For some reason I started looking through my old LiveJournal posts a couple of days ago, and was impressed (vain though it may be to say it) by how thoughtful and even literary some of them were. Perhaps my mind was clearer when I was younger, or perhaps I just had more time to think in general. Certainly LiveJournal seemed to encourage deeper ( Read more... )

I mailed my last Christmas letters (except a few I plan to deliver by campus mail at work) late last week, which is to say that quite a few were mailed after Christmas, and many that were mailed before Christmas were mailed so close to that holy date that they will not have arrived in time to be read before Christmas (although even if they arrived ( Read more... )

Ever since Cookout opened a branch in the Garden Spot of the Universe, we have eaten a fair number of milk shakes. My favourite is the blue berry one, but I have not yet had a bad one. The watermelon milk shake had been recommended to us so often and by so many people that when they became available with the advent of summer, we had to try a ( Read more... )

I am heading by to school Thursday, beginning Lincoln Memorial University's Doctor of Education programme. I have to admit to being pretty nervous--I have not done graduate work in a long time, and am out of practise at the kind of thinking and writing that is expected there. After all, as in so many things, success is much more about how you ( Read more... )

It has actually been snowing for about a week (in addition to getting a fair amount of snow in December that melted around the New Year). I must admit to mixed feelings about this ( Read more... )

I read my fiftieth book the other day, although it (like the last several) were children's books for Landon. I am going to try to read a few more adult books before the end of the year, but hopefully everyone will be understanding. Landon has recently heard The Lively Little Rabbit about a rabbit whose family is under attack by a weasel (his ( Read more... )

Since I last posted, I have read several books, and am still working on A Penguin History of Latin America (which I am really enjoying, despite being called away from it several times), but most (although not all) of them are books rather below my reading level ( Read more... )

Last month I managed to read two more books (in between being in The Drama and doing my other reading and various labours), Walking toward the Sunset by Wayne Winkler and Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck.

I got Walking toward the Sunset 'free' (i.e. not free, since I only got it because I made a donation to NPR that I might not have made if the ( Read more... )

I finished A Death in the Family yesterday and began Steven Brust's unofficial Firefly novel My Own Kind of Freedom last night. I feel it is very true to the characters and setting, while reading like the other Brust books I've always enjoyed (and, of course, it has 17 chapters).

I finished My Own Kind of Freedom this afternoon, bringing this ( Read more... )

Some of my students made a new year's resolution on Facebook to read fifty books before the end of the year. I figured I would take a stab at it, too, but took the easy way, by beginning with some works of fiction that I had mostly read before (but had been considering re-reading anyway ( Read more... )