Well, the big day is tomorrow: I turn forty.
We celebrated last night with KFC and ice cream cake. I also got some cool gifts: Walk the Line Deluxe DVD set, a good portable breathalyser (it might make me the most popular guy at the drinking club), a wireless speaker for my family room (connects, wi-fi-like, to my living room stereo), a Kalamazoo Wings Hockey drinking glass, money from my folks, a bottle of Wisconsin strawberry blush that's out of season (and is now empty), and a handful of little things.
Today, three or four of our middle children are going to Detroit to visit their cousins. My parents are taking them. It's going to be a morgue around here, what with only a baby, a two-year-old, and a 12-year-old hanging out. But it should work out well. The forecast is gorgeous: 58 and partly sunny. It should be a good opportunity for a little outdoor recreation: reading on the front porch.
I'll probably try to take a major chunk out of Dreher's Crunchy Cons. The book is getting a ton of publicity, and not just from conservative magazines. Fox and Friends interviewed Dreher, as did NPR. There might be others, so I figure I better read the daggone thing so I'm current on the conservative conversation, since I've spent a lot of time studying it, especially its paleo-conservative tree, of which Dreher's book is the most-recent branch.
I've read the first parts, and I'm favorably impressed. Dreher is a great writer, and I like his ideas. He dubs Russell Kirk the patron saint of the crunchy cons, and I'm a big fan of Kirk's. After his widow, Annette, saw the feature article I wrote about Russell Kirk for Touchstone, she invited me to Mecosta for a weekend. I stayed at Piety Hill and slept in daughter Felicia's old room. I drank beer in the living room, was given freedom to explore Dr. Kirk's immense library, and visited with Annette over breakfast in the kitchen. She was a delightful host. It was one of the best weekends I've ever spent. The least I can do to repay her kindness is to keep abreast of what might be a Kirkian recrudescence.
