Dee--When you're in Myrtle Beach, I hope we're in your EATING THOUGHTS---lol. Remember, you have to answer to us upon your return! I am almost through my 5th day of CONTROLLED EATING!!!! Hey, ya gotta start somewhere and I am doing well so far. The weather is HOT --for HERE, milkdud--lol--we're in the upper 70's and lower 80's. That helps me drink more and eat less. I'll have my FIRST weigh in on Monday, so I'll be here for that. Wodka, I am on the same page with you and the dentist's drill. When I was a youngster, my dad and mom took me to an old military dentist friend and his novocaine was WAY out of date and didn't work. I never recovered from those experiences and every dental visit is MAJOR trauma for me, emotionally---besides pinching me in the pocket book! DonnaSNJ! YAY! Good to hear from you! Stay in Touch!!!!! Whatcha been doin'? TreKaren---You've got more guts than me. I went to ONE cycling class and quit---about 2 years ago. It KILLED ME! I do ride my "outside" bike in the summer though. I have padded seat bike pants AND a gel seat---hey! Even though I have extra *fat* padding on my fanny, I still need the other padding; I don't know why! Joyce---You don't want to see your grandchildren, I gather! haha. I can TOTALLY relate to getting your house ready for an open house--it took me SO long--but I finally found I couldn't be a perfectionist about it. Just so the surface stuff and CLEAR it out into the garage or a storage bin as much as you can---then breathe, relax, and get ready! REANNE, NHSuzanne,Marci, and Besh---Get in here---NOW. You guys are MIA too often lately. We're SISTAHS, remember. Ohana now. No one gets left behind... What ever happened to PJ from CA? I wonder what she's up to???? Anybody remember her? Tikanas was her online name. I so enjoyed hearing about her busy and active life... Okay, enjoy! Oh, BTW, DH fired me yesterday at about 9:30am--WOW! I am back at work now, but I have to tell you, working FOR your spouse is a sticky wicket--in more ways than one. (I've only been fired once before, when my ex was having an affair with my boss and she wanted me out of the picture. They served me divorce papers on my birthday...but that was another lifetime ago...)

Eureka!! I found the information! From an obit. in the Washington Post June 4, 2011 "Harry Bernstein, memoirist who wrote of childhood of deprivation, dies at 101 Harry Bernstein, who caused a literary sensation when he emerged from anonymity in his 90s to write two devastating memoirs that explored his childhood of squalor, abuse and anti-Semitism, died June 3 at his daughter's home in Brooklyn, N.Y. He was 101. The cause of death was not reported. "The Invisible Wall" drew favorable comparisons to Frank McCourt�s Pulitzer Prize-winning "Angela�s Ashes," about that author's hardscrabble upbringing in Ireland. Reviewing "The Invisible Wall" in the New York Times, William Grimes called it "a world of pain and prejudice, evoked in spare, restrained prose that brilliantly illuminates a time, a place and a family struggling valiantly to beat impossible odds." In "The Dream," Mr. Bernstein's follow-up memoir, he traced his family's move to Chicago in 1922. In reviews, critics described Mr. Bernstein as a storyteller of quiet, heartbreaking power. Author Juliet Wittman, writing in The Washington Post, said of "The Dream" that "beneath the poignant descriptions of places and times past, beneath the rising and falling patterns of these characters' lives, we hear at Wordsworth called "the still sad music of humanity." For much of his life, Mr. Bernstein's writing career was steady but unremarkable. He critiqued and summarized manuscripts for film studios in the 1930s and 1940s once giving thumbs down to Margaret Mitchell's "Gone With the Wind" as "just another historical romance." Later, he edited trade magazines and continued to publish articles and short stories. In 1981, he wrote a novel, "The Smile," about a fashion model. It received little attention, although he joked that he knew it sold at least one copy because of a letter he received from a reader. When his memoirs were published, Mr. Bernstein faced some skepticism from critics who said he could not possibly recall entire conversations from his childhood. He insisted he did, as they had been seared into his brain with photographic clarity. As much as he tried to forget the past, Mr. Bernstein did not extinguish the burning hatred he said that he felt for his father, who made his mother's harsh life even worse. She died at 65 of malnutrition in an unheated tenement in the Bronx, N.Y. After her funeral, he never saw his father again. "He wept when she died. That's the only good thing I can say about him," Mr. Bernstein told USA Today. He dedicated "The Invisible Wall" to his mother, "who gave us so much and received so little. Can this book make up for it? Can anything?" � The Washington Post Company

I have finished the month of June with a book that was recommended to me on another site I follow and I only have one thing to say about it. Wow! The Q by Beth Brower is only available as an e-book or I can assure you that I would be purchasing it in hardcover. It's set in a slightly different Victorian England, no magic or anything like that for those who don't care for it. The main character, Quincy, has a year to satisfy 12 stipulations of her guardian's will in order to inherit the business she loves and runs. The problem is that the solicitor in charge of making sure she satisfies the conditions cannot tell her what any of them are. This does not really give a sense of the story but I finished it with that sense of loss the end of a good story brings. I did have a little trouble getting into it but it caught me by the second chapter.

The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains -- Neil Gaiman