Weather or not

Threatening sky

Although it rained on and off all night, I was pleased to see that it was not raining when I got to Boulevard Park, where the Fairhaven walking group was to meet this morning. At first I thought there might be just a few of us, but before we headed out for a nice five-mile walk this morning, more than a dozen, plus a few dogs, showed up. We knew that the weather was projected to deteriorate, but we hoped that it would wait until we were warm and dry inside the coffee shop.

We did get wet, but it wasn't awful, until I left to hurry home and change my clothes before meeting my friend Judy at the Pickford to see a movie. It was raining and blowing pretty hard by then, but the bad part was not finding a place to park nearby and having to walk three blocks to the theater. By then I was every bit as wet, even more so, than I was before I changed!

We went inside to enjoy a really wonderful music documentary, Muscle Shoals, about a little town in Alabama that was the birthplace of plenty of the music I listened to in the 1960s and 1970s. I didn't know anything about the place before I saw this, but the documentary was really interesting and very well done. The beauty of the town, which has the Tennessee River running through it, was simply breathtaking at times. I learned about Rick Hall, who started it all, and the Swampers, a group of musicians who backed up many of the great hits. They were all shown as they once were, as well as interviewed as the people they are now. Highly recommended.

And books! I've just finished Gulp by Mary Roach (Adventures on the Alimentary Canal) and The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri. It never fails that I'll start to read a book from the library and one (or in this case, two) other books I've had on hold come into the library at the same time. So I put Gulp down so I could read the other two. I've read everything Lahiri has written and am obviously a fan. This book stayed with me for days as I continued to ponder the characters. Everything Mary Roach writes is funny and interesting, but Lahiri's book was also deeply satisfying.

The last one, which I'm still reading, is The Curve of Time by M. Wylie Blanchet. This fascinating true adventure story was written in 1961 by Blanchet, who put her five children on a 25-foot boat and explored the coastal waters of British Columbia every summer in the 1920s and 1930s. From the book jacket:

Acting single-handedly as skipper, navigator, engineer and of course mother, she saw her crew through exciting (and sometimes perilous) encounters with fog, rough seas, cougars, bears and whales, and did so with high spirits and courage.

I am enjoying her memoir and hope to find out, after I finish this book, whether any of her children grew up to write about how they experienced the same events. Oh, and one more thing: I found out about that huge pumpkin. I guessed that it weighs 315 pounds, but it turns out it is 685 pounds! I was nowhere close.
:-)