Book review

For some years, I reviewed romances for Compuserve. It was enjoyable and I got free books in the process. Even after Compuserve shut down its review board, I kept reading romance novels for the fun of it. But the last one I bought was a little disappointing.

"A Dash of Scandal" by Gloria Dale Skinner, writing as Amelia Grey
Jove Books, 2002
ISBN: 0-515-13401-5

The title attracted me. It was obviously a Regency romance. Ever since I read Jane Austen's stories, that period has held enjoyment. The story is of a country girl who visits an aunt in London for 'the season'. Her aunt is a gossip columnist and has had a fall which precludes her going to parties and gathering gossip. She persuades her niece to do the gathering while she continues to write her column. The niece meets a naughty earl and falls in love with him. In the mean time, a thief has been stealing from the homes at which the parties are held, including the earl's. After some misunderstanding, the niece and the earl form a team to catch the thief. He falls in love with her and all ends well.

A cute story and very well written. But there is a problem for me. The author has her characters saying some things that reek of Regency and others that might have come from her local high school right now. Her character's actions are not those of a pair of Regency gentles. In fact, they might have been a pair of high school lovers in Regency dress up.

Of course, each costume change of our heroine is detailed by the author. She also provides details of the dress of other female characters and some of the males... sometimes. I'm not sure if this is 'de rigeur' for a modern Regency writer. But between skipping those descriptions and the protracted, unlikely love scenes, this book was a very quick read.

It's not that I didn't enjoy the reading. The problem was more in non-Regency charactizations and speach. I think that Ms. Dale Skinner should re-read "Pride and Prejudice" to see what actions were more probable in the gentles of that period.

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Things are changing

We changed our clocks from daylight savings time to standard time last night. It beats me why our government insists on sticking with a system invented when all factories didn't have electric lights and used windows to let in sunlight for workers. But this post isn't about that or our government.
I like to garden. In fact, I'm a Master Gardener (courtesy of the University of Arkansas Extension Service). Yesterday and the day before, I began to get ready for winter. At my Master Gardener project, a group of us mulched plants and removed the summer annuals in preparation for planting winter ones. At home, my wife and I swept up leaves, weeded and I put in pansies for the winter.
The trees are changing and the leaves are falling. Maples make the prettiest show, especially here, among tthe pines and oaks. But the wild pear in the wood below our house has turned to orange. I usually notice it in the spring when white blossoms make it a candle in the bare woods. The lizards have disappeared from our rock garden and the acorns are dropping out of the oak woods, making walking up our back drive like strolling on ball bearings.
Days have become cooler. We can leave the windows open at night without smothering in heat and humidity. Since Little Rock has no ordinance against it, the smell of burning leaves can occasionally be scented on the breeze. Some of the birds are gone, already flown south for winter. Among those, the hummingbirds are most noticeable for their absence. I took the feeder down this morning. On the plus side, mosquitos are not in attendance. Bug gnats still manage to get up my nose.
Deer and pheasant seasons have begun in many states. The modern gun bear season opens here Monday. I don't hunt anymore. Well, I plan on trying to bag a pheasant in Kansas next week. But my deer and elk hunting is over. Both my son and son-in-law provide me with game when their hunts are successful. And the meat is already dressed and butchered into cuts for cooking. It's even better than buying meat at the grocery since they don't ask for money (well not often).
All those leaves are falling on our drive and into our little water feature. That means sweeping, dipping, cleaning and "sucking" them out of wherever they aren't wanted. That sucking is something that I managed to get Stihl to do for me. By turning their blower around, you can make it remove leaves from places that are inconvenient to blow. We still have to pick the leaves out of the lavender bushes and rosemary. The rosemary, by the way, is blooming again. Pretty purple blossoms that you don't notice at first.
Sage, salvia, roses, Japanese anemone are all blooming. Our front garden has all of those and looks quite patriotic with red, white and blue waving waist high.
Of course, the kids are back in school. Since I'm fairly old, this has only one effect for me... the traffic jams start about three in the afternoon and go on until the end of rush hour. Those yellow buses seem to be everywhere.

I'm not...

I'm not as young as I was yesterday; and I was older then than the day before that.
One of my favorite rants is that I hope I get to Heaven because I want to talk to God about engineering. It seems bitterly unfair to me that my body wears out one thing at a time. It would be so much cleaner if we just fell to pieces all at once, like the "One Hoss Shay".*
This latest complaint has two sources. First, I injured my knee slightly a couple of days ago. That sort of thing used to heal in a couple of hours. But here it is two days later and the darned thing still hurts. It makes me limp when I walk. I hate that. And that is not the only thing that is wearing or has worn out. The second is, for me, really scary. I was talking to my wife this morning. It took me three tries to get a very simple point across. Afterwards I realized that she was not to blame. I had been vague and had not said exactly what I was trying to make her understand. I'm losing my communications skills. Hey, that's really frightening for a guy who wants to write.
My mother-in-law (That's her picture at the head of this post.) had Alzheimer's Disease. It was painful to watch a witty, sophisticated woman disappear, one memory at a time. The first thing we noticed gone were words. She began to call almost any animal a squirrel. Of course by that time, her short term memory was already shot. She hardly remembered what had been said at the beginning of a conversation. That meant we heard the same story often. I'm not complaining about that. She was a talented story teller. She was very good at compensating for memory loss. If you met her then, you would have thought her normal during a short conversation. We were lucky enough to care for her during six months of her illness. She was mobile and enjoyed travelling with us although she would often remark that she remembered a road that none of us had ever travelled.
I'm pretty sure that the regimen we used for her kept her going longer than another might have. After my wife helped her dress, we would have breakfrast. She had always been careful about her weight, but the combination of her disease and age reduced her appetite to the point we gave her nutritional drinks as often as she would take them. After breakfast, I would take her for a walk along our street. We walked up to three miles each morning; less if she felt tired. She would talk to me about her family and marriage. I loved that.
But in the normal course of Alzheimer's, she began to lose people. She addressed her grandchildren as if they were her children. She became increasingly concerned about getting lost. Our son is six feet four inches (96cm) tall. When we went into crowded places, Mother would cling to his arm. She said that holding onto the tallest thing in the crowd would allow us to find her no matter what. She began to wander, mostly in the house and we had to put up barriers to prevent her from falling down stairs or into the garage. She would not go outside without one of us because she was afraid of getting lost.
Dementia can effect people in different ways. The books we read on the subject warned us that her temperament might change, that she might get mean, irritable, even destructive. None of those things happened. Mother never was less than pleasant, never raised her voice or displayed any temper. I wondered if inside, she was fretting at her innability to tell us everything she wanted to say. It is more comforting to believe that she was as happy as she seemed.
Toward the end of her life, she didn't recognise any of her family except her husband. Him, she knew up to the day she died. He died soon after she did and they are buried side by side in the little prairie cemetary below the church they attended almost every week they were married.
Getting back to ME. I fear losing my memories and depending on others for everything. I fear becoming an inarticulate burden on my family. Dying is easy. But being so sick that I can't take care of myself, in unremitting pain that robs me of any other thought or emotion is terrifying.