What we are reading for the next year or so

Last night was our annual book club book selection.  We meet monthly most of the year but take two months off over the summer & the month of December so we are usually looking for nine titles with a good mix of fiction/non-fiction, classics/fluff (or that brass ring:  classic fluff).

This year we had no real wildcards (poems or collections or plays) but B****** & I had both heard an NPR program about a novel about RLStevenson & I have suggested Treasure Island before as a quick-read.  Merging them together seemed natural. 
Our other choices came from all over the place.  Old favorites of non-members (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn), recently deceased authors in the news (The Snow Leopard), recently banned books in the news (The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian).  It is not unusual for books to be proposed by different people in different years (The Light Between Oceans).  One in particular made me laugh because it was proposed by another member but until I was reading the blurb I had completely forgotten I had read it..& loved it (I will let you guess which one). 

Without further ado here are the next books.  Yes we choose through September 2015; that whole taking the summer off thing means we have been facing our big book almost immediately & we all thought maybe we would like to work up to that one instead.

Sept 2014:  Unbroken by Lauren Hillenbrand
October 2014:  A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
November 2014:  The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
January 2015:  Mistress of the Art of Death by Ariana Franklin
February 2015:  The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen
March 2015:  The Light Between Oceans by M. L. Stedman 
April 2015:  Under the Wide & Starry Sky by Nancy Horan AND Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
May 2015:  Art Thief by Noah Charney
June 2015:  Orphan Train by Christina Baker Kline
Sept 2015:  The Dovekeepers by Alice Hoffman

If you are interested you can take a wander through current & previous selections on
my kitchen-table-book-club shelf:

Quilter's confetti

Going to the dogwoods

One of my new year's resolutions -yes, I know it is May & hey I never said this year anyhow- was to document more of what I am doing at the herbarium.  I think I have said before, but I know it has been awhile, a herbarium is to plant specimens as a library is to books.  It houses the specimens under a system that allows retrieval, etc.  It is hard for people, even people who are my age, to contemplate a catalog that does not have any connection to computers what-so-ever, but the reality is that the wood collection at the herbarium is still on index cards; you want to see a particular family, you go to the card file that the plant was assigned to circa whenever the cards were written which was anywhere from the 1930s to the mid 1980s, pull the card, find the number which can be tricky all on its own as there is no standardized way of recording information on these cards but if you are lucky some kind soul will have written the number in the upper left hand corner, you take that number & go to the cabinets, search through hundreds of pounds of wood & pull up your specimen.  If you are lucky.

Enter me.  I am slowly but steadily recording the information on the cards in a single database (OKay that's a lie: for convenience & archival safety I use smaller databases in the same format & merge them into one periodically) so that some day it will be possible to look up some random specimen & locate it -or at least where it should be- quickly.

Yesterday I wrapped up Cornaceae.  Most of our samples in this family are actual Cornus whatever (Cornus drummundii, Cornus nuttallii, Cornus sanguinae & so forth).  & most of the Cornus themselves are Cornus florida.  Yes, yes the herbarium is in Florida, but most of these are from trees that never were.  Besides the "florida" in a botanical name means flowering & is not intended as a regional designation. 

It is impressive how unremarkable the wood alone of this favorite tree is.  Don't get me wrong, it is a nice looking wood, gentle rings, subtle shading.  After years spent in a wood collection I have developed an affinity for these things & I can tell you the dogwood is lovely in an unremarkable way.  Because that is what these are:  dogwoods.  Imagine my astonishment to learn this tree is actually listed as threatened or endangered in several of the northern states where it used to be abundant.  it is frequently listed as a "rare native".  That this was not always so is driven home by the sheer volume of specimens from all over the US. 

Cinnamon-girl good-bye

Before I sat down to write this I took a look through previous posts to see what I had told the world about Cinnamon-girl.  The answer is not all that much.  So let me begin with what a very nice goat she was.  She was not a super goat, she didn't do anything remarkable.  But she was a fine goat ambassador.  Ambassadress.

She came when she was called, either by name or by saying "Meheheheheh".  & she loved to make conversation: when someone talked to her she always talked back, usually in a very soothing "Mhmhmhmh" sort of way.  When she felt quiet she would rest her chin & throat against you & burp quiet grassy burps. 

Cinnamon-girl has not been doing well for a couple months.  She used to run like a marionette cut loose of her strings, but over the winter she stopped running entirely.  Most days she slept alone in the barn, just sort of drowsing until I called her to come for snack time in the backyard (she ate my brand new roses this weekend; they will grow back).  On Sunday I told A I didn't think it would be much longer.  She was stumbling a bit, but hungry & eat happily.

But today, no snack time.  I found her down at the back of the pasture.  Her legs were cycling & I while I could push her up on to her chest (& did so I could pour water into her mouth -which she could swallow).  I kept her as cool as I could, pulling her out of the sun & putting an old -t-shirt under her head so she didn't get grit in her eye.  A came home from work & did what needed to be done.

We buried her in where we have put dogs & cat,  mini-mule & even emus.  When we put her in the ground, we both realized how very thin she was although  she had been eating plenty.  She was not a young goat when we got her.  I don't have the heart to look up her papers right now, but we are know she was in her late teens/early twenties. 

Good bye Cinnamon-girl.  I will miss the way you stood on your hind legs, your front legs hanging down from the elbow eating leaves from the trees.  You always looked like Miss Gulch, if she ate leaved from trees.  Which would have improved her. 

One old dog