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Hey, everyone who may (against all odds) still pop by here from time to time despite my failure to keep up blogging...

We're doing great up here in The Ham.  Here are a few updates, after which I hope to get back to semi-regular blogging if I can tear myself away from Facebook long enough...

Justin just graduated (yay!) and I am oh-so-close...  I'll be graduating in March, but I figured out a way to do two correspondence courses this coming quarter.  As a result, I'll only have to be on campus a couple of hours each Tuesday and Thursday with a prof I really admire.  Easy, peasy.

I finished finals this past Tuesday and then had the rest of the week off work.  I have been reveling in the extra time.  How do I revel in extra time, you ask?  I've been on an OCD rampage for nearly a week -- cleaning out neglected drawers, de-linting sweaters, organizing our game chest -- you know, all that important stuff.  I can see most of my desk here in the office for the first time in about two months.  Ahhh.  That's better.

I've also been doing large amounts of cooking and baking.  Which, for Justin, helps to offset the fact that so much of my time has been spent, say, trying out all the pens and markers in our pen box to see which ones need to go.

Justin and I treated ourselves to a used bookstore visit a few days ago.  It's fantastic, to have the time available to actually read the books we purchased.  I finally read Little Prince to the end, knocked out The Catcher in the Rye for the first time, and since we bought a pretty version of Love in the Time of Cholera rather than the hideously ugly one Justin had picked up a while back, I think I'll be finally able to give that one a good shot.  I know it seems silly to, um, judge a book by its cover, but this copy is beeee-yutiful.  It's hardcover and has those cool uneven page edges and everything.

It seems I am not a good candidate for the Kindle.  I like my cool uneven pages.  Grace knows what I mean. 

By the way, don't bother with the movie version of LitToC.  It was awful.  I made Justin stop it about forty-five minutes in because I didn't want to have the movie's lameness stuck in my head when I finally got around to finishing the book.  Yikes, it was bad.   

A few others I picked up:



Anecdotes of Destiny and Ehrengard by Isak Dinesen.  Includes "Babette's Feast," which I've been wanting to read for quite a while.



Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov --This falls into the category -- "should'a read a long time ago."  Continuing on with the weird fascination with how books are presented, I was able to find an Everyman's Library version.  This makes me quite happy.  They have the little ribbon in the middle to use as a bookmark.  I never end up using it, but knowing it's there.  That's the thing.



Arcadia: A Play by Tom Stoppard -- this was a recommendation from one of my favorite lit profs.  I have a list about six pages long from Dr. M, listing what he considers the best of literature from ancient writers to today.  It's in ten-point font.  Might take me a while to work through it.



And this last book, Excerpts from a Family Medical Dictionary, is by Rebecca Brown, a woman I had the privilege of meeting when I was at the writer's conference over the summer.  For several years, she was a home care worker for people with AIDS (though fiction, she drew on her experiences when writing The Gifts of the Body) -- and then she ended up caring for her own mother during the last six months of her battle with cancer.  This book chronicles that journey.

Rebecca is one of the warmest, most human people I've ever had the opportunity to sit at a breakfast table with.  Check out her stuff.

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Alright, kids, I think that will do it for now.  Hope you're enjoying the holiday season (I find that to do this, you just need to avoid going out as much as possible).  More soon, if all goes as planned.  Which it frequently doesn't.

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Oh -- one last thing.  The hubby and I are all signed up to go to the Writer's Conference this coming summer... together.