Random acts of life

In the last few weeks, I finished several books, watched almost no television, didn't knit anything, played a lot of Packrat, put together a porch swing, and contemplated revenge on a fellow RA. I've been busy.

I finished The Story of Mankind (1921) edition. I've got about 70 pages to read in the 1972 update and I peeked through the 1995 edition. None of the language has been updated nor have citations been added in any of the later editions, so there goes my hopes (I was really hoping for citations, at the very least, in the 1995 edition). I think if I had a child reading this there would be some supplemental reading and research going on especially if interest was sparked in a particular topic. It was just too much of a storybook and not so much a history book, in my opinion. Next up on the Newbery list is The Voyages of Doctor Doolittle, the 1923 winner. I've got an Illustrated Junior Library edition checked out from the Coralville Public Library so I'm ready to go. Here's a list of the vocabulary from the last half of The Story of Mankind:
sturgeon
cipher
serf (which is not defined nearly as well as it should be in the text)
thither
commodity
unscrupulous
parallelopiped
heresy/heresies
mulcted (which I had to look up because NONE of us had heard of it, ever)
Zwingli
abjured
predestination
remonstrance
timorous
Sinn Fein(er)
buncombe
demagogues
tercentenary
obdurate
bumptious
ambiguous
Putsch

I polished off The Host (finally) and was surprised that it took me nearly a month. Each of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight books only took a couple of hours. I didn't read them, I inhaled them. However, with The Host I started seeing too many similarities with Twilight and that had me a little disturbed and worried that somehow Stephenie Meyer was a bit of a one-note. The Host does have an interesting premise - a sort of body-snatchers setting with a love triangle/quadrangle (depending on how you count souls and bodies) - but I stalled about 200 pages from the end due to a soccer game (there's a baseball game in Twilight). A slightly predictable ending (never intimate that the narrator is going to die in a first person narrative with nearly 20 pages left in the book) but I really appreciated how SM wrote the necessary exposition into the storyline of the book (i.e. Wanda's "stories") rather than devote pages and pages to it separately.

I also finished Songs for the Missing, an advance copy of the next Stewart O'Nan novel. Never having read O'Nan (Kat staff rec'd Last Night at the Lobster) I wasn't quite sure what to expect. Lurid? Simple? Absurd? Strangely enough, the situation seemed almost mundane, aside from an eighteen-year-old gone missing. It wasn't mundane as in "I'm so bored I can't finish this" but mundane like "this is LIFE, this is what happens when a child goes missing." Other readers compared Songs for the Missing to Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones, which is a phenomenal novel simply for the power of the author's descriptions. There are some parallels, but what was striking to me was that after Kim went missing in the first chapter that was it. No following her until she's grabbed, no struggle, or what the perpetrator did with the car; instead, we stay with the family and friends as they try to find her. The Lovely Bones, being a first-person narrative followed Susie's thoughts as she watched her family and that provided a completely different sense of the action. One thing I really noticed and appreciated throughout Songs for the Missing was the choice of third-person narrative; the narration wasn't truly omniscient and tended to follow one specific character for each chapter (Fran, Ed, Lindsay, JP, Nina). A very thoughtful novel about how time continues to push us forward even when something terrible happens. Eventually you have to go back to work, to school.

In other random life events, I bought a porch swing - yay, evenings on the porch, reading, napping, etc (must get more citronella to ward off the mosquitoes). It was a pain to assemble because apparently it was "requires two adults for assembly" - phoo on them. I did eventually get the assembly done all by my little self.

And we had an RA bugger off last week and not do what the boss told him to do before he left. So I had a panic and a cold sweat on Monday. Turns out he threw his project at a different (new) RA and left her to do the surveillance cultures instead of me, like the boss said he should. I was supposed to take everything over and then train the new RA. Luckily, the new RA is a lab person so figured out pretty quickly what the project was and got Monday and Tuesday finished before I found out that she was on the project. Whew, but the little bastard didn't mention several key things like how to order more product, how to use the spreadsheet on the shared drive so all of us can stay current on the surveillance, or that other units do surveillance, too, and so you should check the patient's records so we don't duplicate testing. FYI, this is the same little bastard I complained about several months ago (he was just up here talking to one of the secretaries - I guess he needs employment for the summer? I vote "no" and think we should just hire someone else who is responsible and doesn't act like the sun shines out his posterior). I've been thinking of very painful things and I hope he comes back in his next lifetime as a roach or something.

And the weather has been really, really crappy lately.

Current book-in-progress: Persuasion, The Gunseller, Lord of the Flies, The Spirit of the Place, ideas (only 270 pages left), The Shakespeare Wars (only 150 pages left) and The Voyages of Doctor Doolittle
Current knitted item: I've been a very lazy knitter....
Current movie obsession: Little Miss Sunshine (I haven't watched any TV/movies lately except for the news and weather (strange) so LMS is just sitting in my DVD player, ready to go)
Current iTunes loop: John Mayer "Any Given Tuesday" (concert album with a kick-ass riff in the middle of "Gravity")

Snow again

Yet again this winter I am stuck in my house. Not because the roads are terrible - they aren't great, but they aren't blown shut - but because it has taken all day for the snow removal team to show up and plow the lot. I tried to get out around 3:15pm to go to the store (Mother Hubbard's cupboard is a little bare) and that worked not so well. It took two neighbors to help me get the car back in the garage. And lots of shovelling. Three of us were trying to get out, one in particular because he needed to go to the drugstore because his kids were sick. We shovelled and shovelled and the guy with the 4x4 was able to finally get traction so he went to the drugstore for the other neighbor. I do actually have nice neighbors some days.

They are just now plowing the lot (4:30). Sigh. Maybe I can go to the store later.

We were supposed to have book group tonight and decided that we would postpone for a week, given that three people were coming down from Cedar Rapids and they got more snow than we did. So next week we're having a joint book-Oscar party. Yum.

In anticipation for what was tonight's party I bought a coffee table. Yay - I'd been looking for one for a while and finally found one (at Kmart) that didn't break the bank. I still had to put it together, though. Pain in the butt. Looks pretty nice. I have a picture of the cats laying on it before I even got the drawers finished since I obviously purchased the item so they have yet another flat surface to inhabit.

I also indulged in my yarn buying habit. Another skien of Mountain Colors Bearfoot (sock yarn, mmmmm) and four skiens of really gorgeous Cascade Pastaza Paints in a red variegated color. The cats chewed a hole in my red scarf so I have an excuse to make a new one, only slightly better and maybe a hat as well.

Since I'm stuck at home I guess I'll read and organize the yarn stash. It's starting to become unruly. A little coffee, some yarn, music, good book. Decent evening.

Current book-in-progress: The Club Dumas (I totally did not know this book was the basis for the Johnny Depp movie The Ninth Gate); after that dream I'm trying to finish more books than I start and that's really, really hard for some reason
Current knitted item: Well.....I'm still working on the blue socks but I started my new scarf (going to make it similar - half moss stitch, half something else with a reversible pattern)
Current movie obsession: I'm still working on the IPTV Northanger Abbey but I developed a minor obsession with Sense and Sensibility again (Kate Winslet might be the most beautiful woman ever)
Current iTunes loop: I've been on a pretty hard-core John Mayer kick today; his music seems to warm up a dreary day