A New Way To Do Things

A Little Thing

Something I've been working on this year is reading more books. I used to read all the time. My mom was a voracious reader when I was a kid. She loves Stephen King, Dean Koontz and Louis L'Amour. She would start reading a book after I left for school, stay up all night and be done with it by the time I left for school again the next day. And then, promptly start on another one. Plus, we're talking about sometimes huge books here, often upwards of 400 pages. Finished in 24 hours.

A few months ago I noticed how lacking my book-reading had become. In the past couple of years it had gotten to the point where it would take me several months to finish one little book. Most recently I finished When Washington was in Vogue over a period of two years. Two Years! That's just stupid.

I have a folder I started about 6 years ago with magazine clippings full of books I wanted to read. That doesn't even include all the books on my half.com list and the books in my library list. So, somewhere around January I realized I needed to get to work on all these books.

Reading makes me feel better, as evidenced by the fact that I've spent two days procrastinating by reading an insane amount of blogs. But, reading books in particular makes me feel really good. Smarter, even. I like being able to say "I'm reading The Joy Diet right now" instead of saying "I just finished the April issues of Lucky, Glamour, Essence and InStyle UK in one day!". Relaying magazine reading habits seems less...intellectual. You know?

To keep myself on point I've added a book shelf on the right side of my page, near the bottom. This little visual is already helping me track my accomplishments. Look at it! I've finished all those books just this year!

What are you reading now?

Weekend Report

Saturday, past about 9 am? Felt like I'd swallowed one of these.

Today is Tuesday. After a boring day at work that went by blissfully fast (I was in an area where I couldn't see the clock. That actually helped a lot.) I got called off for today, which means I'm currently at home.

So far I've done 4 loads of laundry and gone through over 500 neglected emails. Not bad for 4 hours of awakeness and doing-stuff.

I hope everyone had a good Easter. Mine was ok. HUBS and I took my mom out to his parents place for the annual Easter dinner. Mom had never been out there before because of taking care of my grandmother. I was a bit surprised she agreed to go and didn't back out. When I talked to her that morning, she sounded quite down. This is the first holiday without my grandmother and it's been almost a year to the day since my uncle died. She didn't say it, but I know that stuff was weighing on her.

Everything went fine, but my day was only ok for two reasons. First, I was a bit afraid to eat. Why? Because on Saturday, after taking almost the whole week off "sick", I really did get sick. Big sick. Doing-scary-things-in-the-bathroom-that-no-one-wants-to-think-about sick. I was trapped in there for about an hour. Unfortunately, the thing that seemed to irritate my stomach this time involved jalapenos. Just so you know, spicy in = 1,000 times spicier coming out. It took a full day for my throat to stop burning.

The second reason I wasn't that great was because I knew I'd have to go back to work Monday. I actually almost started crying during the car ride home.

Really? I'm going to try to stop complaining about my job in this space now. I've just realized I'm tired of it. That probably means you're getting tired of it, too. Of course, if anything completely outlandish happens you can totally expect me to tell you about it!

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On a completely different note, HUBS and I went to see Clash of the Titans Saturday after I recovered for a few hours. I found it exciting and enjoyable. We also walked around the mall a bit, which wore me out a lot more than I was expecting. We managed to finally get HUBS a new pair of glasses, something that's been on our list since January. Rectangularish, gray frames will be a new look for him. I'll submit a photo when he's all glassed up.