gardening, reading and baking...
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More great guests this weekend. Terry and Barry were here. It was the 4th Annual Golfapalooza. The men golf as much as possible and on breaks they watch golf. The women garden and shop. Saturday found us at the Farmer's Market. And from the shoes I wore it looked like I got dressed in the dark. Too bad that wasn't true.
I planted some pots of flowers...
while Terry weeded, transplanted, and planted some lupine and foxglove. She has been working on this bed for 3 visits and it is looking good this year. All these great plants for only $40 at the market. Score.
This book has been on my reading list for several years. I am finding it interesting.
Empty Mansions is a rich mystery of wealth and loss, connecting the opulence of the 19th century's Gilded Age with a 21st century battle over a $300 million inheritance. At its heart is heiress Huguette Clark, a woman so secretive that, when she died at age 104, no new photograph of her had been seen for decades. Her father, W.A. Clark, was born in a log cabin, discovered incredible riches in copper in Montana territory after the Civil War, was thought to be as rich as Rockefeller, founded Las Vegas and was pushed out of the U.S. Senate for bribery.
Huguette held a ticket on the Titanic and was still alive in New York City long after 9/11. She grew up in the largest house in New York City, a remarkable dwelling with 121 rooms for a family of four. She owned paintings by Degas and Renoir, a Stradivarius violin, and a vast collection of antique dolls. But wanting more than treasures, she lived out her last 20 years in a simple hospital room, devoting her wealth to her art and buying gifts for friends and strangers.
Pulitzer Prize-winner and NBC News investigative reporter Bill Dedman stumbled onto the story of eccentricity and inherited wealth in 2010, discovering that Huguette’s fantastic homes in Santa Barbara, Connecticut and New York City were unoccupied but still maintained by servants. Dedman co-wrote the book with Huguette’s cousin Paul Clark Newell Jr., one of the few relatives to have conversations with her.
The Clark family story spans nearly all of American history in three generations, from a log cabin in Pennsylvania to mining camps in the Montana gold rush, from backdoor politics in Washington to a distress call from an elegant Fifth Avenue apartment. The same Huguette who was touched by the terror attacks of 9/11 held a ticket nine decades earlier for a first-class stateroom on the second voyage of the Titanic.
I enjoy Maddie Allen's blog Muffins & Mixtapes. The No-Bake Mini Cheesecakes were a hit this week. Check her blog out, I like both the food and the music.
