Thursday Thoughts

Lots to think about today.  Let's see..........

1. My weather app says there's a 50% chance of rain today, with thunderstorms late tonight.  Today's high is predicted to be 101°F.
2. We are under two "Severe Weather Alerts":  Heat Advisory and Air Quality Alert.
3. Hot enough for ya?  High heat and rain tomorrow, too.
4. Oh, no!  Tomorrow, I'm supposed to go with Risé (my retired librarian friend who is the source of my Risé Recommends posts) to take boxes and boxes of books to trade for some new-to-us books for our Crown Center library.  Yikes!  Rain is not good for cardboard boxes or books!  Now what?
5. As I'm typing this, I'm also glancing out my window and seeing blue skies with fluffy white clouds.  Okay, some clouds are kind of smudgy gray, since we are also under that Air Quality Alert all day.
6. I need something positive to focus on.  How about this quote?  It's from page 33 of the book on JOY and ENTHUSIASM:  "Think and practice joy every day. ... Get enthusiasm, think enthusiasm, live enthusiastically!"
7. 
   So I should think positive thoughts, like something about my brand new apartment.  I can say positive things about my walk-in shower.  In my old apartment, my shower was over my tub, which required a nonslip bathmat with suction cups that could grip the slippery enamel.  Yay, fall risk lessened!
8. Let's end with a book Risé Recommends:

 

The Innocents ~ by Francesca Segal, 2012, fiction (London), 289 pages

Newly engaged and unthinkingly self-satisfied, twenty-eight-year-old Adam Newman is the prize catch of Temple Fortune, a small, tight-knit Jewish suburb of London.  He has been dating Rachel Gilbert since they were both sixteen and now, to the relief and happiness of the entire Gilbert family, they are finally to marry.  To Adam, Rachel embodies the highest values of Temple Fortune; she is innocent, conventional, and entirely secure in her community — a place in which everyone still knows the whereabouts of their nursery school classmates.  Marrying Rachel will cement Adam's role in a warm, inclusive family he loves.

But as the vast machinery of the wedding gathers momentum, Adam feels the first faint touches of claustrophobia, and when Rachel's younger cousin Ellie Schneider moves home from New York, she unsettles Adam more than he'd care to admit.  Ellie — beautiful, vulnerable, and fiercely independent — offers a liberation that he hadn't known existed:  a freedom from the loving interference and frustrating parochialism of North West London.  Adam finds himself questioning everything, suddenly torn between security and exhilaration, tradition and independence.  What might he be missing by staying close to home?