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Peanuts  |  3 September 1975

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One with nature.

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Meet the Newest Edition to My Plant Family

Sansevieria Laurentii

Native Location: Tropical West Africa from Nigeria East to the Congo.

Other Names: Snake Plant, Mother-in-Law’s Tongue, Viper’s Bowstring Hemp

Care Instructions 101

Sunlight: Indirect, natural light. 

Watering: Maintain damp soil. If the soil is dry to the touch, then it’s time to re-water.

Temperature: Keep the foliage at room temperature, avoiding extreme heat and cold. An ideal temperature range is between 65℉-85℉.

Grooming: Regularly remove any dead leaves from the plant, which will help them grow full and uniform in their container. Keep an eye out for new “baby plants” in your pot, which can be repotted in their own container.

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Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Date Published: September 9th 2014

Genre: Fiction, Science Fiction, Dystopian, Apocalyptic, Post-Apocalyptic

Opening Line: “The king stood in a pool of blue light, unmoored.”

One Sentence Summary: Experience life in North America, following the Georgian Influenza pandemic, through the lens of five characters connected by one common item: a comic book series titled Dr. Eleven. 

Quote: “She was thinking about the way she’d always taken for granted that the world had certain people in it, either central to her days or unseen and infrequently thought of. How without any one of these people the world is a subtly but unmistakably altered place, the dial turned just one or two degrees.”

My Rating: 3/5 Goodreads: 4.03/5

My Thoughts: Everyone raves about this book and I thought it was just OK.

#1 After 20 years, how has no micro community re-engineered any technology? The Georgian Flu eliminated 99.9% of the population, but the infrastructure and information required to restart a modern civilization still existed. 

#2 Why follow the Traveling Symphony and explore the survival of theatre, actors, and musicians during a post apocalyptic dystopia? I admit it was a useful tool to use, allowing the main characters to travel amongst towns near the Great Lakes. However, the world has basically ended and Shakespearean Theatre lives on? #priorities

#3 What was the goal of writing a complete background to Arthur’s life? How did this relate to the dystopian plot? I could not bring myself to care about Arthur, his problems, or his multiple wives. Similarly, I felt that numerous pages were wasted discussing his life as an actor when he literally died in the first chapter. 

#4 Why did we not learn more about the prophet’s cultish community? I wanted to experience life in his town under his “rule” and felt this was a missed opportunity. 

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10 Books I Read & Loved in 2018

#1 Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande

In Being Mortal, bestselling author Atul Gawande tackles the hardest challenge of his profession: how medicine can not only improve life but also the process of its ending

Medicine has triumphed in modern times, transforming birth, injury, and infectious disease from harrowing to manageable. But in the inevitable condition of aging and death, the goals of medicine seem too frequently to run counter to the interest of the human spirit. Nursing homes, preoccupied with safety, pin patients into railed beds and wheelchairs. Hospitals isolate the dying, checking for vital signs long after the goals of cure have become moot. Doctors, committed to extending life, continue to carry out devastating procedures that in the end extends suffering. Gawande, a practicing surgeon, addresses his profession's ultimate limitation, arguing that quality of life is the desired goal for patients and families. Gawande offers examples of freer, more socially fulfilling models for assisting the infirm and dependent elderly, and he explores the varieties of hospice care to demonstrate that a person's last weeks or months may be rich and dignified. Full of eye-opening research and riveting storytelling, Being Mortal asserts that medicine can comfort and enhance our experience even to the end, providing not only a good life but also a good end.

#2 The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah

In love we find out who we want to be. In war we find out who we are. France, 1939 In the quiet village of Carriveau, Vianne Mauriac says goodbye to her husband, Antoine, as he heads for the Front. She doesn’t believe that the Nazis will invade France...but invade they do, in droves of marching soldiers, in caravans of trucks and tanks, in planes that fill the skies and drop bombs upon the innocent. When France is overrun, Vianne is forced to take an enemy into her house, and suddenly her every move is watched; her life and her child’s life is at constant risk. Without food or money or hope, as danger escalates around her, she must make one terrible choice after another. Vianne’s sister, Isabelle, is a rebellious eighteen-year-old girl, searching for purpose with all the reckless passion of youth. While thousands of Parisians march into the unknown terrors of war, she meets the compelling and mysterious Gäetan, a partisan who believes the French can fight the Nazis from within France, and she falls in love as only the young can...completely. When he betrays her, Isabelle races headlong into danger and joins the Resistance, never looking back or giving a thought to the real--and deadly--consequences.

#3 Educated by Tara Westover

Tara Westover was 17 the first time she set foot in a classroom. Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, she prepared for the end of the world by stockpiling home-canned peaches and sleeping with her "head-for-the-hills bag". In the summer she stewed herbs for her mother, a midwife and healer, and in the winter she salvaged in her father's junkyard. Her father forbade hospitals, so Tara never saw a doctor or nurse. Gashes and concussions, even burns from explosions, were all treated at home with herbalism. The family was so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure the children received an education and no one to intervene when one of Tara's older brothers became violent. Then, lacking any formal education, Tara began to educate herself. She taught herself enough mathematics and grammar to be admitted to Brigham Young University, where she studied history, learning for the first time about important world events like the Holocaust and the civil rights movement. Her quest for knowledge transformed her, taking her over oceans and across continents, to Harvard and to Cambridge. Only then would she wonder if she'd traveled too far, if there was still a way home. Educated is an account of the struggle for self-invention. It is a tale of fierce family loyalty and of the grief that comes with severing the closest of ties. With the acute insight that distinguishes all great writers, Westover has crafted a universal coming-of-age story that gets to the heart of what an education is and what it offers: the perspective to see one's life through new eyes and the will to change it.

# 4 The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah

Alaska, 1974. Unpredictable. Unforgiving. Untamed. For a family in crisis, the ultimate test of survival. Ernt Allbright, a former POW, comes home from the Vietnam war a changed and volatile man. When he loses yet another job, he makes an impulsive decision: he will move his family north, to Alaska, where they will live off the grid in America’s last true frontier. Thirteen-year-old Leni, a girl coming of age in a tumultuous time, caught in the riptide of her parents’ passionate, stormy relationship, dares to hope that a new land will lead to a better future for her family. She is desperate for a place to belong. Her mother, Cora, will do anything and go anywhere for the man she loves, even if it means following him into the unknown At first, Alaska seems to be the answer to their prayers. In a wild, remote corner of the state, they find a fiercely independent community of strong men and even stronger women. The long, sunlit days and the generosity of the locals make up for the Allbrights’ lack of preparation and dwindling resources. But as winter approaches and darkness descends on Alaska, Ernt’s fragile mental state deteriorates and the family begins to fracture. Soon the perils outside pale in comparison to threats from within. In their small cabin, covered in snow, blanketed in eighteen hours of night, Leni and her mother learn the terrible truth: they are on their own. In the wild, there is no one to save them but themselves. In this unforgettable portrait of human frailty and resilience, Kristin Hannah reveals the indomitable character of the modern American pioneer and the spirit of a vanishing Alaska―a place of incomparable beauty and danger. The Great Alone is a daring, beautiful, stay-up-all-night story about love and loss, the fight for survival, and the wildness that lives in both man and nature.

#5 Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn

Fresh from a brief stay at a psych hospital, reporter Camille Preaker faces a troubling assignment: she must return to her tiny hometown to cover the murders of two preteen girls. For years, Camille has hardly spoken to her neurotic, hypochondriac mother or to the half-sister she barely knows: a beautiful thirteen-year-old with an eerie grip on the town. Now, installed in her old bedroom in her family's Victorian mansion, Camille finds herself identifying with the young victims—a bit too strongly. Dogged by her own demons, she must unravel the psychological puzzle of her own past if she wants to get the story—and survive this homecoming.

#6 The Circle by Dave Eggers

When Mae Holland is hired to work for the Circle, the world's most powerful internet company, she feels she's been given the opportunity of a lifetime. The Circle, run out of a sprawling California campus, links users' personal emails, social media, banking, and purchasing with their universal operating system, resulting in one online identity and a new age of civility and transparency. As Mae tours the open-plan office spaces, the towering glass dining facilities, the cozy dorms for those who spend nights at work, she is thrilled with the company's modernity and activity. There are parties that last through the night, there are famous musicians playing on the lawn, there are athletic activities and clubs and brunches, and even an aquarium of rare fish retrieved from the Marianas Trench by the CEO. Mae can't believe her luck, her great fortune to work for the most influential company in the world--even as life beyond the campus grows distant, even as a strange encounter with a colleague leaves her shaken, even as her role at the Circle becomes increasingly public. What begins as the captivating story of one woman's ambition and idealism soon becomes a heart-racing novel of suspense, raising questions about memory, history, privacy, democracy, and the limits of human knowledge.

#7 The Woman in Cabin 10 by Ruth Ware

Lo Blacklock, a journalist who writes for a travel magazine, has just been given the assignment of a lifetime: a week on a luxury cruise with only a handful of cabins. The sky is clear, the waters calm, and the veneered, select guests jovial as the exclusive cruise ship, the Aurora, begins her voyage in the picturesque North Sea. At first, Lo's stay is nothing but pleasant: the cabins are plush, the dinner parties are sparkling, and the guests are elegant. But as the week wears on, frigid winds whip the deck, gray skies fall, and Lo witnesses what she can only describe as a dark and terrifying nightmare: a woman being thrown overboard. The problem? All passengers remain accounted for and so, the ship sails on as if nothing has happened, despite Lo's desperate attempts to convey that something (or someone) has gone terribly, terribly wrong.

#8 Eleanor Elephant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman

Eleanor Oliphant has learned how to survive - but not how to live. Eleanor Oliphant leads a simple life. She wears the same clothes to work every day, eats the same meal deal for lunch every day and buys the same two bottles of vodka to drink every weekend. Eleanor Oliphant is happy. Nothing is missing from her carefully timetabled life. Except, sometimes, everything. One simple act of kindness is about to shatter the walls Eleanor has built around herself. Now she must learn how to navigate the world that everyone else seems to take for granted - while searching for the courage to face the dark corners she's avoided all her life. Change can be good. Change can be bad. But surely any change is better than. . . fine?

#9 The Light Between Oceans by M.L. Stedman

A captivating, beautiful, and stunningly accomplished debut novel that opens in 1918 Australia - the story of a lighthouse keeper and his wife who make one devastating choice that forever changes two worlds. Australia, 1926. After four harrowing years fighting on the Western Front, Tom Sherbourne returns home to take a job as the lighthouse keeper on Janus Rock, nearly half a day's journey from the coast. To this isolated island, where the supply boat comes once a season and shore leaves are granted every other year at best, Tom brings a young, bold, and loving wife, Isabel. Years later, after two miscarriages and one stillbirth, the grieving Isabel hears a baby's cries on the wind. A boat has washed up onshore carrying a dead man and a living baby. Tom, whose records as a lighthouse keeper are meticulous and whose moral principles have withstood a horrific war, wants to report the man and infant immediately. But Isabel has taken the tiny baby to her breast. Against Tom's judgment, they claim her as their own and name her Lucy. When she is two, Tom and Isabel return to the mainland and are reminded that there are other people in the world. Their choice has devastated one of them. M. L. Stedman's mesmerizing, beautifully written debut novel seduces us into accommodating Isabel's decision to keep this "gift from God." And we are swept into a story about extraordinarily compelling characters seeking to find their North Star in a world where there is no right answer, where justice for one person is another's tragic loss.

#10 The Queen of the Tearling by Erika Johansen

Magic, adventure, mystery, and romance combine in this epic debut in which a young princess must reclaim her dead mother’s throne, learn to be a ruler—and defeat the Red Queen, a powerful and malevolent sorceress determined to destroy her.On her nineteenth birthday, Princess Kelsea Raleigh Glynn, raised in exile, sets out on a perilous journey back to the castle of her birth to ascend her rightful throne. Plain and serious, a girl who loves books and learning, Kelsea bears little resemblance to her mother, the vain and frivolous Queen Elyssa. But though she may be inexperienced and sheltered, Kelsea is not defenseless: Around her neck hangs the Tearling sapphire, a jewel of immense magical power; and accompanying her is the Queen’s Guard, a cadre of brave knights led by the enigmatic and dedicated Lazarus. Kelsea will need them all to survive a cabal of enemies who will use every weapon—from crimson-caped assassins to the darkest blood magic—to prevent her from wearing the crown.Despite her royal blood, Kelsea feels like nothing so much as an insecure girl, a child called upon to lead a people and a kingdom about which she knows almost nothing. But what she discovers in the capital will change everything, confronting her with horrors she never imagined. An act of singular daring will throw Kelsea’s kingdom into tumult, unleashing the vengeance of the tyrannical ruler of neighboring Mortmesne: the Red Queen, a sorceress possessed of the darkest magic. Now Kelsea will begin to discover whom among the servants, aristocracy, and her own guard she can trust.But the quest to save her kingdom and meet her destiny has only just begun—a wondrous journey of self-discovery and a trial by fire that will make her a legend . . . if she can survive.

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I recently started watching World War II in Colour on Netflix and realized how little I retained from my high school history/government classes. Within the first ten minutes I needed a quick refresher. Here are a few quick references: 

Government Ideologies: 

Capitalism: An economic system in which all or most of the means of production are privately owned and operated, and the investment of capital and the production, distribution and prices of commodities (goods and services) are determined mainly in a free market, rather than by the state

Communism: Community ownership of property, with the end goal being complete social equality via economic equality 

Socialism: State ownership of common property, or state ownership of the means of production. 

Fascism: A governmental system led by a dictator having complete power, forcibly suppressing opposition and criticism, regimenting all industry, commerce, etc., and emphasizing an aggressive nationalism and often racism

WWII Political Leaders:

The Axis Power: 

Germany - Adolf Hitler 

Japan - Hideki Tojo and Emperor Hirohito

Italy - Benito Mussolini 

The Allies: 

Great Britain: Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill

France: Charles de Gaulle

United States of America: F. D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman

Canada: William King

Russia: Joseph Stalin 

Australia: Robert Menzies

New Zealand: Michael Savage

Brief Timeline of WWII:

1933

January 30 - Adolf Hitler becomes Chancellor of Germany. 

1936

October 25 - Germany and Italy form the Rome-Berlin Axis treaty. 

November 25 - Germany and Japan sign the Anti-Comintern Pact.

1937

July 7 - Japan invades China. 

1938

March 12 - Hitler annexes the country of Austria into Germany.

1939

September 1 - Germany invades Poland. World War II begins. 

September 3 - France and Great Britain declare war on Germany. 

1940

April 9 to June 9 - Germany invades Denmark and Norway. 

May 10 to June 22 - Germany controls much of western Europe. 

June 10 - Italy enters the war as a member of the Axis powers. 

September 22 - Germany, Italy, and Japan create the Axis Alliance. 

1941

June 22 - Germany and the Axis Powers attack Russia.

December 7 - The Japanese attack the US Navy in Pearl Harbor. 

December 8 - United States enters World War II on the side of the Allies. 

1942

June 4 - The US Navy defeats Japan at the Battle of Midway.

July 10 - The Allies invade and take the island of Sicily. 

1943

September 3 - Italy surrenders to the Allies.

1944

June 6 - D-day. Allied forces invade France and push back the Germans.

August 25 - Paris is liberated from German control. 

December 16 - The Battle of the Bulge.

1945

February 19 - US Marines invade and capture the island of Iwo Jima. 

March 22 - The US Third Army crosses the Rhine River. 

April 30 - Adolf Hitler commits suicide.

May 7 - Germany surrenders to the Allies. 

August 6 - The United States drops the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima.

August 9 - The United States drops the Atomic Bomb on Nagasaki.

September 2 - Japan surrenders to the Allies.