Upside Ann

  For the past week I've been watching this little furry black spider saunter around the kitchen ceiling.  I don't know.  Maybe I've gotten soft in my old age or maybe I've developed greater empathy and less anxiety about arachnids.  But, not once did I say "Crap - where did that fly swatter go?" or drag a kitchen chair across the room to off the beast.   This morning, however, the damned thing committed suicide.  There I was happily sauteing a skillet of zucchini for lunch when I see a black shape web drop itself RIGHT INTO THE SKILLET!!!  Aghhhhh.  Intense swearing as I try to swish it away from its fatal plunge then try to remove its crisping body off our noon-time vegetables.   Do things like this happen to EVERYONE, I ask?  This is NOT the first time I've had a spider drop down inches from my face.   The first time I was a young professor attending the graduation party for a student held in the basement of ...

 While I really enjoyed this novel- plenty of my favorite character, Nora Bonesteel, and a lovely man who makes his life enjoying nature and playing Daniel Boone for school kids- the quote I am sharing comes from Daniel Boone himself rather than Sharyn McCrumb.  (Many/most of her chapters open with a historic quote.) I can't say I was ever lost, but I was bewildered once for three days.   Daniel Boone I cannot say that Daniel and I have much in common.  I'm far more hobbit-minded about adventures.  "Nasty, disturbing, uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner!"  And, anyone who knows me at all, knows not to get between me and dinner.  I have been moderately lost on multiple occasions.  Stayed on the bus too long early in my residence of Brisbane - thinking that once the bus reached the end of the line, I'd recognize my bus stop on the second go round...ONLY to learn this was the END OF THE DAY for the bus and it WAS NOT going back from w...

 I read this book when it was new.  Actually, I think I listened to it.  I vaguely remember listening to it while I drove from Ohio to New Jersey to see my godson and his parents.  Last year my friend, Tim, and I did a flurry of book exchanges and he sent this to me.  I didn't get to it.  Then, a couple weeks ago, I chose a sleek red book with a snazzy multicolored yarn ribbon as a blind date.  "Fantasy Fiction," it said.  "Come with me," I said. The Eyre Affair.  Obviously - the universe felt like I needed to revisit.  Actually, insisted upon it. Fford has created a marvelous universe where Special Ops agents investigate all sorts of wonderous criminal enterprises including temporal crimes, literary crimes, nursery crimes, vampires, etc.   In this, his first novel, he introduces Thursday Next, an agent in the literacy division, her dad who is a fugitive agent from the temporal division, her eccentric and brilliant inventor unc...