The Rabenstranger

Person 1: Who’s funeral are you going to?

Person 2: My dad’s.

Person 1: Did he die?

Person 2: Yes

I’m glad I’m not the only person who asks silly questions.

Today, at work, I listened to Kim by Rudyard Kipling. It’s too early to tell but at this point I think it likely that this will become one of my all time favorite novels.

After work, Zach and I baked Snickerdoodle cookies and Maddie and I made a scratch cake.

The rules of this game:
Pick up the nearest book of 123 pages or more.
(No cheating!) Find Page 123.
Find the first 5 sentences.
Post the next 3 sentences.

"I barely remember it," Glenda Ruth said. "Dad thought Kevin, Christian and I ought to grow up on Sparta instead of in the provinces." She shrugged.

From the Gripping Hand by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. It’s one of a couple actual books that I have right now. Lately, all the books I’ve been reading have been on tape so that I can multitask. I haven’t been getting around to my paper books at all and this one will likely go back unread.

Not much has changed in my life in the last week or two. I’m still working at the same job, engaging in the same hobbies and looking for a better job.

Today, I listened to P.G. Wodehouse’s Uncle Dynamite on tape. Like all of Wodehouse’s work which I have so far read it was clever, funny and thoroughly recommendable. After work, Mom and I made taco soup, which was well received by the hungry critics around the dinner table. As soon as the kitchen has been cleaned, Emily, Arita and I will make mint brownies.

All in all, while progress is imperceptible, the current state of affairs is pleasant.

I’m giving the newest version of Windows Live Writer a try. For more than a year, I’ve been using the beta version of this software and now I have finally upgraded to the current offering. This is my first post using it. I’ll let you know what I think after I’ve used it for awhile.

Some of you may be thinking that using this kind of software is not in keeping with blogger purity as it creates messy, inefficient code. This is true but, current constraints on my time and attention lead me to believe that the best service I can do for my blog at this time is to streamline my posting process, and, hopefully, by making it easier to post, enticing myself to do so more often.

In my fledgling effort to purge the fat from time utilization, I’ve deactivated my Facebook account. Along with canceling a slew of email invites and deleting most of the feeds from my RSS reader, I hope the abandonment of Facebook will provide fewer opportunities for me to waste time and procrastinate. It should also help to focus my online attention more tightly on the element of my online presence that I actually care about… this blog.

Much to my surprise, I am finding that even after doing it regularly for a couple of weeks, I still enjoy baking. Perseverence has never been a virtue that I’ve possessed in any great quantity. I am the sort of person that starts out to learn new skills, or accomplish grand projects but loses interest quickly and moves on to something new. As a result, when I got the impulse to bake a batch of cookies I didn’t expect that it would become a habit for me.

This evening, I am trying something other than cookies (I have made a few batches of soft pretzels but other than that all I’ve been making is cookies). With the guidance of my mother’s Betty Crocker cookbook, I’m baking bread. It is rising now.

I did a fair bit of reading last month, stacking up a total of 15 finished books as follows:

Dragon and Judge – Timothy Zahn
The Dragon and the George – Gordon R. Dickson
First Meetings – Orson Scott Card
Time Traders – Andre Norton
The White Company – Arthur Conan Doyle
Sharpe’s Rifles – Bernard Cornwell
A Princess of Mars – Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Third Lynx – Timothy Zahn
The First Commandment – Brad Thor
The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24’s Over Germany – Stephen E. Ambrose
The Star Beast – Robert A. Heinlein
Reflections on the Psalms – C.S. Lewis
The Tunnel in the Sky – Robert A. Heinlein
The Problem of Pain – C.S. Lewis
To America – Stephen E. Ambrose

In other news, I’m still working at getting my driver’s license. The process has been far more difficult than I had anticipated due to an extreme lack of proficiency on my part. Until I get that out of the way I’m hesitant to proceed with searching for a full-time job. Until then, I’ve got plenty of part-time work and lots of things to fill my time (Not just books, I’m going to two church services, church membership classes, a Bible study and have taken up baking 3-4 times a week).

I’ve been spending far less time on the computer than I used to so blog posts will likely remain sparse.