Tag Archives: reading

Two Lovely Things

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This fine Saturday morning I am sitting in my friend’s house in Glen Ariff, N Ireland, drinking tea and valuing books. Liz runs a camping and ceilidh barn, but is rarely here because she’s trotting the world as a storyteller. I think she’s in England today.

The view from my bedroom window this morning

Sitting in Liz’s space surrounded by bookshelves, I’m going through her rather extensive collection. As a former librarian, Liz received a lot of books as presents over the years from places where she’s told stories.Some of them are worth quite a bit, and I am having fun plying my old trade as a bookslinger.

Liz is eyeing a bit of downsizing for her caretakers’ flat at the barn. The barn is divided into three bits: Liz’s private space, the dorm and services for the guests, and a studio for ceilidhs and workshops, sessions, etc. You have to go outside to get between the three.

Of course it’s drizzling today, so I made myself a cuppa tea from the ceilidh barn stash, carried it over to the flat, and changed into my comfy slipper socks. It took this PhD with two master’s degrees about an hour to realize that, instead of changing to shoes and dashing through the rain to make another cuppa each time, I could bring the milk and sugar to Liz’s place and use her kettle. Not much gets by me. I think I’m on my ninth cup of tea, so perhaps my brain is sloshing.

One shelf done, 27 to go….
When I lived in Scotland I wrote a column for a US paper about life overseas and they were collected into this sweet little book, my first. I’ve written nine since then with some major publishers even, but the first is always special!

Some amazing titles live on these crowded bookshelves. And of course there’s the lovely moment when I found one of the books I’d written. Pride filled my heart – until I valued it online. We won’t talk about that.

If you want to be in on the book sale once it starts, leave a comment on this blog post and we will contact you when the time comes. Some books will be listed on eBay, plus there will be a barn sale and possibly an online FB Marketplace sale as well. We will let you know.

The lucky tomes that may get to travel the world via eBay, based on their desirability and value

Now, a quick dash to the toilet and back to the bookshelves with cup number ten.

Destined for FB Marketplace, or perhaps a nice ‘buns and books’ barn sale?

New Year’s Resolutions —

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Writer Wendy’s weekly blog

New Year Resolutions
We all make them. We all break them. I’m not sure I take them all that seriously anymore, but I do have a list of goals for 2024.

  1. Set up the still. We have a sorta jumbled collection of what we think is most of the equipment in one of our outbuildings. This is the year we try making that bundle of tubes and barrels and little metal thingies into a working machine. Outside town limits, of course.
  2. Befriend a crow, maybe? This one is speculative, but gee, it looks like fun. The crows bring
    people pretty presents, and they seem to be excellent conversationalists. Plus, maybe they’d keep that effing chicken hawk away…..
  3. Say the eff word less in casual conversation; save it for important moments. This one might be hard because I’ve been binge watching Succession. (IYKYK) Still, I would like to maximize the impact of my selected f-bomb moments by making them more, well, selective.
  4. Make some new friends. As we age, we all know that making new friends is weirder, perhaps even harder. A widowed friend took up salsa dancing in an effort to meet people, and now she’s beating back male attention with a stick. A divorced friend joined the women’s club, a do-gooding society that raises money by baking stuff and selling it and then spending the money to buy more stuff for baking, etc. They’re also really good at feeding homeless people and holding the government accountable for not taking care of homeless people. Sorta like librarians, the Wytheville women’s club. Do not eff with them; they will eff you up with soft pillows and sweet treats and kind words so that you will not realize until you cannot get a loan at the bank or a seat at the coffee shop that you have been well and truly EFFED around town. They do their best work undercover. I’m not a good dancer, so I joined the women’s club. Since then I’ve met a lot of nice homeless kids with the same sad slide of small situations tumbling together to form disaster in their lives. Homelessness is made up of a bunch of tangled circumstances coupled with one piece of bad luck or timing. But hey, in a small town, bad luck is bad karma which somehow became a Christian concept known as “not working hard enough.” Never have figured that one out, but we laugh about it a lot at the women’s club, between making box meals and crocheting hats for the homeless kids.
  5. Do not fall for the “God is mean” trick making the rounds. Read Matthew 20 once a week or so (that’s the one where everyone gets paid the same for working the vineyard, even though some worked all day and some worked less than half the day). Cruelty is not listed as a fruit of the spirit; preying on the weak is not Biblical. I will ignore the growing Gordian knot of White supremacy mixed with “God only loves those who (insert X here)” mixed with abortion is God’s most important cause, and thus “we all know that means God loves straight white men more” lunacy flowing from so many spigots these days. Imma read the Bible and stay out of the extrabiblical literature zone. And I’ve always been good at staying away from men preaching a Jesus who has their exact personality. They’re easy to spot.

    So no, not too many resolutions really. Now, where to meet crows….?