May's Mutterings

May’s Mutterings: Rants and Ramblings

  • Book review: The Last Run by Greg Rucka

    Queen and Country: The Last Run by Greg Rucka My rating: 5 of 5 stars The Last Run is the final book in the Queen and Country trilogy (A Gentleman’s Game and Private Wars are the two others). The main character in the trilogy is a female secret agent, Tara Chace. In The Last Run,…

  • Book review: The Time of Murder at Mayerling by Ann Dukthas

    The Time of Murder at Mayerling by Ann Dukthas My rating: 3 of 5 stars “The Time of Murder at Mayerling” by Ann Dukthas (a pseudonym of Paul Doherty) is a continuation of a historical mystery series starring Nicholas Segalla, a man who never dies and is also present at pivotal historical events. Segalla solves…

  • Institute for Justice dinner

    Jim is on the board of the Institute for Justice, and we had the board and almost everyone in the organization (approximately 44 people) over for dinner last night.  Robert, Jim’s nephew, came out and helped cook.  Without him, we would never have been able to pull this dinner off. The menu was as follows…

  • Minibar, Take 2

    We went to minibar by Jose Andres last night (the 9:00 pm seating).  As an aside, we are way too old for a weekday 9:00 pm seating as the dinner lasted past midnight, and we didn’t get home until after 1:00 am (the horror!).  But I digress. We had gone to minibar in September, and…

  • Winter Holiday Concert

    Here is Weiwei’s handchime choir performance at the school’s winter holiday concert.  (Which, of course, begs the question of what winter holiday you are celebrating on January 16, 2014.) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRl8UVQk4rs&feature=youtu.be  

  • Year of the Horse

    The Chinese calendar is a lunar calendar and so Chinese New Year falls on a different day every year (calling it Chinese New Year is actually inaccurate as many Asian cultures celebrate the Lunar New Year).  This is the Year of the Horse, which is supposed to be a year of high energy. Different parts…

  • Sips & Suppers 2014

    We attended one of the Sips & Suppers that were hosted last night.  Sips & Suppers benefits Martha’s Table and D.C. Central Kitchen.  Chefs from across the country (and sometimes from around the world) cook meals in private homes to benefit the charities. Our dinner was prepared by Scott Drewno of The Source and Peter…

  • Snow Day Activities

    While the MLK long weekend gave us sunny and even warm (relatively speaking) weather, Tuesday brought us 6 inches of snow.  For hardy Midwesterners and New Englanders, this amount might be a mere blip on the winter radar.  However, for the mid-Atlantic and for DC in particular, it’s enough to shut down the federal government…

  • Movie review: The Desolation of Smaug (Hobbit II)

    While I’m a huge J.R.R. Tolkien fan, “The Hobbit” has always been my least favorite of his Lord of the Ring series of books.  And I simply could not fathom how anyone could make three movies out of such a short book.  I liked but didn’t love the first Hobbit movie (you can read that…

  • Movie review: Saving Mr. Banks

    We were predisposed to like this film, as we are huge fans of all things Disney and enthusiastic fans of the movie “Mary Poppins.”  But this film surpassed our expectations.  The basic plot is the story of how Walt Disney convinced P.L. Travers, the author of the Mary Poppins series of books to let him…

Got any book recommendations?

Get In Touch