My experience is just like yours, Sleeperblues. My only consistent reading these days is done at night, in bed. My granddaughter gave me a silver-spoon book mark engraved with "fell asleep here." :-) I loved The Great Alone, but haven't read any of her other books yet. However, this week I received Night Road, which I purchased used on eBay. It's "airing out" while I finish my current book. Firefly Lane has lots of great reviews on Amazon; I'm guessing all her books do, to one degree or another. I hadn't heard of her until my library gave me The Great Alone as a gift for doing a program last year.

Thanks, Ocotillo. When you said you were reading them with appropriate English accents, it brought back memories of me reading the first two Harry Potter books years ago. I bought them in England when they were yet unheard of here in the US, and that is how I read the whole series. As soon as I finish my current book, I’ll go for it. I haven’t found anything else that seems worthy recently.

I can relate to "not knowing where to start", but about work in general. After Jody died, I really let things go. I fed the animals and did a little picking up around the place. Some days I dealt better than others. Now a year later, I am so behind on everything. I feel much better, but it is hot, hard work. I am getting ready to hire someone to come here and get control of the yard....which is about 3 acres, and mow the pasture for me. I need to fertilize the hay field, but the cost of fertilizer has skyrocketed. I don't even feed that hay because my horses are old and I feed them hay better suited for them, which was expensive to begin with and out of sight, I am sure now. But, Nicole's suggestion of organizing containers is excellent. I don't have room here like when we had an 10 room house before we moved, so I am putting away everything except the bare essentials, to sell them. I asked my daughter if she wanted anything. I had hoped she would at least wanted Grandma's old cookie jar, but she didn't grow up with it, so I am sure some cookie jar collector will love it.

So, I find that I know what an Aspidistra is, and I have known that plant for more than 30 years. I just never called it , er them, by that name. I grew it in Houston around my mailbox. It was even strong enough to withstand the territory marking of the neighborhood dogs as they were walked. There, we called it an "Iron Plant" and it had the most hideous blooms down at soil level at the base of the leaves. Then I moved to New Orleans, and the house next door (all of ten feet away) had Iron plant under the edge of the house (Algiers Point, it was one of the raised Victorians). It also grew like a weed there and maybe preferred being out of the rain, but getting enough water through osmosis. I just find it amusing that without google I would never have put this trivia together. And now to see what insight Orwell got from the aspidistra of England.