3 Wonderful Things

My new favorite book! Yes ,she wrote Under the Tuscan Sun and that might discourage some people...but remember, oh please remember the books are ALWAYS more brilliant than the films. (And Frances Mayes is 823,000 times the woman that Diane Lane will ever be, not that I have an opinion on this matter or anything...i'm just not very fond of Hollywood and it's need to add sex into every equation. Frances Mayes is not a romance novelist, she is a writer, a poet, a traveller and an adventurer, my heroine in many ways. Ok, no more Tuscan Sun talk)... AYEAR IN THE WORLD.. I love it! Her account follows her travels with her husband Ed. The journey is in part a literary pilgrimage, which might explain why i'm so excited about it, and Frances ties the land she explores to writers like Federica Garcia Lorca. They travel Andalucia, Portugal, Split Naples, Taormina, Italy, Fez, Burgundy,Gardens of the British Isles, Islands of Greece, Crete and Mani, Turkey's Lycian Coast, Capri, and Scotland. Her perceptions are poetic, her words tickle senses I didn't even know I possessed. She rambles on about the magic of blood oranges , bougainvillea, bulls, astrolabes, the sun, colors, dust, small weathered women with their mouths full of turquoise clothepins and maritime museums. All of this and i've only read 100 of the 417 pages! I am in love.




Sean has been working on a collection of poetry and prose for nearly a year now. I would place it in the genre of "All things The Sea". It's magical. His writing is other-timely and other-worldly. It's almost like peering into a piece of history that has been kept secret. What I love even more about it, is that it's completely enriched by Sean's deep love for such things. Everything about him is seeped into the pages. His infatuation with telescopes, old sea dogs, cranes, Napoleonic History, sea-glass, salty bottles, square sails, pirates, flintlock pistols, cutlasses, blue that should be called black, seagull cries, and my list cannot do him justice. And now!!! He's taken on the task of Myth-making....did i mention i love myth-making? And is indeed creating a tangible world for his genius creations! I think of Tokien and how he was convinced that humans are designed as sub-creators. All I can reveal is that there is a map involved! And I get hyper at his mere mention of half-moon island, sables cove, and the archipelago of the six star islands. EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!


If all goes as planned I will be with the love of my life, Sean, the other love of my life, Cari and the love of my life by a connection of 1, Ryan Mullaney (did i spell that right cari?) at Mt. Rainier on Sunday afternoon. I miss Cari dearly... I can't imagine her life right now: she's engaged, is graduating, just recently has moved into a house full of strangers, is planning a wedding, interviewing for big fancy jobs as an interior designer (which I will emphasize does not mean decorater!) and all the while is working on maintaining her witty, fun-loving, free-spirited, high-energy, milk-consuming, cari-berry-lovely-fairy self! I'm thankful that Ryan is 94% rock and 6%flesh. Cari and I have one of the most interesting relationships in the history of mankind. We are extremely different and equally similar. Mysteriously, God has paralleled our lives in a way that I would not trade. I can say without a doubt that I would not be who I am were it not for Cari Ann Carnahan in my life. As a result I get very excited to be around her and her future husband, my future best-friend in law, Ryan.