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Monday, January 31, 2011

Wintry Mix

Who wants to hear wintry mix for the next three days? Not I for sure. The kids got out of school at 2 today because of freezing rain with snow to follow as well as high winds and plummeting temperatures. Wishing I could be somewhere warm but settling for staying inside where I'm dry and warm. I can hibernate with my cat and my books and we'll both be happy.

Finished R N Morris's "A Razor Wrapped in Silk" which was interesting but a lot of philosophical discussion. The third book in the series set in St Petersburg, 1870, finds Porfiry Petrovich and Verginsky with two very different crimes  to solve, one is the murder of a society beauty and the other is the disappearance of a child factory worker. On the brink of revolution, there are many factions at work here with some of them doing everything they can to slow down the investigation.  I'm wondering what will happen to these two fine, honest magistrates when the revolution comes.

Thursday, January 27, 2011

From Hot to Cold in One Short Trip

I wasn't ready to leave the wonderfully warm and beautifully blue southern Caribbean but I didn't have a choice; however, it isn't as cold this week as it was while I was gone. I was lucky that I missed the worst weather we have had this winter. Yay! I must admit, reluctantly, that it's good to be home again.

The trip started on a negative note at OHare when my suitcase was overweight and I had to remove a few pounds. Fortunately, it was easy since I had four books in the outside compartments and I could move them to my carry on bag. It still left me with 51.5 lbs but that was okay with American Airlines but it meant I wasn't going to be doing much shopping. Strangely enough it was still overweight on the return trip but they let me have 52.5 lbs so I didn't have to remove anything. I bought a hand scale but it broke before I weighed the suitcase.

It was hot and humid in San Juan after a heavy rain but we were there for sunshine so it was perfect. We walked around Old Town for a while and then sat outside the hotel restaurant with a Margarita and enjoyed the warmth. All we had time to do in San Juan was take a trolley ride around the city but I was able to see the forts even if I couldn't go inside. I was a little disappointed that I couldn't wander around inside them. We went to the cruise ship so early (11:30 a.m.) that we were lucky to find time for the trolley ride.

The ship, Celebrity Millenium, was nice but not as nice as last year's Equinox. The room was good size and the balcony was lovely. I spent a lot of time sitting out there reading during the day and late at night. I just hated being inside when I didn't have to. Much of our time seem to revolve around dining and I sure did my share. The meals were good: lots of seafood. I went to some talks on the islands and their history and some scrap book classes. The scrap booking was fun but who knows if I'll follow through and add pictures to what I started.

We went to Tortola, St Martins, St Lucia, Barbados, Grenada, Aruba and Curacao. My favorite tours were the butterfly farm and the natural rock bridge in Aruba and the Hato Caves in Curacao (discovered it was pronounced Curacel, how embarrassing). All of the islands were beautiful so I enjoyed them all, some more than others.

I read Sophie Hannah's The Dead Lie Down, the one I liked best in the series; Grave Goods by Ariana Franklin; Saturday's Child by Ray Banks and The First Wave by James Benn (either could have been the B book for Kerrie's Alphabet Meme but the internet was too slow to do a review), Tom Franklin's Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter; and I started Laura Hildenbrand's Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival. They were all good but I liked the last two the best.

And that is end of the saga of a wonderful trip filled with enough good memories to sustain me until spring. The days are getting longer so it won't be long until------it's SPRING!!!

Wednesday, January 12, 2011

I'm Off to Warmer Weather

Finally I begin my journey to leave the cold and snow behind. Begin being the key word since I still have to spend the night in a Chicago airport hotel before I fly to San Juan, Puerto Rico tomorrow. After sightseeing in P R and spending the night there, Friday a.m. I board the Celebrity Millenium for 11 days of cruising the Southern Caribbean.

I love being waited on and pampered while I'm on board but I also like the opportunity to go ashore each day to visit another island. I'm a grand tourist because there's very little I'm not interested in seeing. And if I'm not, I always have the proverbial book in hand.

Usually when I travel I have to do all of the work myself, constantly checking that I'm in the right place doing what I'm supposed to be doing but not this trip. This is a Bank trip and yeah there are a lot of other people going but once we arrive we'll all be on our own to do what ever we want.

I'm meeting my roommate, my cousin Judy who is flying from Florida, at the hotel in San Juan where we have time to check out the Old Town. I've heard the "not to miss" food item in San Juan is black bean soup in Old Town so we'll check it out. We travel well together because we pretty much like to do the same things. I have my travel Mah Jongg set so we can play a few games in our spare time. We have three players and maybe we can pick up another along the way.

I'm reading The Dead Lie Down by Sophie Hannah, the third in the series. There are some weird people in these books but I guess I should expect that since they are billed as psychological thrillers. The protagonists have so much baggage that they drive me bonkers but the author keeps me guessing about where the plot is going so maybe that's why I keep reading them.Since I'm only half way through the book, it's traveling with me.

Time to go.

Monday, January 10, 2011

A Lily of the Field-Letter A-Review

      http://farm1.static.flickr.com/22/33442158_d2a55449f3.jpg Today I finished A Lily of the Field, the 7th book in the Inspector Troy of Scotland Yard series but the fourth in chronological order. This is primarily the story of Meret Voytek, a cello prodigy and Auschwitz survivor; Viktor Rosen, a Jewish concert pianist and Meret's cello teacher; and Karel Szabo, a Hungarian physicist, who works on the Manhattan Project, building the atom bomb at Los Alamos. The story moves from Vienna and Auschwitz to New Mexico and post-war London.

For me, this was his best book since Black Out, the first Inspector Troy I read. The book moved at a quick pace from 1934 into 1948 delving into people's lives, politics and the arts. When Andre Skolnik is shot in the back in a London tube station, Inspector Troy becomes involved and all of the characters come together as he solves the case. 

I particularly like reading about life during WWII and the years after the war and I thought Lawton brought a fresh look to these times. The descriptions of the scarcity of commodities and how the Londoners were reacting to conditions in post-war London were particularly interesting to me. Everything was still rationed but the black market was thriving and the restaurants bustling for people who could afford them. I enjoyed comparing the differences between police work in the 21st century with how Troy dealt with solving crime and working with his narcs, with MI5 and with dead bodies. Lawton gave a good look at life during these years.

Tuesday, January 4, 2011

Resolutions and Books

Already one of my New Year's resolutions is proving a problem because somehow I have managed to hurt my foot so that I can't walk without great pain unless I am barefoot. Makes it rather hard to walk on the treadmill or to go work out. I'm hoping if I baby it, it will be recovered by next week when I leave for my cruise. I have tours set up for every island we go to so I'll have to do a lot of walking.

Decided I needed to upgrade my Kindle, mine is the original one, but it seems everyone else decided to buy one also so I couldn't get one delivered until almost a week into the cruise. Forget that idea. Since it's so old, I have to worry that the battery might die and I'll only have the few paperback books that I'm taking along for backup. I don't worry about power outages or plane crashes, I worry about running out of books to read. That's a major crisis!

The book I finished yesterday was Peepshow by Leigh Redhead, a little racier than my normal fare but interesting. I learned more about the sex trade than I ever imagined I could know or want to know. "Simone Kirsch always wanted to join the police force. She's smart, fit and wants to do good. But she has a problem. She has worked as a stripper for the last three years and the service won't let her in." After passing an investigator course in Melbourne, Australia, she has to solve a murder to save her friend who has been kidnapped. Somehow Redhead made the clubs and the people involved look less tawdry and depressing than most authors do so the book was rather upbeat. I liked it but may not read another in the series.

Sunday, January 2, 2011

New Year

I just read my first two comments on a post and that was fun too. This is a positive experience so far. Yesterday I got my little weather station going and my next project is to stream Netflix through my Wii and watch the movies on TV without getting the DVDs but I think I'll save this project until I return from my cruise.

In 2011 besides participating in several reading challenges, I have promised myself that I will exercise more and lose some of these dreaded pounds I have gradually added over the last few years. My weight has gone beyond the ridiculous so it's reckoning time. It's here in writing so I can remind myself every day. Sunday can be my report day. Last week I walked on the treadmill three days and exercised at Curves one. My eating yesterday was better than it was the rest of the week.

I had to stop reading The Saints of New York, R J Ellory, to start a BR by Linwood Barclay, Bad Guys, which is moving quickly. I did not like Bad Move, the first book in the Zack Walker series, very much because he was so silly but this one is funny and interesting. I hope to get back to the Ellory in a few days. It started out slowly but had picked up and was moving along by the 25th chapter.

Cheers