Tuesday, 11 September 2012
For class today, we had to read a decent poem and then write a two-page paper about it. I know I whine about Hamline a lot, and so this day will be no different…
Two pages about a single, thirty-line poem?
Needless to say, I was able to turn in a paper that met the requirement, but, damn, it’s hard to write two whole pages about a single poem. And I say tha tas someone who’s usually so verbose I have to edit like mad. For example, when I write speeches for Toastmasters, they’re usually over 15 minutes long on my first read-through. I then have to take a chainsaw to them and bring them down to ten or eight or even six minutes. For today’s assignment, I had the opposite problem. Tough.
In other news, my old friend Tim has decided to take a photo every day and post it on the old WWW. My wife had this same idea back in 2006-07. So I’m sure Tim was inspired by that, especially since I just talked about my wife’s project in This Recent Post, which I wrote just before Tim’s project began. Either way, good for him. He’s taking some great photos. Comment on them, if you feel so compelled. Comments help give bloggers the incentive to continue.
Wednesday, 12 September 2012
Well, today Owen and I completed reading the book Detective Camp.
If you’re one of the two people who actively check my list of Books I’ve Ths Year, then you’ll know why this is a milestone: I have now read at least one book from each letter of the alphabet (I’m talking about the titles here).
Honestly, I didn’t try to do this…it just sort of happened. Of course, I was helped along by reading the A to Z Mysteries with Owen. This year, we read the G-Z books (but not the T book, which we read last year). So, just by reading those, I had already read a book from every letter except A, B, C, D, E, F, and T. As luck would have it, I read a book with a title beginning with A, B, C and T during the first part of the year, leaving only D, E, and F. I talked about that last month.
Coincidentally, my father-in-law let me borrow the book Fire and Rain last month. I didnt’ even ask to borrow it, so don’t think I asked just to satisfy the list. Nope. He just gave it to me. So I read it. Then Owen and I read the really awful Esio Trot, which I don’t reccommend you parents out there reading with your kids.
Anyway, this just left the letter D. Owen insisted we read Detective Camp (I didn’t even want to read it, being plenty done with Ron Roy’s writings). But even if I hadn’t read it, I’m positive I would have read a D book by year’s end. I just received Damned Good Company in the mail to read for a book review, and one of the books I had to buy last week for my latest university class has a title that starts with D. So there you go.