83 posts tagged “books”

September always seems to ask, "Who are you?"  I'm guessing it's conditioning, a throwback to school years when September meant picking out your classes and school clothes, who you were going to be and how you wanted people to see you.  In previous years that question sometimes threw me for a loop.  This year I know the answer.  This year it's a gentle, familiar question and a matter of reaffirming a comfortable, confident answer.

I think that whole theme is also why the autumn months tend to feel so nostalgic, why my memories are louder in my ears right now than the present, remembering who I am and who I've been.  And that nostalgia is why I tend to reread books this time of year, preferring to fall into familiar favorite stories rather than try out new worlds.  It's also why I've started re-watching Buffy and Angel, from the beginning, and in order of original air date.  Everything about this time of year is so comfortable, from the cooling temperatures to the harvest flavors right on through to the nostalgia.  Life is good.

Today I'm going to roast and puree the early pumpkin my garden gave me, cook up some pumpkin-spice syrup for lattes, and throw some veggie sloppy joes in the crockpot.  I'm also going to start putting out autumn candles and decorations.  ...After I watch some Buffy and read a few chapters from one of my favorite books.

Huh!  While making my smoothie this morning, I noticed my blender has a "Chop Ice" button.  It's right there, top and center, just above the "On" button.  I've only been using this blender for about two years now, and abusing the regular "Chop" button when trying to crush ice.  There are only nine buttons on the thing.  Sometimes the obvious escapes me for such a very long time, ...it's really beyond disturbing and moving into the realm of mental wonder.  Someone should study my brain.  ...I owe my blender an apology.

I've had my air conditioner set to 74degF and on "energy saver" since I got up this morning.  It hasn't cycled off once yet.  Dog days of summer, indeed!  I hope we get some rain.

Speaking of rain, I'm paying for neglecting my garden this year.  My squash and cucumbers have decided they're done.  I've got blossom end rot on my tomatoes.  My lettuces have all gone to seed.  Craig says I should've been watering every day.  *L*  I'm such a bad gardener.  This is just further evidence that I shouldn't have kids.  Next year I WILL get a few rain barrels and I'll be better about watering.  ...Or I'll just get that CSA share I'm wait-listed for.  :D

While the things I planted have been dying of thirst, the detritus from last Halloween has been loving life in my compost pile.  I already have one very orange pumpkin that's larger than a basketball, a couple of smaller dark green ones, close to a dozen pale green tennis-ball sized pumpkins just starting, and a couple vines worth of those smaller, decorative gourds.  :)

I spent a couple of hours(!) yesterday packing up books to mail today.  All of those books we cleaned out of our collection a couple of weeks ago have been claimed via half.com and bookmooch.com.  I went through almost all of my packing supplies yesterday, and spent $50 at the post office this morning mailing them all out this morning!  Oof!  But, my books went to good homes, and the next time someone lists an out-of-print/expensive text I want, it'll all balance out.  :)  Still, from now on, I think I'll limit how many books I'm offering at one time.  :)

I thought I had something more to say, but that seems to be it.  There's stuff to do today, and I need to get back to it.

Gods, what a lovely day!  I know it's not at all exciting sounding, but I absolutely love a low-key non-work day at home.

Today we finally moved our antique desk downstairs and into the back room for Craig to use as radio central.  That frees up a little space in our tiny bedroom *AND* gets his radio cabinet off of the diningroom table!  ...I suppose I should get all of my crap off the table now.  heh.

I also spent an hour or so cleaning off my desk which has been accumulating piles of "found this" and "file this" and "what's this???"  In one of those piles I had about a ream's worth of scrap paper ...from my college years!  I'd found it in a box of memorabilia.  Yes, I keep *EVERYTHING*, even scrap paper.  I flipped through it real quick and found a few invitations from parties I'd thrown, some amusing emails from my old sysadmin job, and college lab reports.  I cracked myself up reading through the sysadmin emails and school labs because even though I once knew all that stuff, I have *NO* idea what any of it means now.  Use it or lose it!  It's true!  It was almost like reading a foreign language.  I've done a very good job of purging unnecessary knowledge to free up the brain cells.  *L*

I spent the rest of the day playing librarian.  Craig had a shelf full of books he no longer wanted, so I purged them from my LibraryThing.com account, listed some on half.com, some on BookMooch.com, and made a pile to donate.  Then I inventoried the rest of his books, logging the new ones we forgot to put into the database, and purging the missing books he'd already gotten rid of.  I *REALLY* LOVE LibraryThing!

For dinner, I cleaned out the fridge, slicing up and seasoning some leftover steak and chicken, and sauteeing it with peppers and onions.  It was really just a simple "let's eat up what's there" dinner, and I accidentally made the best frakking fajitas I've ever had in my life! 

And, we just got done watching "Vantage Point" on Netflix via instant download.  It was a decent movie, "a little dodgie in the middle" (said Craig), but the action in the last part was pretty good.

So it was a completely unplanned day but we got a lot cleaned/organized, had a great dinner and a bit of entertainment.  That's a really good day, IMO!

Tomorrow we need to run a few errands, but I'm hoping to get that done early and enjoy another day of just doing stuff around the house and taking it easy.  I got just enough organized today that I'm really motivated to do more!

I'm having trouble getting my brain on task this morning, so I'm going to sip some coffee and blog about my fabulous weekend and hopefully get those mental gears turning by the time I'm done.

I don't remember much of Friday.  I think we basically chilled, which is good, one of my favorite "activities" actually.  :)  OH!  I remember!  I had recorded those shows on Burning Man so Craig could see what got me all hyped up, so we watched those Friday night.  After watching videos of some of the flightiest people ever to be featured on tv having a blast at Burning Man, Craig's comment was, "If those people can survive a week in the desert, we're going to be fine."  *snort*  :D

Saturday was date night.  Craig had bought us tickets to the symphony to celebrate our twelfth anniversary.  After a relaxing, slow morning of doing nothing, I took a long bath and primped for a couple of hours until it was time to head out for dinner.  We dined at Byblos, one of my favorite restaurants.  We had a quiet table in a corner, and we talked about a bit of everything while noshing Mediterranean delights and sipping wine, wrapping up the meal with baklava and the best cup of coffee in town.

The symphony was delightful.  It was the Toledo Symphony Orchestra's season finale, and they played a fine mix of works, from the lively to the bittersweet.  They even had a soprano to entertain us with Canteloube's Songs of the Auvergne.  The last piece was my favorite though, Elgar's Enigma Variations.  Each variation was inspired by one of his friends, and it was pretty easy to envision a few of the personalities represented by the music.  I have to admit that I was distracted by a percussionist though.  The guy on the cymbals had me mesmerized.  :)  He'd stand there so patiently, once in a great while bringing the cymbals gently together and almost immediately stifling their ringing.  but once in an even greater while he take a stance of readiness and you'd know something big was coming.  He'd bounce a little and slam those cymbals together with some might, then hold one over his head in what seemed to be a gesture of victory and let the sound ring out from it.  It had me giggling and fighting the urge to shout out as if it was a sporting event and my team just scored.  :)  Silly, but good times.  :)

Renovating Old Houses: Bringing New Life to Vintage Homes

George Nash

Sunday we went out for brunch then hit up a bookstore looking for a good book to guide us through our looming kitchen remodel.  We are by no means construction experts, but I do think we've done enough work on this house now that we've outgrown the basic how-to books kept stocked on the store shelves, because there wasn't anything there that we didn't already know and have experience doing.  I did find one great book all on what to do with old houses, everything from deciding if it's even worth fixing to shoring up the foundation to fixing the leaky roof to pulling old wiring ... it basically covered it all.  The pictures were amusing me because it looked like someone had photographed all the trouble areas in our 100+ year old house.  :)  It was a bit of a pricey book, but the information looked totally worthwhile given the age of our home and the projects we have yet to tackle, so it came home with us.  I also picked up the latest "Art Doll Quarterly" (my favorite magazine ever) and a handy book on short bike rides in Ohio.

Then it was off to the theater to meet up with Dave and Kelly to catch a matinee of "Angels & Demons".  Dave and Kelly are very anxiously (especially Kelly!) awaiting the arrival of their first child, who is due tomorrow!  Kelly has been wanting that baby born for weeks now, and I thought for sure if we went to see a movie this late in the game, Murphy's Law would kick in and she'd go into labor ten minutes into the movie.  It didn't work though.  For the sake of her sanity, I hope the baby comes early this week.  :)

The movie was good.  It was true to the book, which I loved, and the art and scenery made for a very pleasant viewing e
experience.  I couldn't find anything to take issue with, but then again, I'm ***EXTREMELY*** easy to entertain.  :D

Sunday evening Craig was trying to plan out some things for our kitchen floor replacement coming up next weekend.  Awesome Memorial Day weekend plans!  heh.  At one point he says, "I want to check something - be right back," and heads down into the damp dark of the basement.  What he found puzzled him, so he recruited me to stomp around on the kitchen floor while he investigated further.  See, our kitchen floor sags in a scary manner.  There are solid, north-to-south lengths, with very squishy, sagging spaces between.  We've been working on the assumption that the joists are those N-S solid spots.  Turns out, looking at it from the crawl space, the joists run E-W!  WTH?  We puzzled over that one for a little bit, then I said, "What the hell, let's just cut a hole in the floor now and see what we're dealing with!"  So we pulled back one of our utility rugs and started cutting through the fugly linoleum and the very weird underlayment.  We found N-S running floor boards, so I guess the squishiness is just soft floor boards?  Or more accurately, the high points seem to be floor boards that are warping and pulling up from the joists.  Craig says the floor looks great from the crawl-space perspective though, which is a relief and will make the work this weekend far easier than our worst-case fears we were planning for.  So yeah, we've got a "fun" weekend in store (very heavy on the sarcasm there), but it's not going to be as bad as it could, and I'm finally going to be rid of the world's ugliest kitchen floor!

And... yeah.  That was my weekend.  Now I have a week of hard work ahead of me, followed by a weekend of hard work.  Fortunately, Craig has Friday, Monday and Tuesday off.  I think we can get teh floor done in two days at the most, so there should still be plenty of time for play and relaxing in there too.

OH!  And I got word the my brother is coming home to visit soon!  For real this time!!!  I'm so damn excited and I can't wait to see him again!!!

I would KILL for a froo-froo coffee drink right now.  I have the ability to make one, but it would require quite a bit of effort.  I also have the ability to put my butt in my car and go get one.  Once I decide which method of acquisition requires the least effort, I will get my coffee drink on!  ...Ironically, the decision making part of the process is usually the most involved for me.  Such is the life of an introvert.

My reading habit has taken a nose dive.  I remember cutting back my reading time in November because I was already feeling the holiday time crunch, but rather than cut back, I just kind of quit.  Now I'm looking at stacks of books that have sat so long they needed to be put on my dusting scedule, and I'm determined to get through a bunch of them as fast as possible. 

I've always loved having a library ...until now.  Now I have dailylit.com and my Kindle, both of which offer great reads with no shelf space or dusting requirements.  I'm still on this minimalization kick, and my books have finally started to irritate me.  I don't want to part with all of them, but definitely most of them.  I've loved a lot of really good reads, but there are very few I would read again, especially when there's always something new out there to read.  If I kept only the books that I know I'll read again, signed copies (treasures) and instructional books, they would *easily* all fit on our gorgeous built-in shelves, with room to spare.  That's the goal.

So I'm starting what I've been calling "The Big Read".  I am NOT a fast reader, but I'm going to push it as much as I can and rip through some books as quickly as possible, hopefully with the end result of passing them on and getting them out of my house.

That's what my mind is obsessing over these days, getting stuff out of the house.  The more I get rid of, the more urgently I feel the need to get rid of more.

Anyhow, last night I was sitting in bed reading, and after reading the same small paragraph five times, I totally realized what happened to my reading habit!  Craig's ham radio happened.  He participates in a net (ham radio chat room) week nights at 10:30, my reading time.  And my reading habit came to a screeching halt when he started doing that.  Unfortunately(?), I've grown quite fond of a bunch of the people he talks to, so I can't help but at least half listen to the conversation.  I need to either pull myself away from that distraction, or I need to find new reading time, and neither choice will be easy.

Speaking of choices, ...I'm back to that coffee conundrum.  I think I'm going to make my own.  I wish I could just snap my fingers or wiggle my nose and BAM!  COFFEE DRINK!  Manifestation.  That would be the ultimate super-power!  *sigh*

EDIT:  The chocolate syrup I whipped up is excellent, but I used a little too much.  Also, I didn't grind the beans quite enough.  But I do have a delicious mocha without having to leave the house or fork over $5.

*L*  Ok, so my subject for this entry sounds pathetically emo, but I assure you, I mean it literally.  I'm talking about broken glass here.  I've been going through this thing for a while now where I'm breaking a lot of glass.  I mean, I've always leaned a little to the clumsy side, but this is getting ridiculous.  I broke my glass candy cane when I caught it one something and it flng to the floor.  One night, after the lights were out, we heard something break, and turned on the light to see an old wine glass on my dresser (decorative) that I'm sentimentally attached to had broken, and I never really was sure how.  Something must of fallen on it???  One night, I fumbled the plastic bottle-brush which fell only a few inches and landed in the dish water with a soft *sploosh*, and was followed by the sound of cracking glass.  I fished all of the pieces of one of my beloved emerald green antique juice glasses out of the sink and set them aside to be melted into beads at some later date.  Another night I was putting the stemware into the rack above the sink, and I smacked the bottom of a wine glass into the rim of one of my lovely martini glasses, and had glass rain down on me.  And, there were, of course, ornaments dropped and done for in the Great Holiday Put-Away '09. 

But yesterday...  *sigh*  Yesterday was the ...ARGH!  I was doing the laundry.  I took a shirt out of the washer, shook the wrinkles out, and tossed it into the dryer.  One of the sleeves caught on my jar of expensive glass rods, the reduction and special colors, and the whole jar was flung to the floor.  *head in hands*  Like the juice glass, it's not a huge loss really.  Not all of the rods broke, and the ones that did can be melted back together,...and even some of the fine shards can be ground or heated and dropped into water to make frit.  It was just an aggravating mess.  This trend must stop.  I love glass and have lots of pretty glass things around the house, ...all which now seem to be awaiting their untimely demise.  I'm kind of scared to go near any of it.  Glass shelves, stained glass, jewelry, snow globes, ...I even have a one-of-a-kind stained glass plate and chalice that used to be used for communion in a church.  I'm afraid to even walk by this stuff.

Yesterday was a *busy* day for me, and long before it was over, I was exhausted and cranky.  I did get a lot done though.  Of the 22 tasks that I'd wanted to get done, I checked 14 off, let 4 roll over to today and rescheduled 4.  It felt good to get so much done.  Still, Craig was encouraging me to take it easy today, hoping I won't get as cranky.  :)  (Sorry, Sweetie.  I'll try not to get cranky today.)  I only have 16 things marked due for today (including the rolled over 4 from yesterday), and a several of them are non-active things, like writing some thank-you notes and paying the bills.  So in comparison, today will be an easy day, nowhere near as exhausting at the very least.

Outliers: The Story of Success

I've been reading Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers.  It's a decent read.  I'm not a "huge" fan of his books.  He has some very interesting premises, but he seems to really have to overwork them to fill up a book.  Still, very interesting premises, and the point he makes in Outliers about 10,000 hours of practice bringing expertise is my favorite yet.  There are a lot of creative things I love doing, but which I feel a bit guilty about making time for when there are so many "practical" type things that always need doing.  He's got me thinking though, that if I make the time for the stuff I love to do now, I might just be able to turn a tidy profit from those things ten years down the line, and perhaps I'll even be able to bring in some extra income in our retirement some day, just from doing what I love to do.  The thought that that could even be a possibility makes me happy.  ...Plus, I'm all about finding ways to justify doing the things I love to do.  :)  And with that said, I think I'll go schedule myself some me time, or rather "practice time".  :D

I posted my usual reviews for books read in September, then depression hit and life got super busy and my reading habit suffered some neglect.  These are the last of the books read in 2008, finally.

Still fighting my funk.  It's the mornings that are the worst.  It's so difficult to get our of bed each day.  More of the same.  Not that the same is bad!  No, not at all.  It's just monotonous.  Work has my brain all tied up in terrible knots with words and procedures and I really don't feel like I'm ever going to get out.  (It's always darkest before the dawn.  I'm very near the end of this stretch and it's pitch black.)  Housework just keeps accumulating.  I make clean spots and try to keep them up, but most days I just can't bring myself to care, not at all.  My calendar is filled with fun things, but being me, even fun things breed anxiety.  (Dreading tonight's art class right now, even though I know I'll be so happy I went.)

It's a stupid, pointless funk.  Even in my low moods I can look at it logically and I know these blahs have nothing to them, but I still can't shake them.

At least I can't shake them until lunch time.  The later in the day it gets, the more stable I feel.  I do things to pick myself up and smack myself out of it.  But then I go to bed, and start all over again each morning.

Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer's Life

Kathleen Norris

This book kept coming to my attention from various sources, and in looking into it, Norris explains acedia is a weariness of the soul.  She goes on to speak of disdain for routine, a shunning of all things social, and a heaviness that comes with severe lethargy.  That so perfectly describes what I'm feeling that I finally took the hint and picked the book up.  I was worried all the Christianity would be a turn-off, and it is a bit difficult to wade through when she gets heavily into theology, scripture and church dogma, but I'm finding the practical wisdom of the Benedictine monks right on target, useful and extremely comforting.

I've highlighted the hell out of this book and I'm still thinking I'm going to need a reread, many rereads.  There have been a small handful of books I've read with which I identify so completely that I would consider them essential reading in understanding me, and this is definitely the newest to make that short list.  So much of what she writes just really speaks to me.  I have so many quotes from this book jotted down right now, but I would think most would only make sense to me.  I do keep coming back to this comforting and grounding quote though:

"Were I to approach an abba or amma asking for a 'word' to help me cope with the assaults of acedia on my soul, I would likely be reminded that if I am especially susceptible to acedia, it is because I harbor within myself the virtue of zeal."

I don't know.  My head is a bit of a jumble.  I know more sleep would help.  I need to start doing whatever it takes to sleep through the night, even if it means medicating myself, or running around the block until my head is clear and I'm ready to collapse.  Whatever it takes.  I think I need to stay the hell away from the tv and news until I feel better.  The current state of this country is a complete downer, to put it lightly.

At least I'm recovering at the end of each day.  That's an improvement from the constant dreary fog of the past few weeks.

Anyhow, that's all I want to say about that.  I need to get out of my head for a while now.  ...And I need to get ready for art class, even though I have half a dozen reasons why I should skip it screaming in my head right now.