Thank you, Maitresse, for reminding me about Ramadan. This suggested a visit to our Turkish friends’ oceanside restaurant this week when we travel over to the east coast for a few days. I’m going to be stuck in a realtors’ board-required, 9 to 5 orientation class. Besides finding a seat in the back and enjoying my own reading material for eight undisturbed hours -- there is no testing required, only attendance -- I now have another reason to be enthusiastic about the trip.

We first met our friends when we stopped in to try their new restaurant on Hollywood’s Broadwalk. S was a newborn, only a few weeks old. She had just finished nursing and I was trying to burp her and get her to sleep when our food arrived. Gulten, our hostess, asked if she could please hold the baby while we ate. A restaurant with babysitting? We were sold.

Since then, countless days and nights have been spent enjoying the excellent food and company of what we all call, “Gul-and-Hasan’s,” instead of the proper, “Istanbul,” while their two children, the same ages as G and L, race around with ours in the sand, steps away from our table.

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Fall has finally arrived here in South Florida. It takes some expertise to detect it, though. No garishly colored leaves or frosty, chill mornings here; it’s very subtle. The air is drier, drifting silkily across your skin. The sky is an almost cloudless, lighter, brighter shade of blue. The light is lemony, changing to a mango hue by late afternoon. The end of October brings cool, damp, blustery nights, accompanied by the wild, chattering, sweeping sound of the palms; perfect weather for trick-or-treating.

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Old news?

Michelangelo’s David not anatomically correct.

John Cage's world’s longest concert. Back in July things really got crazy when three notes were played.

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Yesterday, waiting for Property Appraiser staff to return from lunch in order to complete a petition for reducing our taxes* (“Do we get to hold signs and march, Mom, or do we get to ask lots of people to sign our paper?!”), we popped into the library for a few minutes. I happened across a slim volume by Steve Martin, Pure Drivel, a collection of short essays described by the author as, “little candy kisses, after-dinner mints to the big meal of literature…” I gobbled it up in about an hour and now am craving more. Not much makes me actually laugh out loud, MFS’s comments yesterday aside; this is some funny stuff.

I also picked up on tape, Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters and Wodehouse’s Jeeves and the Mating Season, just what I need for our upcoming drive.

*Our island taxes nearly tripled two years ago and this year doubled again. That’s with a homestead exemption. Without any county services, no sewer or water, no paved roads, no public transportation or schools or emergency services, it would almost be comical if it weren’t so damn expensive. We fortunately discovered that we have been incorrectly billed using the millage rate for Gulf front property, which we are not, and at a rate nearly thirteen times some of our neighbors. We think we have a pretty good leg to stand on.

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Odd Replies

Diane – I finally had a chance to look back through the archives on introverts at WTM Secular. I should have known. That is such a great list, I need to check in more often. Oh, and thanks for the link to Betty Bowers.

Jose – Ah, to be young and innocent again. Don’t worry, it could still happen to you one day. Keep your eyes open.

Joyce – Artes Latinae looks great. The only problem is that you really need to begin with that program since they teach the case paradigms in a different order. Had I realized that before beginning Latina Christiana…