Syllabus #115

I'm becoming the Bubba of peach concoctions.  

Things I have made with peaches this summer:

Peach bars

Peach cobbler

Peach icebox cake (pictured above)

Peach Pie

Peach crisp

Peach and peanut butter sandwich

Peach baked oatmeal

Peach butter

Peach caprese salad

Peach avocado salad

Other than peaches, here's what we've been consuming lately:

I believe the phrase we are using here is 'womp womp'.  Get vaccinated and deprogram yourself from the exceptionalist mindset that bad things only happen to other people.

Bald Knob Pricks Edge of Space 

We aren't ready to re-do our kitchen, but this is the exact cabinet color I have been imagining.  

There are some brilliant items on here.  With a couple of trips coming up this year (hopefully!) I gotta get me some of these.

Analog Reading:

Finally!  I finished The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen.  I am aware this book won the Pulitzer in 2016, and Andy highly recommended it, BUT it wasn't my favorite book I've read this year.  The story was incredibly compelling but there was something about the narrative tone that felt like it was deliberately distancing me from the narrator - like he was being guarded and not giving me the full story (which, if you read the book, makes COMPLETE sense by the end) but I found myself disengaging after reading just a few pages at a time.  I'm that way with people, too.  If you give me closed off, leave-me-alone vibes, I will do exactly that.  But now there's a sequel or a continuation of the story that I feel obligated to read, so it's like, are we doing this again?  

About to finish Somebody's Daughter by Ashley C. Ford.  It's SO good.  It's a memoir by a woman just a bit younger than me, who was raised by a single mother with the help of her grandmother, while her father was in prison.  Growing up, Ashley never knew why her dad was incarcerated, but the book leads up to her learning the nature of his crime, coming to grips with that reality, and then dealing with the complicated emotions she feels when he is finally released from prison 30 years later.