Friday, August 21, 2009

Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Oh this modern world

This may be one of the more surreal Internet experiences of my young life. The gentleman next to me, who must be in his seventies, is watching a Flash something-or-other with "Amazing Grace" playing very loudly. I'm sipping a hot chai. Coffee shop? Hardly. Does the hum of multiple coolers seem out of place?

I'm currently enjoying the wireless services of the Ideal Corners Gas, Convenience and Bait Shop (now with schmancy coffee and Internet). Ahead of me? A pizza oven and microwave in front of the cooler of eggs, cheese, milk, various Carl Budding sandwich meats and pre-wrapped Deli Select sandwiches, then the pop cooler. To my right, the chips and snacks aisle. Past that, the minnow tanks and ancient refrigerator that holds styrofoam containers of worms.

Wireless is everywhere.

Even the resort, in fact, though I can't get it in the trailer. So I didn't really need to come to the Ideal Corners Gas, Convenience and Bait Shop, but...oh who am I kidding? I so did!

Besides, it's a great day for bike riding today. Cloudy and cool but not too windy, for the first day since I arrived. Haven't been to A-Pine for pie with my wireless, as I haven't ridden a bike since last year so thought a shorter jaunt would be better. Good thing. My legs wobbled like a colt's when I got off my bike after only a mile or so.

Am having an amazingly good time, which I guess isn't so amazing since I do every year. Suzuri joined me for the first weekend (lucky for me, since Puck took the car to Wisconsin so I lacked a way to get here). We caught fish and cleaned them ourselves! And then ate them for supper, yum. Have been out on the boat lots but haven't been swimming much because there's always been a good stiff breeze to keep me cool. Am most of the way through reading my third novel. Keep half-expecting Temp to show up, sigh. (Stupid railroad.) Why did I only buy six ears of corn? It is so delicious!

Have been away from the news for days, and when I got here all the front pages were talking about Favre, so I still don't know what's happening in the world. So there's something good to come of that anyhow.

Did you know "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter!" comes in a spray bottle? Doesn't that sort of invalidate their claim? I mean, it's in a spray bottle. I can believe it's not butter. (Sorry, glanced up at the refrigerator case. Welcome to vacation brain! Whee!)

On that note, I should shut up now.

Friday, August 14, 2009

Vacation! And books!

Week of Solitude starts tonight! How much am I looking forward to this? You have no idea.

To kill some of the interminable minutes between now and then, here's a book meme I stole from Temp over on Facebook.

Rules: Don't take too long to think about it. List 15 books you've read that will always stick with you. They should be the first 15 you can recall in no more than 15 minutes.

1. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
2. The Liar, Stephen Fry
3. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
4. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
5. Black Beauty, Anna Sewell
6. Watership Down, Richard Adams
7. The Portrait of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
8. The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison
9. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
10. Good Omens, Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
11. Native Son, Richard Wright
12. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
13. Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut
14. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
15. A Song of Ice and Fire (series), George R.R. Martin

Huh. That was different than I thought. Mostly because of the "books that will always stick with you" bit. I mean, the degree to which I loathed Moby Dick means it will always stick with me, but damned if I'm going to put it on the list. And I just know there are some books that are really dear to me that I just didn't think of right off the top of my head. And then there's the whole thing where books like Jane Eyre were terrifically important to me in my teens, but if I read it now it would be completely different. Some of these are here because of how deeply comfortable they are, others because they are the opposite of that.

Yay books.