I have emerged from the abyss otherwise known as the Guest Room..Ai yi-yi! Im sure that many of you are familiar with The Guest Room.."Where should we put this stuff?" "Oh, just throw it in The Guest Room for now." So there it goes and there it stays until oh-oh, a real guest is coming ! So you shove it all in the closet and warn the guest not to open the closet doors under any circumstances. I spent the better part of the day up there, and have effectively sorted and purged . Filled the trash tote and have two more 32 gal trash bags full and waiting in the wings. Put together a huge pile of salvation army items and lugged them down to the garage. Also lugged down 3 pieces of defunct stereo equipment to take to the electronics recycling next weekend. Discovered that one of the twin beds is sporting two mattresses instead of a mattress and box springs-it teeters at an odd angle as a result.One can only speculate how that came about ! Found a box of 45s. Cleaned out the cedar "Hopeless" chest, which had only two items of any value in it. Its the smallest room in the house , and yet an absolute mountain of stuff kept emerging. ! So it was a productive day..and beautiful weather as I gazed longingly out the window. I did take a break for some watering and deadheading. Everything is just bone dry. How great all the pics were for the birthday trio ! Michelle, I am going to get butternut squash next weekend at the farmers market and make a recipe I found for squash enchiladas. If it turns out Ill share Marian , you and Marie asked about the photo, it was a pic from Yosemite , taken by DS. Marie, maybe you will have some pics of the Bouvier couple ? Deanne- lol, youd probably need an extra truck for all your containers ! My DD is coming down for Thanksgiving and I told her to bring an empty car, because I am sending as many of the containers back up for her to babysit as I can fit in her vehicle. Mary, I have not read "The Road", but had in fact made plans to read all three of his border trilogy this winter. I am so behind on my reading list ! I have promised myself that I will get back to my book-a-week pace this winter. Thank you so much for posting the David Russell link- I have always loved classical guitar and dont have nearly enough cds in my collection. I will definitely order a couple of Davids ! Babs, glad to see a post from you no matter how brief ! Hope all is well. Mariann, isnt it nice to encounter the kindness of others ? I hope your DD is helped by the device that was sent to you ! I imagine that the protracted recovery period has affected your DDs attitude which in turn makes healing more difficult. I wish her the best ! Okay, time to take an evening stroll in the garden with a glass of cheap-o chardonnay. Greetings to all ! Kathy in Napa

Hey guys... just reading that poem makes me cry again. I still cry every day. It's really hard when you're by yourself at night. I miss Danny. I made a shrine to him in my room. It's been a few months now and though the pain isn't... as consuming, it's still with me all the time. The time we had together, his youthful eyes and laughter, they haunt me, you know. It's still not right that we are here "enjoying" life and it is over for him, so young, so full of potential. I keep wondering why it has to be this way. And why he couldn't have been pulled out of the water, why those boys who were with him don't care about us, because they never call. I keep wishing I was old enough to start a family, that my ex boyfriend was a good man so I could give into his pressure to go home. But my path is set.... it's so strange but in the aftermath I see clear evidence that we (mom and I) are doing as God intends, that he has plans for us and taking my brothers away are part of the plan. For my mother at least, no clearer evidence could have been presented that God is here and He does care. My mom was devastated to be here, after her head cleared. She quit her well paying corporate job to slave away for my vengeful, tyrannical father. Things were not looking good - on top of the grief she had to suffer his abuse to pay the bills. She was depressed and felt she made a huge mistake in the wake of the grief. I felt bad b/c I insisted that God wanted us here, to help my Dad (before he betrayed us) to be where Dan was, to be in this small town away from the city, away from my ex bf. I prayed and I really thought we were doing the right thing. Even at the worst I encouraged her that somehow, God would come through - I could feel it. And He did. Out of a pool of 462 applicants in a town of 50,000, *my mother* was chosen to be the business manager/instructor for the only scuba diving school in the entire area. Her new job is about as awesome as they come. She not only gets paid to learn a new career, scuba instruction, but will be taking 10 paid vacations a year to take clients to places like Australia, the South Pacific, Hawaii and Florida. That we moved here after Dan drowned, and now she has a new career in *underwater life support* is not lost on me. Praise God - if that isn't direct evidence of his Love than I don't know what is. My beautiful mother has suffered so - this bit of security, adventure and hope for quality of life was exactly what she needed. The owner is so nice he won't ever make her dive in the huge brown river that took my brother, though it is the local attraction for his business. We also got to meet the diver who pulled my brother out of the water (bless him, if his body hadn't been recovered or recovered quickly it would have been even more tormenting) and my mom will get to be a volunteer search and rescue diver herself. I don't know what I'm doing. I was supposed to go back to school to finish 8 credits but I blew it off - until January. For some reason I lost my motivation to go to law school. I want to do something else. I don't know what. I will keep praying and maybe God will show me the path. I'd endure just about anything if I could have him back. Death is so unforgiving. A few minutes of being underwater, unconscious, and you can't come back. I've been re-reading "The Lovely Bones" and I really like the way that novel describes Heaven. The little murdered girl wonders why her dearly beloved grandparents aren't in her heaven. It's because she can't let go of watching people on Earth - her family, the investigation, her school. I like to think that Dan is here sometimes, I can almost feel him. But when he is not, he must be enjoying hot rods, powdered mountains and babes in bikinis. There must be babes in his heaven. I am waiting to find the perfect landscape tattoo artist, and then I will get a memorial tattoo in Dan's honor. It will be a silhouette of a snowboarder popping off an impossible cliff, with a burning, brilliant variegated sunset in the background. Dan Krueger, 1986 - 2004, it will say. He was such a good brother. I'm so grateful God has shown himself to me in the blessings and messages, so I know Dan continues on and I will see him again. I just wish he could "enjoy" life. Maybe heaven has all the good parts of life and none of the bad. But you can still feel things. I mourn the loss of his feeling - he loved to feel. We all do. That Dan's opportunity was taken away makes me feel like I should make the most out of life - but I don't know what to do. I'm just saving all the money I'm earning, and being here for mom. Thanks for caring, Lu, and I hope you all are holding up okay. Oh man, now I'm looking at the pictures to post the link. Pictures hurt so bad. These basic ones I've seen, I can hardly bear to look at them, and trying to look at the hundreds of family photos we have in the closet is like trying to breathe underwater. I just can't do it yet. CRY CRY CRY CRY CRY Man, it hurts.

I agree it wouldn't be most people's cup of tea. But it certainly gives a body more to chew on than many of the books I more enjoyed reading. ....The other side of the question indicts those novels I enjoyed and which raised less haunting questions. For me "The Historian" was one such. I read it with enthusiasm and looked forward to our discussion here. But my enthusiasm waned with time. We discussed Atwood's "The Robber Bride" sometime long after I'd read the novel, but I found the discussion stimulated fresh ideas and re-engaged me in the novel, It raised new questions. Kept me thinking about the novel long after I'd finished it. ................. Perhaps what I am asking people are what books lingered and haunted them? /:) ...............................................................................................................................With regards to "The Egyptologist" I decided that the protagonist was the nicest person in the entire story. The foul deed we suspect him of commiting from the beginning looks different at the end of the novel. He isn't overly greedy in his blackmail. His foulest deeds spring from an unbalanced mind, after all his supports are pulled out from under him. Up until that point I see him as a survivor rather than amoral.

OK-- this description may have you thinking "What a downer!" but it really is an uplifting book about understanding what's important in life, even when a horrible inevitable stands waiting for you around the corner. It's a fictional piece (very short) about a middle-age man who is told by his doctor that he has a terminal illness with less than a month to live. So he, with the wife, goes to visit the places he has always wished to. They don't spend every minute together, but they are always entwined in a way. It's a simply told story -- no drawn-out plot thickeners, no graf after graf describing scenery. You just feel like you're following behind them, with their snippets of dialogue. (And maybe I was just in a mood to be weepy, but the last chapters really did get to me).