CatchingUp

I've been meaning to post for about a week now, but my reading has gotten in the way. By the end of July - tomorrow - I will have read six nonfiction and two fiction for the month. Pretty impressive considering most were NF and they usually take longer.

What did I read?

It was a good month for interesting books. One of the fiction books, The Doomsday Book, was about the Black Death in 1348 England while time travelers back in 21st Century Britain dealt with a flu epidemic. Timely.

The other, Flight of the Sparrow, is a historical novel about 17th-century settlers in New England and the Indians located there. This was a true story. It is our upcoming book discussion in August.

Two nonfiction books were noteworthy. Killers of the Summer Moon was about the 1920 era murders of members of the Osage Indian Nation in Oklahoma and the founding of the FBI that solved the cases.

The second, Exterminate All the Brutes, was about the colonization and subsequent subjugation of the Africans living there. A horrifying, but very appropriate reading for these times.

Two other books:

David Sedaris's book of essays is typical of him and is entertaining for the most part. The Forster book on reading nonfiction was quite enjoyable. His poetry book, which I have, is next. 

The Education of T.C.Mits was a book about mathematics and thinking, written in the early 1940s, during the war. It was a very popular book and was included in the books that were sent to the men and women fighting overseas. Incidentally, the full title is The Education of The Celebrated Man in the Street.

The Trump book just came out and is self-explanatory. I believe the photo on the cover is from his days at the New York Military Academy (A JROTC high school).

All in all, a good reading month.

Movie Nights

Since COVID has taken over the world of TV watching along with everything else, we have taken to spending evenings either reading or watching movies. Most of the movies are from our collection -over 500 - but some are from TV and we tape them for watching later.

Last evening was movie-watching time. My wife gave me five to chose from - a common way of deciding what to watch except sometimes I select the candidates and she chooses. Anyhow, I chose a James Garner and Doris Day film, The Thrill of It All,  made in 1963.

It was a light-hearted movie. Just the thing for these times. About a baby doctor (Garner) whose wife (Day) becomes a spokesperson for a soap she uses. It is about how the family life is disrupted and changed when she goes to work and the husband has trouble adjusting. 

I had never seen it before. I should add that their two small children steal the film every time they are on - especially the boy. One of the best parts is in the beginning when Dad calls home and Mom, who washing the girl's hair, tells the boy to answer the phone.

A feel-good movie for sure. (It made up for watching the 4th Bourne movie I chose and we watched it earlier in the week. If you haven't seen it, take a pass on it.)

I want to watch a western next.

Ala Heart of Darkness

 I just completed reading a small book (172 pages) written about 1992 by a Swede who was traveling in Niger, Africa, at the southern edge of the Sahara Desert. He intersperses his diary-like inserts with a historical discussion of Europe's exploration, occupation, and destruction of the natives who resided there. He compares this to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness novel written about the same time.

I have had it on the shelf for a few years, but only now decided to read it considering today's environment. It was a very disturbing book. But I am glad I read it. I think I will read Conrad again. And maybe watch the film, Apocolypse Now.

I will have more to say about this book, but not now. A little too raw in my mind.

The next book I should read? The Mind of South by W. J. Cash, written in 1941.

Another Pandemic-Like Episode?: TB to 2008

Going through this current crisis with COVID-19, I was reminded the other day of a slightly similar, though definitely not as deadly nor critical, that happened my last year at SSVC when I was superintendent.

It happened just after Christmas, 2008. We had restarted school after the Christmas break, the students were back, and we were preparing for semester exams. We had had some flu cases earlier in the year, but nothing our nurses and houseparents couldn't handle. This time it was different.

I don't know how or why it happened - maybe it came back with the students when they returned from their homes scattered across the state - but it hit the school hard. Normally, a sick child would be kept in the cottage during the day away from the school and other students. If there was a risk of spreading it to others, the child would be kept in the campus hospital.

The hospital was more of a clinic, with a nurse on duty 24 hours a day. It had a few beds, but its main function was to distribute medications to the 300 students who had prescriptions or needed something for whatever cold or pain they had. It definitely was not equipped for treating a flu epidemic. But that's what it did in January 2009.

We had to put beds in rooms that were originally meeting rooms or equipment storage rooms. Then we began to move beds into the hallways, just like I saw on TV recently. Many of our administrative personnel who were co-located in the clinic were enlisted to assist the nurses in many of the housekeeping chores. Some children were taken home by their parents, but that was the exception since almost all of them lived in either the Philadelphia, Harrisburg, or Pittsburgh areas, and those areas were dealing with similar illnesses.

We survived. After about three weeks, we returned to a situation where the nurses could handle things on their own with help from the houseparents. But it was close for a while. We had some great staff and kids. 

I think about it oftern these days.