading a book I selected from my shelf full of books loaned and passed to me by friends who thought I would like this one. It's a shelf teeming with "ought-to-reads." This particular book first belonged to my friend Julie, who wrote in the margins and highlighted several passages. It is like the old days of book club, "hearing" her comments and reactions.

I am loving this book. In fact I snort-laughed at one point in the waiting room, causing a flicker in the room's conversation. I can't quote a short passage because you wouldn't have the momentum that builds to a snort.

I love snort-laughter. When was the last time you laughed that well?

I learned on my urban dictionary word of the day that today is Cyber Monday. Can you guess what that is?

The Monday after Black Friday when everyone gets on-line after trudging through Friday's crowds and not getting the job done.

I shop on-line often enough to get a barrage of Christmas catalogs. I bet I'm averaging seven a day.

Who are some on-line/mail order merchants you have had luck with in the past?

I must've heard a dozen sources say that this fall would be quick and brown due to the drought conditions of the earlier fall.
They were clearly wrong. The colors this fall have been spectacular. I drive around in awe. The kids and I keep pointing out trees to each other.
"Look at that one!"

This picture is one of my favorite places on earth. We simply call it the tree tunnel. My kids & I climbed into one for our family portrait (which I don't have in digital format.) Every time I drive through the tree tunnel, I wish I had my camera. Although I was a day or two past peek, here's what it looked like today.


I love the Greek mythology explaining the seasons: that the autumn colors were Ceres' last hurrah before her daughter Persephone, had to go spend a few months a year in Hades, although it is a little sad and unfair.

Life goes in cycles like that, doesn't it? Things are going along well, getting more beautiful by the day, and before you know what happened, things seem to be past peak. A time of barren dormancy is coming. You can feel it in the wind. But that is just really making way for a new beginning, not too far off, but easy to forget about when it's freezing.

One of my favorite quotes is
"To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with Spring." -George Santayana

I accidentally cleaned my shed today. I hadn't meant to, but I was looking for something in there. Summer got shut down while I was recuperating. I see things were just thrown in.

I didn't go for very clean. I was not redecorating, just enough to make things accessible - and threw out a bunch of crap: broken water guns, flaky nerf balls, old brittle seat cushions.

I only spent about 20 minutes. It was wonderful to have a little give in my schedule today. It was great to have the strength in my own two feet.

If you had twenty minutes to clean part of your space, which room would it be?