One great thing about summer is it sometimes means connecting with old friends. Seems as we get older there are fewer and fewer people who’ve known us for most of our entire lives.  Brenda and I have been friends since about 1965, although she’s lived in Calgary for many years.  The really wonderful thing about old friends is how quickly you can pick up, despite not having seen each other for a few years.  We weren’t together for five minutes before we were laughing so hard that we were crying into our egg salad sandwiches, just like we used to when we were ten years old.  Excellent therapy for whatever ails you, I’m sure! She and her partner, Pierre, are planning to retire to the Tatamagouche area in four years, so it’ll be nice for two little girls to reconnect as two little old ladies (not!)

A Hare in the Elephant’s Trunk is now available as an e-book, and I’m not sure how I feel about that.  I guess reading books electronically was inevitable, but I’ll always be a fan of actually holding the paper in my hands – egotistically, I suppose, it makes a book, and the blood, sweat and tears poured into it, seem more valuable as something you can actually pick up from a shelf; feel the weight of it in your hands.  But then again, I’m old-fashioned… I’ll be interested to see how many people, if any, choose to read it as an e-book.

http://www.kobobooks.com/ebook/Hare-in-the-Elephants-Trunk/book-7TA8yq35VkaSK0Px_5jL-A/page1.html

And finally, family vacations.  Don, Liam, Shannon and I just spent a couple of nights in a cottage on the Northumberland Strait, and other than a 5-hour ER room wait for strep throat, it was an extremely pleasant time for our family – I’m aware on a daily basis of how increasingly limited these occasions are becoming as the kids get ready to become fully independent, and it’s so great to connect as four adults now – in fact, I’m pretty sure I’m the least mature of the bunch in many ways:)