Scarf herded us all together for Easter brunch after some went to Mass. We gathered chez lui a bit beforehand for photographs, and then we processed to Café Star. She had set up a curtain at one end of her porch and added a vase with flowering branches, which was a nice touch, but so was full sunlight. When we walked, I called to Mia, and she got her feet under her and lumbered toward us, but, too eager for bellyrubs, she lay down too soon--while still on the slope over the sidewalk--promptly rolled once down the slope, and, poor dog, we all laughed at her. But then I gave her a thorough belly rub.
In addition to the usual bookclub suspects were other neighborhood agitators whom I have met through their dog, the Hawaiian soccer god Pele. (They named him after the god, but he's black and white and about the size of a soccer ball, so for me he's both.) They would like to have a political bookgroup, and I absolutely could do with more nonfiction reading, and political reading more in-depth than The Nation and news sites. I hope that gets off the ground, as long as the age thing doesn't matter.
Saturday night AEK had had an Easter egg dyeing party, which should cement her forever as My People except that Sunday morning, looking at Mulchman's house, she said that instead of giving him her leaves, she throws them in the Dumpster, loose and unbagged. I suggested she doesn't have to bag them just to barrow them across the street to him and offered my wheelbarrow. Anyway, I wrote "Blake" on one egg in orange and dyed in yellow, and on another wrote the household's four names--me, RDC, Blake, Formigny--and dyed it green. She had all this newfangled stuff--Paas, which doesn't need hot water or vinegar, and newer Paas tablets that give a marbled effect. I am going to have a Yule cookie-baking party in December--more food coloring, though no crayons--and empty lots and lots of eggs through blowing so that next Easter we'll have lots of shells. Since Blake didn't come to brunch, for the family pictures one of us held his commemorative egg.
This was Café Star's first brunch. They served blueberry crepes (the first item on the menu, and the point at which I stopped reading it), lobster bruschetta (with an egg on top, gack), duck confit with a duck's egg and potato pancake, lamb--Eastery but not 11-in-the-morning-y, mushroom quiche, a savory crepe with trout and asparagus, French toast with ricotta and strawberries, and a few other yummy things.
It was a lovely, three-hour-long event, and afterward we broke Blake's heart by almost immediately leaving again for the gym. It was halfway through April and 83 degrees and I had meters to swim before I slept.
This newish Ursula LeGuin caught my eye in the 'brary on Thursday. The setting's geography, called Uplands in contrast to away's Lowlands, plus the wearing of kilts, reminded me not as much of Scotland as perhaps it was meant to, as Cynthia Voigt's Kingdom. Also the protagonist's name, Orrec, reminded me of the unfortunate same in Voigt's Wings of a Falcon (Oriel). But LeGuin's conflict--and here I think of the English class in Dicey's Song when Dicey first becomes aware of Mina--is on a grander scale than Voigt's usual: a person's conflict with her society rather than mostly with herself.
The only thing that didn't wholly work was the first-person point-of-view: I assumed female and the text didn't clarify for a few pages nor did the character's own gender assert itself strongly. Which would have been fine without my assumption, in fact.