Blogs of winters past.

January 14, 1998.

One thing about caring for Lilly is that it leaves little time for sitting around reading, which is too bad, though I expect this to pass. Over the New Year's holiday I did manage a bit a light reading, very lite indeed, a book about The Beverly Hillbillies that I borrowed from the mail clerk in my office.

I myself was a fan in its final years (it was cancelled when I was 9 or 10), and have seen it a few times as an adult. My adult opinion is that it was a well-written show, sometimes quite funny, and that a lot of criticism of it boiled down to little more than prejudice against Southerners.

There were a number of things in the book I didn't know, such as how astonishingly popular the program was (in the U.S., of course, but also in the rest of the English-speaking world, especially Australia of all places). Also, Raymond Bailey was bald. He wore a very artful hairpiece as Milton Drysdale. Apparently, he wasn't well liked by anyone else on the show, for having a short temper and a propensity to gripe about everything. But he did play Avarice well.

It was warm enough on the 3rd for all of us to go to the Lincoln Park Zoo. Lilly, alternately strapped to my and Yuriko's stomach, slept through most of it, even on her first municipal bus rides, which is how we got there and back (much easier than finding parking in that part of town). Lilly is now eight weeks old, and can more-or-less hold up her head, and can roll over. I didn't see it, but this skill enabled her to roll off the futon the other day. She made a ruckus but other seemed unharmed by the experience.