Vacate

For me it’s imperative that I leave my garden in August. I am so sick to death of the garden that if I don’t leave it, I might wreck it. This year, rather than growing beautifully without me and absence making the heart grow fonder, my garden, out of spite I think (or lack of rain), bloomed out and started to shut down. I missed the full bloom of the brugmansia – had I known that they only give one good show, I wouldn’t have bothered grow it (the pessimist in me knowing I’d miss it.) Happily, our kittehsitter, Z’s sister, enjoyed it for us (if a brugmansia blooms with no one to take its picture is it still beautiful? – Who cares.) Likewise, the night blooming cereus opened all up again and thank goodness Kayla caught it and was gracious enough to say she was awed.

Meanwhile we (Z, Nino, our family and friends) kicked back at “the lake”. My parents found a rental property that by some miracle has been left as its original vacationers intended: A cobbed together house on a rocky pine woods slope, with paths to the hammock and dock worn through huckleberry bushes and scrub oak. Half a dozen – just the right number – of rocking chairs on the porch, shelves full of books and an enormous collection of mugs, loon “artwork”, and one life-size wooden goose. I dove headfirst into crystal clear water and into some of the best books I’ve read in a long time (if you haven’t read Tinkers yet…) and for one week, went as far from any garden as I could possibly could.

Do you need to get away from your garden by now too? (or is it just me.)

(next up “Staycate”.)

Literary kitteh (or the BBC Big Read)

I’ve been a little bit sidetracked lately and if this were a blob that I felt under obligation to write, I’d apologize for my absence from it.  But as it is, I will just offer up this diverting and completely non-garden related meme that I just encountered on one of my time sucking forays within the facebooks:

The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

Instructions:
Look at the list and put an ‘x’ after those you have read.  (copy and paste to do your own)

I have put two x’s by the ones both Z and I have read and one x if only one of us has read it.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen (xx)
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien (xx)
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte (x)
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling (x)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee (x)
6 The Bible – ()
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte (x)
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell (x)
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman ()
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens (x)
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott (xx)
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy (x)
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller (xx)
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare ()
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier (x)
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien (xx)
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk (x)
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger (x)
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger ()
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot (x)
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell ()
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald (x)
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens ()
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy ()
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams (xx)
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh ()
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky ()
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck (x)
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll (xx)
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame (xx)
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy (x)
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens (x)
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis (xx)
34 Emma – Jane Austen (x)
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen (xx)
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis (xx)
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini – (x)
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres (x)
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden (x)
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne (xx)
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell (x)
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown (x)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez (x)
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving (x)
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins (x)
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery (xx)
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy (x)
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood (xx)
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding ()
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan ()
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel (x)
52 Dune – Frank Herbert (xx)
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons ()
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen (x)
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth ()
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon (x)
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens (x)
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley (xx)
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon ()
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez (x)
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck ()
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov ()
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt ()
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold (x)
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas ()
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac (x)
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy (x)
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding (x)
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie ()
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville (x)
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens (xx)
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker (x)
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett (xx)
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson (x)
75 Ulysses – James Joyce (x)
76 The Inferno – Dante (x)
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome ()
78 Germinal – Emile Zola ()
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray ()
80 Possession – AS Byatt (x)
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens (xx)
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell ()
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker (xx)
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro (x)
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert ()
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry ()
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White (xx)
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom ()
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (x)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton ()
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad (x)
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery (xx)
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks ()
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams (xx)
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole (x)
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute (x)
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas (x)
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare (x)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl (xx)
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo (x)

We’re feeling so snart [sic] that between us we’ve read 72 out of the hundred (me 62, Z 33, Audrey 20 – she prefers kitty porn to the classics).  Z wanted me to mention that between us we’ve seen 49 of these adapted to stage or screen, including a few cartoons.  Your turn.