I get up in the evening and I ain’t got nothing to say
I come home in the morning, I go to bed feelin’ the same way
I ain’t nothing but tired, man I’m just tired and bored with myself
Hey there baby, I could use just a little help

You can’t start a server, you can’t start a server without a spark
This Mac is driving me crazy – we’re just shooting in the dark

- Sorry, Bruce!

Sorry if I sound a bit negative in the following but I admit, I am a little frustrated… On the up-side, though, I have decided to write posts about setting up Mac OS-X Lion Server features for real dummies like me…

Before I go into the details, let me share some of my personal history with web hosting. I started this very website innocently about three years ago, and I used BlueHost.Com as the service provider. There is nothing wrong with running your website with BlueHost.Com as long as you don’t require top performance. In my case, my website became more and more popular starting with an occasional daily hit three years ago up to currently 2,000+ visitors a day. When you try to get there or even beyond, you might run into restrictions with BlueHost’s shared servers. I have learned a lot during my time with BlueHost, and as soon as I knew more than their tech support – a tech support with a substantial attitude when pushed beyond their horizon – I deemed it necessary to switch to a higher level.

That higher level came in form of 1 & 1 – you might have seen their commercials lately on TV. They provide dedicated servers, which resulted in a major performance boost for a little more money than a shared server. However, there were basically two major annoyances that I discovered very quickly: First, in order to assure proper performance, I had to upgrade the memory – yes, you can upgrade the server, and you pay for each little step. Currently, I pay $65 a month just for the service. Add to this my Comcast Internet bill. Secondly, while the BlueHost tech support was not stellar, they were all-in-all acceptable, but I can’t even start writing about the 1 & 1 underpaid and under-educated tech support. With them it’s like playing the lottery. Most of my inquiries had to be elevated to specialists (i.e. the real experts) who solved the problems within 24 hours. Let me emphasize that these were real technical problems, meaning my “complaints” were not based on misinterpretation or ignorance.

Now, starting just a few days ago, I started my next adventure: Setting up a Mac OS-X Lion Server in my home office (and now I understand why providing stellar tech support is so difficult). I still use 1 & 1, but I plan to switch to my own server as soon as I have a grip on things, and I am getting there one very small step by another very small step. In addition, I switched over to Comcast Business Class, which provides higher speed, and I won’t get punished for over-using my resources as a private user.

The shooting in the dark starts with a total lack of printed documentation. That includes not only Lion Server, but also the Comcast hardware. The Mac mini I am using comes with a small booklet, explaining how to connect and start up the computer. Well, big deal! The Comcast documentation contains of a bunch of marketing brochures, but no technical information regarding the router they installed in my office. All I have is a hand-written note describing the static IP Address plus gateway, subnet mask, primary DNS, secondary DNS address plus user name and password to access the router.

Luckily, I have set up routers in the past, and as of today I have managed to run my first website with the standard “Hello World!” message. Most of the information I needed, I found on the Internet – the Apple website has all the information, but their content is more in the style of “You can get there from here, but we won’t tell you how.”

The same is true for the “Mac OS-X Lion Server for Dummies” book. Really! Somebody should explain to the author, John Rizzo, the concept of “…for Dummies.” In my humble opinion, you can’t explain an automobile by going into the details of an electronic ignition versus a carburetor. But then, ironically, many of the chapters explain what you can do, however, without elaborating on how to get there (for instance, there is absolutely no explanation on how to set up a client and test the communication with the server). Most annoying are the references to the previous version OS-X Snow Leopard Server, especially the features that have not made it into Lion. Sorry, but who gives a flying rat’s ass? My point is, everybody who dealt with Snow Leopard Server already knows the basics and cannot be considered a “dummy.” The same is true for users who use server hardware beyond the Mac mini. You won’t let a “dummy” handle such serious equipment like a Mac Pro which is worth several thousands of dollars. My point is, a quick reference to the server hardware is appreciated, but leave the details for the professionals.

My idea of “Mac OS-X Lion Server for Dummies” is a basic and comprehensive description of the most needed services. These are primarily running a website and file sharing, which makes about 90% of what “dummies” need. Yes, Lion Server can do a lot more, but let’s get there when we are familiar with the basics.

As I wrote in the beginning, sorry for being so negative, but as they say, “When you get a lemon, sell lemon juice.” Many technical authors have created good income compensating for a manufacturer’s inability to provide sufficient documentation, and maybe by writing better books I can get a small slice out of the huge cake.

The OS-X upgrade from “Snow Leopard” to “Lion” includes a number of features that were designed to help users familiarizing themselves with the features used in an iPhone or iPad, such as the reversed, un-natural scrolling. It reminds me of the dreadful period (until about three years ago) when I still used Microsoft Windows and each “upgrade” came with new features that made you call out “What the f… is going on here? Why is Microsoft telling me what’s good for me and what not?”

Yes, Mr. Jobs, I do enjoy my iPhone very much, and rather than buying a new Mac I will seriously consider buying an iPad. These times I use my MacBook primarily to browse, check emails, and write books, fiction and nonfiction. I can do that with an iPad as well. However, until the time comes, let me explain the difference between my laptop and my iPhone:

• My MacBook does NOT have a touch screen, meaning the window scrolling that makes sense on an iPhone or an iPad does NOT make sense on my MacBook.
• My MacBook comes with a 13″ screen, and, in addition, I have a 21″ external monitor, and let me mention that my eye-sight (through the help of some expensive glasses) is just fine. The point is, I do NOT need to zoom into windows for better readability.

I use a very much appreciated “Apple Magic Mouse,” but, after using “Lion” for two weeks, I reversed all mouse options like Scroll direction: natural (which is NOT natural on my computer), Secondary click, and Smart zoom. I found by chance that, on occasion, I tapped on the mouse and the Double-tap with one finger feature caused the screen to blow up.

Another feature, I need to disable, is the automatic spell-checker. I write a lot, and the spell-checker “corrects” my writing at too many occasions, and I need to re-read pretty much everything again and again. Yes, proof-reading is mandatory, but I’d rather correct only my personal errors, not those of an inefficient spell-checker whose choices for word-replacement are quite bizarre at times.

As I mentioned in my post Mac OS-X Lion: Goodbye Mail, Hello Thunderbird – Goodbye Safari, Hello Firefox, the new Apple Mail and Apple Safari are not worth writing home about, either. I do like the new launchpad, but that’s about it. All in all, my MacBook is slower with “Lion” than it was with “Snow Leopard.”

From a business standpoint let me refer to the dreadful “upgrade” from Windows-XP to Windows-Vista. That was the point in time when I switched to Apple, a step I should have taken much earlier, I admit. However, “Lion” may have the same negative impact on customer satisfaction as Windows-Vista. There are too many “improvements” that nobody needs on their computer, and it will make customers like me think twice about another upgrade.

It would have made so much more sense to deliver the new un-unnatural features as an un-checked option, leaving the user to decide whether or not he/she wants it. Instead it took me some time to learn that these features were quite annoying, and, thankfully, they can be disabled. The question remains, why do I have to adjust “Lion” to resemble “Snow Leopard” ?

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by Lorelei Bell

Sabrina Strong is a Touch Clairvoyant who knows a secret. She knows her mother was turned into a vampire when Sabrina was ten. Now that she is grown up, a powerful magnate in the Chicago business world hires her to reveal the identity of who relentlessly murders vampires in his ultra-modern stronghold of a hotel. [Read More...] – Including an excerpt of the first chapter.

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It seems that ever since mankind was kicked out of the Garden of Eden for eating the forbidden fruit, we’ve been trying to get back in. Or at least, we’ve been wondering where the Garden might have been. St. Augustine had a theory, and so did medieval monks, John Calvin, and Christopher Columbus. But when Darwin’s theory of evolution permanently altered our understanding of human origins, shouldn’t the search for a literal Eden have faded away? Not so fast.

In Paradise Lust, Brook Wilensky-Lanford introduces readers to the enduring modern quest to locate the Garden of Eden on Earth. It is an obsession that has consumed Mesopotamian archaeologists, German Baptist ministers, British irrigation engineers, and the first president of Boston University, among many others. These quixotic Eden seekers all started with the same brief Bible verses, but each ended up at a different spot on the globe: Florida, the North Pole, Ohio, China, and, of course, Iraq. Evocative of Tony Horwitz and Sarah Vowell, Wilensky-Lanford writes of these unusual characters and their search with sympathy and wit. Charming, enlightening, and utterly unique, Paradise Lust is a century-spanning history that will take you to places you never imagined.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Editorial Reviews

“Part adventure story, part historical narrative, Wilensky-Lanford spins the history of explorers who searched for the Garden’s precise earthly coordinates. With adept, well-researched prose, she traces how, from four verses in Genesis … scientists and pseudo-scientists, preachers and theologians, have claimed ‘scientific proof’ of Paradise’s location—in Iraq, Sri Lanka, the Seychelles, Florida, Ohio, the North Pole, and elsewhere…. Quick-witted and quirky … Wilensky-Lanford isn’t satisfied with asking only “where,” she also deftly explores “why?”… meditating not so much on the Garden, but on humanity’s first steps from it.” —Publishers Weekly

“There is great pleasure to be taken from Brook Wilensky-Lanford’s affectionate, witty, and carefully-researched survey of crackpot Biblical archaeology, past and present. But the real prize is in the wisdom: including the point that modern science, despite its fancy track suit and pneumatic shoes, chases just as desperately as did the naked and barefoot ancients after their always-elusive quarry, Truth.” —Les Standiford, author of Bringing Adam Home

“Be wary, reader, of this tempting fresh fig of a book. If you bite you shall perhaps acquire more knowledge than you counted on and experience an undue degree of bliss. … The search for a literal Eden is a more American story than you might think. Wilensky-Lanford delivers her comprehensive survey with a wit and levity that serves as perfect fulcrum to the doomed gravity of her subjects.” —J.C. Hallman, author of In Utopiaand The Hospital for Bad Poets

About the Author

Brook Wilensky-Lanford grew up on Mount Desert Island, Maine, studied religion at Wesleyan University, and is a graduate of Columbia University’s M.F.A. program in nonfiction. She has written for The Huffington Post, Salon, Triple Canopy, Killing the Buddha, Lapham’s Quarterly, and The Exquisite Corpse. She lives in the Garden State.

Review

In the beginning, Paradise Lust seems a light-hearted jaunt through a set of biographies and portraitures of men who have sought to locate the Garden of Eden (literally!) on today’s map of the world. Wilesky-Lanford’s cast of characters is a motley crew – and she clearly enjoys exposing the little insanities that drive each of them to the quest. But these tales, together, tell a much deeper story: the Garden of Eden, she says, “has always been located both in the original past and in the idealized future” (92). Taking Darwin’s Origin of Species as her starting point, Wilensky-Lanford cleverly manages to both pit literal Christianity against evolution and allow them to co-exist: “Those who looked for Eden . . . would have to answer at least two questions: not only where was Eden, but, more important, what was Eden?” (xviii).

The nuances of the many Edens she finds are delightful and insightful and move the book from a read for idle curiosity to a self-reflective history of our origins. One Eden is the silent revolution from hunting and gathering to farming – “the moment where humans began to control their environment, instead of being controlled by it. What bigger transition could there be? All of human history depends on that first person who realized: I can do this myself . . . .” (240). Another Eden is simply a new take on an old Babylonian myth. But “if the story of the Fall wasn’t original, how could it be sacred?” And of course, Eve’s role in why we left the Garden of Eden is always on trial. In one history, Wilensky-Lanford discovers that God “wanted Eve to eat from the Tree of Knowledge” because the serpent – aka the welfare-state – “wanted to keep Eve . . . barefoot and pregnant, forever.” (171)

The many meanings and stories that make up Paradise Lust are at times too loosely connected and for this, Wilensky-Lanford relies on the reader to hold multiple threads at once. But from Ohio to Mongolia to Florida to Iraq and Tahiti, her analysis of what was Eden leaves even those of us who didn’t go to Sunday school eager to learn more about our origins and our world today. As Wilesnky-Lanford concludes, “That’s the essential paradox of the search. Eden has to be erased in order for it to be Eden. A paradise isn’t paradise until it’s lost.” (253). – Sunny Daly, Amazon.Com Customer Review

Which Way to the Garden of Eden?

The New York Times Book Review – August 5, 2011 (Excerpt)

Most people probably think the search for a “real” Garden of Eden was abandoned centuries ago. With so many modern scientific advances, the discovery of fossil evidence from early ages and, of course, the advance of Darwin’s theory of evolution, surely no one would be so mad as to look for an actual Eden. Brook Wilensky-­Lanford’s first book, “Paradise Lust,” suggests just the opposite.

It seems there have always been — and continue to be — little armies of Eden chasers who take this quest very seriously, carrying their search to the most unlikely places. Wilensky-Lanford carries the reader along on some of these journeys, from the North Pole to rural Ohio, evoking the lives and characters of a collection of eccentrics that includes a professional archaeologist and a preacher, as well as a Chinese businessman and a British irrigation engineer. What these disparate types have in common is their insistence that they have finally and truly cracked the biblical code.

They all begin with the verses in Genesis. “A river flows out of Eden to water the garden, and from there it divides and becomes four branches” — namely the Pishon, the Gihon, the Tigris and the Euphrates. But while it’s easy to find the Tigris and the Euphrates, which run from Turkey through Iraq into the Persian Gulf, the locations of the Gihon and the Pishon remain distinctly murky. A further complication is the theory that today’s Tigris and Euphrates are not the same as the biblical ones, a notion that allows, as Wilensky-Lanford puts it, room for a more “fanciful geography.”

“Fanciful” might be putting it mildly. William Fairfield Warren, the first president of Boston University, published a book in the late 19th century in which he argued that Eden was located at the North Pole — or, at least, that it had been there before the Flood. The river that watered the Garden, Warren proclaimed, was not a river at all but rain. Eden, he added, was populated with people “of giant stature” and its landscape dotted with enormous trees closely related to the California redwoods. (Conveniently, sequoias can reproduce asexually, making them perfect for an Eden before the Fall.) [Read the full article...]

A research-heavy yet light account of Garden of Eden seekers

Boston.Com Book Review – August 8, 2011 (Excerpt)

In the beginning, Brook Wilensky-Lanford was confronted with a piece of family lore that she couldn’t wrap her mind around.

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Boiled Peanuts

A Novel by John Patrick Doyle

A Peeping Tom Goes Nuts Over A Blind Girl

Paul Kirk is a librarian and one of his town’s quirkier residents.  In a childhood home lacking parents (his mother dying of MS and his father an alcoholic) Paul had imagined himself a member of the neighboring family. Now in his late twenties, Paul vicariously participates in the households of his community. His peeping-Tom proclivities express his awkward need for social bonding.

Then Paul meets Bronwyn, a counselor who is lovely, independent and blind. She has inherited her Aunt Phyllis’ house and is newly arrived in town. When Paul first sees Bronwyn at church, he knows he wants to be part of her life. As the mystery of Aunt Phyllis unfolds, Bronwyn and Paul become more deeply involved as they learn about Phyllis’ secrets and how they relate to Bronwyn and her past, but Paul’s peeping ways may ruin it all. [Read more...]

Boiled Peanuts is available through Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

Anyways, once I had paid as little as $29.95 (Yeah!), everything went smoothly, and, after about 40 minutes of download and installing, the system started up without problems. I still remember the old Windows times where every update came with a “What the f…! Where are my programs? How do I close a file? How do I print a Word document?” – Most updates were major, and all major “improvements” came with major headaches. Not so with my MacBook! Everything is still in place where it was, and you can continue working without scratching your head. Yes, there are improvements, but they don’t interfere with your work.

The most obvious change is the reversed window scrolling, a tribute to future touchscreen operation. It will cause stomach cramps for a few days. It’s like driving on the left side of the road. You’ll get used to it. Nevertheless, you can eliminate the reversed scrolling by going to System Preferences -> Mouse and check off the Scroll direction: natural option.

The most welcome addition to OS-X is the iPhone-inspired Launchpad, which allows the easy access to your applications. It’s like an improved Windows Start Menu, but way cooler.

The smoothness of upgrading due to lack of revolutionary changes has a downside, though.

It is not an earth-moving statement when I say that Apple’s Mail and Safari were (and still are) years behind other mail and browser programs. However, until “Snow Leopard” I used both programs for the mere fact that they were simple. Both had a clean and logical interface, which worked for me. Now, with “Lion” both programs, Mail and Safari, changed. Get this right: Both programs were modified, but not improved.

Apple Mail

For instance in Mail, I don’t see the ability of flagging an email in seven colors instead of one as an improvement. Apple also copied a feature from Outlook and Thunderbird: The preview pane. Some people like it, some don’t. The problem is, customizing the view is extremely limited. Mail comes basically “as is.” Yes, you can hide the mailbox list, but that’s it. Thunderbird, in turn, allows three different layout options, and you can hide the preview pane. After playing with Mail a little longer, I found that you can extend the mail list to the far right which effectively hides the preview pane. An option like “Hide Preview Pane” would make more sense to me.

While I was willing to accept the limited view options, I was most annoyed that unread messages are only marked by a small and hardly visible blue dot. Sorry, but I would like to know where my unread messages are without searching the little blue dot. It’s simply not user-friendly, which is surprising. Would it be such a terrible effort to mark unread messages more clearly? After all, we are talking about Apple here. Once you go Mac you never go back.

To add to my dismay, there is no easy way to import current emails and account settings into Thunderbird (There is an “Import” menu item, but it doesn’t work). This a major oversight in the Thunderbird development. It will make the switch to Thunderbird a little harder, but not impossible.

Apple Safari

I have to admit, I have not yet discovered all the new features in Safari. There is the really cool “Reading List” feature, but, honestly, that’s something I created in form of a bookmark folder years ago.

I started working with the new Safari within minutes after installing Lion, and I noticed some performance issues on my MacBook, i.e. loading Safari takes longer than before. The most annoying side effects I found so far were: Safari opens the last web page you viewed, which is not necessarily the assigned home page. I, personally, would like to see my home page, because that’s where I start my blogging work. It would have been nice if the guys at Apple would have added another option for that. Yes, you can set your homepage, but, yet again, the browser opens the last opened webpage regardless of the home page setting.

The old Safari used to open a new tab to the far right. Now it opens it right next to the currently opened tab. When I update my blog, I usually open about six different websites, and, for the sake of speedier work, I’d like them to be in a certain sequence. Whenever I open an additional website in a new tab, it opens somewhere in between. Again, it would be nice if that feature was user-adjustable.

As a matter of fact, I am writing this post through Firefox, because it makes more sense at this time.

Lack of Customization

I find it astonishing that an extremely competent company like Apple, whose business strategy is focused on cloud technologies, is not able to keep up with their competition when it comes to email programs and browsers. Adding features to Apple Mail, that are already  offered by MS Outlook and Thunderbird for years, doesn’t seem to be a major task. Apple Safari is still a good browser, but it is still years behind the competition, namely MS Internet Explorer and Thunderbird.

Despite these little shortcomings I am looking forward the next MacBook generation with touchscreens. I like the iPad, but right now my work requires more than the iPad can offer.

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Boiled Peanuts

A Novel by John Patrick Doyle

A Peeping Tom Goes Nuts Over A Blind Girl

Paul Kirk is a librarian and one of his town’s quirkier residents. In a childhood home lacking parents (his mother dying of MS and his father an alcoholic) Paul had imagined himself a member of the neighboring family. Now in his late twenties, Paul vicariously participates in the households of his community. His peeping-Tom proclivities express his awkward need for social bonding.

Then Paul meets Bronwyn, a counselor who is lovely, independent and blind. She has inherited her Aunt Phyllis’ house and is newly arrived in town. When Paul first sees Bronwyn at church, he knows he wants to be part of her life. As the mystery of Aunt Phyllis unfolds, Bronwyn and Paul become more deeply involved as they learn about Phyllis’ secrets and how they relate to Bronwyn and her past, but Paul’s peeping ways may ruin it all. [Read more...]

Boiled Peanuts is available through Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

Click on image to buy from Amazon.Com

From the acclaimed Vanity Fair and GQ journalist–an unprecedented, in-depth portrait of the man whose return to Apple precipitated one of the biggest turnarounds in business history. With a new epilogue on Apple’s future survival in today’s roller-coaster economy, here is the revealing biography that blew away the critics and stirred controversy within industry and media circles around the country.

Editorial Reviews

For the legions who revere Apple Computer’s high-profile cofounder as a godlike figure, the aptly titled Second Coming of Steve Jobs will prove an intriguing picture of a seminal time in their deity’s roller-coaster life. It should emphatically vindicate their deeply held faith in the man and his ideas. But even for those with a lesser opinion, Alan Deutschman offers an interesting and enlightening look at the crucial period from Jobs’s unceremonious Apple exit through his triumphant return. Deutschman, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair magazine and longtime Silicon Valley correspondent, interviewed nearly 100 colleagues and friends to draw this portrait of a bewilderingly complex and notoriously private man–albeit one whose talents, personality traits, and idiosyncrasies have long been on public display. “He succeeded in becoming the Jackie Kennedy Onassis of business and technology,” Deutschman writes, “a figure who was ubiquitous as a symbol of his times but little known as a human being.” To change that, he looks into Jobs’s ill-fated first post-Apple endeavor at the Next computer company, his return to undeniable respectability with Pixar and the two Toy Story movies, and finally, his ultimate absolution with a very successful reclamation of the Apple crown. It’s a revealing account of a singular individual during a remarkable time. –Howard Rothman, Amazon.Com Review

A revealing, balanced portrait of Apple Computers CEO and founder Steven Jobs, this fast-paced business biography is based on interviews with nearly 100 of his associates and friends. One glaring absence, however, is Jobs himself, who apparently declined to be interviewed by Deutschman, a Vanity Fair contributing editor and staff writer at GQ. Still, Deutschman provides a juicy, privileged look inside the Apple core. He reports that Jobs’s recent resuscitation of Apple, to which the visionary entrepreneur returned in 1996 after being ousted by John Sculley a decade earlier, was accomplished through a “reign of terror” that shook up thousands of complacent employees. Like other commentators, Deutschman portrays Jobs as both engaging and troubling, a natural charmer who is also an abusive, egomaniacal boss fond of meting out public humiliations. But Deutschman goes further, replacing the image of the pop-culture icon with a complex, contradictory figureAan insecure elitist who yearns for the patronage of the masses, a narcissistic vegetarian billionaire who thrives on scarcity and adversity. Among the book’s revelations are details of Jobs’s bulimia-like eating disorders in the 1970s; his reconnection in the ’80s with his long-lost biological sister, novelist Mona Simpson (Jobs was given up for adoption at birth); and his explosive negotiations with Disney honchos Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg, who produced the hits A Bug’s Life and Toy Story with Pixar, Jobs’s animation film studio. Though this gossipy bio has a slick magazine feel, Deutschman gets closer to Jobs’s inner self than any previous attempt. Agent, Suzanne Gluck, ICM. – Publishers Weekly

Review

I am unabashedly one of the (until recently) Macintosh Faithful, having at one time printed my own business cards with “Mac Evangilist” as my title. I would approach customers in the Macitosh section of CompUSA or Computer City and see if they had questions (only while i was there already, mind you!). I have waxed lovingly on the virtues of Macintosh to all my friends and family, and longed for a NextStation, if only as a hobby machine.

Needless to say, I am a died-in-the-wool Steve Jobs fan. In all fairness, the amount of information out there about the MAN is thin and disreputiable. His charm, ‘reality distortion field’ and his public dressing-down of employees are the stuff of legend, but little concrete has been found about the MAN.

A few years ago I read another biography, called (i think) “Steve Jobs and the NeXT Best Thing”. It was a one-sided, blistering account of every failure Jobs made with his founding of Next, and seemingly NO good choices were made.

Picking up this book, The Second Coming, I was expecting more of the same. What I found was a fair, inciteful, and only slightly more vague than it could have been. The writer does seem to set the reader up as to many of Steve’s strong points, and then makes a point to tear down Steve and portray him as almost an unfeeling monster. The narrative is a gentle roller-coaster ride between these two extremes, giving the impression that Steve is either a child, or possibly suffering from multiple personality disorder.

One thing to note is that Steve Jobs does not approve of this book, and as I understand sued to stop publication. Needless to say, HIS point of view and interviews with him are not part of the makeup of the book.

Overall, I find this to be an excellent, information packed book on one of the FEW businessmen I would consider a ‘hero’ to me. However, without Steve’s direct input, this book comes across VERY strongly as a coloring-book picture colored from the OUTSIDE up to the outline of the man, not filling in the man himself. – John R. Patrick, Amazon.Com Customer Review

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Boiled Peanuts

A Novel by John Patrick Doyle

A Peeping Tom Goes Nuts Over A Blind Girl

Paul Kirk is a librarian and one of his town’s quirkier residents.  In a childhood home lacking parents (his mother dying of MS and his father an alcoholic) Paul had imagined himself a member of the neighboring family. Now in his late twenties, Paul vicariously participates in the households of his community. His peeping-Tom proclivities express his awkward need for social bonding.

Then Paul meets Bronwyn, a counselor who is lovely, independent and blind. She has inherited her Aunt Phyllis’ house and is newly arrived in town. When Paul first sees Bronwyn at church, he knows he wants to be part of her life. As the mystery of Aunt Phyllis unfolds, Bronwyn and Paul become more deeply involved as they learn about Phyllis’ secrets and how they relate to Bronwyn and her past, but Paul’s peeping ways may ruin it all. [Read more...]

Boiled Peanuts is available through Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

Ingredients:

1/3 c. quick cooking tapioca
1/2 c. sugar
1/2 tsp. salt
2 c. milk
1/4 tsp. cinnamon
1/8 tsp. nutmeg
1 1/2 tbsp. lemon juice
1 c. grated raw apple
3 egg yolks, beaten until thick & lemon-colored
3 egg whites – stiffly beaten
2 tbsp. butter