Unchained malady

The latest from suburbia; My friend Dave's son is in a classroom that has banned kids from bringing any Lego guns to school. In case you are a bit out of date on your Lego news, the popular toys include characters with weapons -- light sabers, wands, pistols, etc. These have been determined to be in violation of the school's policy against weapons, which includes toy guns, and now even tiny ones.

Fall is hunting season. My friend Kyle went out last weekend and said it was beautiful. I miss autumns in Michigan, and walking through the fields and woods with my 16 gauge, and my dog racing around me, following every trail she could pick up.

It's windy in the valley today. Did you know that hurricanes sometimes run out of steam so dramatically that they are absorbed back into other storm systems? That is apparently what is happening with one in the Atlantic today. I don't like to refer to hurricanes by their human names, because it seems insulting.

I can think of several Katrinas, for example, in my life, and they are all very nice people. So, I'd rather call hurricanes by software names, like H06.1, H06.2, TS06.3 (for tropical storms). I'm not anticipating my idea will catch on any time soon, though.

Last night, I stumbled upon the foreign editions of my books in a bookshelf rarely visited this summer in a corner of what was then my highly cluttered living room. Nowadays it is looking quite spiffy and neat, as I'm sorting and discarding various items, and recovering lost jewels, the occasional one of which I photograph and post here, maybe to remind me later on what they actually look like.

I think two of my books were translated into about a dozen languages each, and I supposedly have one copy of each foreign edition. But they're all mixed in with other books by other people, also in multiple languages. I've got a bunch of books in Chinese, French, Spanish and Japanese, for starters, not to emotion Arabic and Farsi. But before anyone gets too impressed, I should add that can't read any of these languages, with the partial exception of Spanish.

But I've traveled to virtually every one of the countries that published my books, at least, with the exceptions of Portugal and Korea. Except for that strange northern neighbor of our's, I haven't been visiting any foreign parts lately. Mainly it's New York where I go, which reminds me I am slated to visit there again, for the first time since last April { :-( }.

I'm hoping to take a new companion this time, somebody who never has been there before. It should be fun to see the city through her bright brown eyes, rather than my own jaded blue ones.

-30-