Life on the Vine

Yesterday I finished the Book Riot 2019 Read Harder Challenge .  This is my second year doing the challenge and I've found I really enjoy it.  It has diversified my reading and led me to authors and books I would not have found otherwise. The challenge is 24 categories.  If you read a book that fulfills more than one category that is a-OK but I typically try to read a book per challenge.  Earlier this year I wrote a blog about finishing the first twelve challenges.  Here is a link to the post if you want to go back and read it. The final half of the challenge included the following: Read an alternate history novel; an #ownvoices book set in Mexico or Central America; an #ownvoices book set in Oceania; a book by or about someone that identifies as neurodiverse; a book of mythology or folklore; an historical romance by an author of color (AOC); a business book; a novel by a trans or nonbinary author; a book of nonviolent true crime; a book written in prison; a self-published boo

I mentioned this briefly in my blog about our 7-day sailing trip around the Ionian Sea, but traveling to Greece opened a long-forgotten memory bank for me, going back nearly 25 years ago, when I studied Latin for two years in school.  My teacher taught Edith Hamilton's classic book called Mythology .  There was a time when I was very well versed in the myths of the ancient Greeks and Romans.  In the years since, I haven't really needed the knowledge except it has been useful a couple times to know the legends of Atlas (holds the Earth and celestial heavens on his shoulders), Sisyphus (cursed to roll a rock up hill for eternity), and of course Pandora (the first woman in Greek mythology who let evil enter the world by opening a vessel, often referred to as a box).      Bookending our Greek sailing trip was a night in Ancient Corinth on the front end and a night in Athens on the back end.  We got to walk around the ruins of temples to these mythic gods and a city named after on

The first week of September Tom and I embarked on a vacation we had been planning for nearly a year and talking about for probably close to ten -- a Greek cruise.  Doing a cruise around the Greek islands has always been high on my vacation Wish List.  Tom was in Athens years ago for a work trip but I had never been to Greece.  Over the years we researched and requested literature on different cruise options.  We did start first with large cruise companies and then looked at the smaller "sail" boats that carry about 150-200 people.  We then learned through one of Tom's former co-workers that it's possible to charter a sailboat in Greece and it's actually fairly reasonably priced.  He pointed us in the direction of Sea Trips of Greece. All the credit for making this trip happen goes to Tom.  He did all the coordination with Sea Trips, reserved our boat and crew, took care of the pre-trip payments, and pulled out all the Euro cash we needed to pay our crew and v