Friday Afternoon View from My Window 19Oct19
On a cloudy afternoon, following a morning of drizzle, I can still see some autumn colour. It’s amazing that, after the winds of Hurricane Dorian, the remnants of Tropical Storm Melissa, and the mini-tropical depression that pelted us with heavy rain and high winds yesterday, so many of the trees are still holding onto their leaves.
It’s been a gorgeous fall here on the North Shore of Nova Scotia. And today, despite the rain and cloud, was another beautiful day: sweater-mild and glowing.
You might notice some differences in the landscape since, say September three years ago. We’ve chopped down that scraggly pear tree in the foreground, trimmed up the alder in the “rock” garden, and the spruce tree has grown up past the power lines again. But the biggest change is a result of Hurricane Dorian in late August. We lost the hard maple tree at the very end of the driveway, and half of one of the tamaracks. Friends helped us clean it up the very next day.
We also lost a pine tree at the parking end of the drive, a small willow by the barn and what amounted to a large limb (in bits and pieces) from the big poplar tree by the house. We (and the house) came through unscathed.
I hope you enjoy this little piece of nature. I’m not looking forward to the winter but, oh my, I do love the fall!
Whew! It’s these kind of questions that make me feel totally inadequate and unqualified to be discussing books.
Some of you may realize that before my break, I was using Exurbanis to list & describe all the books that I’ve read, as the years progressed. And you may also know that I was behind in monthly summaries – by about three years. In January of this year (2018) I posted my summary for January 2015 and determined to myself that I was going to be up to date by the end of the year. Instead, I stalled at October 2015, and am now a month further behind than I was in January. 
What’s happening:
The Companion book contained many photos of the series, but also of the real-life royals. It also provided history for each episode about the political and personal disasters taking place at the time. Although we googled the events as the show progressed, I found many things in this book that I had not previously known.
It’s a chick-litty romance which is not something I usually read, but I was intrigued by the royal connection. It features all-American Rebecca (Bex) Porter, who goes to Oxford and falls in love with the guy across the hall, who just happens to be the heir to the British throne. It was sort of based on William and Katherine, but would make great reading now in light of Harry & Meghan.
My reading overall was down dramatically in the past year, and I had only 3½ nonfiction titles in the mix. They represented a wide range of topics: medicine, history and lifestyle. 
The rules are:
This was published in 1991 when computers had been in the general work force about 15 years but were not nearly as developed as today. Peter Diamond is the ‘last detective’ because he still insists that leg-work, and not computers, is what will solve a case.
It might be stretching it a bit to say this was set in Canada because in 1869, the Pacific-bordering territory of British Columbia had not yet joined Confederation. Nonetheless, Chad Hobbes, newly arrived in Victoria, finds himself made a police detective and sent to investigate the death of Dr. McCrory, a new age doctor who was found stabbed with his cut-off penis in his hand (it had been in his mouth). 
I do love Marina Endicott, who departs from her usual current day settings to tell this story set on the vaudeville circuit of the Canadian prairies and Montana in the years 1912 to 1917. It follows the fortunes of three sisters who form a singing and dancing act.
Called a Korean ‘fable for our time’, this is the tale of Sprout, a self-named battery laying hen who has one dream: to be a yard hen so she can hatch an egg and raise a baby. She escapes a mass cull operation, and finding herself outside the fence, finds an egg in the hedge to sit on. She hatches a duckling, which she raises, to find that it is accepted as neither duck nor chicken.
Lisa at 
Johncock has peopled his novel with the real players in the game – the real astronauts, the real bar owner, and so on, except for the main characters of Jim Harrison and his wife Grace. This fictional couple desperately want a child and think constantly about new life even as the news in the bar almost weekly seems to be the death of another colleague.
I included this in my reading because of the setting on Sark, one of the Channel Islands, from which my mother-in-law’s family emigrated,(Guernsey), and because it has lovely cover.
But that’s not the issue. I just read this 
That sounds so serious – and the poetry I’d like to share today is not. It prefaces the book 
In early September 2015, I received an unexpected call from my neurosurgeon, with a cancellation the following week – and a date for my spinal fusion surgery. 
It’s seldom that I rate a cookbook five stars, but Make the Bread, Buy the Butter is so much more than a cookbook. Cover blurb says: “When Jennifer Reese lost her job, she was overcome by an impulse common among the recently unemployed: to economize by doing for herself what she had previously paid for. . . . So Reese began a series of kitchen-related experiments, taking into account the competing demands of everyday contemporary American family life . . . . Although you should make your hot dog buns, guacamole, and yogurt, you should probably buy your hamburger buns, potato chips, and rice pudding. Tired? Buy your mayonnaise. Inspired? Make it.”
I always try at least one recipe from a cookbook before I pass judgment. In this case, it was ‘Simplest Buttercream’ frosting. It was that simple – and scrumptious.
Penny writes an excellent mystery set in the fictional village of Three Pines, Quebec but she also writes with wonderful insight into the human experience:
Ah – (fictional) St. Denis, in southwest France, the home of Bruno, chief of police and all things southern France-y. In this episode industrial espionage threatens the local wineries, a research station growing genetically modified crops is burned down, and a big US winemaker wants to buy up land in the valley to produce a homogenous commercial product that is anathema to Bruno and most of the people of his community.
Another great entry in this series, this one dealing with the illegal cactus trade (and murder – of people, not of cacti). 
It’s 1922 and Jack Haldean, young crime writer and former Royal Flying Corps pilot, is enjoying the local fete on a beautiful summer’s day in rural Sussex. When his friend is murdered, Jack steps in to solve the crime. I can’t remember how the police figured in this one, but I do remember being pleasantly surprised at the quality of the mystery, and that I enjoyed it even though I saw the murderer right away. 
Many years ago, I somehow got hold of and read the fourth in this series featuring Benni Harper who is a folk art museum curator in fictional San Celina, California. 
Ethelred Tressider, mystery write (aka herring seller “it was a facetious reference to the red herrings that she considered my stock in trade”), and his agent, Elsie (the herring seller’s apprentice?) try to solve the mystery of the apparent death by suicide of Ethelred’s ex-wife Geraldine. Geraldine had taken several people, including another of her ex-husbands and her banker, to the cleaners with an investment scam.
Ten-year-old Lucky Trimble lives in Hard Pan, California, pop. 43, at the edge of the desert. Her mom recently died as the result of going outside after a storm and touching a downed electrical wire. She’s now living with her biological father’s first wife, Birgitte, who has come from France to look after Lucky. And Lucky is afraid Birgitte will return to France, leaving her in an orphanage.
Rich Countess Camilla DeMoss issues invitations to her country estate to six children (including Tabitha Crum) from various circumstances, some with a Roald Dahl bent. She tells them that they are all adopted and one of them is her long-lost grandchild, heir to her large fortune.
Spoiler alert: The writing is beautiful and for the first hundred pages, I really enjoyed it. But by the time Jude finally committed suicide, I was done. 
Dr. Sam is a country doctor in what I recall seemed the early part of the twentieth century. There were still horses and carriages, but Dr. Sam did have a nice roadster. Aside from making house calls and doctoring the county, Dr. Sam is an amateur sleuth. 
Much as in 
