It is a beautiful sunny day after days of clouds and rain. At least the cisterns around the island should be full again. The first hurricane of the season, Adrian, is at 40 mph and headed for the Bahamas so we are safe from this one. I want to get moved in to the new apt. before we have major hurricane warnings and torrential rain. Last year I missed the worst storm as I was in Houston when it hit and came home to road with potholes big enough to swallow a small car.

I just finished the coolest book! I love Sleator's creepy books anyway. The House of Stairs will always be my favorite, but I loved The Boy Who Couldn't Die because of the moral - immortality does have it's drawbacks! The arrogant teenage protagonist got what he was bargaining for and then some. But, Sleator's new one The Last Universe just blew me away with its creepiness. I am glad I was reading it during the day with the sun shining. Just the idea that I could wake up in an alternate universe where the people I love could have changed and so could have I. Susan's brother Gary is ill and in a wheelchair and loves to go out into the creepy family garden. Susan hates it because of the way it creeps her out - especially the opium poppies growing near the old outhouse and the lotuses growing in the pond. This can't happen in the world as we know it as they are tropical plants and this is Massachusetts. Their father tries to pass it off as seeds in the wind but their Cambodian gardener and his cat know better. On Gary's insistence the brother and sister start exploring more of the garden and discover that it is a quantum garden and entering and leaving alternate universes is possible. The ending had the hair raised on my arms! The Publisher's Weekly review refers to it as "an overall sophisticated horror story" but I think it is incredibly well written science fiction. There is no bad magic here - just the weirdness of quantum physics.