Mundane Stuff

I'm gradually trying to work on my blog. I decided I need a "blog name"--my real name is unusual enough that it makes me feel a bit exposed, so I just picked one I like. And I decided to add some movies and books to my profile. The added bonus is that I googled Noel Streatfeild (whose books I loved as a kid) to find the right spelling of her name, and found out about a whole bunch of her books I haven't read. So now I have some new reading to do . . .

If you look at my list of books, you might notice that I'm a fairly frivolous reader. I generally can't sleep at night without reading some fiction first. I do tons of heavy, dry reading for work, and reading some fiction helps to stop my brain from running. The funny thing is that I am a really fast reader, and Mr. X is slower. But he actually retains what he reads. When we read the same books, he'll refer to some event in the story, and I will have absolutely no recollection of it. But the bonus is that I can read the same book over and over again (and I do). When I was in elementary school, my best friend and I were extremely competitive with each other. We carpooled for children's choir, and on the half-hour drive, we would sometimes take a library book, sit next to each other in the back seat, and open it with the front cover on my lap and the back cover on hers. Then we would race to the end of each page. Whoever finished first would nonchalantly say something like "you can turn the page whenever you want to. I'm finished."

Well, I should probably go and check the carpet. Wonderdog is blowing her coat, so every time I look, we have enough hair on the floor to knit a small dog. Seriously, we're vacuuming at least three times a day. The back yard is muddy, too, so we're spending a couple of hours a day cleaning her paws after she comes inside. (OK, maybe that last part is a bit of an exaggeration . . . )