Lazy day.

No babysitting today. One of the kids caught some nasty bug, and Mom wanted to stay home with her, so I wound up with oodles of free time on one of the most perfect summer days Wisconsin can produce. I visited the library to pick up an armload of books about, you know, genocide, war, human rights violations, man’s inhumanity to man; and dropped by the grocery for plums at 99 cents a pound. So far, I’ve spent the day bicycling, gardening (mostly watering our poor parched plants), harvesting raspberries (some were so dangerously overripe that they never would have survived the arduous journey back to the house…), gorging myself on raspberries (hello, Tummyache), sunbathing, listening to NPR and Franz Ferdinand, catching up on correspondence, and reading Niall Ferguson's The War of the World. I am not crazy about Ferguson. He writes about history engagingly enough, but his penchant for speculation. He's much too fond of asking, "What if this had not happened, and this had happened, and this had happened differently, and Chamberlain had grown a pair, and Hitler's Sudeten gambit had folded... then what?" for my tastes. I'll take Mazower over Ferguson any day, but I've already re-read everything of his twice, and Dark Continent and Hitler's Empire at least five times each. Mazower needs to publish a new book! I do admire/appreciate Ferguson's attention to the economic causes (especially the severely limited war-making resources of the Japanese Home Islands and Germany, within its 1919 borders) of World Wars I and II.