Manic Bookstore Cafe

So I've been neglecting the Bookstore Cafe because of another, unrelated manic episode -- I started a project in mid-December with our high school. Knowing that the new version of Anna Karenina  (the movie) was coming to the Little Art Theatre around New Year's, I challenged the high school students to read the novel over the holiday break. My goal was to help them through it by writing a series of blog posts and to celebrate their achievement on Russian New Year's on January 14 (well, actually on the 13th, since I wanted to do it on a Sunday). I'm not sure it was the most well-organized experiment. I had 13 takers, including an eighth-grader, and hustled all over Dayton and Columbus looking for enough books. (It had seemed to me that I would pick them up used at the end of the semester, but even though two courses at Ohio State read the novel this past fall, the bookstores had already sent the books back to their warehouses or wherever they go...) I had to buy some ...

My friend Gera likes to talk about life as a series of lines or rows, a white one followed by a black one, followed by another white one. Stripes, if you will, of good luck and bad luck. When he feels like things are going very badly, he remembers that the next stripe is bound to be white. This holiday season, I found myself thinking not of stripes, but of plaid. We had a wonderful ten-day adventure back in Philadelphia for the holidays, but it was definitely plaid. Safe and enjoyable drive out -- no white-out conditions, no heavy rain, cats well-behaved overnight in the motel -- and a lovely day in Philadelphia. We got our visa pictures taken and went to a new (for me) Chinese restaurant for lunch, Han Dynasty, where the sesame noodles were to die for and the fish I ordered rivaled Peter Chang in Charlottesville ( very  high praise from me). We went to the house and discovered water on the floor from the leaking washing machine, and overnight Steve couldn't sleep at al...