Au Revoir

I'm saying good-bye to this blog. I've enjoyed writing it and I've loved the fact that people read and respond to what I've written, but I'm on to other projects. Thank you, readers and friends, for being my audience. I've really appreciated the privilege of sharing my daily thoughts and experiences with you. Au Revoir for now -- Nolastra.

Too Hot to Blog

Another heat spell heat hit, as it is wont to do this time of year. It was much too hot to blog. Needless to say, I had to remove the winter comforter from my bed. One night it was so hot I couldn't stay in my room, just laid on the couch in the living room in a state of miserable semi-wakefulness while I listened to the dog howling next door and the occasional truck rumbling by.

I had one bearable afternoon working on my art journal at my friend Christina's house. Her living room wasn't air-conditioned, but she had the blinds pulled down and the curtains closed, which protected the room from the punishing sun, and she had a powerful fan going. She was in a cheery mood because she'd spent the weekend in Monterey where it was cool and foggy. Sigh.

I got through the rest of the week by reading. I started out at the bottom with romances, read two by Amanda Quick. Hers are light-hearted in tone and involve psychic abilities. I then proceeded a step up the literary ladder to Robert Barnard, an excellent mystery writer that I highly recommend. As The New York Times Book Review put it: "One of the deftest stylists in the field...goes about it with a quietly malicious sense of humor." Finally I crossed the line into literature by reading The Missing of the Somme by Geoff Dyer though when I say "crossing the line," I am not being entirely accurate as he likes to blur the lines between fact, fiction and personal memoir. He's written books in all three genres and he enjoys mixing them up so he's hard to classify. Novelist, diarist, journalist, historian, critic, comic, travel writer?

Rooms and Altars

Autumn is my favorite time of year. When the Equinox arrives, I perform my quarterly ritual of moving the furniture around in my small bedroom, taking down old pictures and hanging up new ones more appropriate to the season. I also put my heavier comforter on the bed, a beautiful Japanese quilt with a pale blue and gold design. Unfortunately, the weather has turned warm again so that action is premature.

Bob and I watched Inspector Lewis last night while I munched on Concord grapes. Mmm, my favorite -- only available for a short time in the fall.  (The grapes, not Lewis, though in a recent episode he kept going on about retirement so I wonder if there's a secret plot to ax the series.)


Inspector Lewis is an offshoot of Inspector Morse. I like the pairing of Lewis and his assistant Hathaway so I enjoy the program even though the plots are absurd. The story line invariably features an insane person as the murderer who has a secret room/ altar/ notebook filled with photos and clippings of the object of his obsession. The room, altar or notebook is discovered at the last minute by the detective team who then race to the rescue of the final victim. (There are usually at least 3 victims. The murderer saves his favorite for last.)

Detective Dee and the Phantom Flame

Happy Autumn Equinox! Looking back on my postings for August and September, I see that they've gradually dwindled away to nothing. Chalk that up to heat and fatigue, but it's cooled down a bit and the tang of autumn is in the air so I'm back to blogging.

Yesterday Bob and I visited our friends Chris and Ingrid in San Francisco. We all went to see Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame because Bob and Ingrid like Chinese films and Chris is up for anything. Besides, Ingrid and I had memories of the Judge Dee books by Van Gulik  We hoped this movie was based on them. It was not. It was a Chinese blockbuster with a plethora of special effects featuring martial arts encounters, the kind where people swirl through trees and leap up and down steep canyons and off rooftops into the sky or undergrowth. There were lethal red beetles whose poison caused the various victims to crumple up in flames and turn to black ash -- just like Halloween Jack O'Lanterns whose insides have melted and collapsed from too much heat.

It was fun. Lots of costumes, continuous action and never a dull moment. Shallow, though. Very shallow. Another in the puffed-up sequence of ancient empire sagas that the Chinese like to make now that they have a lot of national pride, professionalism and money at their disposal -- and government watchdogs.

Truthfully,  I remember the old Judge Dee books as rather dull so I guess this is an improvement. As far as martial arts movies go, though, I'd much rather watch the old Hong Kong cheapies starring Jackie Chan. Charlie Chaplin is preferable to Cecil B. DeMille.

Slipping and Sliding

I spent another enjoyable afternoon with Christina working on my art journal. Mindless gluing is restful, which is what we did to the pages of our new notebooks during our last session. This time we painted. I'm usually quite careful when I paint, but on this occasion I let myself go. I squeezed globs of acrylic onto the pristine page and then scraped it across the surface with a credit card. (Sample credit cards that come in the mail turn out to be very useful for applying glue and paint.) Then I dripped a different color on top of the first and slipped and slid the card across the page again in whatever way that took my fancy: broad strokes, short chops, undulating ripples, rhythmic waves or sharp scratches. Some pages came out looking good; others not so, but it didn't matter because I was having so much fun. When I got home, I tore out the pages I didn't like and pasted a few collage images onto the ones I did.

Mitzvah

In Judaic tradition, the word mitzvah has a rich array of meanings, but it has come generally to be known as a worthy deed or an act of kindness. After a week of non-stop media coverage of the tenth anniversary of 911, the mere mention of the event made me sick. When the actual day arrived, I was not full of the milk of human kindness, but as it happened, we were due to visit a friend in the hospital -- so we went. I told Bob, "This is how it should be. Instead of all this over-the-top sentimentality, each American should do two mitzvahs -- one for a friend, neighbor or family member -- and one for someone whose country we have harmed in our never-ending "War on Terror."

Our mitzvah was our expedition across the Bay Bridge to visit our friend in San Francisco, who was recovering from a serious surgery. This turned out to be an act of kindness for us as well as for her since the visit was so pleasurable.  She entertained us rather formally by sitting up in a chair across from her empty hospital bed. She had a regal gracious air about her so that I felt like I was an emissary from a foreign country (the outside world) visiting Queen Victoria. We were delighted to see her recovering so rapidly.

I never performed my second mitzvah, the one about doing a kindness to someone in a country where we are waging war.

Complaints from Utopia

So far our September days have been beautiful, but I'm miserable because of the breezy weather. It wreaks havoc on my sinuses. I'm not sure we have traditional seasons on the West Coast in the same way they do back east. (I feel lucky that we haven't had their extreme weather patterns, at least not so far) but we do have our own sorts of seasons. This is fire season, when the weather is hot and dry and the winds create the danger of spreading forest fires. If there's a rainstorm and lightning sets fire to a tree, that's also dangerous. I worry about the danger even more since our governor Jerry Brown has closed down some of the state parks because of budget constraints. Unsupervised wilderness is a disaster just waiting to happen, be it a wildfire or a haven for wild folk.

Well, I hate to be gloomy, but these last days of summer do habitually fill me with gloom. My allergies metaphorically run as wild as forest fires. I stagger through the days with runny or dried up nose and swollen eyes, feeling so spacey that it's hard to focus on anything, be it work or play. There's nothing to do but burrow down in my misery and wait it out until the weather changes, which hopefully will be soon -- though past experience tells me that this woeful state of affairs (perfect blue skies and sunny days, diabolically hiding nasty pollen and dust mites) could last through October and even up to Thanksgiving.