10036 + 4

I bagged my 0-skunk-30 power walk this morning in favor of a paddle on the Huron River. We paddled from the put-in just left of where Maple meets HR Drive down to Barton Dam and back. We think that’s about four miles total. Nice to get out there early when nobody much is around.

Followed that up with a short moe-skee-toe-ey hike on the “bottom” loop of the Barton Dam trail, where we have some birdhouses put up. Theeennnn… Over to the Mouse House. Actually it’s an apartment but “apartment” doesn’t rhyme with Mouse. Anyway. We had a desk that Mouse purchased at Treasure Mart in the Frog Hopper and the GG was hot to get it dropped off. Mouse made us coffee with her French press and I greatly enjoyed hanging out drinking it and reading a boooooook on my phone on her beautiful shaded balcony.

By the time we got home from all that, it was going on noon and I had not eaten anything yet today. I had a hankering for a BLT!!! So I trucked on over to the Plum to get bread and mayo (we don’t use a lot of either here so I don’t usually have it) and by about 1 PM, we were in the lunch business. Michigan-grown tomatoes and even some avocado. Probably from Cal-i-forn-i-aaa. Washed down by cucumber lime mint aqua fresca, which tastes much better than it looks. The 2011 version of Frog Juice. Don’t kid yourself! I miss the days when people would go through a gallon or so of the old version of Frog Juice overnight! I think we could add some gin to either version of Frog Juice…

I had vague plans for de-hoarding activities today. Did I get there? Naw. I did some pre-cooking for the week and ran my cute little Rooomba around the Landfill Chitchen (again, because somebody tracked a bunch of detritus in). And then. I got. Sucked into. A book. On my iPhone. The Help, in this case.

I have transitioned myself from paper to lucky-shucky almost completely. I transitioned to news via Twitter feeds over the winter and I have the New Yorker app on my iPad but haven’t used it much yet. I mean, I don’t generally keep my iPad in the basket in my bathroom… I didn’t really transition to downloading books until this summer. Partly because I haven’t been reading books regularly for a few years.

This summer’s crop of beach denizens were passing around a couple of books. The Help and South of Superior. I suppose I could’ve just *borrowed* those books but then I would have to *finish* the book in a timely fashion so somebody else in the beach borrowing queue could have it. And I probably wouldn’t do that. When I am at the moomincabin, it seems like I am either in the kitchen or walking or kayaking or running into town. No time to read for extended periods of time. None of that stuff represents any kind of complaint. I LOVE doing all that stuff! It is what it is!

Anyway, I downloaded both of those books to my iPhone/iPad. I’ve been mostly reading on my phone, not sure what that means or whether it’ll be a continuing trend. I am new at this. I liked The Help better than South of Superior, not that the two books can or should be compared. I just felt that The Help (I’m sick of typing emphasis tags so deal with it) was written better.

Yeah. Written better? What the heck does that mean? Obviously, I ain’t no English major but here goes. I liked how the author of The Help wove the story together from the perspective of several characters without losing us on the overall plot line. And I cared about her characters. All of them including the villain(ess) were drawn as multi-dimensional people. As we all are.

South of Superior. I liked the book enough that I couldn’t stop reading it until I finished it. It seemed obvious that the town McAllister was probably Grand Marais. I couldn’t ever figger where Crosscut or Halftrack were. But maybe that’s the point. But. The story line was the predictable “girl meets boy, girl loses boy, girl gets boy.” With a bunch of stereotypical Yooperland characters along the way. I loved recognizing the general terrain of the Yooperland. I thought the prose fell flat. It felt like the author was coached to keep things simple. Well, maybe too simple… The characters felt flat to me too. I am sure that I fit some aspects of the typical yooper stereotype (still, after all of these years on the Planet Ann Arbor) but I really don’t recognize a lot of the stuff in this book.

One Response to “10036 + 4”

  1. Marquis Says:

    I hope that South of Superior will be ready to return to STL when I come through town?