Books & Beer & Babies

We had our Books & Brews Book Group meeting yesterday. We had six of our regular members not make it for one reason or another, but we had two new people show up for a total of nine. Not bad. This month's book discussion leader (she chose the book) and her husband were missing. But she had a good reason - she went into labor early! Mother and baby are doing fine!

The book, "Lowland", I have written about before. It turned out that most liked it very much, even though I don't like to use that phrase. I would rather say that I found the book very interesting, and the author's writing was excellent and I was involved the whole way through.

One benefit of having the book group meet in a pub is that we get to try different beers. I had a particularly good one yesterday - a tequila lime wheat beer from Alltech brewery in Lexington, Ky. A little late for Cinco de Mayo, but still great!

Speaking about books, I just finished one of the best nonfiction books I've read in quite a while. It's called, "Between You & Me", by Mary Norris. The subtitle is "Confessions of a Comma Queen". She is a copy editor for The New Yorker. She talks about her working life there but also spends chapters discussing the art of writing and punctuation. Separate chapters on pronouns, hyphens and dashes, apostrophes, who and whom, that and which, and of course, commas are just some of the most interesting writing I have ever read on these subjects.

One of the best chapters comes at the end - it is about pencils: the writing, sharpening and erasing with them. I love writing with a wooden No.2 pencil; she loves a No.1 which is softer and more difficult to find anymore. I intend on searching for one.

Here are the last of the horse parade pictures:

The Baby Robins are all hatched and demanding food, keeping Momma and Papa Robin flying around gathering worms and bugs! As you can see, they already have a lot of hair!