More reading

More for the book list:

Just finished - in order of how much I liked them:

• Sight Hound, Pam Houston - this book was so wonderful, and so different from what I expected given it's girl-with-a-dying-dog theme, that it's all I can do not to go buy twelve copies and press them in the hands of each of my friends-who-are-voracious-readers. Sweet, funny, silly, lovely book that did not, despite its subject matter, make me weep throughout. It's told from the perspective of twelve different narrators, including three dogs, with one particularly surly and hilarious chapter inserted in the middle by the cat. Pleaseplease go read this book.
  
• Julie and Julia - 365 Days, 524 Recipes, and One Tiny Apartment Kitchen Julie Powell - well known blogger who spent a year cooking her way through Julia Child's entire Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Highly entertaining - I read it in a day, and immediately wanted to cook things with lots of butter.
  
• The Ice Queen, Alice Hoffman - sometimes I love Alice Hoffman (Practical Magic is still a favorite of mine), sometimes I like her less. This was one of the good ones. Weird little book, lyrical, fast read. Fascinating details on what happens to the victims of lightning strikes.
  
• May Contain Nuts - A Novel of Extreme Parenting, John O'Farrell - chick lit, brain fluff, but fun and an easy read. Brett bought me this. About a mother waking up from the uniquely British spin on the common psychosis about getting your child into the best school possible.
  
• White Teeth - Zadie Smith - I've put off reading this book for a long time; something about all the hype when it first came out put me off it. And now that I have read it - well... I liked it okay. The story was complex and yes, it did seem to be masterfully told, but I was left feeling like I'd missed something. What the heck did all the teeth imagery have to do with anything? I feel like a high school sophomore who slept through the lecture. I know there's more there than I picked up.
  
• A Game of Thrones, George R. R. Martin - I bought this, and its two following tomes, because I read in an issue of Newsweek at the doctor's office that Martin is the "best fantasy author writing today" and the heir of Tolkein, yadda yadda. Well, he writes a decent book, but it wasn't all that remarkable by my view. What it was was long. And dense. And complex. I read the rest of these books in a day or two, but this one I had to slog through for over a week.

Still working on:

• Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It, Geoff Dyer - bought this because the book jacket shouted that it was "screamingly funny" and a laugh riot, Sedaris-like, life changing. I haven't laughed yet, and can't seem to get more than halfway through it. I liked one small chapter that was a brilliant little essay on Rome (my favorite city), but aside from that it seems to be a book full of people who waltz around in a drug-induced haze speaking in such overly pretentious prose that you can't believe anything you read. "Is it the time of evensong and mellow fruitiness?" the author's companion says to him at one point. Well gee, who cares, I thought to myself. Not me.

Home sick

Called in sick today, but I was planning to actually do some work. Little did I realize that my day was actually going to consist of lolling around half-asleep, half-awake from nine in the morning all the way until 3:30. Instead of working, I've dozed, napped, dropped off, rested, siesta'd, got forty winks, then forty more, drowsed, slumbered, and snoozed. If there's a form of napping I haven't hit today, I don't know what it is.

And now, finally, I'm semi-awake and actually attempting to start up the laptop and work, but Max keeps climbing into my lap. Gimme more of this napping stuff, lady, he says. Finally someone around here gets how to spend a work day.

I really should be writing performance reviews. But maybe just a little more sleep first.

More sleepwalking

Last night at about one thirty a.m., I took out my earplugs, rolled over to wake Brett up (all in my sleep) and said, "Hey, hey. Where is it? Listen!" And right then, honest to god, there was a big huge explosion outside the house.

It was like a movie. My timing couldn't have been better. And let me tell you, it scared the bejeezus out of both of us.

We never did figure out what the explosion was. It seemed to be of the magnitude of a house or a car exploding, but we couldn't see anything after the initial flash, and no sirens showed up. Nothing was burning. Nothing in the papers this morning.

But it happened. I swear it happened. We both remember it. It took me over an hour to get back to sleep, I was so freaked out. Just from the circumstances of it.

Meteor? More likely, a firecracker to celebrate the Seahawks win. But it sure seemed louder than that at the time.

Reading

Ok, I'm going to try this again - every year I intend to keep a list of what I've read, and every year I fail to do so for more than a month. But perhaps if I run a post and just keep updating it every few weeks I can get most of it down.

Read so far this year:

• The Historian, Elizabeth Kostova - about a third too long, but not bad. I skimmed it as much as read it, but the story was interesting. If I'd read every word, I'd have gotten bored and quit.
• Skinny Dip, Carl Hiaasen - very enjoyable, funny book.
• Something Rotten, Jasper Fforde - latest in a long series about Thursday Next, literary detective. Great.
• The Lost Slayer, Christopher Golden - why did I read this? Cuz I bought Brett fan fiction for Christmas, but got through all of my books long before he got to it. First time I've read the genre - it wasn't very impressive.
• A whole bunch of nonfiction I'm not going to list yet - none of it cover to cover, just sections that interested me.

Reading now:

• Julian, Gore Vidal - love it! I wish I weren't about to finish it.

Ramblings

I'm sitting in front of a roaring fire with two cats on the couch next to me and one lying in wait under the dining room hutch - the next hapless person or animal who walks by is going to get nipped on the ankles, I think. It's the last day of Christmas break for me, and I'm actually working - but working in such circumstances is a pleasure. I wish more of my worklife involved coziness and warmth and the ability to stop and take naps.

A few bits of news:

• I've been off for ten days total, seven workdays, and for once the time has not flown by the way it usually does. Instead, I feel like I've been off for weeks. Partly, I attribute this to the fact that I've gotten so much sleep, and to the fact that I've put work largely out of my mind except for a few hours here and there. Partly it's because it's the first Christmas in a while during which we have not traveled. And partly it's because of some interesting things which have been distracting me, like the two quilts I'm making. I'll post some pictures of those soon.


• We're starting to talk about travel plans this year - hopefully we're going to Italy with some friends in the late spring or early summer. We've had this idea for years now of renting a villa in Tuscany with a group of close friends and just cooking and relaxing and sightseeing a little and living the sweet life for a week or two. I'm going to spend part of today looking for a villa rental - what a lovely distraction on a gray January day.


• My sister in law is trapped in Mendocino (poor her) where the big storms you may have been hearing about have washed out the roads out from their cabin. Between landslides, high winds knocking over trees, and flooding, it will be hard to get out of the entire county they're in. Still, if you have to be trapped, a nice romantic coastal cottage is probably the way to go, even if it means you have no power for more than a day.


• We had Christmas with my parents this year, which was nice - we haven't been able to do that for several years now; I think the last time was three or four years back when we all went down to my sister's in Texas. They came over for Christmas day and had dinner with us, and the next day we loaded up a slide carousel and looked at Dad's slides from Hawaii in the 1950s and early pictures of me and Dana from when we were babies. Let me just say that even at the age of two, my sister was the consumate photographer's model, striking catalog-ready poses with never a wrinkle in her clothes or a hair out of place, whereas I'm usually wide-open mouthed and looking more startled than anything. This photographic trend has continued throughout our lives.


• Attended Ann and Jim's wonderful New Year's Eve paella supper - definitely one of my favorite meals (and events) of the year. Unfortunately, my friend Sid wasn't here this time, for the first time ever - he's off in Hawaii visiting his family. When are you coming home, Sid? Anyways, we had a great time, and both stayed surprisingly sober to boot, eliminating the New Year's Day hangover tradition. We're getting smart in our older age.

That's the news for now - can't quite believe it's 2006 already, but it promises to be a momentous year at Chez Zalkan. More soon...