2009 Random Stuff .............................................


It's Friday, February 20th 2009.

Yesterday we had what was, I think, our ninth snowstorm of this winter.
Yesterday America's new president, their 44th, visited Ottawa for what was, I think, an insultingly short time. Seven hours was it?

Last night Vivian read to us aloud in bed as she does every night. She reads until I fall asleep or until tiredness sneaks up on her. The former is the more frequent by far. I slip away after just a paragraph sometimes, but occasionally, I hang on for a whole chapter.

For a long time now she's been reading from Patrick O'Brian's books. He wrote a series of books, twenty in all, set in the days of sail. The Royal Navy in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The main figures are Jack Aubrey and Steven Maturin. Recently a movie appeared, "Master and Commander," not bad - an odd mix of two of the books.

Vivian is now nearing the end of the 20th, the last, of the series. The last, because O'Brian died before he finished the next.

Seems an odd mix of mortality and imortality somehow. O'Brian's pen is stilled forever yet Captain Aubrey and Doctor Maturin are frozen in time now. They'll sail no more together, yet the stories will live forever.

When she closes the book on this last tale I know I'll be unreasonably sad.

I just Googled 'Patrick O'Brian' to get the spelling right. Splendid article in 'Wickipedia.' There's a wonderful map project mentioned there too which shows all his voyages with an amazing collection of notes and 'stuff'. Ah the "web"!!!