If wishes were pigs...

Or if horses could fly (something like that), wishes might come true. On my sister Susan's blog one day, I found a device that would tell you which famous author's style your writing most resembled. It said that I write like James Joyce. I tell you, if I could write like Patrick O'Brian, author of the Master and Commander books, I think I would spend half my time writing and the other half thanking Providence on bended knees. With brief intervals for looking after physical needs.

The one I'm reading now is The Far Side of the World, surely one of the best books I've ever cracked, although so far it seems to be a sort of calm or hiatus between real battling sea-adventures. I keep thinking that, when I've sailed through all twenty books of this set, I have to read Moby Dick again. Maybe even sooner.

The book club meeting yesterday was really great. At the end, four of us sat for a long time telling personal adventures in the supernatural or, briefly, ghostly experiences. This indulgence was brought on by the apparently supernatural elements in Sweet Music on Moonlight Ridge. I must say that getting to the library and back, with loads of food and other hospitable necessities, almost melted me down to a nubbin. I slept off and on for the rest of the time from then until now.

In The Far Side of the World, O'Brian in an aside flings off the recipe for grog, the seaman's thirst-quencher and legal stipend. Grog it seems is merely a watered-down, unfrozen daiquiri. "Three of water, one of rum, with the proportionate lemon juice and sugar." "Six-water grog" was punishment for misdemeanors. Anyway, I have been longing for something to drink all day that's thicker than water and less insipid than my version of tea, but not as calorie-laden or kidney-damaging as fizzy soft drinks. So I made a jug of grog using white Zinfandel in the absence of rum, which has always given me bad headaches anyway. Luckily I had lemons. My mixture could use a lot more sugar; otherwise it serves the purpose.

Suddenly I remember Baskin & Robbins's daiquiri sherbet. Which also gave me headaches, but which I loved to distraction.
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Sometime recently, I found scattered in my computer files a tiny poem I wrote in 2009, that fits one of the fall contest categories. It needs work, but it's not too bad.