August 18, 2024

 

Dear Everyone,

We’ve been back from the barge trip for a couple of weeks now.  Not very much has been happening in Hinsdale in all of that time.  We’re anticipating a visit from Nicola prior to the G3 summit (just after the DNC finishes).  And of course, we welcome Rafaela into this world!

I have spent some time watching the Bears pre-season games.  They appear to be playing well, but time will tell.  American football is not nearly as exciting to watch as Australian Rules Football (Footy). We also watched the last week of the Olympics, which had better TV coverage than in the past. I especially liked Mike Tirico - - who asked surprisingly intelligent questions.  One of my questions is why handball is not a more popular sport in the US?  It doesn’t appear that you need to be a freak of nature like a basketball or football player to be good at this game, and there is enough speed and physical contact to satisfy the American appetite.

I have been lifting weights with Jami Walloch as usual.  Jami has a productive small backyard garden, and we were the recipient of several pounds of homegrown tomatoes that I quickly rendered into gazpacho. Yum. We went out to dinner with Jami and Carolyn a couple of days ago, at a new Greek restaurant in Clarendon Hills called Thassos.  It was over air-conditioned, but the food was good.  Also on the food side, I also recently experimented with our ice cream maker, and turned out some mint/lime ice cream that reminded me of some I had in Hamburg.

I have read some interesting books over the last two weeks.  On the non-fiction side, I finally read Nickel and Dimed, by Barbara Ehrenreich, a book I had been thinking about reading for years. Living on low wages is hard, and probably worse now than in 2000.  Her biggest adversity is the lack of affordable housing, and after this, the inadequate transportation from areas of cheap housing to where the jobs are.

I read some better fiction than usual over the last two weeks. Cahokia Jazz is a noir within an alternate history - - what if the US had not committed complete genocide of Native Americans?  It takes place in 1920’s Cahokia (basically St. Louis).  Another great read was the Maniac, by Benjamin Labatut.  This is an excellent book about John Von Neumann, the atom bomb, computers, artificial intelligence, and Go; although I will admit that I liked his previous book, When We Cease to Understand the World more. Also good was The Ministry of Time, half time-travel and half romance, with a lot of politics and intrigue thrown in. Maybe a little too autobiographical (the main character is half-Cambodian, like the author). And just a shout out to My Murder, and Black Tide (the second ‘Jack Irish’ novel in the noir series by Peter Temple).

Love, H.

A visitor to our backyard.  (Juvenile?) Broad winged hawk.  We hope it will eat some chipmunks, who ate through the wire insulation of our air conditioner.  We have also been plagued by pin oak mites, a consequence of our cicada summer.