• Zits Supersized, by Jerry Scott & Jim Borgman (Thanks, Ormans!)
• Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, trade paperback (Thanks, Ormans!)
• Crack of Noon, by Jerry Scott & Jim Borgman (Thanks, Colleen & Travis!)
• Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, Braille edition (Thanks, Colleen & Travis!)
• Thief of Time, by Terry Pratchett (Thanks, Mom & Dad!)
• The Truth, by Terry Pratchett (Thanks, Mom & Dad!)
• Web Site Design Goodies, by Joe Burns (Thanks, Mom & Dad!)
• By Faith: 31 Days of Faith and Bible Translation (Thanks, Mom & Dad!)
• Driving Guide for the Independent Traveler: New England (Signpost Guides) (Thanks, Mom & Dad!)
• A City in Winter, by Mark Helprin, illustrated by Chris Van Allsburg (Thanks, Hobors!)

I also visited three bookstores (well, a library and two bookstores) in Chicago, and bought another 22 books (~$50).

• Howard's Books
  http://www.howardsbooks.net/
• Amaranth Books
  http://evanstonillinois.net/amaranthbooks.html
• Winnetka Public Library
  [url]
• Other bookstores in Evanston, IL:
  http://www.evanstononline.com/shopping/bookstores/bookstores.htm

Nostalgia has awakened. My brother brought me a handful of his old GameBoy games. I've been playing Zelda. Aquinas thinks this is hilarious. My brother also brought my old Sega Genesis. We couldn't get it to work while he was here, but I did a little Feng Shui with the television and now it works. And Aquinas got me some new controllers (and a replacement console) for Christmas from eBay. The original Sonic the Hedgehog game seemed easier than I remembered, but the music and sparkling 16-bit graphics made me feel somewhat sentimental. And giggly. Anyway, if it's somehow true that I never stopped being 12, it would explain a lot. Anyone up for a game of Wiz 'n Liz?

This weekend my (visiting) brother and I bought a ton of presents at the mall. Those kiosk people are really aggressive, let me tell you! But it was a successful sojourn. I managed not to buy *anything* for myself, perhaps largely as a result of having spent ~$40 on (individually cheap) CDs and DVDs at Princeton Record Exchange the previous day.

I will spend Christmas in Chicago with friends and with my husband's family. When I get back, I will be staffing the Princeton Univ. Press table at the 2006 MLA (Modern Language Association) conference in Philadelphia.

And then, happy new year!

Last weekend, I paid a somewhat expensive visit to the yearly warehouse sale at JR Trading Company, just up the road. YA fantasy fiction acquisitions included the complete Tales of Otori by Lyn Hearn; more than half a dozen somewhat random foreign language phrasebooks were also purchased.

One of the phrasebooks I bought was for Mandarin Chinese, which, with help from Jing on Tuesdays, I'm trying to learn a little about. The Illinois Hobors gave me their book, from Hippocrene Press, and I also have the Teach Yourself book (which focuses more on the Pinyin). Not that it's at all possible to learn Chinese from a book, anymore than it's possible to learn swimming from one.

Meanwhile in German class, we've learned the simple past and some modal verbs, but haven't covered attributive adjectives or genitive case (to say nothing of the subjunctive). Vocabulary is still pretty limited, and I still haven't got a firm grip on the noun endings. This sort of . . . baroqueness . . .  makes me really appreciate the simplicity of Mandarin morphology, even if the phonetics is impossible! Imagine, not only do the nouns lack gender (and number, for that matter), the pronouns do too! And there's no verb conjugation, period!

Two weeks ago, I went skating for the first time in about a year; I hadn't worn my rollerblades in maybe a year and a half. It was terrific fun, and heaven only knows how many calories I burned. I should go more often. But that might mean reading less. Hm.

I've acquired the last two books in the Fearless series, which I'm nearly done reading. I have the two most recent George R. R. Martin books too, but they'll take me a lot longer to read!

If you're sitting around wondering what to get me for Christmas, click here to see my perpetual wish list. There's some stuff my husband wants too, but he's not as good at keeping lists.

The Cranbury street fair yielded some treasures again. In particular, there was an out-of-print edition of the Princeton Science Library title Eye and Brain; the beginning of a manga series called Ranma 1/2, which is bizarre but entertaining; Edith Nesbit's House of Arden, which I happily read right away; a Ruth Chew paperback I didn't already own (Witch's Broom) and a nearly complete box set of Laura Ingalls Wilder books.

A week's vacation in Maine with my husband and his Aunt Nancy yielded some nice found-on-the-ground rocks and a couple of excellent purchased specimens (malachite that looks like velvet and malachite that looks like brains; a huge garnet in matrix) and some souvenirs from a Shaker community as well as some household odds and ends, and some scenic photos. We hiked, but only a little.

I'm back and the school year is in full swing; I've now got a two-weeks' toehold on the German language.

I'm fascinated by the writing of George R.R. Martin. (I've read A Game of Thrones and I've started A Clash of Kings.) The books are dark, but it's an honest kind of dark, I think, rather than a nihilistic kind of dark. There is no ultimate good and evil; there are good and bad people, but who they are depends on who's telling the story. There's magic, but it's peripheral; the plot is full of consequences of human decisions and human acts. There are likable characters and despicable characters, but the likable characters are far from perfect, and the despicable characters can also be alternately sad or amusing. It's a bit crude for my taste, but perhaps that's just because I typically read kids' books. Anyway, it's complex. I'm absorbed.

It seems I have forty-eleven hobbies. In addition to reading and working full time, I'm also: buying books, selling books, babysitting, volunteering for fMRI scans, knitting, learning Japanese braiding -- called Kumihimo (this is a brand new hobby which is way cooler than Chinese knotting), trying out wrapping paper to fold origami, thinking about teaching origami to co-workers, becoming more culturally literate thanx to NetFlix, becoming more culturally literate by surfing the net at random, making friendship bracelets, making sky fish, selling the latter two things on Etsy, quilting and/or sewing (theoretically), and hopefully, this fall, acquiring German.

Then there's the whole website overhaul thing: I want to become familiar with my ISP, FrontPage, XML/XSLT, Javascript, CSS, PhotoShop, and a host of other related things, like RSS and the Google Maps API. And I'm supposed to be maintaining *this* website, although you can see that's not happening.

There are other hobbies that are more or less mothballed at the moment: the Atlanta Sunday paper comic strip archive, the magazine archive, my stamps, coins, dice, marbles, rocks, board games, and Pokemon cards, to say nothing of inline skating (who needs gross motor skills, anyway?).

Hm. Was that forty-eleven hobbies or forty-twelve? I've lost track. Must be time to go read the less-dry book!

I bought thirty-some-odd Andre Norton paperbacks at the Cranbury Bookworm last weekend. In the, well, "fiscal book year" from July 05 to June 06, I purchased a total of 332 books, up from the previous year's 160. I guess I should probably learn how to read faster.

6/12/06
Two months later, I'm declaring the moving over. On to the business of staying put.

But now I'm moving into my new digital real estate. As of 6/8/06, I'm a customer of 1&1.Yup, I bit the bullet and acquired my own domain, www.somepeoplejugglegeese.com, or www.spjg.com for short. I expect that there will be nothing much there for a while, but I was sick of waiting. I had the chicken and the egg problem: I couldn't learn how to build the site without having a bona fide server to put it on, and I didn't want to buy hosting for the site without knowing what kind of hosting it would need. I figured out some stuff about the hosting, but there's clearly a long way to go.

The good news is that I've got my computer plugged in again, finally. There was this issue with the outlet in my room (it only had holes for two prongs). But now we've got spiffy fiber-optic Internet and a wireless network, and my computer's got two monitors plugged into it. I can't find my audio splitter for attaching the cassette deck to my sound card, but I'm sure it'll turn up. Or I'll go buy another one.

In the midst of it all somewhere, I had a birthday! Thanks to all who got me gifts or sent me birthday wishes. I'm now the proud owner of:

• A book on Chinese knotting (Thanks, Hobors!)
• A really cool amethyst/quartz geode thing (Thanks, Hobors!)
• A nice used copy of The Phantom Tollbooth (Thanks, Aquinas!)
• An octagonal wooden dice tray (Thanks, Chris B.!)
• Some extra bucks from Mom & Dad, Grandaddy & Grandmartha, and Pop Pop. (Thanks, all!)

I enjoyed my visit to Nashville where I saw Grandaddy (now a published author!) & Grandmartha.

I've attended two book sales recently, one at the Ewing Public Library (yesterday), and one on May 6 at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Princeton. The Ewing sale happens every few months, and they always have good stuff. The UUCP sale is just in the spring, I think. The folks running it were very friendly (and gave big discounts, since it was getting to be lateish in the day). As at the sale last year, I found some real treasures! This year the big treasure was a copy of Transformers: The Movie. This movie is out of print, and I'd been looking at prices on eBay, which vary with condition between $2 and $15, plus shipping. At UUCP, for more than 14 books, the movie, and a cassette tape, I paid $12.50 total. Here again we see the principle of One Man's Trash Is Another Man's Treasure kick into action for my benefit.

Also, this week I've made ~$30 from online sales of books that people at my office were getting rid of. Yea me.

[new apartment]

[new computer setup]

[new sparkly rock]

[new new new]

[everything looks different and new here]

[but you can't see it because these aren't photos]

[this should be a cover scan of A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth, which I enjoyed very much -- all 1400 pages of it]

On a related note, I'm enjoying a book called Biblioholism. It describes my life, I'm afraid.

My husband and I are moving to a new apartment in about a month. This will mean more space for books! And a wireless network for our computers, among other things. Mainly just more space period. Yea! (NB: Friends help you move. Real friends help you move books.)

I imagine that updates to the website, as well as the much anticipated overhaul of the website, will continue to be postponed while the physical objects in my life go topsy turvy in the move. But I'll keep updating the book log. Hopefully some day I'll actually finish the book New Times in Modern Japan. . .  

Also, I have finally acquired my own computer speakers. Chris B. was throwing them out. One of them was rattling, but I took it apart and fixed it, and they work.

My husband and I spent our Christmas break in Atlanta at my family's house. We got & gave lots of nice presents, and I bought a lot of clothes and (unsurprisingly) some books. We also went to a comedy dinner theater show at a place called Agatha's, and saw the new Georgia Aquarium.

Recently, I visited Boston on a trip whose purpose was to help staff our Press's booth at the ASSA meeting at the Hynes convention center. It was interesting to greet economists from all over the world. I had some nice dinners too (Thai, Indian, Afghani).

Work on a revamped website (in XML) seems to be at a standstill, (you'd noticed that, had you?) and as I've already said, I've got a backlog of books to catalog. What books, you ask? Well, I'll tell you.

Gifts:

• Megatokyo 1 (Thank you, Crouches!)
• The Arabian Nights (Thank you, Elizabeth!)
• Galactic Empire (2 vol) (Thank you, Elizabeth!)
• Eldest (Thank you, Anjali!)
• Book of card games (Thank you, Mom!)
• Book of dice games (Thank you, Mom!)
• Forgotten Delights: The Producers (Thank you, Colleen & Travis!)

From PaperbackSwap:

• Steel Magic
• Songsmith
• The Gate of the Cat
• Octagon Magic
• Titan AE
• The Magestone
• The Lost City of Faar
• The Stones Are Hatching
• Pegasus in Space
• Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc
• The Merlin Effect
• Lirael

From home:

• Midnight's Children
• The Satanic Verses
• Pride and Prejudice
• Kim
• The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm

From Elsewhere (Chicago, NJ, Atlanta, online):

• The Second Chronicles of Amber
• Daybreak 2250 A.D.
• W.I.T.C.H 1 & 2
• The Guardians
• The Case of the Vanishing Boy
• Crisis on Doona
• Treaty at Doona
• Sassinak
• The Coelura
• Crystal Singer
• Casual Day Has Gone Too Far
• Garfield 1
• Garfield 1 in German
• Frog and Toad Together
• Caught in the Web of Words
• The Warden of English
• The Conch Bearer
• A Study of Writing
• Rocks and Minerals
• The Story of English
• The Wonder of Words
• A New Aristotle Reader
• New Times in Modern Japan
• The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity
• Fearless 1 - 6 & 8-15
• Why Johnny Can't Read
• Death in Kashmir
• Death in Zanzibar
• Shadow of the Moon
• The Egypt Game
• Seven-Day Magic
• The Wishing Tree
• Sabriel

Also, some movies:

• VHS
  • Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
  • The Parent Trap
  • The Phoenix and the Magic Carpet
  • The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (old version)
• DVD
  • Titan AE
  • The Incredibles
  • Batman Begins
  • Office Space
  • The Return of the King
  • Serenity

For reasons best known to herself (and mysterious even so), Lucy Day has been buying Pokemon cards on eBay. Again. She's even got a (frighteningly large) box to keep them in, and a nifty spreadsheet to catalog the ones she's missing. She's collecting from the Base set, Jungle, Fossil, and Base 2. For now.

In fact, I have many books (~30) sitting around waiting to be scanned and added to the site. They used to all be on my desk, but that got to be unbearably ridiculous. So I sent most of them to roost elsewhere in the apartment. Unfortunately, there aren't too many "elsewheres" left!

Friends of mine, the Penrys, recently went to Barcelona (something to do with a computer science conference). They brought back Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone in Catalan as a surprise for me! They said it was difficult to find books not in Catalan in the bookstores in Barcelona.

[Long story long, I shopped for barebones machines, decided that $93.84 is rather less than the ~$200 I would need (even buying online from TigerDirect), tried to plug my hard drive into an old (free) Dell OptiPlex GX200 from PUP, found out that the memory somehow got damaged, pilfered its cleaner, quieter, compatible processor fan, and plugged everything back into my old GX1.  Yes.  I'm still running on a machine from August 1999.  Grrr.]

To continue another adventure in hardware repair (remember?), Mike (network admin at PUP) manhandled the last stubborn screw holding the green board with the burned chip to my old hard drive so I could attach the replacement board.  I have not plugged it in, so I don't know whether the data is intact.  Keep your fingers crossed. 

I'm reading some non-fiction.  About time, too.  Geez. 

I went to a skate meet yesterday.  The good news is, I've got competitors now.  The bad news is, I've got competitors now.  The result is, I made an utter fool of myself. . . twice. 

Quickly changing the subject. . . .  On Friday at work I heard a spiel by a guy from
S R Nova about all the things they can do to get information (books, journal articles) into and out of XML format.  It was a beautiful vision of the future.  They are applying technology to publishing.  They are changing the industry.  I will see it, and I will be part of it.  This is what I was trained for.  It's very exciting.

Recent Non-Fiction Reading:

[Everest]

[India]

[Japan]

• Archive 3 (11/14/05 to 12/31/06)
• Archive 2 (01/02/05 to 10/21/05)
• Archive 1 (08/09/04 to 12/17/04)