Saturday at Last

Happy Birthday, Diane!







It's a DeVille! (Click on it to make the pic bigger) I didn't check to see if it had Dalmation seat covers, darn it. I hope I'm not invading privacy or anything, it was just too clever not to snap. Does this count for Kat?


Summer Reading Program/Challenge:

Language Visible: Unraveling the Mystery of the Alphabet From A to Z by David Sacks (375 pages)(L). This was a great book. I highly recommend it for anyone. Everyone. It has linguistics (that "an" before the FO is an "n" acting as a euphonic buffer) trivia, rhymes, history, wit and truly bad puns: "we all know what happened when the cow tried to jump over the barbed-wire fence: udder disaster." Can you guess what letter that's under? (The book is arranged with each letter as a chapter.) T!

The English alphabet has only been 26 letters for less than a couple of hundred years. Shakespeare didn't have this many letters! It was a big fight. I realize language is fluid but it's a little disconcerting to see just how fluid. Sacks tells the background history of where the letters come from, (the British/Canadian "Zed" for "Z" is more in line with the ancient/medieval nomenclature), what the letters have looked like down the ages, (the right to left reading vs left to right flipped a lot of letters so that we use the mirror image), oh, just all sorts of cool stuff. Did you know that M from Ian Fleming's James Bond real name is Sir Miles Messervey? And that the letter M was more or less a pictograph of water? (He tells Q's real name too.)

Highly entertaining and educational. I bought a hardback copy for my library.

The Gun Seller by Hugh Laurie (that Hugh Laurie) (339 pages) (L). Speaking of James Bond, this is Hugh Laurie's contribution to the genre. His hero, Tom Lang, sounds remarkably similar to a tough Wooster, but that could just be me. Tom manages quite a credible American accent at times, if he does say so himself. He also says "As ye sew, so shall ye knit" which, yes. Love. (Okay, once, but once is enough sometimes). It's a pretty good spy thriller, lots of self effacing Brit humor, derring do, covert action, a pretty freaky plot if you believe in conspiracy theories. (As in, timely. And it freaked me out to think of it).


This is Hezekiah's plan for the day:





Mine is to knit and sew and clean and FINISH SOMETHING! I'm dying to do Liz (not that way) now that I've seen all the lovely Liz's at Tudor Roses. Not to mention all the other Tudors. I'm only to the sleeve shaping on the first sleeve of Its Jacket. Think I can finish it today? Tomorow?

Oh, and check out the gorgeous knitting of The Rainey Sisters.