The Friends We Keep

 Evvie, Maggie, and Topher are the three friends in The Friends We Keep by Jane Green. The friends met at university. Evvie went on to become a super model. Maggie married Ben. Topher became a famous actor. Their lives drifted apart. Now, thirty years later, they reunite. This was a nice story about friendships with flawed people.

Cheeky Doe

 This cheeky doe doesn't care if I am walking by on the Lakewalk today. She is an urban doe and is used to pedestrians, bikers, roller bladers, skate boarders and electric scooter boards whizzing by.

Reputation

 Sarah Vaugan wrote The Reputation, a psychological thriller and crime drama. The story revolves around a member of Parliament living in London with two other female members of Parliament. Emma is divorced. Her daughter, Flora, lives with her father and step-mother during the week and comes to Emma's place on weekends. Emma takes up social causes. When a young girl commits suicide because her boyfriend threatened to release a video of the two of them having sex, the boyfriend is sentenced to 5 months of probation. Emma writes a law saying that on-line abuse should be  punished with 7 years of incarceration. Emma puts up with a stunning amount of on-line abuse herself. She gets letters threatening her life and her health. She is stalked by one voter. A newspaper reporter stalks her too and has a photographer outside of her house every night. Reputations are important. I liked the book but sometimes I thought it went too slow.

 

Primary

 Today is primary day here in Duluth and I worked as an election judge at First Lutheran Church on Superior Street. We registered 35 new voters and had a total of 251 ballots cast. Traffic was slow but steady all day. Everyone was friendly. One of our judges was friendly and also not so friendly at times. If people tried to cast their ballot at the machine for blind people instead of the voting machine, she was say, "Uh uh uh uh uh."  She sounded like a parent scolding a toddler. I would say, "Excuse me, the machine you want is over here." She got irritated off and on throughout the day. One of the other election judges (not me) must have rubbed her the wrong way because it was obvious she didn't like her. We all saw it. Anyway it all worked out in the end and we posed for a photo when the night was over. My civic duty is now complete and I am exhausted.

The Myth of Hiawatha, And Other Oral Legends

 As long as I was staying at Schoolcraft State Park I thought it would be a good idea to read one of Henry Schoolcraft's books. I read The Myth Of Hiawatha And Other Oral Legends. Schoolcraft married a native woman. I suppose many books written in the 1800's wouldn't be as interesting now as they were then. I found this one to be dry, repetitive, and boring. After his first wife died he married another woman whose family owned slaves. Schoolcraft later wrote a pro-slavery book which caused a rift between him and the children of his first wife.

Beautiful World, Where Are You?

 Sally Rooney wrote Beautiful World, Where Are You? The fiction novel is set in Dublin and involves two couples, Eileen and Simon, Alice and Felix. Eileen and Simon, as a couple, makes sense to me. Why Alice puts up with Felix is beyond me. Eileen and Alice have been friends since childhood. In between visits they write each other long emails about their activities and also about their thoughts on beauty, life, and consumerism. What I didn't like about the book is the incredible amount of detail into mundane things such as opening a front door. Should opening a front door take six sentences? If the details were important to the plot, I could understand but they weren't important, they were boring. 

St. Croix Paddle

 Today was the annual canoe trip. This time we started at Interstate State Park and got out in Osceola and rode the school bus back to our cars. The weather was unusual. The temperature was in the low 70's with no wind and cloudy skies. It was nice not to have the sun beating down on us. For a Sunday there weren't that many people out in the water. The water level was very low and we ended up hitting a few rocks. I steered for the first part of the trip but after lunch I rode duff and sat in the middle soaking my hands in the river water. We saw a few eagles, a turkey vulture, a belted kingfisher and about 5 turtles. We saw several stands of cardinal flowers from our canoe. When we got to the dalles part of the river where cliffs are on both sides we sometimes see a sand bar. This year there were two sand bars. We could tell my the water lines on the rocks that the river was four feet below normal. I had a really nice time on the water today.