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Sorry I haven’t been around lately. We got home from a wonderful trip to Koh Samuii, Thailand and then a few days in Singapore safely.  It was a very welcome break from winter days though we forget how hot Singapore can be.

I realised the Penguin was getting to be a trifle dirty from travelling the past couple of years. He has been on four different continents without a bath so a bath was in order.

As soon as we got home, probably from the airplane trip home, I came down with a whopping case of bronchitis. Coughing spasms making it hard to breathe or sleep. It is now on its way out but this particular bug has really hung on.

It was a time for magazine reading, peppermint tea with honey, catching up on articles cut out of magazines I wanted to get rid of.

I did manage to finish The Group by Mary McCarthy. I thought it was an excellent book as it is the story of several women graduates from Vassar College in the US during the 20’s and 30’s. Our book club discussed it a week or so ago. Most found it average, a couple didn’t care for it and two of us gave it 4 stars. I think the positive side of this book for us ‘older women’ who really enjoyed it was it showed the life women usually took once they graduated from college. (University)

These women were very educated and intelligent but their whole life seemed to involve around getting a husband and the colour of curtains and furnishings for their new house. The men didn’t seem to respect them for the women who they were. It showed a social progression that many women took during this time period.

A criticism of the book was we didn’t think the writing reflected the time period of the 20’s and 30’s. It read as if it was after WWII and the 1950’s. I know as I read it I constantly had the fifties and the life of my own mother in mind. She was a woman that finished two years of university before war broke out. She was a very creative and clever woman but married a man who spent his life in the military. The rest of her life was supporting social activities related to his career development. She developed alcoholism, depression and had many unfinished dreams though I am not sure she ever really knew what they were. This book reminded me a great deal of her life and the expectations on women of the time.

Then when I was feeling quite crook and the antibiotics were giving me headaches and nausea I laid in bed one day and checked out the book Finding Gobi by Dion Leonard as an e-Book from the State Library.

Non-fiction. A man with issues from his past who is a long distance runner participates in a race through the Gobi Desert in Mongolia. A small terrier attaches herself to him and runs beside him. A bond grows. When he is finished with the race and has come to know the spirit of this small terrier he is hesitant to just walk away from this homeless dog.

The book is the story of the trials and tribulations of getting Gobi back to Edinburgh, Scotland including Gobi becoming lost in a large Chinese city and being found again. The whole journey these two experienced was at times harrowing, uplifting and I only read the book because I knew it had a happy ending. I always have to know the ending of animal stories before I will commit to reading them.

I understand this book is currently being made into a film by Fox studios.

This week also has me participating in the Tasmanian Reader and Writer’s Festival in Hobart. I am signed up for four sessions and I hope to do a post about each one.

As  I am feeling much better now but still not 100% I need to get back into life again. I have been quite self indulgent in my crabby mood about getting sick, yet again this winter.

Spring is supposedly here in Australia. The Australians celebrate seasonal changes on the first of the month of the equinox and solstice. However as I have come to realise the previous weather is not yet finished I hold out for spring to begin on 22nd of September, not the first. We had snow here a few days ago and in my mind that is not yet spring.

Everything is in bloom though or about to burst into bloom. It has been warming up a bit and the first of October sees us going into Daylight Savings Time with more light in the evenings. I am more than ready for that.

I hope this finds everyone happy and safe.  For those Americans, especially in the southern United States I hope you have found safety through the terrible hurricanes. I know I followed the American news for a couple of days  as Irma swept through my old home of Fort Myers, Florida. I doubt the house we lived in at the time has survived without a great deal of flooding. I remember digging a hole to put in a post for a bird feeder once in the back yard and we hit water. I can’t imagine how it must be now after Irma.

Stay safe wherever you are and enjoy what you are doing today. Especially if everything gets to you in the world, just focus on today. Do something that makes you laugh. That, to me, is the best cure for everything.

I must say I am about 100% better than I was a week ago. It is amazing what a week in the heat, sun and light can do for someone when winter is taken away. We are in Koh Samuii, Thailand, eating everything in sight, reading, swimming and resting. Lots of resting. From what I am not sure but we are doing it.

I have just finished the Australian book (Text- first published in 1965) Aunts Up the Cross. This is a bohemian memoir of growing up in the 1920’s and 30’s through to about 1945 in Kings Cross, Sydney. It is the most wonderful read and extremely entertaining.

 

When a book begins as this, one must keep reading:

My great-aunt Juliet was knocked over and killed by a bus when she was eighty-five. The bus was travelling very slowly in the right direction and could hardly have been missed by anyone except Aunt Juliet, who must have been travelling fairly fast in the wrong direction

The introduction to the book is by writer and humorist Clive James. He also does a wonderful job introducing this story. He writes his intro in 1996:

Here at last is the living proof that a civilised, unpretentious, fully evocative prose style had been available in Australia ever since the young Robin Eakin (her maiden name) handed in her first essay. All we had ever needed to do was look in the wrong place. And so often happens, the true art was filed under entertainment.

Robin writes of the eccentrically large house they lived in (though in later life she said it wasn’t as large as she remembered it)

Her father was a doctor in the area and everyone seemed to know him. Her mother entertained anyone who came to the door. They always had relatives, friends and completely unknown people staying with them. She fed the entire community. Her parents had a loving, sometimes volatile relationship and the tricks her father played on people were laugh out loud funny. Her ancestry of all of the aunts plays an important role though she never met half of them. Death came frequently to her house over the years but in such a way it is hard not to read bits out loud to your partner. Is there such a term as “ludicrous deaths?” This book certainly has it in abundance.

I won’t say a lot more as Mr. Penguin is reading this book now and I don’t want to spoil it. If you are Australian and have not read this book then you must remedy the situation.

If you are not Australian you must read it in order to learn we do not all live in the outback with hats and corks on our heads.

The history of Kings Cross from the 1920’s up to the time of WWII is fun and enlightening. It was a very different place to how it is now. I loved it and the people inside this book will be with me forever.

Now for the “travellin’ part of the Penguin.  We were out by the pool the other day. A couple sat reading in the chairs beside us. I could see the woman was nearing the end of her book. I crane my neck around deck chairs and posts to get a glimpse of what people are reading when I am on holiday. Does anyone else do this?

She threw down the book and burst out, “Well!!!  He didn’t make it in the end.”

When she put the book down on the little table beside the chair and headed for the pool I had to get up and follow her lead, also into the pool. By then I HAD to see what the book was. Blast the spoilers.

 

The Chamber by John Grisham. Popular holiday reading by many people. I quite like the occasional John Grisham courtroom drama.

It turned out they were a couple from Melbourne and we have made ‘Holiday Friends’ with them. We chat to them at breakfast in the morning. Complain about our noisy neighbours and squabbling children. Last night as we walked to dinner the smell of marijuana was very strong down our outside hallway. What fools. Thai authorities do not smile upon drug use in this country. My worst nightmare, outside of being dragged off a campsite by a saltwater crocodile in the Northern Territory, is a long stint in an Asian prison on drug charges. I wouldn’t even pack tobacco for being so paranoid.

Thursday we leave for Singapore for about 5 or 6 days.  I think I am getting ready to face chilly, windy Tasmania again. I always thank the powers that be for having an Australian life and the blessings that are.

 

I have scattered a few photos through in case you want to see how hard we all have it this week.

 

 

I am in the middle of a big winter shake up. WINTER= Beautiful sunny days. But by the end of it I am fed up with the short days with dark coming too early. I am tired of the cold. I am tired of the damp. I think many people who live in the southern regions of Australia feel this way in winter and head for warmer climates if only for a couple of weeks.

We are leaving this afternoon for 8 days or so to Koh Samuii in Thailand. We are going to lie on a chaise lounge between the beach and the swimming pool. Picture me at the bottom of the pool, long snorkel and a drink in hand. I might sit there for 2 or 3 days. The hot sun beats down.

Then we are going to Singapore to  be around people for a week and celebrate our 46th wedding anniversary.

There have been family issues back home,(Michigan)  including my very old mother who is probably in her final year. It all makes me sad and winter is not a good time to be sad.  When I seek refuge in a book I am reminded I am reading War and Peace.

I have finished five parts out of ten. I have enjoyed it for the most part but it dawned on me the other evening I do not care about these people.  I enjoyed the strategy and conversations during the war scenes. Those were the scenes I thought I would dislike the most. They weren’t. It is the domestic part I get so impatient with. The society rules, the silly women who are presented again and again. The men who prance around. They are either silly or weak. I am tired of them. I want to get back into the books with strong women, modern women. Yes, women with smart phones and important jobs.  I can’t take anymore of it. I am, yes, quitting.

I have SO MANY tbr books on my shelves that look like adventure. They look like fun. They have beautiful covers. I don’t care if the stories are new or old, they are books that I want to spend time with.  When one is older, one is conscious of how little time may be left in the scheme of things. Even 20 years is not a great deal of time considering how fast the years go by.

I always wanted to read War and Peace. I wanted to be able to say, “Oh yes, I read that.” Am I comfortable not being able to say it? Yes, Absolutely. I get the gist. I will, however continue to follow the others who are reading and writing about it.   I have partial interest in hearing what might happen. I might pick it up again but when winter depression and Seasonal Affective Disorder has left me. When family issues overseas don’t occupy so many of my thoughts. When politics are better?  Ha!!

I am going to take a couple of copies of ‘real’ books with me. For the poolside. Something interesting or fun. I have many books on my Kindle and I can access the eBooks from the library.  I am going to work on my photography. I am going to take walks along the beach. The camera is packed. The Penguin is ready. Mr. P. has his things ready.  The housesitter comes tonight. The cats are at camp (cattery).  As one person, name unknown, once said.  “Elvis has left the building.”   Out of the way. “We are leaving the building.”

Stay tuned.