Summer

Today I went to a Meetup at the Distillery where a doctoral student talked about medieval literature.  Keeping with the theme, I read the first part of the prologue of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. (There were almost twenty people there!) Afterward Debi and I had ice cream.

I recently finished reading Jonathan Spence's God's Chinese Son, about Hong Xiuquan, leader of the Taiping Rebellion that devastated China in the mid-19th century.  I've almost finished reading Mary Macauliffe's Dawn of the Belle Epoque, the subject of my French Culture Meetup the other week. (Next month's subject will be Toulouse-Lautrec's art.) It's a good book and I'm eager to read her sequel Twilight of the Belle Epoque.  My next book will be Louis Auchincloss' Penguin Lives biography of Woodrow Wilson, for next month's History Meetup.

Some of my Meetup events have been attracting nobody.  I was going to host a midtown walk for the Meaningful Genuine Connections group on Saturday, but nobody was interested, so I'll try again in October.  And my Reading Out Loud Meetup event with O. Henry stories that night also drew a blank. (But I'll try again next months with Walt Whitman's poems.)

I've been spending a lot of time on a Facebook group that posts classic comic strips.  Rip Kirby especially interests me!  (They also have some early Modesty Blaise adventures.)

My machine for crushing ice cubes is on the blink, so I ordered a new one from Walmart.  But I don't know how long it'll take to arrive:  possibly close to a month!