It would be so nice if a person didn't have to lift a finger before her house gets painted. Unfortunately, Denis and I had to lift all our fingers countless times this week to get ready for the house painting next week. You see, we have shrubs close to the house that needed to be trimmed so the painters can get in there and do their thing. Then there are things like signs and wind spinners and wind chimes that need to be taken down. Since our hard work out in the midday sun coincided with the quarterly curbside trash pickup by the city, we also shaved back the oleander hedge and sawed off branches on the palo verde, arbor vitae, and sumac trees.
Don't worry about us; we know how to deal with the heat. Sunscreen, hats and thick gloves were de rigueur, as well as frequent breaks to sit in the cool indoors and guzzle down plenty of fluids. As soon as I'm finished sharing these links with you, I'm headed outside to the pool to read-- and to look around at the fruits of all our hard, sweaty labors and smile.
Books & Other Tidbits
- According to Amazon, Alexandria, Virginia, is the most well read city in America.
- The distractions of writing in the modern world.
- A wonderful video about why libraries matter.
- Eerie photos reveal the lonely life of a reclusive heiress and her empty mansions.
Channeling My Inner Indiana Jones
History, Archaeology...
- If you were a lighthouse keeper back in the day, there was a traveling library just for you.
- There have been developments at the dig in Ecuador's Lost City of Giants.
- Mexican researchers are going to be extracting the 12,000-year-old skeleton of a teenage girl from an underwater cave. They think she's going to have a lot to tell us.
- A 42,000-year-old mummified mammoth has been found.
- 180-million-year-old fossils have been discovered and are revealing their secrets of the Jurassic deep sea.
- These bones might be the biggest creature that ever walked the Earth.
- The wreck of Christopher Columbus' ship the Santa Maria has already been looted.
- A video giving us a tour of the secrets of Henry VIII's Hampton Court Palace.
- A burst water pipe reveals century-old Crusader murals in Jerusalem.
- The lost desert libraries of Chinguetti.
I ♥ Lists
- 21 great novels it's worth finding time to read.
- Eight How-To books from a century ago that are still (sort of) useful.
- 21 reasons a book is the most beautiful and productive form of escape.
Book Candy
- Dieter Horn has designed the lese+lebe ("Read + Live").
- These ten home libraries are for people who really, really love their books.
Okay... it is now time to head for the pool! Don't forget to stop by next Friday when I'll have a freshly selected batch of links for your surfing pleasure-- and hopefully photos of the new and improved Casa Kittling).
Have a great weekend!
Cathy - I know what you mean about the heat. We had that last week and it was awful. It kicked up some wicked wildfires in my area. All's well, but it was a dicey couple of days. Thanks as ever for the links!
ReplyDeleteWe've got a wildfire now up in Oak Creek Canyon north of Sedona. A particularly bad place to have an out-of-control fire.
DeleteWhat a lot of work pre-house painting and tree and hedge pruning. The pool sounds so inviting after that.
ReplyDeleteOn the 21 suggested novels, there's no diversity or many of the real classics, like John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, Alice Walker's The Color Purple, Toni Morrison's Beloved, which won a Pulitzer, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and so on. Don't know where these lists come from, and then there are writers from Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, etc. Entire worlds are left out.
I, for one, am proud to have read so many of the "banned books" listed by the American Library Association at their website.
Most lists say more about the list makers than anything else. You should be proud of reading so many banned books!
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