Garden sculpture

As much as I love the flowers of the rose and clematis, I also love to watch  sea holly and hens and chicks take their shape as they come into bloom.

Sea holly has this beautiful exquisite blue, berry-shaped thorn.

The hens and chicks erupt skyward, pink stalks towering above the green rosettes.

Prickly, sturdy, colourful sculptures while they last.

Sea holly

Hens and chicks in flower

And the Mountains Echoed

This novel is a series of interconnected personal stories that are linked by common threads of history and family, but spread across generations and continents.

Afghanistan is the place of origin but borders expand to San Francisco and Paris. The hardship of a war-torn country is portrayed, along with the impact of poverty, ignorance, and cultural bias. Yet despite the heavy subject matter, I feel more enlightened than burdened by reading And the Mountains Echoed. Without question, this deserves a Pulitzer Prize and I hope to see it nominated in 2014.

Hosseini has great compassion and empathy for these characters, and the depth of feeling opened better understanding of new worlds for me.

When I followed up my reading of the book with a little research about his creative process, it came as no surprise that his literary ambition aligns with a spiritual mission, a quest to connect readers with lives lived.

What has happened in Afghanistan has an impact on the lives of my characters, and so, in part at least, the writing of my novels has necessitated the writing of recent Afghan history as well, or at least enough of it to provide a credible world for my characters to inhabit. I lay no claim, it should be clear, to being a historian. So in my books, the intimate and personal have been intertwined inextricably with the broad and historical... You do not need to be Afghan, or even know anything about Afghanistan, to connect with the stories. They are basically about the choices we make in life and the consequences of those choices. These are experiences that all of us have had at some point, regardless of race, religion, ethnicity, culture. My hope, as a writer, is that readers will connect with my characters and perhaps see something of themselves in them, something about how they understand life reflected on the pages. Of course, I will be extremely honored if readers step away from And the Mountains Echoed not only with a satisfying story, but also with a little more insight and a more personal sense of what has happened in Afghanistan in the last thirty years.

.....

My books are love stories at core, really. But I am interested in manifestations of love beyond the traditional romantic notion. In fact, I seem not particularly inclined to write romantic love as a narrative motive or as an easy source of happiness for my characters. I am more interested in love that blooms in the most unexpected places, between people who don't really see it coming -the co-wives in A Thousand Splendid Suns, for instance, or between Nabi, the chauffeur in And the Mountains Echoed, and his employer. My characters search love and human connection, and in that process face the limitations of their own hearts and see their own vulnerabilities exposed. It is the overcoming of these obstacles, in the name of love, that leads to those acts of self-sacrifice and altruism that speak so deeply to me and represent what is best in man. 

.... Read the full interview with the Huffington Post,

Splash pad

Rob noticed this little green guy by the pond this morning, waiting for the sun to come out from behind the clouds.

We were happy to see this visitor, because we've tried introducing tadpoles and frogs in years past, but they'd soon disappear. We figured the pond was just too small. Who knows, maybe this is one of them returning to check out its old splash pad.

Let the Great World Spin

I loved it when I first picked it up and continued to savour every page of  Let the Great World Spin.

McCann embodied his characters so well I genuinely felt I was viewing life through their eyes, feeling  the pain of mothers who had lost their sons, daughters estranged from mothers, brothers trying to connect, a Jesuit questioning vows of chastity or Pierre Petit preparing for his high wire walk between the two World Trade Towers.

Most of the novel is set in 1974 and many of the characters are affected in some way by Petit's display. McCann gained some of his insight into Petit from the memoir, "To Reach the Clouds" published a few months after 9/11 in 2002. Both this novel and the Oscar-winning documentary Man on Wire were released in 2009.

Reviews were over the top for this novel, "One of the most electric, profound novels I have read in years," (New York Times Book Review); "An act of bravado, dizzying proof that to keep your balance you need to know how to fall," (oprah.com); "Now I worry about Colum McCann. What is he going to do after this blockbuster groundbreaking, heartbreaking symphony of a novel?" (Frank McCourt)

Some passages I dog-eared:

What Corrigan wanted was a fully believable God, one you could find in the grime of the everyday. The comfort he got from the hard, cold truth - the filth, the war, the poverty - was that life could be capable of small beauties. He wasn't interested in the glorious tales of the afterlife or the notion of a honey-soaked heaven. To him that was a dressing room for hell. Rather he consoled himself with the fact that, in the real world, when he looked closely into the darkness he might find the presence of light, damaged and bruised, but a little light all the same. He wanted quite simply, for the world to be a better place, and he was in the habit of hoping for it. Out of that came some sort of triumph that went beyond theological proof, a cause for optimism against all evidence. (p. 20)

The over-examined life... is not worth living. (p.  79)

Let this be a lesson to us all, said the preacher. You will be walking someday in the dark and the truth will come shining through, and behind you will be a life you will never want to see again. (p. 145)

There was an arrogance in it, he knew, but on the wire arrogance became survival. It was the only time he could lose himself completely. He thought of himself as a man who wanted to hate himself. Get rid of this foot. This toe. This calf. Find the place of immobility. So much of it was about the old cure of forgetting. To become anonymous to himself, have his own body absorb him. And yet there were overlapping realities:  he also wanted his mind to be in that place where his body was at ease. / It was so much like having sex with the wind. It complicated things and blew away and softly separated and slid back around him.  (p. 240)

He was happy, give or take.  He was lucky, give or take.  He didn't have everything he wanted, but he had enough. Yes, that's what he wanted: just a quiet afternoon of nothingness. (p. 264)

Some people think love is the end of the road, and if you're lucky enough to find it, you stay there. Other people say it just becomes a cliff you drive off, but most people who've been around for awhile know it's just a thing that changes day by day, and depending on how much you fight for it, you get it, or you hold on to it, or you lose it, but sometimes it's never even there in the first place. (p. 304)

Glass cork

Came across my first glass cork when I opened a bottle of Cusumano Nero D'Avola, a Sicilian red.

Wasn't expecting to see this and had in fact not even heard of the practice.

It was easy to recork the bottle and when I reopened it, it gave a nice 'pop' sound, proof it was doing a fine job. I've set it aside to reseal others.

The glass cork seemed a better alternative than the composite or synthetic corks that are showing up more frequently in my bottles these days.

According to the Reluctant Gourmet, there are a few other advantages of glass corks.

Since cork is an agricultural product--the thick, spongy bark taken from a living tree--there are some down sides to its use.  For one, sometimes the phenols present in cork can react with the wine, causing cork taint.  Wines that are "corked."  In short, mold forms and contaminates the wine. Sometimes the wine can smell or taste like mildew, but other times, the wine just might taste a little. "off."  Regardless, anywhere from 5-10% of wines sealed with natural cork can end up with cork taint.

Since the Vino Seal is made of smooth glass, there is no chance of its interacting with the wine in any way.  The seal part of the Vino Seal is achieved with a small O-ring under the lip of the stopper.  This creates a hermetic, or air-tight, seal.
Another plus of the Vino Seal is that it is reusable.  If for some reason you don't finish your bottle of wine, just reinsert the stopper into the bottle.  The O-ring again creates the seal, and you can finish your bottle the next day.  You can't do that with natural or synthetic corks, because to pull a cork, you have to basically drill a hole all the way through it with your cork screw.

Wines that are sealed with almost any closure other than natural cork do not have to be stored on their sides.  Natural cork needs to be kept moist to maintain the tight seal.  Store your wine upright for too long, and the cork dries out, shrinks and then there goes your seal.  While this is a plus for the Vino Seal, it can also be a minus.  The foil that covers the seal and the neck of the bottle helps to maintain the air-tight seal. So, when unopened, you can store the wine either lying down or upright, but once you open the bottle, it is best to keep it upright to prevent any minor leaking.