During summers I wake up earlier. That's a good thing. Midday it gets too hot to go out, the sun is too strong. Then I hang out in the arm chairs in the shady corners of the house, with the windows open to the north and the wooden shades pulled down to the south. One can still see out through them. I read. News, blogs, books, bits and pieces. And I look at pictures. Some I save for later. Blogs often irritate me. I seldom follow any. Except my old student Hilla's. Her's was special. She was dying if cancer and reported very honestly about what was happening to her.

One day she wrote about how unfair life is, and asked herself why she hadn't taught her sons more about how to deal with that.
We recently had a young woman, succesful, staying here. I checked her blog out. It was full of comments on how to pack the right type if make-up for trips, how yoga makes you healthier, how proud she was that she took the bus to Malaga on her own, what a great lunch she cooked... And she has so many followers that a publishing house had asked her to write a cook book, and actually published it. "They knew it would sell since I have a big audience", she remarked surprisingly insightful. 24 years old. She makes a living this way. Good for her. But hardly fair.
​
I just made my own cook book. I don't really cook, but my daughter had asked me to write down some of my 'fast' recipes for her (when I cook I want it to go fast). I made her a book for her birthday. These days one can just put it together sitting in an armchair in a cool corner of the house. If one does it digitally it's easy to just upload it to a site like vistaprint and they will print it and sent it out. One copy