Hello!  Happy Friday!  It has been a nice week of weather here, not terribly hot, though my friend who has been without a/c this week would probably take exception to this.  Well, I was out mowing and weeding on Wednesday and it really wasn’t terrible.  But temperatures are climbing again this weekend, making it likely that I will need some ice cream to make it through unscathed.

I have no plans to see Harry Potter this weekend, though probably eventually I will go.  However, Cave of Forgotten Dreams is starting at Ragtag this weekend and I do want to see that.  But instead of doing either, I will go to the New Music Festival that they’re holding right now at the Missouri Theatre downtown.  I went last night to one of the performances and will go again tomorrow night.  I enjoyed some of it, but one of the works was atonal, and I don’t think I’m really experienced enough in the form to appreciate it (which is meant to be a diplomatic way of saying that I didn’t like it at all, but I’m willing to admit that it was probably above my head).

I finished some books over the last month, after a few months of not really reading.  (By that, I mean not really reading anything in traditional paper book form, because all I ever do is read stuff online.  Some of which is pretty interesting and that is what I am linking in those shared posts, if you take a look at ‘em.)  I finished both the Columbia One Read Program book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, and the Mizzou Reads book, Zeitoun, and also Bossypants by Tina Fey.  I am a new member of the MU Libraries Diversity Action Committee and I’m doing book discussions with library staff on both of the first two books.  I am excited about both parts of that sentence.  While I am not putting together any kind of group discussion for the Tina Fey book, I did find it entertaining.  But the more interesting part, to me, was that I read it on a Kindle that I borrowed from my sister.  I’m not sure I want to buy an e-reader, though I like staying on top of the market and knowing about them, but I did enjoy reading a book on that one.  I liked having a book with me that fit easily into my bag and didn’t get all bent up.  It was quite convenient for traveling.  So maybe I will think about getting one in the fall when the new one comes out, hopefully with a touchscreen.  (Not having a touchscreen is annoying if you like books that have lots of entertaining footnotes.)  So, me?  I liked the Kindle but am not currently in a big fat hurry to buy one.

I like to keep you abreast of the ’90s music videos that I happen across in my life.  Memories are made of this, for those of us who came of musical age in the MTV2 era.  (The first iteration of MTV2, anyway.)  Enjoy!

So, despite the fact that it’s chilly and rainy, I have had a lot of sinus headaches this week.  I tried switching to generic Zyrtec to save some cash, but it ended up being a waste of money.  Those pills made me drowsy and then didn’t actually do much to fix my allergies.  So frustrating.  But I can recommend Excedrin Sinus Headache.  Those are pretty good.

I had a really unbalanced weekend, not doing anything of particular note on Saturday (except watching a Netflix movie almost exclusively so that I could return it- anybody else do that?  I mean, I wanted to see the movie [Marathon Man] or I would have just sent the DVD back unwatched, but I had to watch it so that I could get it out of the house) so I had to run around on Sunday to get things done and take advantage of the time.

I did manage to finish my first book in months, Adventures in Yellowstone: Early Travelers Tell Their Tales, which I ran across on the shelves of the local library while looking at guidebooks.  This was a collection of diary entries written by visitors to the Yellowstone region between the 1840s and 1905 (beginning with mountain men and ending with early tourists).  I read a similar book a few years ago called Worlds to Explore: Classic Tales of Travel and Adventure from National Geographic.  It was a much larger collection, with essays from all around the world, but I enjoyed it quite a lot.  It’s fascinating to read about how difficult it was to do what is now considered fairly minor traveling.  Anyway, I’m glad I finished the Yellowstone book.  It was good background reading.  And many of those earlier travelers referred to the area as Wonderland.  I like thinking that I’m taking a vacation to Wonderland.

My trip is coming up- I leave two weeks from Saturday, and I’ve finally nailed down more plans in my itinerary.  I had to make lodging reservations in the park back in February, but I didn’t make any other reservations until this week when I discovered cabins for rent in a nearby state park in Montana.  Yay!  So far, I’m only staying in places where ‘electricity’ and ‘lights’ are considered amenities, and restroom accommodations will involve sandals and flashlight.  Headlamp, actually!  I am trying not to buy anything much for this trip, to keep my costs down, but I did get a headlamp, bear spray, and a bear bell.  Well, I’d rather have them than wish I had them, too late, right?  I also need to figure out whether I am going to take plates and cups and silverware or be wasteful with paper & plastic (well, the compostable stuff made of corn, anyway.  Still wasteful, but less hassle than washing and drying after every meal, I guess).

Went to see Iron Man 2 last night and quite enjoyed it.  (I like that they didn’t fuck around with a subtitle, you know?  Another movie would put a colon after the 2 and follow it with a pithy pun.)  All due to a well-written script with a nice amount of humor, good direction, and, of course, stellar performance by Robert Downey, Jr., in a role that is perfect for him.  Sam Rockwell was good, too.  Unfortunately, he does the same kind of evil manic energy thing that Robert Downey, Jr., does, only not quite as well.  They kind of clashed in that regard.  But I love both of them.  My only complaint is how stupid the female characters in this franchise are.  Both Gwyneth Paltrow and Scarlett Johansson only exist here to be eye candy.  The worst action sequence belonged solely to Scarlett.  Robin Hood comes out this weekend, and I will probably see it, but I am torn on whether it will be any good or not.  I don’t hate Russell Crowe and I love Cate Blanchett, but they both seem kind of old for the roles.  And if Maid Marian is turned into some kind of deadly assassin on horseback, I will be irritated.  I’m sick to death of recent movies rewriting historical characters as more enlightened than they were back then.  There is a line somewhere between making Maid Marian a warrior princess and letting Gwyneth Paltrow do little more than squawk and bitch and look pretty.

My fall clothes have been getting a workout, including a new pair of knee-high boots that I bought a few weeks ago. I just love them. I’ve been wearing them at least twice a week since I bought them because they go with all of my black and gray trouser pants, they’re completely warm and comfortable when it’s wet and they dry quickly, and I can wear them all day even with a rather substantial heel. Score one for the big black boots! I am already dreading the day where they start to wear out and need replacement, because I think I will probably wear them almost daily once it’s really cold.

It is Homecoming weekend for Mizzou, which means a busy weekend in Columbia.  Unfortunately, we’re (for unfathomable reasons) playing the Texas Longhorns (currently ranked #3 in the country) for our Homecoming game, which puts a sad and depressing pallor on the meticulously crafted decorations that the frat boys and sorority girls put up all around downtown this week.  They look even more gloomy in the rain.  I could be wrong, and I hope I’m wrong, and I hope we pull off a crazy victory, but I’m not much of an idealist and it’s pretty unlikely, at best.  It’s sad when a Homecoming game results in a big loss for the home team.

Tomorrow, other than avoiding the crowds around the stadium and watching the game in the evening, I plan to go hiking in the morning and do a family photo shoot in the afternoon.  On Sunday, I have no plans but possibly working around the house and taking some autumn leaf photos (if there are still some left over after this week’s rain).

Last night, I went to see the movie It Might Get Loud at Ragtag.  I didn’t love it.  It was kind of a biographical documentary about guitarists Jimmy Page (of Led Zeppelin), The Edge (of U2), and Jack White (of The White Stripes, etc.).  I guess these three are supposed to represent the best guitarists of their respective generations, but I don’t know if I agree with that assessment on its own.  I did enjoy the music, of course.  I consider myself a fan of Jack White’s various endeavors.  I have a couple of Led Zeppelin albums, but I wouldn’t consider myself a fan, really, and I don’t think I own any U2 albums or even any U2 songs.   (Is that true?  Maybe I have a couple of old mp3s around somewhere.)  The biographies were interesting, but unfortunately the whole thing was edited pretty badly, and I wasn’t very clear on the narrative arc.  If there were striking similarities between the life stories of the three guitarists, they weren’t terribly obvious.  I felt like they retreaded over the same material several times in the 90 minutes, so the whole thing seemed about 30 minutes longer than it needed to be.

I really should go see more movies at Ragtag, though.  There are a lot of them that start right after my workday is finished, and I could get into the habit of seeing one every week or so.

In other what-kind-of-media-am-I-consuming news, I finally gave up on ever finishing Northern Exposure.  It’s sad, too, because I was halfway through the fifth season with only the sixth season remaining, and yet I couldn’t bring myself to finish the episodes.  I think I had two DVDs for about six weeks, and I hate that.  So I stripped the rest of the NE from my Netflix queue and sent the last two discs back, and I’ve got some random movies on my Netflix list right now while I finish watching Battlestar Galactica, which I’ve been renting from Ninth Street Video.  Maybe I’ll return to Northern Exposure after the fifth season of Rescue Me, which will probably be true shit.  Maybe the rest of the fifth season of Northern Exposure will look good after that.

I am also perpetually on page 50 of David Simon’s book Homicide, which I really like, but which feels like a long slog.  I think I’ve read two other books while still reading this one, and I’m definitely in danger of getting another quick read because I’m not terribly excited about going home to open up this one.  Which is too bad, because I do like it.  It’s just pretty slow going.

And let’s just round this all out with a comment about that super clock I bought a few months ago.  It really is pretty super.  I have two alarms set, one at 5:30am with a buzzer and the other at 7:00am with the radio, and I love that.  But I can also put my iPhone on its little iPod dock and play the Tom Waits Pandora station every night before I go to sleep.

(I was listening to Top 40, but if I have to hear that Taylor Swift song one more time, the one about the tomboyish music-loving dork wanting to date the high school boy who is, surprise surprise, more interested in dating the super girly cheerleader, even though she is kind of bitchy, because, you know, he’s a high school boy, well, I might have had to write Taylor Swift a VERY STRONGLY WORDED LETTER about how high school boys have their collective heads up their collective asses and she should consider writing a lot of melodramatic poetry like all the other nerdy high school girls do instead of whine-singing about it so much.  UGH.)

I really love Tom Waits and I seem to love all the music that Pandora picks to go with Tom Waits.  But I think I’ve discovered that I love blues music.  I know that shouldn’t be such a recent discovery, but I’ve often lumped it in with jazz, and I don’t love jazz.  It’s okay, but I wouldn’t choose it.  I like blues.  (Which circles back to that fandom of Jack White in that documentary, because it was really obvious how much blues music influences him, and how much of that comes out, especially when compared with U2.  But then again, I don’t love U2.)

Anyway.  Rock on, you crazy super clock of mine.  I hope you last for awhile.

We got home from Massachusetts and Connecticut on Saturday night, not too late.  We had time after we landed to run by Trader Joe’s, so I’m stocked with sparkling cranberry juice and Tofurky for the big day on Thursday.  I’ll just have to get up early and make the Tofurky before I head up to Centralia.  Tracy is leaving that day to go to DC, so it won’t be too big of a deal.

It will be a small party at my parents’ house on Thursday, apparently, with most of the family coming from Kansas City.  I did invite and will bring my Chinese friend from the International Center program and her Chinese roommate.  I really hope that goes well, but I assume that if they don’t like the food, they can eat later, and if they don’t like the company, they can talk to each other.  But my family will be very friendly and the food is very basic (we aren’t crazy gourmet Boil-The-Turkey, Put-Curry-in-the-Potatoes type people) and always plentiful, so I’m sure it won’t be a problem.

I had a really nice time in Massachusetts and Connecticut.  We flew into Bradley International Airport, which is in Hartford, Connecticut, and just twenty minutes or so south of Springfield, Massachusetts, where Tracy’s interview was.  I had never been to central Massachusetts or to Connecticut at all, so it was exciting to see another new state.  I did almost no research until last Wednesday afternoon, when I just started my Googling for vegetarian food and making my lists, which I do every time I travel anywhere anymore.  I make up lists of vegetarian-friendly restaurants and tourist attractions and the hotels, and then put them on a custom Google map and print it out to take with me.  I used to print out directions to various things as well, but since Tracy got her navigational device, this hasn’t been necessary.  We can just plug that sucker up and it takes us where we want to go.  I think my iPhone will do it as well, in a pinch.

Tracy interviewed on Friday morning and I drove down to Hartford.  I took a few pictures along the Connecticut River, but not too many.  I was fascinated by the Connecticut River and how the buildings were built all the way to the banks, and how wide and flat the river was, when we would never have that kind of thing in the Midwest.  Our rivers flood, if you don’t know.  I just don’t understand how they do that there.  Does the Connecticut River never flood?  Even with the snowmelt from the mountains in Vermont?  I don’t understand!

After I drove by the pretty state Capitol, I went to the Mark Twain House and took the tour.  Mark Twain is from Missouri, you know, and I share his birthday, and he is our Native Son, even nearly 200 years after the fact.  I liked the house and enjoyed seeing that aspect of him, since the aspect we have here is his birthplace and childhood home in Hannibal.  It’s not the same picture.  It was a nice house in good shape, with a pretty spectacular visitor’s center.  I guess it’s having some hard times, money-wise.  But I hope they fix their troubles.

The Harriet Beecher Stowe house was right next door, and I walked around it but didn’t go inside.  I meant to drive by the Noah Webster birthplace, but I was pretty hungry and started on a quest for food that landed me in Farmington, Connecticut, which was farther than I thought it would be.  I ate what was supposedly vegetarian duck at a Chinese place in a strip mall, but that was either some amazingly fantastic vegetarian duck or there was some kind of poultry broth on top.  I would hate to think it wasn’t vegetarian, because they made quite a show of their vegetarian menu, but it tasted very real to me.

However, you can’t believe anything I say on that matter anymore.  It has been about five years since I’ve knowingly eaten meat, and I often annoy waitresses by picking at an obviously vegetarian burger because it tastes too good to be fake.  Any meat eater could tell it was fake in a heartbeat, but I just become positively certain that it must be real until I spot a flake of carrot or an actual grain of rice or something.  Until then, it’s suspicious.

Anyway, after that, I drove out beyond the edges of the Hartford surburbs, looking for Colonial houses and authentic New Englandness or something to that effect, which I did find, especially in the Avon, Connecticut areas.  It was a pretty rolling countryside and, although it was pretty cold and the leaves were all long gone, it felt just right to be there at the holidays.  I was looking for the Connecticut of all those 1940s movies, and I think I found what I was looking for.  It was a nice drive.

And then Tracy called, a few hours earlier than I expected that she would, and I had to hoof it back to Springfield while she waited in the hospital cafeteria or somewhere, because I was about an hour away.

After she changed clothes, we went to a nearby shopping mall that had an Apple Store so I could buy a Speck ToughSkin.  That wasn’t an accident; I had mapped it out just for that exact purpose, and I was successful.

She was pretty tired, so we drove through Northampton after that but we didn’t stop or get out because the traffic was bad and parking looked pretty hard.  We went back to the hotel and got some pizza from a surprisingly packed Chicago Uno’s next door, then ate in the hotel room while watching random game shows on television.  I kind of liked the one with the lyrics and Wayne Brady.

On Saturday, we left the hotel early and took a winding drive north again to Northampton with the express purpose of seeing the Five Colleges and maybe a little more Colonial New England.  We didn’t see much of the latter, even on the out-of-the-way rural drive that I chose, but oh well.  I accept that I probably stumbled on a very pretty area in Connecticut the day before.  We drove by Smith College first and had some breakfast at the Haymarket Cafe in downtown Northampton.  We were surprised by how small Smith was, and how it seemed packed into a tiny corner of the town.  All the campuses were quiet, but it was the weekend before Thanksgiving and I’m sure most of the students had gone home for the week.

Next we drove over towards Amherst, but ended up seeing Hampshire College first (which Tracy loved, loved, loved) and Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, which was my favorite of the Five, and then we went back to Hampshire to go through the Eric Carle Museum.  I love Eric Carle!  I love his work!  I was slightly disappointed in the museum, which had not devoted much of its floor space to exhibits, but I was thrilled with the gift shop, which had stacks and stacks and stacks of all the children’s picture books that I loved as a child.  I could have spent all afternoon in there, but I decided that I do have a library at home in Columbia, and I could spend an afternoon there instead.

Then we drove into Amherst, where we drove by Amherst College (which looked cold and forlorn up on that hill, all Federal style) and UMass Amherst, which was enormous in comparison to the tiny college campuses we’d seen all morning.  If I was picking from those colleges, I would have chosen UMass.  I liked my experience at a huge state school.  But I thought that Mount Holyoke had the prettiest campus.  It wasn’t as pretty as Bryn Mawr, but it was very pretty.

Amherst seemed crowded because there was a Cranberry Fair happening.  We ate a brunchy lunch at the Lone Wolf, and then we walked over to the Emily Dickinson House just down the street.  We didn’t have much time left before we had to get to Hartford for our flight, but I managed to talk them into giving us a tour of the house, which was almost completely unrestored.  I mean, it was still vaguely reminiscent of the right era, and they’d tried to put around some furnishings from the time, but the carpets were new and the wallpaper was from the 1960s, and generally you just had to use your imagination a lot.  They give tours of that house plus the house next door, which is where Emily Dickinson’s brother and family lived, and that house (the Evergreens) is apparently in perfect condition, original furnishings and everything, but we just didn’t have time.  I wanted to see where she wrote, and that was all, and then we left.

And then we flew home.  I finished Touching the Void, which was an awesome book, and I started Roughing It, which is not too bad.

We spent yesterday doing not much until late in the afternoon, when I got a surge of energy to go to the dog park, clean the house, start some laundry, and the like.  By the end of the evening, I felt that I had been pretty productive, all told, even though I hadn’t done much for most of it.

And it’s another short week for me, with Thanksgiving and all.  I head up to Chicago on Friday and return on Saturday night, and then spend another Sunday sitting around the house and resting up from a busy week.

Anyway, we’re flying again tomorrow, this time to Massachusetts.  Actually, we’re landing at Bradley International Airport, which is in Connecticut, and I’ve never been to Connecticut before.  I’ve added two new states to my “States I’ve Been To” list this month.  Florida was the other one.  I have been to Massachusetts twice, if you count a layover at Logan Airport, which I wouldn’t count but I also drove through a tiny corner of northwestern Massachusetts on a leaf-peeping drive through Vermont a few years ago.  This should be a much broader tour of the state.  I intend to see a good part of the Connecticut River Pioneer Valley while Tracy is on her interview, and then I intend to make her see parts of rural Connecticut on Saturday before we catch our flight.  Or maybe I’ll do the opposite of that if she’d rather spend Saturday driving by all of the Five Colleges.  I don’t know, whatever.

The flight is out around 4:40pm, and it’s out of the little terminal in St. Louis rather than the big one, so we can get there later than I usually like to get there, but Tracy can’t leave until 1pm, so I’ll be on the edge of my seat the whole drive.  I don’t know why I get so stressed about missing flights.  I’ve only ever missed one flight (not including missed connections), but my travel anxiety is upped exponentially when airplanes are involved.  I don’t envy Tracy for having to put up with me during these times.

I have been much less stressed about actually flying these days.  I do have an irrational fear of it, but I have been much less scared throughout the flights.  Maybe it’s just because we’ve been flying so often?  I don’t know.

Meanwhile, I decided to get a smartphone this week.  I even went and got one, but then I returned it because I decided that if I was going there, I might as well get what I want: an iPhone.  But they only sell that at one specific store in the area, so I have to go there after work and hope that I can pick one up.  It’s a big move, folks!  But I’m glad I decided to go for it instead of just making do with the Windows Mobile based one that I had for a couple of days this week.  Ugh, I found it so frustrating.

I decided to follow through and get a couple of books about mountaineering while I’m still fascinated by the subject, so I’m reading Touching the Void right now.  I watched the documentary a few months ago, and since then I’ve often thought about the story.  It’s probably one of the most inspirational stories I have ever heard.  But I don’t agree with the descriptive used in the book’s subtitle, miraculous.  I’m not a fan of the terms ‘miracle’ and ‘luck’ used when it comes to subjects of human heroics like this.  It takes all the credit away from the actual hero.  I know luck when I see it (I’m often a very lucky person, and I give much credit to luck for most of the great things that have happened to me in my life), but climbing down an actual mountain with a broken leg is not a matter of luck or a ‘miracle’.  I’m not saying there wasn’t luck involved, but to chalk it up entirely to luck is just wrong.

I think that words like ‘luck’ and ‘miracle’ are overused in our world, while words like ‘courage’ and ‘bravery’ are underused.  The story of Joe Simpson is nothing if not a tale of bravery rather than miracles.

Okay, I’m putting the soapbox away.

It’s going to be cold in Massachusetts.  I definitely have to bring my heavy coat. 

We fly back in the evening on Saturday.  I am hoping we land and get through baggage claim and pick up our car with enough time to swing by Trader Joe’s before they close.  I will try to pick up a Tofurky here in town, but I do love the sparkling fruit juice that they sell at Trader Joe’s.  It’s very festive.  I want a bottle or two for Thanksgiving.  Tracy is going to DC for Thanksgiving, but I’m staying in town and plan to make the Tofurky for myself to bring to my parents’ house for the big feast.  Well, maybe.  It’s an expensive item and an awful lot of work just to let non-vegetarians pick at it in the serving line.  On the other hand, it’s easier than trying to put together another vegan meatloaf, although those do tend to scare the meat-eaters away.  Maybe I could get two Tofurkys.  Tracy would certainly not argue with having one later in the holiday season.  They are so good.  (I prefer the orange juice glaze, personally.  And I never buy the ‘feast’ with the weird cranberry potato dumplings.  Not that good.  Neither is the fake gravy.  Might as well just eat the potatoes plain.)

Yay, Thanksgiving!  Then it will be my birthday.  Boo!  Boo!  Ugh, I’ve got just over a week to psych myself up for being thirty-one.  Thirtysomething.  Ugh.  Not ready for that.  Not ready.

I did write last week, but it was in-between everything.  We left on Thursday for Columbus, Ohio, and my sister came along.  The weather was really nice, and we had a good time.  While Tracy was in her interview, my sister and I drove by the Franklin Conservatory (then balked at the $7.50 entrance fee when it was clear there wasn’t much of a gardens there), then went to the James Thurber house for a tour.  That was one of the strangest house tours I’ve ever taken.  The two front rooms are in reasonable shape, but the kitchen is an office and then most of the bedrooms upstairs are offices too.  But they’re not separated, like they do in most house museums.  You’d walk down a hall and the bedrooms would be full of desks and papers and office equipment, and then the last bedroom would have a bed and be decorated ~1920s.  People would be talking and chatting and on the phone, and you’d be there holding a brochure and reading the placards.  It was very weird.  But it was also cool, because I’d read a few of his stories (especially “The Night the Bed Fell”) and it was funny to see the actual layout of the house where that took place.

After Tracy finished her interview, we went out for dinner and then dessert (because Tracy’s birthday was Saturday).  We had dinner at the Northstar Cafe in the Short North neighborhood, which did both vegetarian and non-vegetarian food.  My sister ate vegetarian so we could try everything, and it was delicious.  I had the Northstar burger, which was, by far, the best veggie burger I’ve ever had.  By far.  And it was made with beets!  I hate beets.  I couldn’t even tell.  It was so good.  I would love to have that recipe.  Tracy and my sister each had a tofu wrap, both of which were also good, but personally I was thrilled with my burger.

We had to get up very early to come back on Saturday morning, but we flew from Columbus to Memphis, and from Memphis to Columbia, Missouri, so we were back in our houses by noon, which was great.  I’m not generally a fan of the little prop jets, but there’s something to be said for not having to make the two-hour drive (as we’ll have to do again this week- we leave for Hartford, Connecticut, on Thursday afternoon).

We then had most of the weekend left over, which was nice.  Tracy took the dog to the park, and then she did some errands before we went up to my parents’ house with a Hy-Vee sheet cake (which is Tracy’s favorite kind).  The goal was to watch the MU game, but then we couldn’t get it for some reason, so we just listened to it on the radio, ate Frito pie for dinner, and talked.  We took the dog with us there too, which was good for her because we could tell she was lonely and wanted some fun.  She thus had quite a weekend, because Tracy took her back to the dog park on Sunday.

I spent Sunday running errands and doing laundry, both of which were immensely satisfying.  I think I did most of the laundry in the house, plus cleaned out the fridge and stocked it again, and made dinner for myself while Tracy went to play videogames with my sister and her notboyfriend.  (I am not usually interested in videogames.  I watched The X-Files and did some work instead.)

And today I had a physical at the doctor, and now I’m feeling very on top of things and ready to face the week.  I mean, I still have a lot to do, and I’m out of town both this weekend and then next weekend, but still things are good.

The weather has definitely turned cold here, with freezes every night.  I put up the lawn furniture last weekend when I cleaned out the garage, and I started feeding the birds again.  The dog wants to be outside all the time now, because she loves cold weather.  And I don’t know if I’m going to get any more yard work done from my Fourth Quarter 2008 Resolutions list.  But I did finish a second book on the Columbus trip, which puts me on target to complete a third while on the trip this weekend.  I finished Barack Obama’s first book, Dreams From My Father, written while he was a law professor at the University of Chicago, about his father and his heritage and his race and ethnicity.  It was a really excellent book, very well-written.  I look forward to reading The Audacity of Hope sometime soon.  I don’t know what I’m going to read next, though.  I think I will have to stop at the library tonight.

However, I was watching the No Reservations Uzbekistan episode last night, and I was thinking that what the Travel Channel really needs is a female version of Anthony Bourdain (ballsy and funny, but without the insecurity and bravado) who could do a show about traveling to Asian, Middle Eastern, and African countries and talk about traveling as a woman.  Bourdain commented a little on the Uzbek culture, but he didn’t really delve into it.  I want to see what the country is really like, because I want to think that someday I will be able to travel there, and I want a sense of what it would be like to travel alone there as a woman.  I get the sense of it when I watch Bourdain, except in places where I think my gender would be a liability.  What the Travel Channel does NOT need is more Samantha Brown.  I am not a fan of Samantha Brown.  Who travels like that?  I do not care to see video of the fancy hotels.  It is boring.  She bores me.  Stop playing those damn commercials for her new show about weekend vacations.  They are insipid.

I also read Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer on the way home from Anaheim.

This is how stupid I am.  I go to a library conference, where publishers bring boxes of books to show off their new catalogue to collections development librarians, and then they put them on big-time sale at the end of the conference.  You can walk away with brand-new hardbacks for $5 each, easily.  The problem is that you then have to get all of those books home again, and I am not a light packer, so I never have room, and I never buy any, even though they’re so cheap.

But what do I do?  I browse around the stupid airport bookstore and buy one there for $15, because I am some kind of idiot lunatic.

Anyway, I haven’t seen the movie, and knew next to nothing about the story, but thought it was a pretty good book.  In the forward, the author delves into the controversy that surrounds the story of the kid who walks into the Alaskan woods sans survival skills or a decent amount of food, and then starves to death.  (Err, spoiler!!)  It was also a fast read.  I read it all on the plane home.  Which makes it not really worth $15, but whatever.

I need to go through my books and start giving some of them away, especially these $15 pop lit books that I will never read again.  Forcing them on family members, leaving them on park benches.  $15 for a CD that I will listen to endlessly or a movie that I will rewatch over and over, this makes sense, but $15 for a book that I’ll finish in a few hours, stick in a bookshelf, and then leave to gather dust is just dumbassery.

Seriously, I am the worst librarian in the history of libraries.

Henry the dog is back today, but he has the choice of many other hands for petting and adoration and I haven’t seen him much.

With the Tivo out of commission, Tracy and I actually had to make a plan to watch the new episode of The Wire tonight.  Back to appointment television, yuck.  I ordered the power supply and I’m pretty sure it will work, but I won’t get it until next week.

Tomorrow is Friday, which I’d planned to work, but then someone close to me is going to have surgery, so I’m off.  I need to make up that day, though, because I just got tickets for the San Francisco trip in April, and I need to have some vacation time booked up for that trip.  But there’s important stuff and important stuff, and surgery is important stuff.

And that will start off a four-day weekend, since I get Monday off for Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday.  And surely I need a four-day weekend after several days out of the office.  But, really, I haven’t had much rest since the conference kept me so busy, even if I was out of town.  It will be nice to have a lie-in on Saturday, but I should come up with some things to do this weekend, like paint the bedroom or something.  Whew, that sounds like a lot of work though.  I don’t know if I’m that motivated.

In other news of recent purchases, which I can’t think why I’m phrasing like that, whatever, but I bought this DVD burner on Amazon a couple of weeks ago.  I was having some trouble burning DVDs with my Mac laptop, which was not surprising as it’s getting to be an old machine and the DVD-R in it is first-generation.  But I don’t have one in my work computer, which is my primary machine these days, and I don’t have one in the desktop machine at home.  I love using DVDs as backups for files, and it’s a pain to move everything to the Mac laptop for backups, so I decided to get an external DVD burner so that I could do backups of all these machines easily.  It wasn’t too expensive, the bundled software is fine, and it works.  If you don’t do backups, and you have anything saved to your computer at all (photos, schoolwork, work work, iTunes), you’re an idiot.  You are an IDIOT.  You are going to lose that data and you are going to be mad at yourself.  So get a DVD burner, make two copies of everything, and keep one copy at home and the other somewhere else.  (I keep the second copies at work, which is convenient!)  See how easy?  Then you’ll be safe.  Someone steals your laptop and your house burns down on the same day, and that will suck for you, but you’ll have your precious Justin Timberlake albums all backed up.

Things are going okay right now for me, I guess.  I don’t have much going on for the weekend, except the intention of finally getting to see Sweeney Todd and getting a facial tomorrow morning.  (I love getting facials, but they’re expensive and indulgent so I only do it every once in a long while.  This one was a gift.)

I have a lot of New Year’s goals in terms of photography, I really do.  I want to second shoot on some weddings this spring, I want to find out more about getting on the exhibit schedule with the Columbia Art League, I want to sell a picture (even if it’s just a greeting card or something), and I want to do more portrait sessions, whether with family or friends or complete strangers.  (So if you know anyone, speak up!  The shoot will be free and I am eager and friendly!)

I have a lead on the selling-pictures front: a coworker of mine is a potter and has started selling out of a consignment shop in nearby Fulton.  She told me that I should put some pictures in there, and though I haven’t done it yet, I have been shooting with it on the mind over the past few months.  Finally, I talked with the store owner at a party last weekend and decided to move forward and make this happen.  I ordered some prints of a few of my abstracts yesterday, and I’m going to frame them up with big white mats and thin black frames and take them down there and put them up for cost or nearly that, just to see if I can get something sold.  Profit can come later.  The owner said that greeting cards don’t sell well, but that she has lots of college girls and mothers decorating college housing and framed prints sell better than matted prints.  So this is a big step!  An exciting step!  (If the abstracts don’t work, I’ll try some of the black-and-whites.  I don’t think color landscape will sell.  It’s hard to match that kind of thing to your furnishings, you know?)  (Clearly, I am not too worried about ‘selling out’, have you noticed?  I do not really think I’m an artist, just someone who loves using a camera.)

In other, unrelated news, I read The Golden Compass this week and quite liked it.  We discussed it at a recent work lunch, in which my coworkers agreed that it was good and sort of the anti-Narnia, because the Church is the evil overlord of the series, more or less.  It’s also very enjoyable at an adult level, more so than the Narnia books.  It’s clearly meant for young adults, of course, but it’s not as child-friendly as the Harry Potter books either.  Anyway, I hear the movie was bad, but that’s not surprising.  My sister was taken with the story but not the execution of the movie, and if you’re like her, try the book and see.  I bet you’ll enjoy it.  I’ve started the second in the trilogy and will let you know what I think when I’ve finished them all.

Photo Notes: My little nephew (well, first cousin once removed, but that’s a mouthful and I like to think the ‘aunt’ and ‘nephew’ titles are inclusive) turned one year old yesterday, on January 3.  Lots of babies stare down my lens like this, I’ve noticed.  There’s something about the wide open aperture that keeps their interest for a few seconds, though it’s usually a thoughtful expression and not so much a smiley expression.  But I like the thoughtful expressions, and also the big eyes.  I took this last week at the family party.

Other than running right out and seeing Superbad last weekend, right after it came out, I haven’t gotten to see many movies this summer.  Not as many as I always intend to see, anyway.  Well, if I could have my druthers, I would spend every evening in a movie theater.  I just don’t get tired of going to movies.  I think it’s due to the fact that we never really lived near movie theaters when I was growing up, so I still consider movie-going a big deal. 

But although I haven’t seen a ton of movies in the theater, we’re still getting Netflix at home and I’m still working my way through the AFI 100 Years, 100 Movies list.  Unfortunately for me, they decided to release a 10th Anniversary edition of the list, and they changed it up by dropping a bunch of movies and adding a bunch of movies, and it pissed me off because I’ve been set back by the new version.  Still, I’ve knocked several off the list (both of them) in the past few weeks.  Tracy and I watched The Last Picture Show on a miserably hot Sunday afternoon, and I tried to sit through Robert Altman’s Nashville last week (though I failed, because I found it almost entirely incomprehensible, and I even like Altman in general.)  The other night I saw The Best Years of Our Lives, which was pretty great.  Yeah, the thing about this project is that it does mean involving yourself in the best movies ever made.  Nashville‘s the first one that I’ve just turned off.  In general, it’s a pretty great list of movies that are worth watching.  I still have a couple of dozen to go through, but several of them are westerns, Marx Brothers, Buster Keaton, or Charlie Chaplin movies, and I was exposed to some of that in college film classes.  I’m not saying I won’t enjoy them, but I’m not as excited about them as others on the list.  Of course, I say that and I felt that way about others from this list that I’ve watched and then really enjoyed, much more than I thought I would.  So I can never really tell.

Music:

I went back to the gym a few weeks ago, and now I’m going to the location of Corporate Gym that is downtown (near my new office) rather than the one that is on the south side of Columbia.  And, actually, they changed ownership and the gym is no longer Corporate Gym but now rather Small Local Chain Gym instead.  So hooray for the little guy, I guess!  And for me, who now must climb three stories to get to the cardio machines, although there are many fewer people at this location than at the one south of town after work so I can usually get a machine right away rather than fighting it out with someone.  Parking, on the other hand, sucks.

Anyway, I had a point, and that point was music, and that point about music is that I have been listening to my iPod at the gym rather than watching television while running at the gym, and so I’ve had to come up with some good gym workout music because lots of things just don’t cut it.  Last night, I discovered that, while I can’t really listen to M.I.A. in the car or at work, Arular makes for pretty great running music.  I think I’m going to buy her new album too, just for this purpose. 

It has to have a beat, you see.  You have to be able to keep your momentum up, and I’m just saying that watching Jeopardy! or If Walls Could Talk or whatever crap How Much is My House Worth? and But How Much is My House Worth Now? is on HGTV at the time, well, that doesn’t really have the right beat at all. 

Dance music.  I need dance music that doesn’t make me cry.

Television:

Summer is always void of good teevee watching, but I have been happy with the Flight of the Conchords on HBO and Mad Men on AMC.  If you have basic cable, you likely get AMC, and Mad Men is really worth checking out.  It’s pretty great, worthy of HBO even though HBO turned it down.  And we’re counting down the weeks before the regular teevee season starts up as well, for most stuff anyway.  I think I have to wait until February to watch Lost, right? 

Books:

I finished the Harry Potter reread, and now I’m rereading the Lord of the Rings series.  Because, yes, I am that kind of a dork.