Dinner with Nan

My business travels brought me to Raleigh recently and though I was in a lot of pain and wearing an inconvenient apparatus on my right foot (which I had recently broken in an embarrassing home accident) I managed to drive to Columbia in order to have dinner at the home of my sister and her husband. My grandmother attended.

It was great to see Nan. She had recently moved from her lifelong home in Greenville to Lexington, where my sister lives, and I was able to spend two days with her before flying back to Seattle.

Pictured with me are my parents, my sister and Nan.

Lots of Books!

“You are supposed mark the books you have read, want to or again and again if it’s one you keep reading.”

I saw this on my friend Rick's blog. I wish I knew how these books were qualified for this list, but I don't. I marked the ones that I’ve read in blue. 34 -- that's a third. Of these, I will most likely read the Tolkien and Hictchhiker's books again some day. The ones I want to read or are planning to read are in green.

1. The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)
2. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
3. To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee) Sadly, this is my wife's favorite book
4. Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
5. 6. 7. The Lord of the Rings (Tolkien)
8. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)
9. Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)
10. A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)
11. Harry Potter 1 (Rowling)
12. Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)
13. Harry Potter 2 (Rowling) Two chapters only; left the book on a plane
14. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)
15. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
16. Harry Potter 3 (Rowling)
17. Fall on Your Knees (Ann-Marie MacDonald)
18. The Stand (Stephen King)
19. Harry Potter 4 (Rowling)
20. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
21. The Hobbit (Tolkien)
22. The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
23. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
24. The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
25. Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
26. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams) Rick introduced me to this one in 1983
27. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
28. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)
29. East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
30. Tuesdays with Morrie (Mitch Albom)
31. Dune (Frank Herbert)
32. The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)
33. Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
34. 1984 (Orwell)
35. The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)
36. The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett) Really liked this book
37. The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)
38. I Know This Much is True (Wally Lamb)
39. The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)
40. The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)
41. The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel)
42. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
43. Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)
44. The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom)
45. The Bible
46. Anna Karenina (Tolstoy) My pastor is big on Russian literature
47. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
48. Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt)
49. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
50. She’s Come Undone (Wally Lamb)
51. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
52. A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)
53. Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card)
54. Great Expectations (Dickens)
55. The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
56. The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)
57. Harry Potter 5 (Rowling)
58. The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)
59. The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood)
60. The Time Traveller’s Wife (Audrew Niffenegger)
61. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
62. The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
63. War and Peace (Tolsoy)
64. Interview With The Vampire (Anne Rice)
65. Fifth Business (Robertson Davis)
66. One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
67. The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants (Ann Brashares)
68. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
69. Les Miserables (Hugo)
70. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
71. Bridget Jones’ Diary (Fielding)
72. Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez) Love the title - know nothing about it
73. Shogun (James Clavell)
74. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
75.The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
76. Tigana (Guy Gavriel Kay)
77. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
78. The World According To Garp (John Irving)
79. The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)
80. Charlotte’s Web (E.B. White)
81. Not Wanted On The Voyage (Timothy Findley)
82. Of Mice And Men (Steinbeck)
83. Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier) Started this one once...
84. Wizard’s First Rule (Terry Goodkind)
85. Emma (Jane Austen)
86. Watership Down (Richard Adams) This paperback has been in my stack for 10 years
87. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
88. The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)
89. Blindness (Jose Saramago)
90. Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)
91. In The Skin Of A Lion (Ondaatje)
92. Lord of the Flies (Golding)
93. The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck)
94. The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)
95. The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum) My Uncle Ron turned me on to Ludlum many years ago
96. The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton)
97. White Oleander (Janet Fitch)
98. A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)
99. The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield) Did not like this one
100. Ulysses (James Joyce) ...or this one, either

Wardrobe Malfunctions

My wardrobe is a mess.

All of my recent clothing purchases have come as a result of packing errors and missed flights.

And I've been buying my clothes now at Eddie Bauer, a place I'd not shopped before last year. It's not because I like their merchandise (I guess I do, but that's not why I shop there). I shop at Eddie Bauer because it's on Michigan Avenue around the corner from my Chicago hotel.

I am adding to my wardrobe items not chosen to compliment what I already own. Thursday night I bought a blue shirt comfortable for wearing on a flight the following morning, a clean undershirt and new socks. I had missed my flight hours earlier and it was rescheduled for the following morning; I had nothing clean to wear.

I arrived in Chicago on one trip back in the fall, and when I got to my hotel I found a notice in my suitcase that informed me TSA had inspected by bag. And wouldn’t you know it – all of my pants were now missing! And I was in Chicago for four days. Talk about being inconvenienced by our country’s present security measures!

So I pressed on, as I usually do, only to find three pairs of slacks hanging on the doorknob of my study, where I’d failed to pack them beforehand.