A Month in Summary - March 2019

Nehalem, Oregon

March 2019

Once again, I had a great month of reading. Each and every book was a winner! I'm not doing too well with regard to reading from my own stacks, but it's not easy to ignore all those lovely books on the New Release shelves at the library. We didn't have nearly as much rain this month compared to last month, so I was able to get outside and do more walking than I did in February. I played a lot more Pickleball this month (3 times a week!) and really enjoy the workout, as well as the laughter shared with the group of women I play with. We continue to watch a lot of movies and TV shows, and wound up re-watching a few old favorites while we were on our first road trip of the year. We didn't go too far; just a little trip up the coast to one of our favorite state parks along the beach. I'm surprised that with all of the nice weather and a week away, we were able to complete three puzzles. The Van Gogh was the most challenging, but the other two were pretty quick and easy. I love the one with all of the book cover art. 

Books Read in March (click on titles for my review):

The Brutal Telling by Louise Penny

Kitchen Yarns: Notes on Life, Love, and Food by Ann Hood

My Grandmother Asked Me To Tell You She's Sorry by Fredrik Backman

The Library Book by Susan Orlean

A Ladder to the Sky by John Boyne


First Lines:

"All of them? Even the children?" The fireplace sputtered and crackled and swallowed his gasp. "Slaughtered?" (The Brutal Telling)

The first time I made pesto sauce, I used dried basil. Lots of it. Two entire containers of McCormick's dried basil, to be exact. This was 1982, and I wanted to impress my new boyfriend. Josh had just relocated to New York City from San Francisco. He made a mean cup of coffee by pressing the grounds through what looked like a sock. He put apples in coleslaw. He bought live soft-shell crabs in Chinatown, fried them in butter, and put them in a sandwich smeared with homemade mayonnaise. (Kitchen Yarns)

Every seven-year-old deserves a superhero. That's just how it is. Anyone who doesn't agree needs their head examined. 

That's what Elsa's granny says, at least.

Elsa is seven going on eight. She knows she isn't especially good at being seven. She knows she's different. Her headmaster says she needs to "fall into line" in order to achieve "a better fit with her peers." Other adults describe her as "very grown-up for her age." Elsa knows this is just another way of saying "massively annoying for her age," because they only tend to say this when she corrects them for mispronouncing "deja vu" or not being able to tell the difference between "me" and "I" at the end of a sentence. Smart-asses usually can't, hence the "grown-up for her age" comment, generally said with a strained smile at her parents. As if she has a mental impairment, as if Elsa has shown them up by not being totally thick just because she's seven. And that's why she doesn't have any friends except Granny. Because all the other seven-year-olds in her school are as idiotic as seven-year-olds tend to be, but Elsa is different. (My Grandmother Asked Me To Tell You She's Sorry)

Even in Los Angeles, where there is no shortage of remarkable hairdos, Harry Peak attracted attention. "He was very blond. Very, very blond," his lawyer said to me, and then he fluttered his hand across his forehead, performing a pantomime of Peak's heavy swoop of bangs. Another lawyer, who questioned Peak in a deposition, remembered his hair very well. "He had a lot of it," she said. "And he was very definitely blond." An arson investigator I met described Peak entering the courtroom "with all that hair," as if his hair existed independently. (The Library Book)

From the moment I accepted the invitation, I was nervous about returning to Germany. It had been so many years since I'd last been there, after all, that it was difficult to know what memories might be stirred up by my return. 

It was the spring of 1988, the year the word "perestroika" entered the language, and I was seated in the bar of the Savoy Hotel on Fasanenstraße, contemplating my sixty-sixth birthday, which was only a few weeks away. On the table before me, a bottle of Riesling had been decanted into a coupe glass that, a note in the menu revealed, had been modeled on the left breast of Marie-Antoinette. It was very good, one of the costlier wines on the hotel's expansive list, but I felt no guilt in ordering it for my publisher had assured me that they were content to cover all my expenses. (A Ladder to the Sky)

Movies & TV Series:

House, MD - I can't believe we're still watching this series, but we only watch a couple of episodes a night and not every night of the week. We're now into Season Six, so only a few more seasons to go.

A Star is Born - I know I'm in the minority, but I just didn't think this was as great as all the hype suggests. Lady Gaga was very good, though!

The Green Book - Good, but not great and certainly not THE best picture of 2019.

Castaway - Perhaps the third time we've seen this and it was just as good as the first viewing.

Apollo 13 - We've watched this two or three times and it's still good, but not as impressive as the first time we saw it on the big screen.

About Time - This is the second time I've watched this film and I still enjoyed it, although it is a bit sappy and manipulative. I do adore Bill Nighy and Rachel McAdams, though.

Puzzlemania:

Finished in less than two weeks.

Finished in less than a week.

Finished in two days!

We took our first RV trip of the year and headed up to Nehalem Bay, which is one of our favorite Oregon State Parks. We camped for eight nights and had a wonderful time, in spite of a few days of solid rain. It was nice to go for walks on the beach, take a couple of bike rides, read both outside in the sunshine or inside when it rained, and relax by the campfire. We're already planning to take another trip in a couple of weeks. Here are just a few pictures from this trip. I plan to do an entire post on Nehalem sometime soon.