Another Birthday

 Friday was Janet's birthday, so we headed out of town for the day. We both like Manchester, down in southern Vermont, and so this has become our go-to place for close getaways. Mainly, I was taking her there to treat her at Northshire Bookstore, but also to grab a great meal. It was an absolutely lovely time, and we're already talking about what we'll be doing on her birthday in Sicily next year.

I've never really been a Bed and Breakfast type, although the Inn at Ormsby Hill was nice.

I ended up sitting out here in the living room reading to my heart's content. They had a wonderful collection of books. I don't think they left the great books in the Library so that the patrons in the other room could enjoy them.

We stay in what was called the Library, although all the really nice books were out in the living room. The book in the Library room were mainly there for aesthetic effect, although, if you're a book lover, it was a nice room.

The Mystico Italian restaurant is our default choice in Manchester, and, as always, the meal was fantastic. Plus, it's like a hundred feet from Northshire Bookstore. Most importantly, my lovely wife had a wonderful time.

Janet's directions were to select as many books as she wanted, and I kept sending her back to get more. She had just finished the Donna Leon Brunetti series, so she picked up Leon's book about writing and her life in Venice.

And, somehow, I walked away with three books, as usual, raiding the New York Review of Books series.

2025 Readings 114

     "You should understand, Mr. Blodget, that one thing I have come to trust is that people find what they are looking for, what they believe on some level that they either need or deserve. I think this is proven moment to moment, so I take it as more than mere happenstance that you are here. I take it as a measure of your will, which honors us and obliges me to be honest."

     Blodget looked up from the Tibetan pieces to find the doctor's eyes directly upon him. "Please."

     "Well. Something else I've come to trust is that truth is provided in precisely the measure and form appropriate to each of us individually. I find, more over, that the disposition of truth is not, as it may sometimes seem, to withdraw and then appear. That is a function of our concentration. The disposition of truth is to remain constant. That way, when a man chooses to look, directly at whatever happens to be surrounding him - whatever it may be - he will find the truth there waiting. Am I clear?"

Brooks Hansen, The Chess Garden

This morning I finish my latest, I'm guessing my fifth, reading of Brooks Hansen's The Chess Garden. As always, I sobbed. I didn't cry because the ending is sad, although it is in a way, but because of its almost crushing beauty. As I was saying to my great friend Sarah this morning, The Chess Garden is, to me, a remarkably generous gift. I mention Sarah mainly because she's the only person that I've recommended the novel to who has loved it like I do. Seriously, we can't talk about it without getting misty-eyed. Every other person I've recommended it to (and I've dragooned so many people into reading it) have either not finished it or tried to gracefully cover up how mystified they were by my love for the novel. It's on that short list with Dickens's Bleak House or Proust's Remembrance of Things Past or Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet (if that's actually a novel) or Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio for the designation as my favorite novel. I don't know if I completely understand it - or that I'm supposed to understand it - although I also feel that I come a little closer with every reread. Recently I purchased an Emanuel Swedenborg (his life and philosophy play a huge role in the novel) reader, hoping that will give me more tools for my next reread. In the spring I'm going to start my latest reread of Remembrance of Things Past, although this will be my first with the new translation, with the more appropriate title In Search of Lost Time, I recently acquired. My plan was to finish the reread so that I wouldn't feel the pressure to take all seven volumes in my suitcase this summer to Sicily. My logic was much the same with The Chess Garden, especially since my copy is falling to pieces. However, the thought that I would go anyplace without the novel is madness. Obviously, The Chess Garden is remarkably, impossibly highly, recommended, and I'll apologize in advance. I would like to point out that Doctor Uyterhoeven, who is talking to Blodget above, and I share the same birthday. Like Doctor Uyterhoeven, I plan on leaving my cane hanging from the apple tree outside the cabin when I head overseas.

Mike in Madrid

 It's funny the pictures that don't make this blog, at least until years after they should have. Here's a picture that I snapped over a decade ago on the Spain/Portugal trip that I led with my friends Mike and Kelly. We disappeared into the streets of Madrid in search of a bar with the NFL package, and, clearly, we succeeded in our quest.

I guess I had never posted this previously because we're clearly in a bar, although I can't imagine any parent who would send their kids on a student trip to Madrid and not assume that a bar (or several bars) would be in the offing. That said, that trip featured about the most nerdy, in-bed-by-ten group of students on any of the dozen trips I ran.

More CFL Swag

 And how did I not post this picture earlier? I'm signed up with all the CFL teams as an insider so I get all sorts of emails from them, including a sweet sale from the Hamilton Tiger-Cats. Sooner I will have jerseys from all CFL teams (not even counting the various and sundry supporting t-shirts and sweatshirts), so I will be empowered to attend any game without identifying myself as a southern continent rube.

That's a sweet Bo Levi Mitchell jersey, and they they threw in the long sleeve t-shirt for free. The Tiger-Cats have become the favorite CFL team of all of my friends, but, at least to this point, they remain only one of my four favorite CFL teams.

Grey Cup Excellence

 There was a time when my son and I would be making a Shaw's run on Grey Cup Sunday and we'd make some comment, parodying the mad grocery store rush for Super Bowl Sunday, that everyone must have done their shopping early. And then I began my years-long quest to bring the beauty of the CFL to my friends, although I suspect they might consider it an annual ritualistic dragooning. Now that I've brought nineteen different people to CFL games, in six different Canadian cities, the Grey Cup is a thing. For a couple years my excellent friend Craig would host an annual Grey Cup soiree (one time I drove across the blizzard in a wretched storm to buy a motherlode of TimBits for the game). This year I think  an evolving group of folks watched several games together, topped off by Kevin (who, despite his protestations, is a huge CFL fan) hosting a Grey Cup party. It was an Event of Excellence, as one might assume (and not simply because we saw a rouge). The Alouettes are our hometown team, and the Roughriders are not one of my four favorite CFL teams (although after this summer's Saskatchewan/Winnipeg doubleheader I might change my mind), but I was quite happy with the Roughriders victory.

I brought a wealth of CFL swag to celebrate the combatants: the Saskatchewan Roughriders and the Montreal Alouettes.

Erik and Kevin, two CFL game veterans, were enthusiastic participants.

Marcelle and her brother Roger are consistent attendees of Lake Monster games, but have taken blood oaths to attend their first Alouettes game next summer.

Can a game start better than 1-0? It's a testament to my success in winning over my friends to the CFL that immediately after the scoring of the rouge I received multiple texts from around the country with one word: "Rouge!!"

And then there's that magic moment when the Mounties bring down the Grey Cup. It says something wonderful about Canada that one of the Mounties was a Sikh, and that everyone, quite rightly, just viewed it as another day in the week. Sadly, in Trump's America, the racist, xenophobic rants would start firing up the social media hellscape.

And Kevin, who, as we all know, is a great cook, whipped up some killer poutine. I'm already sad that I won't be in-country for next year's Grey Cup (unless I make the most amazing secret mad dash over, because, well, it's the Grey Cup FFS).

2025 Readings 113

 If I blew through Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower in two days, my 113th book dragged itself across the finish line in dribs and drabs after months on my nightstand. This is not a condemnation of Vladimir Nabokov's Lectures on Don Quixote, but rather the recognition that it was not a book designed for a passionate reading marathon. The title of the book describes itself: it is the actual lecture notes that Nabokov prepared for a class he taught on Cervantes's classic. However, Nabokov clearly didn't consider Don Quixote to be a classic, and was dragooned into teaching it. He considered it to be a cruel book, and I think that's an interesting (and in many ways correct) interpretation. Nabokov proposed that Cervantes's talent as a writer and the beauty of Don Quixote as a character made up for a poorly structured novel that mainly seemed designed to cruelly misuse the poor knight errant. I only read Don Quixote in its entirety a couple years ago and really liked it, flying into a minor rage when some wanker on a podcast that Janet likes was telling his listeners that they didn't need to bother reading the novel. I'm not going to agree with the wanker in question or Nabokov, because I definitely think you should read Don Quixote. Still, it was interesting to get Nabokov's very different interpretation, and it inspired me to give Cervantes another read sooner than later. 

Christmas 2025 - the Prequel

 OK, so Christmas is clearly not here yet, and I don't know exactly what form it will take (we might be down visiting Janet's mom or we might be spending it with Gary and Ali and some combination of her family or we might be spending it blissfully alone). So, I thought I would go ahead and post the beginnings of the celebration.

I think we went a little crazy on the Christmas tree this year. At Morse Farm, our traditional location to buy our tree, we had a sense that it was a tall tree, but we didn't seem to understand how fat it was as well. Thank God we live in a cabin, or that guy would have been hunched over by the roof.

I was out running errands when Janet began to decorate the tree, and when she realized that we don't really have enough lights or ornaments (but considering this is our last Christmas here for, at the very least, years, we couldn't justify purchasing more stuff for decorating).

Being a problem solver (and also, obviously, usually a problem creator), I jumped in to help fill out the tree decorations. Thank you Mothman! That said, I'm disturbed that the Banff Trading Post didn't selling Merman stuffies.

Merry Cryptidmas!! What problems doesn't Mothman solve?

It's strange to think that next year we'll be celebrating the Christmas season in Sicily. I started doing some research on Christmas traditions in Sicily and I think it's going to be pretty amazing.