so, my final days of being 50 have passed, and i say adieu, farewell, good riddance! let’s move on….. i spent the first week of june on the river with family and friends very old and very new. my new best friend huckleberry had some really bad manners but i learned a lot from him. he just takes time to do what makes him happy. like proudly bringing me dehydrated cowpies. chewing on unsuspecting plants and animals. peeing inside as soon as you bring him in. and my favorite, sleeping through a hide and seek game which scared 3 middle aged old ladies into thinking he was abducted by a ‘squatch. he’s kinda clueless. and i luuuurve him.
we sewed and cooked, napped and played and generally had a kick ass time. kelly, kaya and old friends lynn and george (and 4-legged hannah) made appearances! some of us traveled down the canyon to an ice cream social and made our own ice cream at a friend’s campfire. guests ages 7-84 froze their unsuspecting fingers but loved the final produce and proclaimed the event a success.
because the propane oven wouldn’t light- sister diane baked me a cake in the old Monarch out in the summer kitchen. i woke up at 8:30 to find her polishing the cast iron parts and evicting the variety of rodents and arachnids that had long since made the oven home. she chopped kindling into toothpicks (daresay!) and hedged all her bets to create a magnificent lemon blueberry cake fit for a princess! it made for a fine dessert after a dinner of fresh corn on the cob and chicken/bacon/roasted chili/cheese/bbq sandwiches!
earlier this year i bought a banned book to read on my palm springs vacation, but i was so busy boozing that i never even opened it (and rightly so). so, lolita traveled again. so, flopping around in my porch bedroom over the course of a week, i read it cover to cover. let me tell you, it was a shocker. but maybe not in the way that you would think. sometimes after i read a book, i gts it (google that shit) to find out what the hell just happened. and this was one of those. like when i finished memoirs of a geisha and nearly passed out when i turned to the back cover and realized it was fiction. you could have knocked me over with a feather. here are some of the wikipedia comments for lolita that especially intrigued me in a variety of ways:
“Nabokov himself observes in the novel’s afterword that a few readers were “misled [by the opening of the book] … into assuming this was going to be a lewd book … [expecting] the rising succession of erotic scenes; when these stopped, the readers stopped, too, and felt bored.”[12]
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The term “Lolita” has been assimilated into popular culture as a description of a young girl who is “precociously seductive…without connotations of victimization.”[29]
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In 1959, novelist Robertson Davies wrote that the theme of Lolita is “not the corruption of an innocent child by a cunning adult, but the exploitation of a weak adult by a corrupt child.
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I am probably responsible for the odd fact that people don’t seem to name their daughters Lolita any more. I have heard of young female poodles being given that name since 1956, but of no human beings.[74]
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poodles? really?
i took the opportunity to query lynn and george on their long-term careers in the art industry and we all loved hearing about their adventures to their summer place in alaska. though lynn admitted to having a career in art for most if not all of her grown life, she clarified that it may not have been the most lucrative decision she ever made. lynn was faculty in the art department at isu for 10 years and george taught art at the university of alaska for 25+ years. they also said they have traveled to europe together several times, including amsterdam. i can’t wait to ask them more about that. i was humbled (shocked, disgusted, in awe?) to learn that when they need an oven (or other appliance) repair in alaska, they have to uninstall the offending item, strap it to a canoe (or two canoes depending on the size), and row it across the water. and after all that, they still need to drive 120 miles each way to secure the solution. they learned to test the appliance as independently as possible before returning it to it’s home to avoid two full trips to reach success.
bluebird skies 