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By Sue Lyn, on November 15th, 2008
Mid-November always makes me want to curl up with a good book. Preferably a scary book. My mental soundtrack in this season is the winter concerto from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Just picture me in an armchair with a reading lamp over my shoulder listening to the rain outside.
Perhaps it’s perverse of me, but at this time of year I love reading something that will give me a chill in keeping with the dreary weather outside. I’ve just begun reading Roald Dahl’s Book of Ghost Stories. It’s a collection of stories collected by Dahl, rather than written by him. You may remember Dahl for some of his own creepy stories, like “Lamb to the Slaughter.” Since I’ve just begun this book, I don’t know yet whether it will join the list of favorite short-story collections I go back to year after year. Here’s short list of my loves:
- The October Country, by Ray Bradbury
Bradbury is a master at creating and sustaining an eerie atmosphere. All the stories are wonderful, but my favorite is “Skeleton,” about a man who becomes obsessed with his own.
- The Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories, ed. by Michael Cox and R.A. Gilbert
This has lots of all-time classics, including the most chilling ghost story every written, “The Monkey’s Paw,” by W.W. Jacobs. It’s the all-time best illustration of the old saying, “Be careful what you wish for.”
- The Bone Key, by Sarah Monette
This is a recent book of linked stories by Monette, who writes in a wonderfully antiquated gothic style. The tales are connected by a single protagonist, an archivist who works in a mysterious library-museum, who has a sensitivity to the strange and uncanny.
- The Bloody Chamber, by Angela Carter
An oldie but a goody, this book came out in 1979. Not actually ghost stories, these are retellings of classic fairy tales in a much darker vein than normal.
What do you like to read when the weather turns dreary? I’d love to get some suggestions for my nightstand once I finish the Dahl collection.
By Sue Lyn, on November 12th, 2008
I talked to my sister last week and she was just getting over her first case of the flu, ever. I don’t know how she survived to the age of (mmmhh) without having it before, especially since she has a five year old daughter, but she managed it somehow. She was shocked by how nasty it is, how you just want to lie on the couch all day and moan. It’s been a few years since my last case, but I remember it with an awful fuzzy vividness.
So this morning I read about a new Google site tracking flu cases with fascination. Google has studied the volume of searches for flu-related terms like “fever” or “flu”. Over five years they tracked it against CDC reported cases of the flu and found that the searches are actually an excellent leading indicator (since CDC reports lag real time by weeks). Now you can go to a new page and get a look at current trends for the US as a whole or for your state or region. Here’s a graph showing the correlation between searches and flu cases:
 Google's Graph Comparing Search Activity to CDC Flu Cases Kind of cool, I thought. My version of this image is a bit low-res; you can see a better version and get the whole explanation of how it works by going to Google’s explanatory page.
By Sue Lyn, on November 10th, 2008
Yesterday was Sunday. Mark and I looked at each other after breakfast and said, “What will we do today?” Both of us had worked on Saturday, so it would be our only day off together of the week. We look around the house and the bathrooms need cleaning, there’s laundry to do, and the backyard is full of leaves that need to go down to the curb in time for a Wednesday pickup. But our hearts are saying, “Nooo! It’s a nice day! Go out and play!”
After a bit of debate– will we be grasshoppers or ants?– we decided to be bad and go have some fun. We drove out west to Leesburg and north from there to the Old Lucketts Store. I wrote about the Lucketts Store a few years ago. It’s the world capital for shabby chic. Three stories in an old house on a crossroads, packed with everything from antique radios to vintage clothes to full size stained glass windows from actual churches. We had a ball. We followed our successful shopping expedition with a long Italian lunch in a little cafe in Leesburg and roamed the old town center until it got dark.
After we returned, I was straightening up a pile of books and found this quote from Albert Schweitzer:
Do not let Sunday be taken from you…If your soul has no Sunday, it becomes an orphan.
I like that. No more feeling guilty about taking a day off from responsibility now and then. And if I’d missed the trip to Lucketts, I would never have found this little fellow:
 A little bronze frog sings and plays the violin He reminds me a bit of Toad from The Wind in the Willows, and made me smile so much I had to bring him home. He is now sitting on top of a bookcase in the office so he can serenade me while I work. He ought to do wonders for my soul.
By Sue Lyn, on October 24th, 2008
The chill of November can already be felt on this overcast October afternoon. Although most of our leaves are still in the process of turning, the cold gray sky seems like a premonition. We’re looking forward to Halloween here on Summerfield Road. As many of the neighborhood children have grown, my neighbors don’t go in for quite such elaborate front yard displays as they used to. But many houses are still decorated with pumpkins or some fake cobwebs over the bushes.
Halloween always seems to me like a pleasant throwback to an earlier era. It’s one night when I actually see most of my neighbors (at least the ones with children). The whole street comes alive with happy noises and light. I’m always glad to be around that night, since the rest of the year I often feel disconnected from my neighbors. While I used to know all my near neighbors, that’s not true anymore. The language barrier isn’t helping. Next door is an extended Hispanic family that speaks very little English. On the other side is a semi-reclusive Filipina lady who rarely leaves the house. Across the street our long-time neighbors Joe and Jonita retired to North Carolina, and their house is now occupied by renters whom I haven’t met. Thank goodness for Nicolette, who still lives directly across from us, and our good friend Chris who is just down the hill.
The build-up to Halloween may help me survive the final weeks of campaign season. We’ve pretty much stopped answering our phone, we’ve had so many calls exhorting us to vote one way or the other. At least two or three every day. If we didn’t know before that Virginia was a hotly contested state… So many people here in Washington and elsewhere across the country seem gripped by a kind of temporary madness, passionately declaring their support of one candidate as though the other guy’s victory would mean the end of the world. I know how I plan to vote, but I don’t expect major changes no matter who wins. After all, isn’t that the great thing about the U.S.? No matter which party wins the presidency, the government and the rest of our lives continue quite smoothly.
By Sue Lyn, on October 2nd, 2008
Okay, it’s been a while since I put any funny cat videos in. This one had me guffawing– my little Miss Thing used to be a master at this trick:
By Sue Lyn, on October 2nd, 2008
 The sky reflected in a new window After fifteen years of living in this house, Mark and I finally bit the bullet this fall and put in new windows on the front of our forties-era house. For quite a while we’ve had mismatched windows on the façade, with some new windows where we’d renovated rooms and some old, where we still had the house’s original steel frame windows.
Partly we’d left the old windows in place for cost reasons. Windows are shockingly expensive! But also partly we’d left them in place because I loved them. I’ve written before about my attachment to the old swing-out casement windows. With their small panes and wide swing-out style, I always felt like Snow White opening the windows out into space. The black-painted square leading dividers were a real design feature of the house’s distinctive and sort of retro-modern look on a street full of colonial Cape Cod style cottages. For the first ten years we lived here I fended off all itinerant window salesmen with vigor. (If I only had a nickel for every time I opened the door to hear “We were doing work in your neighborhood and noticed you still have some older windows…”)
But in the last two years even I had to admit that the windows were past their natural life span. The single-pane metal frames leaked heat and cold like sieves, and in winter were so cold ice crystals formed each night on the inside of the panes. The condensation would melt with the sunrise, only to drip onto the wooden sills, rotting them out unless we left stacks of old towels on the sills to protect them. Sound also came right through, so we heard each car and conversation passing on the street. The screens were battered and ill-fitting after sixty years of constant use. And each fall there was a string of repair work to be done to fix panes that had been cracked by the constant flexing of the metal frames with changes in temperature.
At last we had the time and the cash to make the change, but I admit I gave my go-ahead with a lot of trepidation. Windows are such an essential part of the style of the house, would I still be happy after the work was done?
I shouldn’t have worried. The window installers did meticulous work and we are now enjoying the interior quiet that the low-e windows provide. I’m even happy with the outside look, now that all the windows match and have a clean appearance. I’ll be even happier snuggled into a warmer, cozier house this winter. And with the price of heating oil having jumped so much this year, we will definitely be glad to have a more efficient home. I hope now we can rest up from the summer’s extensive renovations and just enjoy the house. At least until next year. Anybody know a good roofing company?
By Sue Lyn, on September 23rd, 2008
That’s how I feel after a three-day weekend of yoga with Kofi Busia. Since Kofi lives and teaches on the west coast, I am trying to take advantage of every opportunity when he travels east. Last week he was at Greater Baltimore Yoga on the north side of Baltimore, MD.
As at Omega, which I wrote about last August, he was merciless in a compassionate way. Once he zeros in on something he believes you need to work on, he won’t let you get away with anything. In my case, that’s posture in tadasana and extension in forward bends. The first day I was doing pretty well. I know he was smiling at my “See Kofi? I’ve been working so hard,” effort. The second day I was tired and had a harder time maintaining it. He caught it right away and started correcting me once more. “This is more like yesterday,” he’d whisper after guiding my slumped spine into a better position. More work is needed, but I still am clearly better than before working with him two months ago.
An interesting thing happened to me late on my last day with him. Towards the end of the afternoon practice we were all in paschimottanasana, a seated forward bend with straight legs. Even after five years of yoga practice forward bends are very challenging for me with my long legs and tight hamstrings. I was doing my level best to keep the spine extended as I folded forward, and moved my sternum away from the pubic bone to get more length. Suddenly a feeling of emotional upset came over me, like I was about to burst into tears. It didn’t fade, but continued through the final ten minutes of the practice. As I lay in shavasana at the end of class I was struggling to keep my composure. I couldn’t figure it out—I wasn’t in any pain, there was no reason I could think of why I should have the feeling that I might cry at any second.
I didn’t feel any better as I rose to roll up my mat. Kofi had spotted my trouble and asked if I was okay. “I don’t know,” I told him. “Something about that paschimottanasana upset me.” He impressed me all over again by knowing precisely what was wrong. A spasm of the diaphragm. He had me go into a backbend over a bolster and weighted my hips with a sandbag, but the sheet of muscle at the bottom of my ribs continued to flutter uncomfortably. So he got me up into a handstand and had me drop back (with his support) to put my feet on the seat of a chair behind me. At first I thought “OMG! My body won’t go that way!” But then it released and I was able to hold the pose for several seconds. He brought me back down and had me go into the backbend two more times, each time with greater ease. Then I felt exhilarated, not weepy. All was well.
This morning I couldn’t wait to tell my story to my students. More evidence that the body-mind-emotion link connects in all directions. Not only does our mind affect our body, with mental tension creating physical ills. The body directly affects the mind and emotions. In my case, a tightness in the breath signaled emotional upset to my mind. I literally couldn’t tell the difference between an emotional pain and a physical one. They felt the same. So keep smiling. When you frown your body thinks that something is wrong.
By Sue Lyn, on September 8th, 2008
August was incredibly dry for us here in Falls Church. The only rain we’ve had in more than a month has been from tropical storm Fay and then on Saturday, Hannah. Hannah may have been a bit too much of a good thing, however. That was more than six inches of rain in six hours–my rain gauge filled up to overflowing so I don’t know exactly how much more.
We got through the day on Saturday with a few minor drips in the sun room from around our chimney flashing and were counting ourselves lucky. But all too soon. Sunday morning I stepped off the last step downstairs and the carpet was distinctly damp. Oh no, not again!
So we’re back on the all-too-familiar fan and dehumidifier drill, with the carpet pulled up at the edge. The good news is it wasn’t nearly as bad as the last flood in 2006 when we had 13 inches. Just a bit of seepage under the front wall of the house, so I think the new stone work outside helped. We’ve been through this before and the carpet is drying pretty quickly, so I guess we’ll live. But it’s a major pain in the patooty, nevertheless.
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