A Style Mis-Statement

At the Pawsox game on Saturday, a young man with his shirt on wrong side out. Very obviously wrong side out. What was he thinking?

For the national anthem, the announcer told the men to take their hats off. This used to be an automatic thing.

Four guys going down the row four different times, each carrying two beers. Discovered they were giving half the beer to their girlfriends, so they drank 4 and not 8. Awful in the stands when adults get sloshed and misbehave around kids. This was a well-behaved Sunday crowd, and of course, no one gets dressed up for a baseball game, in fact I always feel sorry for the guys who come straight from work still wearing suits.

I took the train into town today, and almost missed my stops because I had my nose in a book, as my mom used to say. The Warlord's Son, by Dan Fesperman, very exciting.

I noticed he used half the book to set things up, normally a no-no, but it does build tension and it seemed to work. Always looking to improve my craft. Fesperman has obviously been in the area he writes about (Pakistan and Afghanistan) and the descriptions of the smells and sights really take you there. Always a good thing, taking the reader there.

The tomatoes are really coming in now. If you have this delightful "problem," I recommend tomato-bread salad. Delicious. How about some home made tomato soup? Also wonderful with decent bread and read butter. Cherry tomatoes provencal are always good and anything that uses all the fresh herbs from the garden and the tomatoes is a good thing.

Tomorrow we are having a cauliflower-pasta entree. I know it sounds weird, but it was really a nice vegetarian dish. Lots of parmesan and olive oil. Parsley gives it some color. The Globe this morning had a blueberry pie recipe. Wards Berry Farm has ripe blueberries now, and I'm really tempted. Need to make a from-scratch pie once a season or 4 times a year.

I rewrote (again, yet) the first chapter of Festival Madness, and it's getting there. Starting draft five after the edits for draft four are done. By this weekend, I hope.

Never a dull moment in the writing life, except of course, having to suck it up all the time which is maybe not so much dull as depressing. La-di-dah.

Grapeshot