More Fun With Dates

Awesome Dates:
Rebecca made the following comment to my last post:
"Arlene today is 3-6-9. Does that mean anything to you? I'm thinking it must!"
My response: 3-6-09 is 3M awesome. The last such date was 2-4-06 and before that 1-2-03. The next such date will be 4-8-12. The series continues up to 12-24-36.

Walking to Quebec:
With the excuse of a morning dental appointment, I took a break from my walk to Quebec yesterday. Unfortunately and inevitably this effected my food choices. I find that I'm able to eat sensibly and without a specific diet program when I'm being disciplined with exercise. Shock of all shocks, I discovered for the seven billionth time that the opposite is also true. Today is a new day. I'll be putting in an hour on the elliptical later in the day.

A Review of Books:
I'd forgotten how much I enjoy Kaye Gibbons' writing. Her style is deceptively simple and compelling. In Charms for the Easy Life she writes in the voice of Margaret, the grand daughter of respected folk healer, Charlie Tate. Beginning with Charlie's marriage to a worthless husband in 1902 and spanning the years until just after World War II, her canvas is a large one and filled with a lot of interesting people. The setting is rural North Carolina and the various interconnected stories have a Southern feel to them. A most delightful book.

Women of the Silk by Gail Tsukiyama: I enjoyed this book, yet sometimes found myself noticing the quality of the writing instead of being pulled forward by the story. It's not that the writing is bad; it's just that it doesn't seem to have the natural flow to it that I find with the writers who's books I most enjoy. In fairness to Gail Tsukiyama, this is her first novel.

Women of the Silk focuses on Pei who, at the age of eight, is abandoned to the silk industry by her father. The year is 1919. The story spans the next 20 years of Pei's life as it is played out in the silk industry in a very small town in China. Through her story and the stories of the women she encounters. one gets a sense of what it meant to be a women in the China of those years as well as a hint of the changes that were forced upon them first with The Chinese Civil War and then with the Second Sino-Japanese War beginnning in 1937. While I probably wouldn't actively search for another book by this author, I'd choose to buy it if it showed up in my local used paperback book store or in Costco.

Eeek, it's 3:52 p.m. and I had planned to spend today working on glass. I always end up spending far more time writing my blog than I'df intended.