slowly she turned

Living the Slow life in North Carolina

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  • Saturday morning coffee pot post

    Well, lookathere, it’s now Saturday afternoon. Time has been all whacked out during the pandemic. You would think that it would go more slowly, being mostly stuck at home, but instead it races.

    I’ve been avoiding politics as much as I can make myself do it, and since hospitalizations are at a high with not many (or any) ICU beds available it has become time to really hunker down again. When I went to work yesterday I mostly closed my office door and had little contact with anybody, even at a masked distance. I plan to keep it that way for a while. I don’t think that we are going to do Thanksgiving, even. My brother-in-law is having heart surgery soon, and they need to be extra careful. I am still considering going down to the lake house but Sandy doesn’t want to go.

    Twitler and Mikie and the Ratlickers have been hitting North Carolina hard this week and last, bringing more Covid to our state. North Carolina has always been a purple state. It’s been gerrymandered badly during the past decade so it has been a tough slog at the state level. We have a Dem governor and attorney general and a deeply red state legislature. The GOP is not even embarrassed at what they do to suppress the vote and get their people into power by any means necessary any more. So I am looking forward to getting my Social Security and getting the hell out of Dodge at age 62. Hopefully we can wait that long, and we will survive in good health that long. I spend a lot of time on ex-pat Portugal Facebook pages these days. It’s doable, but it’s gonna be rough on my anxiety and the cats.

    On Election Night I am doing a Zoom meeting with some artist friends connected through Leighanna Light’s Facebook page, where we will all have some kind of creative work that we are individually doing and some emotional support. I expect that unless it is a landslide we will not know who won that night. Certainly it was a devastating surprise in the 2016 election the following day.

    Anyway, another hurricane remnant came through this week: Tropical Storm Zeta. This one was fast and strong and blew out a lot of power in central/western NC. We had no problems. We seldom lose power in this house.

    The other thing that happened was that I did an online chat with an Orbitz rep to ask some questions about my Aer Lingus credit, and it was good that I did, because they told me that it expired at the end of June and was surprised that someone from Orbitz told me differently. Fortunately I had enough misgivings that I had not booked our flight. Now it has been passed up another level and I might get a refund since I have documentation of the Orbitz rep saying that I had until Nov. 30.

    That would be splendid if I get the money back.

    On the tax refund front, however, we are still stuck with nobody to help. I think that when Kathy Manning gets elected to Congress and we actually have a Rep who might help us we will call her office. I highly doubt that Tea Party Ted could be bothered to help out a Dem/Independent couple. I would at least like to know if we should re-submit our tax return.

    Still working on moving the Flickr photos over to WordPress and changing the links in my blog posts. That is a pretty tough job considering this blog has moved three times and I’ve been posting since 2005. However, on the second move I lost a LOT of posts because it was so boogered up on GoDaddy that I moved a lot of it manually, and in doing so I skipped a lot of the more mundane entries. I lost the links to a lot of my photos too. In the noughts I wrote a lot, often daily. I have been working on this project for a little more than a year, and plan to not pay Flickr anything come 2021. They became too expensive and I’d rather pay WordPress to host my photos. Then I ended up dealing with moving the Tapestry Weavers South mess of a web site and I lost a lot of time. At least it is on WordPress.com now where I can deal with both of them in much the same way.

    Sandy has been doing a lot of handyman work around the house and it has been a very good thing. I got some more of the front porch painted but it was stormy this week and I have dealt with my mental health by spending a lot of time in bed, unfortunately.

    Okay. Back to cleaning and a bit of art work. I finished The Good Lord Bird this week and it is a great book. Amazing that the subject of John Brown could be made so entertaining and funny. I want to read more James McBride. Right now I am sticking with mid-19th century U.S. historical fiction and starting Lincoln in the Bardo.

  • Rainy Sunday Afternoon

    I start out every blog post I write with a rant about the new WordPress block format, and how tired I am of having to learn new tech and software when the way I did it before was perfectly fine. Sometimes I mess around until I find a way to go back to something similar that they had before, but I never know how to find that way again. Then I usually delete the paragraph. So THIS TIME, I have figured it out and I’m documenting it. I saved the draft of this post, then when I opened all posts to work on it again, when you hover over the name of the post, links appear beneath it and one of them is “classic editor.” Whew!

    Last weekend I had a lot of fun in Leighanna Light’s “Layered Faces” Zoom class. It is definitely not my style but it was a lot of fun and got me out of my head. Here are the photos from my piece after day one and at the end. I got a wild feline feel from the face as it was developing so I went with that. Sandy was all blah about it until I finished and then he was saying “Don’t do another thing to it! It’s perfect!” LOL. I won one of Leighanna’s faces in a random drawing on the second day, so my luck was with me this week.

    I’ve mainly been concentrating on work, cleaning up the garden, cooking, and today, cleaning house, so I don’t have anything exciting to report. I voted in person on Wednesday with a friend, and I didn’t have to wait long. No funny business going on. Paper ballots, but no straight ticket options. I painted another section of the front porch yesterday, but a cold front came in last night and it is about 25 degrees chillier and rainy today.

    Some fall shots from my yard and my walk around the block:

    Reading: I finished “The Windup Girl” by Paolo Bacigalupi. At first it was a bit of a slog only because it is dystopian and my emotions are on edge. It ended up being very good with a complex plot and several different points of view. Now I am reading “The Good Lord Bird,” and had I known that it would be this funny (I mean, it’s about John Brown, what a surprise!) I would have started it long ago.

    My fixation on traveling to Portugal with the idea of scouting out places to live is back, and I almost booked tickets to go in June, but the fricking searches were confusing, and then I figured out that to get my Aer Lingus travel credit I have to go through Orbitz, who is charging $100 more per ticket than going straight through Aer Lingus. I got disgusted and decided to start over again this coming week. I have until the end of November to book Aer Lingus tickets to get my credit for my cancelled flight this past June, and their prices went way up.

    This year my sister and brother-in-law are going to travel with us. This should be interesting to see if we get sick of each other. We have not traveled together before – just stayed in one familiar place like the beach or the lake. Of the four of us, only Sandy has a lot of patience, so he will be fine. I have been looking forward to traveling with my sister for a long time but they haven’t been able to do it for eldercare and other family reasons. All four of us are interested in emigrating to Portugal, although that’s might change after the election. I’m ready to go regardless, but for financial reasons I need to either wait 2.5 years or get permission to work remotely from there.

    We’ll spend a couple of days in Dublin since they haven’t been to Ireland before. It’s cheaper to fly to Dublin from Raleigh and then catch TAP or Ryanair to Lisbon from there.

    This also means that I will not be going to the art retreat in west Ireland or FOBA this summer. I hate like hell to miss these, but this is more than just a vacation – it is also a scouting trip. It’s important to do it soon, and I promised Sandy that we would go in 2021 before we knew that my trips would be canceled this year. We need to spend enough time in Portugal to explore different areas to see where might be the best fit for us. I am reading a lot of ex-pat advice.

    Of course, all bets are off if there isn’t a vaccine by then.

  • Saturday Morning Coffee Pot Post

    Woke up today to the lovely sounds of roofers across the street. I’m grateful for ear plugs and the ability to catch up on my sleep these days. One thing about working from home is that if insomnia keeps me awake until 3 a.m., I can generally shift my schedule to accommodate it since I don’t have office hours from 8-5 on Monday through Thursday. That’s crucial for managing my panic disorder. Next week will be different because I am administering tests through email to PhD students beginning at 9 a.m. every morning for a couple of weeks. Still much better than having my butt in my office at 8 a.m. every day! So there are some silver linings, and I try to focus on that most of the time.

    My anxiety is more about the election than anything else. Sandy voted in person on the first morning of early voting and I had planned to go with him. I mean, that is the whole reason that I didn’t vote by absentee ballot. But I had work meetings that day and he was determined to go on the first day, so I will go vote during a lunch break next week when it is less busy.

    This afternoon and tomorrow afternoon I am taking a Zoom workshop with Leighanna Light, one of my favorite people. I hope that the Zoom format in person will help me stay on track, instead of like the many online video workshops I have bought and abandoned over the last few years. I also bought a video workshop from Sharon Payne Bolton. It is a workshop that I’ve done in person with her before, but the price was relatively cheap and it will be a good jumpstart for when I need it, I hope.

    This week I finished up a collage that I began several weeks ago on my mountain vacation retreat. I got very good feedback from Crystal Neubauer’s Facebook group and that helped me over the finish line. The branch, root, and duck feather are from Lake Waccamaw. I repurposed the piece with the word Inspire from a cardboard pin I was given by a classmate in one of Sharon’s classes at Art-is-You, because I knew it wouldn’t be long before I put it in the washing machine by mistake. (If you are reading, thanks, Maria!) I replaced the blue button that was on it with a tiny spiral shell I picked up at Topsail Beach. The music is from an old booklet titled “Gospel Pearls.” The background book cover I found in a free box of old books outside a used book store.  The panel and the bit in the top right corner is from an old book I took apart.

    This is one big reason that I love collage – especially the ones in which I gather things that have meaning to me. Each element has its own story, like chapters in a book, that pull together to make their own story together.

    I had problems getting this saved and published and had to rewrite some of it. Now I need to get ready for my class at 2 p.m. Hopefully I will have more to share later!

  • Sunday morning coffee pot post

    Okay, it is afternoon now. I just spent an hour writing a private grief filled post, so I got that out of my system. My guess is that I will go back to it and use it as a private diary. I want to share more here, and I know that as a writer it is vital to open up and have that vulnerability, but right now I don’t have a lot to give others, and I certainly need an outlet.

    I finally finished moving the Tapestry Weavers South web site to the WordPress.com platform. The site itself is not finished but at least I have the main parts in place.

    Anyway, we came home from the mountains a little over a week ago, with a stop in Mt. Airy on the way. It was a scary place – we happened to hit it on the first day of “Mayberry Days.” Around here the Andy Griffith Show is sacred and Mayberry was based on his hometown of Mt. Airy, which is not far away from Pilot Mountain (Mt. Pilot on the show). It is also an extremely politically red place. So not only were there crowds of maskless people and character impersonators like Barney Fife on Main St., there was a lot of Trumpy campaign stuff on the sidewalks and inside stores and on windows. The Snappy Lunch was packed.

    Most of the time signs about masks and social distancing rules are for show and not enforced, but we did find one antique mall in the center of Main St. that was strict, even telling someone to leave who came in without a mask. I wish I had made note of the name of it.

    Just off Main St. there was a safe, really good Japanese restaurant called Kazoku where we had a very late lunch. If you are ever in the area, I highly recommend the sushi.

    Since then, I have been working hard on the class schedule for Spring 2021, which due to budget cuts and a lot of uncertainty in the administration about what to do in the face of the pandemic, has been difficult. The way it is here, if classes go totally online, UNCG loses a lot of revenue from parking, dining, and residence halls. This, during a time when we had already been asked to make budget cuts because of a shortfall last year. So, it will come down to whether to cut the budget further, meaning salaries and staff, or make our campus safer and try to push on. So far, UNCG has been pretty safe as far as we can tell. When you drive through campus, most of the students are even wearing their masks outside.

    Our main office suite was closed last week because of a Covid-19 exposure. So far, everyone who was in the room with the person has tested negative, and we will get back to “normal” this coming week.

    I picked loads of “beautiful beans” last weekend, along with a few butterbeans that I didn’t even remember planting. The “beautiful beans” are actually heirloom field peas that my recently departed friend Pat Bush found in the bottom of a freezer in a farmhouse she rented. She started planting and developing the seed stock and gave me some. These peas are real winners – tasty and make a good broth, and the snaps (immature green pods) are good as well. I will have plenty of seed stock and I am giving away beans to some of our mutual friends for them to start their own seed stocks.

    Also, I am going to give up my last UNCG garden plot once I am done with these.

    I will miss Pat. She and I worked together in Slow Food and in the local food movement, and I loved her. I bought many of my plants and herbs from her. Almost a year ago when she made it to the School Climate Strike rally, she was feeling very optimistic about getting better and wanted to get more involved with the permaculture guild as a teaching elder. But one thing after another befell her until her body was overwhelmed. She was sick for about five years after she fell and broke her knee.

    There are a lot of people who I care for who are very sick right now. I remember Mama talking about the worst part of getting old is seeing your friends get sick and die.

    Anyway, back to the garden. Here are photos of my carrot and squash, yes, singular, from this year. However, our figs had an abundant second crop and I have frozen a lot of them. Right now I am pulling up all the peppermint that I can and drying it for tea or whatever.

    Hopefully I will get it together enough to raise some food next year. Might have to be all onions and garlic and mint, since those are the only plants so far that the groundhogs won’t eat. Fencing and cages will need to be made this winter.

    Okay, time for a very late lunch. Chicken clam corn chowder, sort of.

  • Collage this week

    My muse was waiting for me in the mountains. The collage with the stick and feather was started at Lake Waccamaw. The one with the creek stones is in progress, and the rocks have a bit of mica/pyrite/gold glitter in them. That one and the blue green collage are based on lyrics from Stairway to Heaven.

  • Wild Hare Retreat

    After RBG died, I decided that we really did have to get away. I had waffled until the last minute, but I found a place that we could afford that met our criteria during the week this week, an airBnB place called Wild Hare Historic Farmhouse Retreat right on the Blue Ridge Parkway near Sparta and Stone Mountain State Park, only about an hour and a half drive away. The first night we “glamped” in a 1968 Avion travel trailer parked on the property, and then we moved inside to a room with a private bathroom and a Jacuzzi tub. There is a creek with rapids and a small beach on the property, which was my main criteria. I wanted to get next to running water over rocks.

    Now I am sitting at the dining room table of the BnB and the only other person in the house this week is one of the owners, Cara, who is very friendly.

    Today is a rainy day, but other than being quite chilly the first night, the weather has been lovely.

    On the way up here, we stopped at Stone Mountain State Park for a couple of hours, and I have to wonder why it is that we haven’t been up here in over twenty years. It is a pretty short drive and a really lovely park. We hiked a little and hung out beside a pretty creek with a little whirlpool at the top of the rapids.

    Then we went into Sparta and ate inside (!!!!!) at a pizzeria but the tables were well spaced out and the staff and most of the customers were masked.

    Then I got a major migraine and so I can’t give you a good description of staying in the travel trailer that night. I will say that the sleeping arrangements were comfortable and it was well equipped enough that we could have stayed in there for the week as we originally planned.

    The next day I explored the property and the creek, and we drove to Galax, Virginia and had lunch (inside again!) at a combination antique store and cafe called Briar Patch Marketplace and Cafe on Main Street. The sandwiches and soup were very good (oh my God, that pimento cheese!!!) and they were doing all the covid precautions right. It was 2:15 p.m. by that time and there weren’t many people there.

    We moseyed around the antique part and it was one of those consignment malls with a lot of different booths. I found a treasure trove of old books for very cheap that were amazing for the kind of collage that I do. I knew that I was in serious danger so I left after picking out three books in five minutes. I do NOT have room for more books. As it is I have started stacking them on the floor. Unfortunately when I went up to pay THAT person was not masked. I handed him my credit card and stepped back in a hurry. Then down the street the music store we wanted to go into had three guys without masks just inside the front door. So we headed back to Sparta.

    We visited a local potter’s studio and then hit the Food Lion to get me some Allegra and some snacks. That night I don’t think Sandy ate anything but I munched on Goat Lady Dairy marinated goat cheese and crackers and was happy. We sat beside the fire pit and Cara joined us and brought marshmallows to roast under the stars. Then we enjoyed the Jacuzzi in our bathroom and it was a great one!

    Wednesday was warm enough that I waded in the creek and collected a few rocks. Sandy started a drawing for a watercolor of the springhouse. I sat on the back porch listening to the water down below and lo and behold, my muse came back, finally! Next post.

    That night we went early to a nice restaurant in Sparta called Crave, and our meals, chicken marsala and spaghetti with Italian sausage, were excellent. We both had desserts that were amazing – tiramisu and Italian cheesecake. We were going to visit the local brewery but had to waddle back to the car and so we came back and spent a quiet night reading and watching TV.

    I would be content staying here at the retreat the whole time, actually. There is delicious water straight from the spring, cats, and chickens, flowers and herbs, the sound of water over rocks. I am more relaxed than I’ve been for a long time. I suspect that I will come back. They are not open all the time though, because they are heading to their other job as captains on a catamaran that hosts three couples in Florida! So Scott is already down there getting ready for that gig.

    This morning I have been playing with collage. See the next post.

    Tomorrow we go back to Greensboro.

  • Been too long, back at the lake

    I have neglected to post here, but I have been doing a lot on my laptop for work and finishing up the new Tapestry Weavers South website. Transferring the files from the old site to the new was time consuming because of issues with the old design and a problem with getting into the dashboard of the hosting company, but I have FINALLY gotten them to acknowledge that I am who I say I am and now awaiting the information to transfer the domain. Not exactly what I wanted to do with my free time, but it’s almost done, hallelujah! WordPress.com will be much easier to work with since they will automatically do updates and I am already hosting this site here.

    “Hallelujah” has been stuck in my brain for about a month now.

    Sandy and I suddenly decided to come down to Lake Waccamaw after a call from my sister on Sunday, and I am so glad that we did. The weather is as perfect as it gets. Low humidity and high temps in the high 70s-80s. The water is cool for a change, and there is a bit of a breeze to keep the bugs off. The wifi is better here than it is at home; I guess because there are not so many people here working and taking classes online. I can work on the back porch facing the lake and listen to the waves and birds singing. Zoom meetings will be taking place late this afternoon and tomorrow. At one time when I did freelance work for Greensboro College, I didn’t like working from home, but these days when I can take my work with me, it is wonderful. I needed a change of scenery badly.

    First time I have seen this kind of snail. She was a big one!

    The plan was to leave tomorrow after the last Zoom meeting so that I can be in the office on Friday, my one designated office day per week. Tomorrow the forecast is for flooding rain from the remnants of Hurricane Sally moving northeast. So we have decided to leave late this afternoon. I don’t want to, but we don’t want to drive three hours in that, either. We will be packing and cleaning, after a take-out lunch from Dale’s.

    Last night was a real treat! For the second time since mid-March, we sat down at a real restaurant and had dinner outside, with lots of spacing and beauty in one of our very favorite restaurants, Indochine, in Wilmington, NC. We went all the way, with appetizers, drinks, and dessert, and enough leftovers to eat another meal. If you love Thai and Asian food and you are ever in Wilmington, NC, I highly recommend it.

  • Afternoon in the studio

    ^Detail, “Cathedral”

    I have managed to get started in the studio again – there’s nothing that I am over excited about happening BUT I have actually started weaving on Cathedral again and glued some stuff down for collage and doodled a pretty good page during a long Zoom meeting.

    As far as Cathedral goes, I finally worked out why I couldn’t weave it for so long. The tension is terrible…so uneven and I tried warping and rewarping this sucker for a solid month before I finally said fuck it and started weaving it anyway. So, after all this time and work I became terrified because it is definitely going to have puckers and and crazy tension problems when it comes off the loom, and I just couldn’t bear to think about it. I was already suffering from severe depression and that just added to the pain.

    But all that work and time is wasted if I DON’T finish weaving it, and once I get it off the loom I can warp it with a much shorter warp (at the time I was warping for multiple tapestries – big mistake) and begin another weaving. Now the plan is to be less persnickety about the details and get it to a place that is even on the top and finish it as a smaller tapestry.

    ^Lighting makes a big difference in how we perceive color. I chose the cool lighting on the left.

    Today we are getting some remnants of Hurricane Laura moving through but it’s not bad at all. Sandy and I have decided to go to Haw River State Park tomorrow for our adventure since the weather report is a bit better and I don’t want to stop the studio energy.

    I do need to remember to take frequent breaks for my back and neck and shoulders. Yesterday my massage therapy studio emailed to say that they will be re-opening soon for existing customers and I hope that my therapist will continue to work there. I have been seeing her for about four years almost every month until after January. I canceled my February appointment due to bad allergies and at the time we didn’t know that they would be shut down so long.

    The good thing about working from home most of the time is that my physical problems are much much better, which leads me to believe that I don’t get up and move enough when I am in my office. Here I can take my laptop to the porch, or to the sofa, or to the bedroom, or answer email on my phone. I get up and play with the cats, take breaks lying down if my back or neck hurts. Teleworking has been good for me.

    Not doing too well mentally, though. I brood a lot in my bedroom, play games to numb my brain. Read a little. I can’t watch TV or videos for long – I wish I knew why. It would help to have that distraction and to be able to focus on online workshops.

    Okay, break over. Back to Cathedral. I am accepting that it won’t be getting into any shows for technical skill, but it is worth finishing, puckers and all. Who knows, maybe I will be surprised.

  • Town Creek Indian Mound

    Yesterday Sandy and I drove south to Town Creek Indian Mound, a state historic site in Montgomery County, North Carolina. I had never been there, and Sandy had gone many years ago. Unfortunately, the visitor center with the museum and gift shop was closed, but we could walk around the reconstructed mound and buildings and a prairie had been re-established in the once groomed picnic grounds around the site.

    There is a large creek running on one side and a nature trail through the woods that is easy and flat, although this time of year it was muggy and buggy. Still, it was good to go some place different and get outside. I was able to get some nice photos.

    I wore a mask outside most of the time because my allergies are kicking butt.

    Also, I was surprised to see that Troy and Mt. Gilead had some interesting shops in their downtown areas. I hope that they are still there post-pandemic because I’m not shopping for anything but essentials inside stores until things get much safer.

    Morrow Mountain State Park is nearby and one thing that I would like to do during this time is to visit as many state parks and historic sites within a day’s drive as possible to force myself out of the house. We used to go to nearby Lake Tillery and Badin Lake about 20-25 years ago when we had an operating jet ski and friends that had places down there. There was a Revolutionary War reenactment that we participated in a couple of times in the area. That area is where the Henley side of my family settled in the 18-19th century. So I wouldn’t mind going back.

    Another family connection, although not by blood, is that my grand nephew is the direct descendant and namesake of the archaeologist who directed the reconstruction at Town Creek.

    Critters: I have never seen this kind of ant before.

    Look out, spider!

    Fungi and textures:

    And us:

  • Coronavirus Chronicles

    I don’t have a lot to say because the past week I have been so focused on work. Other than migraines and allergies, I am fine and Sandy is okay, although he has gotten to the point that he lives for food. He says that he thinks about it all the time now, and he makes bad choices. My choices have not been great either, but I do manage to get in fruit and vegetables in between the York peppermint patties.

    Boredom can be dangerous.

    We went grocery shopping at Deep Roots Market on Wednesday night. It seemed to be a good time with few shoppers in the aisles or at the checkout. All masked, all observant of good practices.

    As far as work goes, I have been scheduled to take care of the office on Fridays. Even 90% of our face-to-face classes meet online on Fridays, and I can answer the phone from my office down the hall and hang a sign on the History office where to find me. The only thing that I worry about is the bathroom, but there shouldn’t be many people in the building.

    I ran into my first maskless student this week. He was waiting for the elevator to go to the third floor for an appointment. I told him to put his mask on and he said he forgot it. I was firm and said he could not be in the building without a mask. He said that he would go up and see if they had masks there. I told him – I didn’t ask – not to get on the elevator, to follow me up the stairs to my office and I gave him a disposable mask.

    He was not hostile at all, just clueless. Which baffles me. There are dozens of signs on every wall and door of the building saying that masks are required. Many emails have gone out to students that state that the rules will be enforced – no exceptions for medical excuses, no excuses at all, because if you can’t wear a mask, you will take classes online. I guess he must have come from a community where no one has followed the mask mandate. We will see more students like this, and some of them will be hostile.

    Next week will be awful. The way the university has managed the Banner schedule to make it “clear” for hybrid class students to know where to go on what day is very, very confusing. Even our faculty can’t figure it out. I can, because I have stared at it for so long every day for weeks. I am glad that I won’t be there in person.

    It would have been better for the faculty to have handled it for each class, but since I have been working here (since 2004) control of everything has increasingly gone to a bloated administration who has embraced technology, automation, and making blanket policies that affect many very different fields. I would not be surprised if they go to a central academic department staffing scheme if the pandemic disrupts us for more than a year. That was floated a couple of years ago anyway.

    Even though I am complaining here, I know that it is a difficult monster to wrestle and we didn’t have any choice in whether to open the campus, just how we make it safe as possible.

    Vote BLUE no matter who in November. We have to survive this mess before we do anything else, and that means getting Trump and his fascists out of office and out of the state and local offices also. Think of it this way – the world is on fire, literally and figuratively. We have to deal with climate change now, although we are past the tipping point. But everybody has to help put the fire out right now instead of sitting back bitching and arguing about how we will rebuild after the fire is put out. The fire comes first. We can work on rebuilding after we survive the fire.

    I was so sleep deprived by the end of the week that I took a nap when I got home yesterday, then slept for ten hours last night/this morning. Tornado dreams, mask anxiety dreams, but also a good recurring dream also about a condo complex that we move into that is older and awesome – really more like an intentional community.

    I picked up The Luminaries again and once I got to around page 450 I got interested and I think that I will finish it now. That first half was a heavy slog though. I love a good character novel but I’m not sure that having this many characters helped in this one.