Everyone has their favorite and least favorite holidays. My favorites are the Fourth of July (it's always sunny, and it's a great excuse for a BBQ or picnic) and Thanksgiving (you get to invite everyone you've ever met over to dinner and then stuff yourself silly - who doesn't love that?), and my least favorite of the traditional American holidays is Valentine's Day. That's a whole different story, though.
Our plans for this Fourth of July were up in the air for a while due to work and friends, but we ended up going whitewater rafting on the Wenatchee River and camping near Leavenworth with some friends. (Leavenworth is a Bavarian town in the mountains two or three hours east of Seattle - not to be confused with the prison.) It would have been a great weekend - it was almost 100 degrees, but we wore enough sunscreen to not get burned, the 35-degree spray from the snow-melt river felt great, and I even drank enough water - except that our campground was basically infested by mosquitos. I'm not an "ew, a bug!" kind of girl, but I got about twenty bites on Friday night and a few more last night, in spite of wearing a long sleeved shirt and jeans tucked into my socks.
We drove out Friday morning, stopped for bratwurst (Munchen Haus), cheese (ardi gazna, the number one cheese in the world), and chocolate (from Schocolate, for a friend) in Leavenworth, and then set up at our campsite. We normally camp alone, so it felt pretty packed with six tents and twelve people at our campground, but that went as well as it could have. We went rafting Saturday morning, ate lunch, then went back to Leavenworth to get gelato and go to a river there - because no one wanted to go back to the mosquitos at the campground.
I didn't plan it this way and didn't even realize what I'd done until today, but I finished a very appropriate book yesterday - the Fourth of July - American Sphinx by Joseph Ellis. This book, which is about Thomas Jefferson, was really interesting and clearly written for a layperson, although it didn't condescend, either. Ellis wrote a book (that I'll probably read) on John Adams and realized afterwards that, although he's one of the more popular American presidents, most people only know two facts about Jefferson: that he wrote the Declaration of Independence and that he had an affair with one of his slaves, Sally Hemings. (On that topic - Ellis doesn't actually believe Jefferson had an affair with Hemings, but he basically refuses to address it in the text of the book - there's an appendix that discusses it.) So he decided to write a book discussing some of the major events in Jefferson's life, what we can learn about his character from those events, and what his legacy is.
The whole book was interesting, but this is a good example (from the time when Jefferson was living in Paris) of how a book about history can be pretty funny, too - if your sense of humor is like mine, anyway:
Finally, and rather comically, Jefferson decided to refute the leading French naturalist of the day, Georges de Buffon, who had argued that the mammals and plants of North America were inferior in size, health and variety to those of Europe... Jefferson launched an all-out campaign to gather specimens of American animals that were larger than anything in Europe. Sparing no expense, he commissioned an expedition into the White Mountains of New Hampshire to obtain... "the Moose, the Caribou, and the Original or Elk." The expedition produced the desired specimens, but Jefferson was disappointed in their lack of size, especially the moose, which he had counted on as the trump card to play against Buffon's puny European deer. So another hunting party went out, another moose was killed, another carcass was shipped over to Paris, where Jefferson put it on display in the entry hall of his hotel, still somewhat frustrated that the moose was only seven feet tall and that its hair kept falling out. Buffon, who was himself a miniscule man less than five feet tall, was invited to observe the smelly and somewhat imperfect trophy but concluded it was insufficient evidence to force a revision of his anti-American theory. It was one of the few occasions when Jefferson failed to enhance mutual understanding along the Franco-American axis.
That makes 42 books for the year. This book was on my grandmother's list of favorites (along with Founding Brothers, and His Excellency, both by Ellis - she also read Passionate Sage but didn't mark it with an asterisk), and although I still read history slower than I read fiction, I really enjoyed this book.
On the other hand, I already dislike the book I've just started, and I've only read about ten pages of it. This would be the point at which a less stubborn person would put it down and start reading the next book.
Our plans for this Fourth of July were up in the air for a while due to work and friends, but we ended up going whitewater rafting on the Wenatchee River and camping near Leavenworth with some friends. (Leavenworth is a Bavarian town in the mountains two or three hours east of Seattle - not to be confused with the prison.) It would have been a great weekend - it was almost 100 degrees, but we wore enough sunscreen to not get burned, the 35-degree spray from the snow-melt river felt great, and I even drank enough water - except that our campground was basically infested by mosquitos. I'm not an "ew, a bug!" kind of girl, but I got about twenty bites on Friday night and a few more last night, in spite of wearing a long sleeved shirt and jeans tucked into my socks.
We drove out Friday morning, stopped for bratwurst (Munchen Haus), cheese (ardi gazna, the number one cheese in the world), and chocolate (from Schocolate, for a friend) in Leavenworth, and then set up at our campsite. We normally camp alone, so it felt pretty packed with six tents and twelve people at our campground, but that went as well as it could have. We went rafting Saturday morning, ate lunch, then went back to Leavenworth to get gelato and go to a river there - because no one wanted to go back to the mosquitos at the campground.
I didn't plan it this way and didn't even realize what I'd done until today, but I finished a very appropriate book yesterday - the Fourth of July - American Sphinx by Joseph Ellis. This book, which is about Thomas Jefferson, was really interesting and clearly written for a layperson, although it didn't condescend, either. Ellis wrote a book (that I'll probably read) on John Adams and realized afterwards that, although he's one of the more popular American presidents, most people only know two facts about Jefferson: that he wrote the Declaration of Independence and that he had an affair with one of his slaves, Sally Hemings. (On that topic - Ellis doesn't actually believe Jefferson had an affair with Hemings, but he basically refuses to address it in the text of the book - there's an appendix that discusses it.) So he decided to write a book discussing some of the major events in Jefferson's life, what we can learn about his character from those events, and what his legacy is.
The whole book was interesting, but this is a good example (from the time when Jefferson was living in Paris) of how a book about history can be pretty funny, too - if your sense of humor is like mine, anyway:
Finally, and rather comically, Jefferson decided to refute the leading French naturalist of the day, Georges de Buffon, who had argued that the mammals and plants of North America were inferior in size, health and variety to those of Europe... Jefferson launched an all-out campaign to gather specimens of American animals that were larger than anything in Europe. Sparing no expense, he commissioned an expedition into the White Mountains of New Hampshire to obtain... "the Moose, the Caribou, and the Original or Elk." The expedition produced the desired specimens, but Jefferson was disappointed in their lack of size, especially the moose, which he had counted on as the trump card to play against Buffon's puny European deer. So another hunting party went out, another moose was killed, another carcass was shipped over to Paris, where Jefferson put it on display in the entry hall of his hotel, still somewhat frustrated that the moose was only seven feet tall and that its hair kept falling out. Buffon, who was himself a miniscule man less than five feet tall, was invited to observe the smelly and somewhat imperfect trophy but concluded it was insufficient evidence to force a revision of his anti-American theory. It was one of the few occasions when Jefferson failed to enhance mutual understanding along the Franco-American axis.
That makes 42 books for the year. This book was on my grandmother's list of favorites (along with Founding Brothers, and His Excellency, both by Ellis - she also read Passionate Sage but didn't mark it with an asterisk), and although I still read history slower than I read fiction, I really enjoyed this book.
On the other hand, I already dislike the book I've just started, and I've only read about ten pages of it. This would be the point at which a less stubborn person would put it down and start reading the next book.
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