Life on the Vine

In October I read Gary Paul Nabhan’s book Mesquite: An Arboreal Love Affair . I've long wanted to read it to learn more about our woody neighbors. Mesquite trees are the predominate plant species on our property. We have easily 200 trees, quite possibly more, on our 40 acres. I haven't gotten to the stage of my nature journaling journey where I'm out there cataloguing them but that's not out of the realm of possible.  In the book I learned about the beneficial relationship between mesquite and ants and the less beneficial relationship between mistletoe and mesquite. I learned that what we see above ground, which can sometimes be quite shrub-like and less tree-like, can be a quarter of what exists underground. Scientific studies have found that a mesquite's biomass underground can be 4-5 times larger than what is seen above ground. Decades ago, an elder mesquite tree in Arizona was confirmed to have a root depth of 175 feet. The mesquite's bulky underground biom...

Saturday I finished the 2024 Read Harder Challenge with nearly two months to spare. It's the seventh year in a row that I've completed the challenge. Typically I try to read as many of my own books for the different challenges but this year I was only able to complete five with books I already own. I completed the rest thanks to my local libraries.  Here are the covers for all the books I read and the list of challenges is below.     2024 Read Harder Challenge Read a cozy fantasy book - A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers.     Read a YA book by a trans author - Being Jazz by Jazz Jennings.   Read a middle grade horror novel - The Girl and the Ghost by Hanna Alkaf. Read a history book by a BIPOC author - Homecoming: The Story of African-American Farmers by Charlene Gilbert and Quinn Eli. .  Read a sci-fi novella - Very Far Away from Anywhere by Ursula Le Guin. While a novella and a book by Ursula Le Guin, who typically writes...

When the new year started we still had contractors at the house, installing the tile floors and doing the stucco finish. We were emptying the rental and the connex as finished spaces in the house allowed. I'd received my tentative job offer from the U.S. Department of Agriculture just before Christmas and had a start date at the end of February. Work on the house continued throughout the year, the largest project being new porches constructed during the summer.  I went on three work trips, one to Northern California and two back to Washington D.C. We went to Colorado to see family and hosted friends from Italy for three weeks. We've had a handful of other house guests, a few gatherings with our neighbors, and my parents have moved to Arizona after more than two decades living in Nebraska. It has been a FULL year.  During all that I have been slowly checking off my Read Harder challenges for 2023 , finishing the challenge yesterday, November 17. This is my sixth year in a row c...

Today I spent part of the day emptying my walk-in closet.  Tom has bought a new closet system for me.  As I was carrying all my clothes and other items from one side of the house to the other, I thought about our move into the house.  I looked around each room.  Tom and I physically moved every piece of furniture and every household item into the house ourselves.  In some cases, we moved items twice, moving boxes into the connex last summer for temporary storage and then moving it up to the house.  I have two observations after today's exercise.  First.  Man, oh man...I have A LOT of clothes!  Second.  I'm about tired of moving stuff!  I know for sure Tom is too.  The house and the move have been consuming.  So I thought I'd mix things up and do a book blog.  I haven't done one since the new year.  I've been reading but notably at a slower pace in the first quarter of the year.  It felt like a bit of a slog ...

When 2022 began I didn't know if I'd finish my two reading challenges - Book Riot's Read Harder and The Unread Shelf .  At the start, 2022 looked like a year that was going to kick my butt.  And, frankly, it kind of did!  '22 was a year of doubles.  Two jobs each.  Two homes.  Two moves.  Two truck purchases.  Two foster dogs.  Two household goods deliveries.  You get the picture.  But, despite everything, I did finish my TWO reading challenges.  I already wrote a blog post about Read Harder but wanted to do one more for the year. I read 48 books in 2022.  In keeping with the trends of the past few years the majority of the books were written by women: 33.  And the majority were nonfiction: 30.  I continue to read books recommended by Elizabeth Gilbert as part of her Onward Book Club .  Reading four this year: Hood Feminism , An American Spy , An American Marriage , and An Awakened Woman .   Here are ...

When the year began I was skeptical that I'd be able to finish the 2022 Read Harder Challenge .  As 2022 began I knew that we had a full, challenging year ahead and boy did it get even more full and challenging than expected.  I knew that we'd be packing up and leaving Italy after five years.  I knew that we'd be moving home to Arizona and starting new jobs.  I knew that we'd be living in a temporary situation as we prepared to close and build our new home.  Well, if you've read my recent posts, you know that the house we thought was coming in July 2023 actually came THIS July.  And everything we thought we had a whole year to do got packed into just a few short months.  But despite the life-changing move, house delivery, stress and hecticness, I managed to finish the Read Harder Challenge with two months to spare.   Here are the 24 books I read for the challenge and below I've included some commentary on the books.  Five of the books al...

Earlier this month I reached the halfway point of my 2022 Read Harder Book Challenge .  Finishing my twelfth challenge of twenty-four.  Since then I've ticked off another two challenges so I've comfortably got only 10 more to do in the next six months.  With the total upheaval of our lives this year, I'd wondered if I'd be able to finish this year's challenge but I'm confident now I'll finish. Within days of being home in Arizona I had a new county library card and hold books on the way.  Last night I finished my first of the requested library books:  Pamela Paul's book My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues .    A couple of Books of Books This is a book that has been on my wish list to read since June 2017.  The month we were moving to Italy.  Up until earlier this year, Pamela was the editor of the New York Times Book Review.  I think we can safely say that the woman knows a thing or two about books....

When Jesuit priest Gregory Boyle was teaching a short story class to lifers in Folsom Prison in 1993, he asked them if they could describe the difference between sympathy, empathy, and compassion.  He noticed they were using the three terms interchangeably when discussing the grandmother's transformation in Flannery O'Connor's story A Good Man is Hard to Find . As I've been reading and watching the news, and listening to the tone and rhetoric of our national and political debates, I've been thinking a lot lately about empathy.   The first time I thought of empathy as a personal trait was around 2006-7 when I completed a yearlong leadership development program.  We were all required to take the StrengthFinders test and empathy was identified as one of my top five strengths.   It states: "People exceptionally talented in the Empathy theme can sense other people's feelings by imagining themselves in others' lives or situations."  It also states that...

My worlds of books and wine converged in a pleasant and unexpected way last October.  A recommended winery in Greve in Chianti turned out to have a historical connection to a book that one of my college professors had used as an example of a strong opener.  This was more than twenty years ago!  The opener, we'll get to shortly.  But first, the wine.      A quick web search reveals there are more than 45-THOUSAND wineries in Italy.  Since 2017, we've visited just over 110.  Even THAT is a lot of wineries. So given the bounty of wineries, what makes a winery stand out?  The wine, of course.  The winemaker.  The family.  The origin story.  The cellar.  The labels.  The view.  The vineyard.  The tour.  The wine-food pairing experience.  All true and all things any winery can potentially offer.  But when a winery has a surprising connection to the discovery of your nation and to a book of...