More Summer Lightness, Sort Of

Professor J,

I think it's really funny that we meant to keep it light for summer and now are reading War and Peace. 

 Well okay, then. Something to discuss! It's been about 25 years since I read Anna Karenina and a collection of short stories by Tolstoy. I'm about 75 pages in so the characters and their situations are still being revealed. One of the things I love about Tolstoy is his ability to describe those emotions we have that are hard to recognize even when they are our own. Mixed emotions and bittersweet things are presented in paragraphs that make us feel as if he understands us. Brilliant way to make us care about the characters. By making them painfully human. I remember in AK I thought that his insight about that was his great gift. You may not know how you feel, but LT did. ;)

While doing a quick Wiki search on him I noticed that it said "His teachers described him as "both unable and unwilling to learn." More education fodder for Sir Ken!

I had no idea LT had such an influence on Ghandi, though I was aware of some of his rather strange religious ideas.

As for your Independence Week concept: I noticed that over the weekend everyone was far more relaxed than normal. The lake I walk around was crowded with people fishing on Saturday morning. Clearly we all need at least one day to settle into real time off.  

This summer is a bit overwhelming in many ways. There is lot of change going on so several things are in limbo. One of the problems overwhelming me is having to deal with the things that older relatives have accumulated that must then be dealt with when they no longer need them. You can cram an amazing amount of stuff in a small one bedroom apartment. I'm rethinking all my own possessions. I have a personal blog post coming up about that on Friday.  Scandinavian design looks better all the time.

Just after my posts where I've complained about the heat, we had unseasonably cool temps and low humidity here for the holiday weekend. Sitting on the porch swing drinking my morning coffee and feeling "chilly" is a rarity around here in July.  I stayed outdoors as much as I could for several days to make the most of it.

A few more things I like about summer:

Summer movies like Jaws, The Long Hot Summer, Mr. Hobbes Takes a Vacation, The Seven Year Itch, The Sandlot, and Summertime.

The Beach Boys.

Mojitos on the porch. And the occasional mint julep, of course!

Cooking with fresh herbs.

Going barefoot.

Blueberries.

Spring honey.

Fresh flowers in the house.