I’ll be away through the weekend and since Rudi’s mom doesn’t have a computer or Internet access, postings will be sporadic and dependent on finding public kiosks and spare time.

In the meantime, I leave you with three beautiful things from the last week:

1. The rain broke the heat and the weather has been beautiful. Today dawned sunny, with weather in the 70s.

2. Rudi has class on Wednesdays this fall, so I went to a political meeting alone last night. But because I was there by myself, our friend John offered me a ride home in his two-seater convertible.

3. Sunday night after Rudi went to bed, I picked up one of the library books I’d borrowed Saturday and started reading. At 4 a.m., I forced myself to put the book down and go to bed. Once I woke up (just shy of noon!), I started reading again. A bike ride to the zoo interrupted the reading for a while, but I came home and finished the book off before supper. It’s been a while since I found a book so compelling it required finishing in one fell swoop. (The book, you ask? The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan. It really did live up to the hype.)

I hate to travel.

Oh, don’t get me wrong. I love being other places, visiting friends and family, and seeing new sights.

I just hate the process that’s required to get there. I hate packing. I hate figuring out whether I have the right clothes for the predicted weather in my destination and whether their meteorologists are as inept as ours. I hate worrying about whether my contact solution is now against the rules. I hate having to choose just one or two books and one or two knitting projects to take with me. I hate cleaning. I hate stressing about whether the cats will have enough food or if I ought to have someone check in on them after all.

I hate having a timetable. I hate having to arrive at terminals a ridiculous amount of time early. I hate waiting in lines, particularly behind people who don’t bother to prep until they arrive up at the metal detector. I hate airport prices. I hate the delays that inevitably don’t happen until you’re already trapped in the terminal or at a layover. I hate the idea of being stuck on the plane for what seems like days and days. I hate stale-tasting airline food. I hate uncomfortable seats. I hate airplane bathrooms that smell funky and that require knowing advanced yoga in order to get in and out. I hate not being able to use my iPod when it’s unclear that it will prevent anything anywhere. I hate strange male seatmates who seem to be under the impression that it is somehow appropriate for him to sit spread-eagle and invade my personal space.

I hate sleeping in other people’s beds. I hate my odd hours affecting other people. I hate not having internet access. I hate having to remember to hide my stuff so that other people’s cats won’t be tempted to spray my bags or my clothes or my shoes.

Usually I’m fine once I get there. I just hate that in-between transition purgatory.

But I feel better having shared that. Thanks.

I’m going to blame work deadlines and strep for a slow conclusion to the summer reading. Work kept me tied up late into the evenings and over weekends, and the strep left me feeling listless and uninterested in picking up even the funniest book. But eventually both were conquered and I did squeeze two more books into the season:

I’m a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America after Twenty Years Away, by Bill Bryson

From the book jacket: “After living in Britain for two decades, Bill Bryson recently moved back to the United States with his English wife and four children (he had read somewhere that nearly 3 million Americans believed they had been abducted by aliens — as he later put it, ‘it was clear my people needed me’). They were greeted by a new and improved America that boasts microwave pancakes, twenty-four-hour dental-floss hotlines, and the staunch conviction that ice is not a luxury item. Delivering the brilliant comic musings that are a Bryson hallmark, [the book] recounts his sometimes disconcerting reunion with the land of his birth. The result is a book filled with hysterical scenes of one man’s attempt to reacquaint himself with his own country, but it is also an extended if at times bemused love letter to the homeland he has returned to after twenty years away.”

Why this book? I really enjoy Bryson’s books. I bought it because there was a buy-2-get-1-free sale of certain publishers at my local book store. I picked it in August because you can’t help but laugh when you read Bryson, and the month seemed woefully serious from the outset.

My take: The book differs from a number of other Bryson tomes in that it is a series of adapted newspaper columns he wrote for a British newspaper recounting the differences (both good and bad) he encountered between the U.K. and his new-old home in the U.S. The advantage of such a book is obvious for such a disconnected month — no column lasts more than four pages and the topic changes from “chapter” to “chapter.” And it worked. I’d read an article or two at night to wind down before I went to bed or while I waited for the Metro in the evening. On the other hand, because it’s a series of articles, there are some repetitions that wouldn’t be as noticeable if the series were read weekly over three years that become more so when read nightly.

While it wasn’t my favorite Bryson book, it’s not because it isn’t good or funny; it’s just different. I’d recommend it to anyone who thinks they’d like to try a taste of his style without having to commit to a whole book about one subject — Europe, the Appalachian Trail, science — or someone who doesn’t have a lot of time to read anything all at once and has to fit their reading into bits and bats of time sprinkled throughout the day, week, or month. You’ll find you won’t think about things like health clubs the same way again!

Pages: 288

Peter and the Starcatchers, by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson

From the book jacket: “In an evocative and fast-paced adventure on the high seas and on a faraway island, an orphan boy named Peter and his mysterious new friend, Molly, overcome bands of pirates and thieves in their quest to keep a fantastical secret safe and save the world from evil. Bestselling authors Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson have turned back the clock to reveal the wonderful story that precedes J.M. Barrie’s beloved Peter Pan.”

Why this book? This has been on my to-read list for a while (because who doesn’t love Dave Barry?), but I hadn’t managed to pull it together to buy myself a copy. And the library took its own sweet time in acquiring a copy. Hopefully they won’t be so slow in buying the sequel, which came out in July.

My take: Having read one of the original Barrie works, I definitely feel this pulled more from the play and movie adaptations than the original works. Having said that, I enjoyed it anyway, finding it entertaining to see how Barry and Pearson managed to introduce each familiar aspect of the Peter Pan story. I also enjoyed the new characters (especially Mollie) and plot twists that were introduced

The book’s beginning was a little slow, with the authors taking a bit too long to get the action moving, but once they got going, the story remained riveting and fast-paced. There was no obvious, “I wrote this chapter; he wrote the next” kind of divisions disrupting the story, so I’ll definitely read future collaborations between the two, even if they choose to stray from this successful storyline.

Pages: 452 pages

Total pages read for Kat with a K’s Summer Reading Program during July: 740
Total pages read to date this summer: 3890
Total books read this summer: 14

This leaves me having beaten my goal of 10 books for the season, but falling short of my bonus goal of reading de Tocqueville. It’s too bad for Democracy in America, but there’s always the winter… And I just want to note that some of Kat’s other participants leave me feeling woefully inadequate and under-read. As of last week’s update, the folks leading the count had read 50 books apiece and one woman’s page counts were more than quadruple mine. I bow before such prowess.

The weekend is going very well (well, all except for the cleaning part). Yesterday we slept in and then bummed around the house for a while, watching old Andre Agassi footage and knitting and generally hanging out. Eventually we convinced ourselves to get off our butts and headed to the library, where we picked up some books and dvds. While this is normally exciting enough as it is, a block from our closest library branch is a new Trader Joe’s. So we stocked up on necessities like peanut butter pretzels and beer.

Last night we moseyed over to Michael and Julia’s to help Julia celebrate her 40th birthday for the third straight year. This year’s party was low-key, but I think I enjoyed it more than some of their wilder parties. Our friend John has decided on a way to get me elected D.C. mayor in about 10 years. (I suggested that it would also make me eligible for Providence’s mayor’s position.) It only involved embezzlement, drug dealing, and murder, so I’m pretty sure I’ll be looking into it as an option quite soon.

Today we sauntered to the farmers’ market to fill our baskets for the next few days. We brought home milk, plums, corn, tomatillos, pluots, pears, peppers, carrots, and a tiny little palm-sized melon.

Then we returned home to breakfast upon scones and watch the Agassi match. I admit I teared up at the end watching him struggle to compose himself in order to thank the crowd for their longtime support of him. He’s such a classy guy, even if he did once plow into my mother in a Georgetown shopping mall. (I was so jealous! I wanted him to walk into me!) I give him a lot of credit for helping popularize tennis among my generation.

Agassi never seems to finish tennis matches quickly these days, so we didn’t leave ourselves a whole lot of time to hit the Smithsonian Museum of American History. I think I mentioned that they close at the end of tomorrow for two years to renovate the building. While part of the collection will temporarily be housed in the Air and Space Museum, the rest of it will be mothballed until the museum reopens. We wanted particularly to see the Jim Henson exhibit that’s about to end. It really was cool to see how his puppetry evolved from the first Sam and Friends critters to The Dark Crystal animatronics. Coolest of all, of course, were the Muppets I grew up with. Dr. Teeth, Rolph, Kermit, the Swedish Chef, and an early iteration of Rizzo were all present and accounted for, as were Ma and Emmett Otter. (Rudi took pictures and I ssume will upload photos tomorrow night.)

Then we pedaled over to the Kennedy Center, where our friend Michael was doing a staged reading of his latest play, The Quick Brown Fox Jumped over the Lazy Dogs.

He describes the play thus:

Take a simple sentence. A typing drill. Nine words. 37 letters. What do the words mean? How are they related? How is meaning conveyed? Inspired by the texts of Saussure, Jakobson, and Chomsky, [the play] addresses linguistic concepts such as metaphor, meaning, message, and messenger. The work is infused with absurdist musings from Lewis Carroll, Donald Rumsfeld, and George Bush and illustrates how — in this age of global telecommunications and a barrage of media outlets — nothing is being said.

I admit that I am an English major. I enjoy wordplay. I find communication fascinating. But I thought Michael’s play was hilarious and meaningful and — ultimately — timely. I cannot say enough nice things about the play or Michael’s creativity (and I would feel that way even if I didn’t know him personally).

A bunch of us then went out to dinner where we talked politics and life and generally whiled away a pleasant evening. Afterwards, Rudi and I retired home to the Burrow where we finished out the night by watching Junebug, which was sweet but ultimately lacking something. Its message seemed to be that life is short and too many things ultimately get miscommunicated or left unsaid and that we don’t appreciate the things we ought to. But I found it frustrating that the only urban, “intellectual” character in the play is portrayed as insensitive, overly ambitious, and ultimately clueless about the important things in life. It strikes me that there are just as many shallow people living in the small towns of America as in its cities.

Rudi’s going out riding a quarter of the miles it takes to get to my folks tomorrow. I have offered to make this ride memorable by riding on his handlebars, but we ultimately agreed I’d probably be happier if I hung around D.C. and knit and read and oohed and ahhed over baby tigers. Sounds like fun, doesn’t it?

After reading today’s article on O’Rourke’s in the Hartford Courant and visiting the website set up to facilitate communication about the diner, I’m pleased to say there’s good news.

Brian says he’d definitely like to rebuild. Offers of assistance from around the world have poured in. And some Middletown attorneys have set up a trust to help Brian rebuild.

If you’d like to send a check to help, you can direct it here:

Howard and McMillan, Trustees
Howard and McMillan, Counselors at Law
386 Main Street
Middletown, CT 06457

They’re looking into the ability to process credit card and Paypal payments and information about that should be available sometime next week. Lots of people are working on fundraisers (as well as weekend bake sales in front of the diner), too.

Should it prove infeasible for Brian to rebuild, the attorneys will return everyone’s money.

The rain and wind have finally kicked in. God, how I love stormy weather. Somehow you just feel very … alive … in the midst of a storm.

The weekend is going to be divvied up into going out time and staying in time. Lots of activities demand our attendance this weekend — the farmers’ market, a friend’s birthday party, a friend’s play reading (which we’ll actually get to on the right day this time). Other things we just hope to get around to — the Smithsonian’s Museum of American History closes for two years after this weekend and we have yet to make it to the Jim Henson exhibition. And the 3-month-old tiger cubs go public tomorrow morning. If it’s raining that means all the tourists will stay away, right?

The rest of the weekend I plan to lie around and listen to the rain and sip tea. Okay, yes, I do have a backlog of housework that must get done. But after that, I plan on reclining on the couch with a heap of books and my knitting bag. I’m currently knitting up a storm on the Daisy baby sweater and the latest pair of socks, with a few more projects in the planning stages. And I finished my last book Wednesday night, so a new one must be picked. Anyone have a great recent read?

Enjoy the weekend, folks. May the rain lull you to sleep.