Life: It Goes On - January 31

Last day of January? Hell, yes! It's been a month that's good to have behind us. Winter, surgeries, sad things. On the plus side, we had attended a wedding, spent time with friends, and we got to celebrate this guy's birthday this past week!

We're bracing for a big snow starting tomorrow night, possibly up to 19". By "bracing," I mean "planning how I'll spend the day I won't go into work." Which probably means we'll only get enough snow to make it a real pain in the ass to get back and forth to work but not enough to prevent me from going. That's how it usually works. I think it's a safe bet that the groundhog wouldn't see his shadow here on Tuesday. I can never remember if that means an early spring or 6 more weeks of winter.

This Week I'm:

Listening To: Podcasts, still. I listened to an interesting story on "Stuff You Missed In History Class" about Queen Victoria which made me want to rewatch the movie "Young Victoria" and do a little research. Love when that happens!

Watching: At the moment, I'm watching the 1995 remake of "Sabrina," starring Julia Ormond, Harrison Ford and Greg Kinnear.

Reading: I'll finish Alison Case's Nelly Dean today. Nelly Dean was the narrator of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights. I'm never sure about books based on characters in other books but I'm enjoying this one quite a lot so far.

Making: Miss H was heading down to Kansas City to celebrate Christmas with them this weekend so this week was all about finishing up their gifts. Somehow I neglected to get a pic of the final products but here's an idea of what we did.

Planning: On spending today putting my house back in order. I've been back and forth to Lincoln three times this week, had book club one night, and celebrated The Big Guy's birthday two nights. Needless to say, this place could use some TLC!

Grateful: To still have both of my parents with us. I watched a family put their mother, grandmother, great-grandmother to rest on Monday and was, once again, reminded that I am no where near ready to do that. Love them both so much!

Enjoying: Still being in my pajamas at noon. Which, to be honest, is not that unusual on the weekend.

Feeling: Proud of my dad. He spoke at the funeral the other day and did such a wonderful job. He ended his talk with the most perfect line.

Looking forward to: Reading all day on Tuesday. C'mon snow!

Fairy Tale Fridays - Coloring Books

Have you taken up coloring yet? It's certainly "the" thing for adults these days and there's a full range of prices and subject matter of books and you can spend up to $100 for a good set of colored pencils. Furthermore, I read recently that coloring is good for you - it helps relieve stress and engages your mind in ways that other activities don't. Miss H has never stopped enjoying coloring so she's very excited about the grown up options available these days.

I haven't taken it up yet - there seems to be little enough time to do the things I'd like to do as it is. Still, I used to enjoy coloring quite a lot and I enjoy doing things that allow me to be creative.  I may have actually been the one to color in a lot of those maps the kids used to have to do for school. Don't tell the teacher!

And now? Fairy tale coloring books! They might be just the thing to convince me to take up the colored pencils. After all, I'd be getting to combine two things I enjoy.

Have you joined the coloring book crowd?

Amelia Earhart: Beyond The Grave by W. C. Jameson

Amelia Earhart: Beyond The Grave by W. C. Jameson
Published by Taylor Trade Publishing January 2016
Source: egalley courtesy of the publisher

Publisher's Summary:
This well-researched book is a biography of the life—and disappearance—of Amelia Earhart, the pioneering aviator who was the first woman to fly solo over the Atlantic in 1928. But did Amelia’s plane really crash and sink in 1937, or was her fate entirely different?

My Thoughts:
I've had an interest in Amelia Earhart since I was a young girl, buying the official story of the mystery of her disappearance in 1937. It wasn't until I got much older before I became aware of the many theories of what might really have happened to Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan. But what I had been aware of, before this book, was the idea that Earhart and Noonan had survived for some time after their plane initially crashed and the so-called discoveries of the crash site based on recovered airplane pieces.

What I was not aware of was the enormous number of theories as to why Earhart was actually making that fateful flight, whether or not she and Noonan survived the crash, and what became of them if they did survive. Jameson is not only well aware of the many theories but has collected research on many of them and determined that the most feasible of the theories is that Earhart's flight was a ruse to allow her to spy on Japanese activities on the Marshall Islands, that she and Noonan survived the crash of their plan, that they were taken prisoner by the Japanese, and that both returned to the U.S. where they lived the remainder of their lives under aliases.

Earhart certainly was not the aviatrix we were all lead to believe she was.

"Earhart possessed a set of skills and accomplishments related to flying and was fearless, to be sure, but not necessarily any more so than a number of other female pilots of the time. She was no better or worse than the rest, but as a result of fearlessness and a desire to break down certain social barriers along with a clever publicity and marketing campaign, she managed better breaks than her contemporaries. She was, without a doubt, the most famous."

I'm okay with the idea that Earhart wasn't the greatest female pilot; I don't think that takes anything away from what she was able accomplish for women.

Other researchers have latched on to Earhart's weaknesses as a pilot, her recklessness (rather than fearlessness), and her willingness to rely on her husband and promoter G. P. Putnam as reasons that her flight was doomed every step of the way. Other researchers have also floated a number of theories as to what happened on that flight and what became of Earhart and Noonan. Jameson seems to rely entirely on those researchers in determining which of the theories he believes is true.

While he does advance a number of the theories, Jameson often seems to dismiss theories and evidence that don't advance the theory he supports. He also seems to accept as fact a number of things that seemed, at best, suspicious to me.

For example, he relies heavily on the "evidence" presented by a yman named Robert Myers who was a very young man who was allowed to spend a lot of time around Earhart and her crew as they prepared for her final flight. The problem with this, for me, is that the stories Myers told were the recollections of a man many years after he purportedly overheard conversations, the recollections are the interpretations of a young man of parts of conversation he overheard rather than conversations he was a part of, and that Jameson believes Myers' recollections to be fact based on Myers passing a lie detector test decades after the events occurred. I would think a person that has been telling himself the same stories for decades would have come to believe them to be fact, making a lie detector test pointless.

Jameson certainly raises some questions for me, and I don't entirely rule out the possibility that Jameson may be correct. There are just so many questions raised by everything he relies on. The woman many believed was Earhart, for example, Irene Craigmile Bolam, seemed to run with a group of people involved in aviation. I can't help but think that if Earhart were trying to escape her past, she wouldn't put herself in a position where questions might be raised.

My biggest problem with this book, though, is the fact that it is one of a number of "Beyond The Grave" books that Jameson has written. I'm lead to believe that Jameson has picked historical mysteries, done research into the research on each, and grabbed onto a conclusion that would create the biggest buzz. I haven't read any of Jameson's other books so this is just a feeling I have and I may way off base about his body of work.

Too many questions, not enough answers for me to really enjoy this one.

Life: It Goes On - January 24

Life: It Goes On - this seems to apply more than usual this week.

My mom had a knee replacement on Monday. She's got a long road of recovery ahead of her but she reports that she's already walking better than she was before the surgery. The fact that can happen always makes me think of the opening sequence of that old t.v. show, The Bionic Man, when they talked about making him "better, faster, stronger." I never ceased to be amazed by her strength.

The Big Guy had a scan recently and a scope procedure this week which both confirmed that he remains cancer free after over four years. Anyone who's come through cancer knows that there will always be things to deal with in the aftermath, but, as we like to say when we start to feel sorry for ourselves, it beats the hell out of the alternative!

Lastly, my parents lost a dear friend last week. She had her husband have been friends of my parents for over 55 years. He was my dad's first principal; she was one of the nurses in the delivery room when I was born. Can you even fathom having people in your life that you've been friends with for so long? Betty's family will have to figure out how to go on without their mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, beloved wife. My parents will have to adjust to life without another of their friends.

This Week I'm:

Listening To: More radio time this week but still catching up on my podcasts. "Catching up" may not be entirely accurate. "Keeping up" might be a better phrase. I did wish I'd had an audiobook Tuesday when, thanks to a rush hour snowfall, my 30 minute commute took almost two hours.

Watching: Movies: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and Inside Out. We liked them both. In fact, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. was one of the best adaptations of a 1960's television show I've seen; they played it very much like the tone of the television show.

Reading: Why didn't any of you warn me about the sadness that is the ending of A Man Called Ove??? I seriously cried in a hospital waiting room! I started books, switched books, and reorganized my reading plan this week. Because of the archive dates on books from Netgalley, I decided to wait on reading My Name Is Lucy Barton until later and started Nelly Dean (she of Withering Heights). I also started Why We Write About Ourselves and decided that it's a perfect nightstand book. I'm moving The Flying Troutmans off the nightstand and I'll read it when BG decides he need the iPad.

Making: Pork roast, tator tot casserole, cheeseburger pie, runzas, fettucine alfredo. I've decided cooking is fun again! This week I'm planning to try a couple of new recipes including a crockpot chicken marsala. What's been cooking in your kitchen?

Planning: The past couple of weeks have been busier than usual with more on the calendar, longer work hours, a week of being down with a cold. My plan for this week is to get my house back in order.

Good thing my mom's room was big!

Grateful for: Family. In the University of Nebraska fight song, there is a line that says "we all stick together in all kinds of weather." That's my family. I'm sure hospitals never know what to make of us but we travel in packs when it's time to support one another.

Enjoying: Watching my daughter stretch out on the floor in my mom's hospital room the other day with a book. There are four readers in my immediate family. Miss H was not one of them. Now that she's really discovered how relaxing reading at bedtime can be and how great it is to have a book to pass time, I think we may just have a fifth reader!

Feeling: It's been a week of feeling all of the things.

Looking forward to: Thanks to last week's winter weather, book club had to be postponed. So this week I'm once again looking forward to spending an evening with my ladies, talking about A Man Called Ove. I wonder if anyone else cried?

Bourbon Empire: The Past and Future of America's Whiskey by Reid Mitenbuler - Guest Review

Bourbon Empire: The Past and Future of America's Whiskey by Reid Mitenbuler
Published by Penguin Publishing Group May 2015
Source: courtesy of the publisher

When I was pitched this book, I knew immediately it was one that my husband would enjoy. I was right!

Publisher's Summary:
In this savory history of bourbon whiskey, journalist Mitenbuler recounts the journey of this archetypal American libation: distilled from a mix of half corn and half rye, wheat, or other grain, and aged in charred-oak barrels. The narrative follows from bourbon’s backwoods origins, through its patriotic ascension in the late 18th century over British-associated rum, to its modern maturity (after a flirtation with gangsterism during Prohibition) as the creature of multinational corporations. Mitenbuler engagingly explores the science and lore of whiskey-making and the resulting subtleties of taste, both lampooning the new wine-style whiskey connoisseurship and wallowing in it (let the “concentrated bursts of honey, spice and vanilla flavors unwind on your tongue,” he murmurs). But bourbon’s convoluted cultural associations fascinate him just as much: its protean links to cowboys, blue-collar joes, and Wall Street bankers, and the fake advertising backstories about rugged individualist founders sprouted from Kentucky hollers. Mitenbuler’s prose is relaxed and mellow with a shot of wry; his entertaining, loose-limbed narrative revels in the colorful characters and droll hypocrisies of capitalism at its booziest.


The Big Guy's Thoughts:
A very interesting book that outlines how bourbon shaped and has been a huge part of American history since before the American revolution.  I was amazed how much the growth of this country and bourbon production, sale and consumption was integrated with many points in history and in many circles of society, high and low.

Many of the fathers of our country including Jefferson and Washington had stills and whiskey was thought to have medicinal qualities, so they provided rations to their fighting men in the field.  Lewis and Clark carried significant whiskey rations on their legendary trip across America.  Mitenbuler goes through the entire history of America from the not only the American Revolution but our Civil War where whiskey was thought to improve fighting skills.  Obviously used as a pain killer in the gory field medical hospitals, but i would imagine to summon up courage to go into battle in the first place as well.

Mitenbuler spends a good deal of time discussing whiskey and prohibition and the beginnings of moonshiners  which was the humble beginnings of America's beloved sport of NASCAR auto racing.  Mitenbuler reviews a great deal of history over the various whiskey brands, families and companies rise and fall through history before and after prohibition.  There were quality issues that brought about government regulation for safety of our fine American beverage and also the oak barrels and charcoal aging process developed over the years.

So the book covers the vast impact that whiskey has had on American society from the settlement of our country, through our wars, the business side of it's development through today's resurgence across the globe.

Having enjoyed some of the spirits myself, good and bad through my personal history, I really never thought of whiskey having this much impact on our society in the past and to this day.  A very enlightening read.