Back to the Sleeping lady

Once a year, I visit the Sleeping Lady for a lovely yoga weekend. It's a dream. Food, yoga, hiking, sleeping. The best.

I attend every year with a friend from my amazon days. it's the only time we see each other even though she lives down the street. middle aged life.

The stay-cation

For spring break, we are staying home. On Monday, we were tourists at the Pike Place market. We visited the famous Piroshky place. Even though I have lived here 25 years, I had never tried the piroshkys (kies?). Anyway, delicious! There is a reason there is always a line there. We saw the first Starbucks. The kids only wanted the sweet piroshkys so we went to Taxi dog for their lunch.

lunch at Victor Steinbruek park

the chocolate place. juice from the fruit of the cacao bean

view over the soon to be gone viaduct

old picture I found. funny.

The Sale of a Lifetime

I check out random finance books that I find in the finance section of my library. This book is all gloom and doom. The author tracks demographics and historical trends. He is also really good at selling his financial advice. He says the stock and real estate markets are going to collapse any day now. I completely agree with this especially if you look at the market from this guy's - a member of the baby boom generation -- point of view.  Our markets sit on air because we believe they float. As soon as we lose that faith, poof!

However, I started this other book called Plutocrats. A (relatively) small number of people are buying stocks and real estate. Monaco has always been a wealthy country because people with money like to go there. So maybe this small number of people can hold up this bubble by continuing their weird pyramid scheme games? Or maybe it just doesn't matter that wages are flat in the US because other countries' economies are growing and so then grows the profits of the US based but multinational companies. Either way, the US is going the way of Mexico where the bulk of the citizens live in poverty with no hope of a living wage.

Back to the Sale book. He has $0 in the stock market. He puts his money in US treasury bonds and other safe investments and waits for the storm.

All the Light We Cannot See

This is one of those books that inspires people to clutch their chest when they talk about it.  Everyone says it's great. It was on the bestseller list for almost 3 years. But, for some reason, I could not get into it. I started it a year ago and kept putting it down. I am starting to wonder about my attention span. In the past year, I've started Hamilton by Ron Chernow, The Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, and My Religion by Leo Tolstoy. I haven't finished any of them. They are all good, interesting books. I don't know if My Religion is popular but the other two books are loved.

Once I realized I am not finishing anything, I committed. All the Light We Cannot See is a great story. I often feel like we are living in unstable times but they are very calm compared to World War II, especially if you lived in Europe. It's hard to imagine that so recently Europe was a war zone, a truly hellish place.

In spite of the very sad theme, this is a hopeful book.

A Man Called Ove

First, I saw the movie based on this book. Then I listened to the book twice. While the plot is about a 59 year old man who is trying to kill himself, it somehow manages to be an uplifting book about how every person is worthy of love.  Ove will probably remind everyone of their dad (in a good way). Originally published in Swedish, it has sold over a million copies in 40 languages. There is something universally good about this book.

Never Split the Difference

Like Being Mortal and Naked Economics, I think this book should be required reading for all adults. The author had a career as a hostage negotiator in the FBI. What surprised me most about his insights is that the same skills required for effective negotiation are also taught by Buddhists who find salvation from suffering in the present moment. Being present is not simple and neither is negotiation but it's interesting that requirements for both overlap.

Great and terrible anecdotes abound.

The Power

One day, young women all around the world become physically stronger than men. This power eventually spreads to all women. The premise of the book ( I think ) is that women's oppression is founded in men's physical strength so what happens once that is reversed?

Bad things.

Somehow I thought women would be more noble and compassionate when they held all the power. Spoiler: they are not.

The book won the Bailey's Prize for Women's Fiction (British award) and when reviewed by the Washington Post, it was called "our era's Handmaid's Tale." I wondered if the author's intention was not to show what women would do if they were more powerful but rather to ask us to view the actions of men through female characters.

I found myself very disgusted with various characters but when I took a step back, these women are just doing what men in power do every day. All that time. Since the beginning of time.

Worth the read.