While the oven heats

With daughter Heather gone to the convention of the State Bar for the rest of the week and grandson Dylan with his father all of this week, it's just Oliver and I here at home. The TV schedule this evening is slim pickings---the College World Series is on (but North Carolina in its sickly blue suits is playing) and the NBA Finals Game #6 will be on (and I want the Celtics and the Lakers both to lose). So I turned on the oven---first for pizza for supper, now for my favorite pumpkin dessert which will last me all week, and next for peanut butter cookies. No reason to heat up the oven separately for each of these reasons, so I'm doing it all at once. . . . . .

There are thunderstorms an hour or so to the west, and it's been overcast here for several hours. We'll see if we get our first rain in a week's time. . . . . .

It will be good when Friday afternoon is over. I mistakenly agreed in April to play a 30-minute organ/piano concert out in the country at Dalesburg Lutheran where they're having their annual Midsummer Festival this weekend. So yesterday I went out to see what music I want to do on that organ, deciding to do four organ pieces, then switch to the piano and throw in some sing-alongs to help make the half hour go quickly. Oliver and I will go out again tomorrow so I can practice again, especially the organ pieces. . . . . .

As I was skimming my newest book purchase, Thurston Clarke's "The Last Campaign," the story of Sen. Robert Kennedy's final 82 days, this morning, I wanted to check out what he said about the South Dakota primary, which occurred that day in 1968 when the senator died. What leaped off the page was a phrase that said something to the effect that the senator received a call from Bill Daugherty (it should have been spelled "Dougherty") "who was in a hotel in Sioux City, South Dakota, with campaign workers."

Good grief! Doesn't Henry Holt & Co. have any proofreaders or editors with some degree of geographical acumen? Apparently not. Sioux City is not in South Dakota; it never was; for that matter, we don't want it.

If I had known such a stupid error was in this book, I wouldn't have spent $20+ on it. How can I be sure anything else the author says is accurate if he can't even get the name of a city in South Dakota correct? . . . . .