“Happy Birthday to Us”
Alicia chauffeured us from San Luis Obispo on Monday afternoon. Grammie was glad to see everyone. She’s been asking about our arrival for several weeks now.
I received a hilarious video of Campbell and Molly doing karaoke with the Texas relatives, back in San Diego:
Another birthday for me showed up on Tuesday. They just keep coming! I received a lovely song from the New Orleans group in Roatan, Honduras. Denny reported it was very nice but very hot and humid – something coming from a New Orleanian.
The little monsters all made me lovely birthday cards that they delivered to Grammie’s:
Hand made cards really are so special!
And then there is this hilarious card from Patty and Brent. Where do they find these?
The boys and Melanie gave me a gift certificate to La Costanera in Half Moon Bay. This is a wonderful Peruvian seafood restaurant. Caroline and Clorinda joined us, and Clorinda certainly enjoyed the food, consuming more than anyone else. It was nice to see her enjoying things. The only thing not readily consumed was the green mocktail that we chose for her. The restaurant is located by the marina and offers great views.
I had picked out a few interesting things on the menu before going, and ended up sampling most of them.
The ceviche sampler, mushroom empanada, pulpo and elote were all delicious.
We got to watch Massimo and Luciano compete in a baseball championship game on Wednesday evening. The game was tied 15-15 at the end of regular innings. They had a heartbreaking loss in the extra inning.
A walk by the beach on Thursday offered pretty flowers and great views of several pods of migrating hump back whales. After the walk, I used the Dinosaur’s gift certificate from Caroline to buy one of their yummy Portobello sandwiches.
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/whales-spotted-san-francisco-bay-area-coast-18121919.php
Andy and Jude joined us on Friday afternoon and we enjoyed listening to music and telling stories. Always so fun to visit with them.
On Saturday it was time to cede Birthday Week privileges to Alicia. She had requested a 70s theme, and Diana did a great job of coordinating flower colours and decorations to that request.
Diana whipped up some of her delicious jambalaya – an ideal dish for a party where folks show up over several hours.
I invited Sean to join us since his wife has been gone for several months, taking care of her Mom.
We had a great turnout and I think Alicia enjoyed herself very much.
Here’s my favourite birthday picture – three generations:
Diana was finally able to sit down, relax and snuggle up with Yeti.
Sunday was a travel day for me. Time to head back home to McKinney and an empty, quiet house for a week or so.
My book this week was “Solar” by Ian McEwan. Here’s what The Guardian had to say about it:
“Solar is a sly, sardonic novel about a dislikable English physicist and philanderer named Michael Beard. He’s a recognisable Ian McEwan type, a one-dimensional, self-deceiving man of science. We have met others like him before in McEwan’s novels – such as Joe Rose, the science writer who narrates Enduring Love, or Henry Perowne, the brian surgeon protagonist of Saturday – but none is quite as repulsive as Beard. Perhaps McEwan should have written against expectation by choosing as his protagonist a scientist who has a profound artistic sensibility in the model of his friend Richard Dawkins, or an artist who is articulate in the language of science, as McEwan is himself. As it is, he remains a determined binarist; what continues to interest him are stark dichotomies, the clash and interplay of stable oppositions. Repeatedly in his fiction he sets reason against unreason, science against art, the mind against the body, technology against nature.
Beard, who we are encouraged to believe won a Nobel prize in physics as a young man for something called the Beard-Einstein Conflation, is a short, fat, balding, much-married man of immense bodily appetites and scant self-discipline. He rapaciously consumes food, women and drink, with little regard for the consequences. He’s a resolute short-termist, fearful of commitment and of becoming a father, living for the here and now. His behaviour is a local example of the more general problem of human over-consumption: just as Beard devours everything around him, so we are devouring our world, with its finite resources and fragile ecosystems.
The trick of the novel, its central comic turn, is to make Beard, the greedy, selfish uber-consumer, an accidental expert on anthropogenic climate change. Through his expertise as a physicist, and then his opportunism in stealing the research ideas of a graduate student who works with him at an institute in Berkshire known only as the Centre, Beard is engaged in a programme to create cheap renewable energy through a process of artificial photosynthesis (you’ll need to read the book to be filled in on the science).
McEwan’s great gamble is to narrate Solar, which is in three parts and spans nine years, from 2000 to 2009, entirely from Beard’s point of view. Some of this is satisfying, especially the pithy scientific elaborations: McEwan, who has a precise, technician’s vocabulary, has swotted up to PhD level on physics, just as he did on neurosurgery for Saturday, musicology for Amsterdam and molecular biology for Enduring Love. None of this extracurricular learning feels perfunctory, especially when compared with, say, a novel such as Martin Amis‘s The Information. In that novel, disquisitions on infinity, black holes, dwarf planets and astronomy felt imposed on the narrative rather than being intrinsic to it. In Solar, the physics never feels forced or unearned but rather is embedded in the deep structures of Beard’s consciousness. We see the world just as he does, in all its cold reductiveness.”
I kept having a nagging feeling that I’d read this book before. A search of all the blogs says that wasn’t in the last 7 years. Maybe I read an excerpt somewhere – the ending certainly seemed familiar.
I think The Guardian is a bit harsh on the one-sided, unlikeable nature of Beard. I did enjoy the satirical tone, but didn’t find it particularly comedic. I certainly didn’t chuckle at any part of it.
Not too bad of a read, but far from McEwan’s best – which in my opinion is “Saturday.”
I heard this Aretha classic on the radio, and had to look up who was drumming. Of course, it’s Bernard Purdie, and it turns out the song was built up from his drum pattern. I didn’t know he was Franklin’s musical director for 5 years. So good!
Here’s the angelic voice of the late Jeff Buckley, recorded in a tiny club. Such a talent.
Coexist peacefully, with kindness and compassion for all!