Gliding -- But Not Entirely -- June 7

My late night doings Thursday evening took their toll and for the first time in memory I awoke at 6:30 a.m. to the sun flowing into the bedroom window.  The felines had long before abandoned the end of the bed, fully engaged in their prowl mode somewhere in the house.  The 5 hours of sleep was still hanging on me when I padded downstairs to find a cup of coffee. 

Although I started Ursula Le Guin's book of short stories, there are no lack of possibilities in my accumulation of books throughout the house.  Among last year's Christmas presents from Jennifer was Jon Meacham's biography of Thomas Jefferson which I had skimmed, but really hadn't sat down to enjoy (ah retirement with so many possibilities for spending one's time!).

 So I spent about an hour getting into Meacham's quite engaging sketch of the great man from Monticello.  About three years ago I got on a "founding fathers" reading kick and managed to get through biographies of Washington (4 volumes), John Adams, Alexander Hamilton and Benjamin Franklin, as well as histories of the French and Indian War and the Revolutionary War.  Jefferson does not come off well in some of the biographies of the other "founders" or at least, in comparison with the chief object of the biography in question.  I think I have enough distance from those other biographies to give Jefferson a spin. Meacham's treatment got good reviews, so we'll see.

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My late rising might have dissuaded me entirely from hitting the exercise room, but it was a gorgeous day looking out into the back yard, which I survey when I'm on my elliptical.

Flowering shrub in our backyard, seen through the kitchen window, June 7

 

So, although I didn't actually finish my workout until 10:30 a.m., I got the whole routine in, once more.

After breakfast and a shower I was in a "gliding" mood and enjoyed an hour in the sun, again with the Meacham book.

The afternoon mail brought a package postmarked from San Francisco from my late brother-in-law's partner, Bob, with a belated birthday/retirement gift of three eclectic books, now that I have time to read them.  I'm familiar with Gavin Menzies, but haven't read this book (no, it's not about aliens and UFOs).

Whole Grains was published in 1973 and has shades of "counter culture" all over it, (Last Whole Earth Catalog, etc.) some of the quotations are profane but there are definitely some pithy ones, even for writers of blogs: "The laying bare of oneself is obscene." (Ad Reinhardt) and "Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness." (Samuel Beckett).  Ouch!

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Although "gliding" was what I thought I might be sliding into on this beautiful Michigan day, I received a call from my retirement fund representative, necessitating pulling out files and making decisions about how my retirement will be funded.  Conversations like this remind me a little like medieval brain surgery:

 And at their conclusion, I'm not sure I feel a whole lot better than the poor lout who got the business end of this wicked mechanism.  But in fact, all's well; it turned out to be a minor point of clarification.  Jimmy Buffett's Margaritaville is real!