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  Click here to zoom down to today's entry (after clicking, you can bookmark this page and it should always take you to the current date).

 
Feb.1 2010
    I revisited the doctor today over my ear infection.  He thought I shouldn't fly (had a trip planned to California this weekend), and put me on another round of Amoxicillin.  At least my blood pressure was down in the normal range...
    We got a lot of 16 foot long pine tongue and groove boards today, and started putting them up on the wall in our cabin.  I don't know about "lipstick on a pig," but pine boards can cover up any number of imperfections in a house, as well as lighten the rooms with natural warmth.  I think working on the walls will be almost as good as a trip to California...

Feb. 2
    The only catch, when working on walls, are the switches and plugins.   They must be painstakingly cut out with a jigsaw.  Working with pine instead of sheetrock, the advantage is that if you cut the hole in the wrong place you haven't messed up a 4 X 8 foot piece of material.
    It rained a bit this morning, making our gravel street "mud-luscious," an e.e. cummings phrase found paging down on this link..  In just Spring --A fine poem, even if it needs updating as to the children's activities--video gaming and texting more like...

Feb. 3
    We're putting up a wall a day with the pine tongue and groove.  It looks to be a week or more to install it, then it will need some sort of finish.  It was warm enough (40F) to work without a coat on.  We opened the windows and doors to let the sawdust out.
    We went for a walk on the lake this afternoon--saw turkey tracks on the snow on the lake.  They were puzzling, because some of them seemed to only make a mark with the middle toe, so it looked like a creature with a long narrow foot.  This evening the coyotes have been nearby, howling quite a lot...

Feb. 5
        It snowed all day today, but at ground level the temperature was above freezing, so it didn't really mean it. This really feels like the winter that wasn't.
    This afternoon we were trying to trim out some of the felted fur on our long haired 18 year old cat.  This was to save the trauma for her and us involved with taking her to the vet, where they do a thing called the "lion cut," trimming the areas that are likeliest to clump up (note--don't get a long haired cat).   Anyway, we snipped into her skin, so ended up taking her to the vet where they will stitch her and they tacked on a few more things she probably needs and the result  was a $150 haircut.  Maybe she should run for president.

Feb. 6
    We started working on the ceiling today, which is harder on the back and neck.  
     Last night I was working through the interesting book, Lost Stories by Dashiell Hammett (who became an American household name mostly for The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man).   I'd read previously that he was stationed in the Aleutians during WWII, as was my father.  It turns out they were both on Adak, at the tip of the chain, a place so depressing that quite a few soldiers committed suicide.  I always wondered if Dad met or at least knew of Hammett, which seemed likely since Hammett edited the base daily newspaper, and my father was always intimately interested in journalism. Although both men were known to have spent some time on other bases in Alaska as well, it is conceivable they were there together.  The book made the conceivability a likelihood, when it mentioned Hammett got to meet Olivia DeHavilland when she did a USO visit.   Through some curious twist of fate, my father got to be the escort for the actress when she came to the island, so, assuming they were both on Adak, and not some other base when she toured, they would have met.  My mother didn't remember him mentioning it in his letters to her, but did remember he assembled a dark room on the base at one of the islands to give the soldiers something to do to stave off the boredom there.  
    When we were  growing up, a favorite holiday activity was watching 8 mm movies,  generally (especially with with teen siblings) deriding the films Dad took on the Aleutians, as they mostly consisted of planes taking off and landing (I being a pre-teen, thought the planes were cool).   Dad did mention that once a security guard thought Dad's films were a security risk.  (The most they might have revealed was the antiquity of some of the planes they were flying there) I asked what he did about it, and he said, "I pulled rank on him. (I think he was a captain, having gone in after college)"  That's about as much as I remember hearing of my Dad's military career, besides the fact he was the camp cryptographer.
   
Books read and other media of note
Lost Stories by Dashiell Hammett introduced by Joe Gores.   More a biographical journey through Hammett's life than any lost gems.   The pieces selected do show his evolution as a writer, and the notes provide a vivid representation of the successes and foibles of the great detective writer. 

Grave Peril by Jim Butcher.  
Wizard  Harry Dresden takes on a bunch of classic mean vampires and demented ghosts, while trying to avoid his wicked fairy Godmother.  It's kind of in a league of its own...

Woman in the Dark by Dashiell Hammett.  A minor novella, first serialized in 1933.  It's almost a western--kept woman comes to ex-con for help to leave her rich and powerful lover.  It seems pretty standard now, but at the time Hammett was helping to create the noir genre.

Ill Wind by Nevada Barr
.  The Hound of the Baskervilles was one of the first stories to make a supernatural scary story easily explained by the scientific method (a bit funny there, as I once saw a book with a preface by A.C. Doyle testifying to the validity of some purported fairy photos, which later were proven to be paper cutouts.)  In latter days, Tony Hillerman made  a career of Southwest Indian scary traditions.  This book, by Nevada Barr, falls into the Hillerman mode, set, as all her Anna Pigeon novels, in a national park, this time, Mesa Verde. She always adds realistic Park ranger details from her own experience, and a human touch to the story line to add interest.  This was, I believe, her second in the series, a long time ago now.




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