it's back to sleep to re-dream me

I actually have a couple of hours free tonight, and I am too tired to knit. Even surfing Ravelry is making me feel exhausted. Send help. Or possibly caffeine.

Recent happy-making things have been:

- Attending my sister Katherine's college graduation this weekend! Spent less than 24 hours in Rhode Island, but I was able to celebrate with her and my family the night before and see her all dressed up in cap and gown. (Sadly, I had to drive back to catch my plane before she walked, but I was able to wave at her during the procession.) (I'm not sure she reads this at all, but if you're reading, Katherine, congratulations again!)

- Less life-changing, but Ben and I have excavated the office closet and set up a workable desk situation for me. No more laptop at the dining room table! And I got to page through all my old college notes before recycling them, and let me tell you, not only was my handwriting neater and my notes far more carefully taken, I was a lot smarter four years ago. At the very least, I knew far more calculus. (However, I also apparently thought jokes about safer math through parenthesis usage were funny enough to scrawl in the margins of my notes. So it maybe evens out.)

- We also made a lot of pesto and I managed to document the process before returning Jen's camera. (Incidentally ... expect a lot of text here until I find someone who can fix a digital camera for less than $200.) But for now, pictures!

This is just under half of the basil we went through - the other half is already stripped off the stems and soaking in the other sink.

One finished batch with more basil leaves and cheese waiting behind it. (I think I minced something like 20 cloves of garlic that day as well. Our pesto is not particularly subtle.)

The fruits of our labors. As we manage to do every time, we vastly under-oiled it, so the effective volume of this batch is far greater, since we're adding oil to it as we use it. (We've finally figured out it's because the pesto heats up in the processor and we go by texture - which is obviously much firmer once it sits in the fridge for a while. We're learning.)

- Also, we went to see "Prince Caspian" last night and, people, it was excellent! I didn't love the first Narnia movie, actually - I thought the effects were simultaneously overdone and not very good, and the pacing was a bit off, but this one is fantastic. (Also, I am completely envious of Susan's badass-ness and amazing outfits, although where I'd be able to wear a cut-on-the-bias chain mail shirt and leather bustier is ... probably no place I'd want to be, come to think of it. She looked great, though, and I am completely smitten by her archery skills.) The rest of the cast was very good, too, although Caspian's accent was a bit irritating at times (mostly the times it faded in and out during the same scene). It was good enough that I broke out our omnibus edition of The Chronicles of Narnia last night and re-read a bit of The Lion... last night before bed. (I seem to recall Prince Caspian being not that good, and I didn't want to spoil the movie experience.) At any rate, I'm excited that the summer movies are starting to come out, although I'm not even sure what else is on the horizon.

- And it's off to bed with me - when I left tonight, we were four patients over our cap. I don't think tomorrow's going to be any better - we've already got a number of patients waiting in the internal medicine wings for as soon as we discharge our current patients. Wish me luck.

title from "Wake Up Exhausted" by Tegan and Sara. Yes, it's a link to a Grey's Anatomy fan vid. I can't help where these girls got their big break. (Have liked them for years! Since they toured with Ben Folds! God, I'm so curmudgeonly some days.)

to break the still of day

Just popping in here to say that I'm loving family medicine. The patients come into the hospital, they get more or less fixed up, and then the same person follows up with them after their inpatient stay. And, you know, addresses the issues that landed them in the hospital in the first place. Love it. (Additionally, we're only calling consults when we have an actual question for the consultant. My consultant calls are going like this: "We've got a patient who's still having blood in his urine 4 days after his traumatic Foley placement and we've worked him up, done these labs, gotten this imaging and we're thinking it's 60/40 for Diagnosis A vs Diagnosis B but we'd like your input and additionally some recommendations on the current best treatment modalities for either diagnosis" vs "This patient has diabetes and we need endocrine on board. Just because." Incredible.)

I really don't have much else to say, and I'm off to bed in about 5 minutes, but just - *happy sigh* When do I get to go do this full-time for real again?

Also, totally stolen from Ben: go check out Pandora - it's this fantastically fun music streaming site where you enter in one or two of your favorite artists and it builds you a radio station. I've already found 3 new artists whose stuff I love.

title from "Of Angels and Angles," The Decemberists.

here's wishing you the bluest sky

Book log time! Since the things I'm knitting are a) gifts or b) maybe possibly going to be submitted to Knitty one day. And I haven't cooked anything blog-worthy all week.

Knitter's Almanac, Elizabeth Zimmerman, 1974. I don't usually claim to have "read" knitting books, as I don't really count a pattern book as "reading" but this delightful little volume is really more like a journal with some knitting thrown in than a pattern book. It's the first EZ book I've owned, and I can see why she has such a following in the knitting community: she's smart, funny (in that wry, transplanted-Brit sort of way) and completely on your side. I enjoyed her little asides directed towards the reader and how she simultaneously elevates the craft of knitting to art and emphasizes that it's art anyone can produce. I'm trying to curtail the knitting-related spending, but when I give myself a knitting budget again, I think I'm going to be hunting down a few more of her books.

Worlds of Exile and Illusion, Ursula K. LeGuin, 1964-1967. Three novels in one volume, I read this both to expand my exposure to LeGuin's work and as preparation for writing again. I love how LeGuin has such a sense of the vastness and the continuity of history, how she can link events separated both by hundreds of years and light-years and show you the connectivity among the events, without beating you over the head with it. She's great at world-building, but her characters - like many seem to be in SF - are not particularly well-fleshed out. I was reading this with more of a critical eye than I usually do with fiction, and so I noticed the lack of vivacity her characters have - the reader has a good sense of their motivations, but maybe not for what lies beneath their motivation. Definitely an entertaining and thought-provoking set of stories, but I think LeGuin's preference for the short story shows through here: these seemed to be more novellas than novels.

James Tiptree, Jr: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon, Julie Philips, 2006. I'm not quite finished with this one, but it's a biography of one of LeGuin's contemporaries and friends, so it fits here, I think. I first heard about Tiptree from the Tiptree Award, "an annual literary prize for science fiction or fantasy that expands or explores our understanding of gender." James Tiptree, Jr was the pseudonym of Alice Sheldon, a Chicago socialite, CIA agent and psychologist who wrote speculative fiction throughout the 1960s and 70s. Tiptree was secretive and conducted all his SF relationships (many of which turned into deep friendships with editors and other writers, including LeGuin), via letters, and didn't meet any SF colleagues in person until his mother died and correspondants deduced that from that week's obituaries that Mary Bradley, whose obit listed as a survivor her only child, Alice Bradley (Mrs. Huntington) Sheldon, was in fact Tiptree's mother. I haven't actually gotten to that part of the biography yet (but Mary is very ill, so I imagine it's coming), but even if you have no interest in SF, this is a fascinating work. Alice Bradley Sheldon was a remarkable and, really, tragic woman - from her behavior and writings, she was probably bipolar, and bisexual if not lesbian - in an era that didn't really understand either. She led a riotous and richly full life - and a lot of that was probably an underlying mood disorder, but it makes for interesting reading, especially when filtered through Julie Philips' perspective as a woman writing in 2006, and reflecting at length upon the positions, freedoms and restrictions women had over Alli's lifetime, which spanned from 1915 to 1987. I highly recommend this and if anyone would like to borrow my copy when I'm done, just let me know.

The Omnivore's Dilmenna, Michael Pollan, 2006. I'm not sure I can say anything about this book that hasn't been said already, but everyone who eats in the developed world really ought to read it. This, with Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, further sold me on the "locavore" movement. The way food gets grown, transported and consumed in this country is really appalling when you look at it, and the only reason it's worked for this long (since the 1950s or thereabouts) is that no one really had looked very closely at it until now. I think (from my very limited perspective since I wasn't, you know, there) that the organic movement in the 1960s and 70s was reaching for this point but didn't quite get there. And I'm not sure if the research and the information was really possible to obtain to put it all together until now, now that we have a better understanding of the environmental cost of fossil fuels, and how soil architecture works and more independent agencies taking a look at what's going on in terms of our food production. And I don't think it's so much the pesticides, etc, that are the problem -which is why I've always been kind of wishy-washy on the organic thing - but it's the way in which our crops and food animals are being fertilized and growth-hormoned and what-have-you past the point of healthy growth so that they require such intense levels of pesticides and antibiotics to survive: that's the root problem. I've been idly compiling a mental "required reading" list for the post-industrial age - in terms of understanding how our society and our economy works and doesn't work and how it suceeds and fails and why - and this is close to the top of that list.

Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance, Atul Gawande, 2007. I still haven't read Complications, but I will have to look it up. I breezed through this, and I enjoyed it a lot - it was interesting to read a surgeon writing for a lay audience from my perspective as someone within the medical field. I appreciate that there are physicians writing about these issues, and forcing change from the inside: I've found there's a lot of resistance among existing doctors towards even conducting performance-based outcomes research, let alone grading/judging/paying doctors based upon those outcomes. But I think it's coming, and frankly, I think it's past due - every other profession in this country is pretty consistently evaluated on their performance in one way or another, and it's the worst kind of arrogance to state that our profession is so special we can't possibly be judged by a standardized metric and we're all performing at the very top of our abilities. Because we're not, and no matter how you look at it, just the act of evaluating performance makes people perform better. Which was part of Gawande's point, I think, and it's certainly something the medical profession - and its consumers and customers - need to hear.

~

Well, that got a bit long-winded. Events of note in real life, short form, include:

- Ben and I celebrated our "T -1" anniversary on April 25th - less than a year till we get married! We had a lovely dinner in (truffled wild mushroom risotto, which was pretty tasty if I do say so myself) and brainstormed ceremony/vows ideas, which was fun. And also made us realize - again - that we started dating in high school. We were going through this little worksheet thing for vows ideas and it was all "talk about your first date, about how you met each other." And we met on the stage crew for the spring musical and our first date was going for ice cream at Mr. Shane's and I had to be back home at 9 pm because my parents were terrified that I was out with a boy and there was just so much cognitive dissonance there. But it was a lot of fun and while we don't have anything actually written down yet, we have (just less than!) a year and a good sense of what we want from the ceremony, so I think we're in good shape.

- Relatedly, we went to the Unitarian Universalist church last Sunday, and really enjoyed the sermon - a very interesting mediation on the whole Jeremiah Wright thing that I was going to blog about before I got sideswiped by the cold from hell last week. I really enjoy the UU perspective and position as religion/spirituality as a basis for fueling social justice and I think we're both pretty comfortable with the idea of finding a UU minister for the ceremony (and possibly as a spirtual home for our family thereafter as well.)

- Okay, I did say this was the short form, so: starting my family medicine AI tomorrow! (Two months solid of doing what I want to do. I can't wait.)

- Still looking for a place to live in June, but have two possible people from Craiglist and one from the plea I posted in the NYC Ravelry forum, so I'm feeling a bit more settled about that.

- Spent the weekend hiding from the rain by doing laundry and gift-knitting. And rewatching LOTR: The Return of the King. Now I'm off to the gym and the grocery store. How can you all stand the excitement of reading about this?? :)

title from "Better Things," Dar Williams. How is this song not on YouTube?

*squeals*

Okay, I have a journal club presentation to put together tonight and so I'm not actually here posting except: I was (momentarily) procrastinating with the presentation thing and discovered that Kay Gardiner herself favorited my kitchen rug on Ravelry! (I'm not the only one who occasionally checks her projects to see if anyone likes her stuff, right? Right.) At any rate, I'm just sitting here bursting with knitterly pride.

....all right, back to work.

when May is rushing over you

Eight pounds of strawberries? Is, for the record, an enormous quantity of strawberries. If you were wondering. (Seriously. If you ever find yourself standing in Costco, telling yourself that maybe you might need the second gigantic box of fruit, you don't. Trust me.)

But, now I have 16 half-pint jars of jam cooling on our dining room table. And two cookie trays full of quartered strawberries in the freezer. And, unrelatedly, I may be developing seasonal allergies. I think I'm going to be in bed inside the hour.


For those of you in Cleveland, let me know if you prefer strawberry preserves (whole fruits in jelly, basically) or strawberry-blueberry-raspberry jam. The jam fairy will be making deliveries this week.

title from "These Are the Days," 10000 Maniacs.

step from the road to the sea to the sky

So the laptop is back home again, virus-free and with freshly-vacuumed hardware. I therefore have access to my food pictures, which may or may not be interesting to you, but... I have no real knitting news, so cooking will have to do.

Ben and I made fresh pasta last Sunday, inspired by Brandon's birthday party fun, and made possible by Lola's generous donation of her pasta machine. (Thank you!) We ate half of it on Sunday, and it was... just okay, which was disappointing. I didn't help matters with the sauce I had made, which was not my finest effort, and the texture of the pasta was sort of soft and rubbery and blah. Which was kind of a bummer after spending two hours preparing it. But! We made the rest of the batch on Thursday with an alfredo-type sauce, and it was fantastic - either the pasta seasoned itself in the fridge a little, or we kept a closer eye on the cooking of it or something, but it was very satisfying and something we will definitely do again. We also made garlic cheese bread, more or less on the fly, and that also turned out very well. So, for your culinary enjoyment, some recipes:

Almost Guilt-Free Cream Sauce (no, really):
1. Make a roux: melt 1-2 tbsp butter in a saucepan over medium heat, and stir in 1-2 tbsp flour. Cook with more-or-less continuous stirring, until a paste forms, and keep cooking for at least 3-5 minutes, so the flour won't taste raw. (The paste may thin out some as it cooks, but that's fine.)
2. Season the roux: for a plain alfredo-type sauce, I like to use white pepper (just for the lack of black specks, but black pepper is fine), a dash of salt and about 1/8 tsp nutmeg.
3. Gradually stir in about 1.5 cups milk (I usually use 1%) and keep stirring until well-blended, making sure you stir/whisk out any lumps from the roux. Keep stirring over medium heat until almost ready to serve.
4. Just before serving, add 1/2 c grated parmesan cheese, and stir until well combined. Remove from heat and toss over cooked pasta.

This sauce actually takes almost no time to make (I usually put the pasta water on to boil and then start the sauce, and it's done well before the pasta is) and, given the small amount of butter and the lowfat milk, it's actually not that bad for you - certainly an improvement over the traditional "equal parts butter, heavy cream and parmesan cheese" alfredo sauce recipes. We've used it as is, and we've also added to it - cooked chopped spinach and diced dried tomatoes are a tasty addition. We've also made a southwest-inspired pasta dish using this as a base, and adding chili and chipotle powder to the sauce, and tossing the pasta with black beans and sauteed diced peppers and onions. Anyway, it's one of our staple, easy weeknight meals, and I thought I'd pass it along.

Garlic Cheese Bread
1. Slice 1/2 baguette lengthwise, completely separating the halves. (We used the Stone Oven's Pugliese baguette, which is of course consistently delicious).
2. Mince 3 large cloves garlic and place in small microwavable bowl/ramekin with 1 1/2 tbsp butter, maybe 1 tsp Italian seasoning and black pepper to taste. (We also added a tsp or two of Trader Joe's crushed garlic, because we seriously love garlic in this household.)
3. Microwave on high for 10-15 seconds. Stir and microwave for another 10 sec or so, until the butter is all melted and the garlic a bit cooked, so it loses that acrid, raw-garlic taste.
4. Stir in about 1 tbsp olive oil to the mix, and spread on both cut sides of the bread. (I usually use a spoon to drop the butter-and-garlic mixture on, then spread it around with the back of the spoon - I've found this works better for me than a brush.)
5. Season further with Italian seasoning or pepper if it needs it. (I'm obsessive and fill in the spots with inadequate spice coverage.)
6. Top breads with maybe 4 oz total grated mozzarella cheese (NOT fresh unless you really squeeze the life out of it, as it will be too watery. TJ's "fresh" mozzarella is actually a good compromise)
7. Bake in preheated 375 deg F oven until cheese is melted and browned.

This one isn't maybe all that good for you, but it did turn out to be very, very tasty.

Culinary exploits planned for this weekend include learning how to brew beer from a friend who brews and making strawberry jam from the pounds of strawberries that tempted us in Costco. And maybe some strawberry-blueberry jam, as I still have some of last summer's blueberries frozen in the fridge. (I really need to start trusting that I've frozen enough fruit, and eat this stuff in December, too.)

We were going to make pesto, but the basil that Zagara's had on Thursday disappeared by the time I went back Friday afternoon, so that will have to wait a few weeks. (I think I scared the poor guy in Zagara's, asking him where their basil comes from and what the season is like, and when will I be able to buy 10 bunches, and if I call and ask, will someone know if it's in yet? Last summer's pesto ran out a month ago, and we're going through withdrawal.)

I thought I had pictures of the bread I baked a few weeks ago, but I can't seem to find them. Maybe I'll have to do some baking this weekend, too.

title from "Snow [Hey, Oh]", Red Hot Chili Peppers

we crossed the deepest ocean, cargo across the sea

A finished object! With pictures scavenged from my Flickr account, since my laptop is getting its annual tune-up down on campus. How much do I love our IT guys? (Having someone else to go virus hunting on my hard drive is a joy I will miss once I'm done with academia.)

Pattern: Tuscany shawl, from No Sheep for You.

Yarn: Debbie Bliss Pure Silk, 4 skeins

Needles: Size 8 / 5.0 mm Knit Picks Options circulars

Modifications: the size 8 needles rather than 6's; only did 9 repeats instead of 11 as written.

(I would have cropped this if I had access to my photo editing software - pretend there's not so much towel and couch in this shot. Also, um, let's further pretend the towel I blocked it on actually covered the entire section of couch I draped wet shawl all over. Thanks.)

Even with the fewer repeats (I bought the yarn on sale and they only had 4 skeins left in this color), it blocked out to a substanstial 72" x 23", which is plenty large enough for me. I've already worn it out three times, as spring is slowly but surely making its way to Northeast Ohio. (It may actually already be the most-frequently-worn knitted object I own, aside from hats/mittens/scarves). I'll have to get someone to take a photo of it out in the wild.

As far as med school goes, well. I'm doing my Perioperative Care rotation and I'm not going to be an anesthesiologist, I can tell you that. Mind-numbingly boring, in terms of the OR stuff. And I've just deleted two-paragraph-long rant on the staff of the pain clinic which no one really needs to hear, but suffice it to say that I've been frustrated by the complete lack of concern re: pain that cannot be fixed with/has not responded to an injection or a spinal cord implant. If they can't treat it with a (very well-reimbursed) procedure, they do not want to deal with you. (Why do these patients keep showing up to the pain management clinic, wanting someone to treat their pain?! )

Okay, so I am going to rant a little: here's a sampling of real, live quotations from the residents and staff: "You have to be careful with these old ladies, because most of them don't really have any pain - they're just pressured by their families to get these drugs so they can sell them." "I try not to write scripts for opioids for people who aren't working - you know, if you're young and active and have a job, then fine. But if you're sitting at home all day anyway, there's no way you need that kind of pain medication." "I'm not going to give you any more Percocet to treat your [diagnosed on MRI, nonoperable, nonblockable, 8/10] pain. It won't fix the problem, it's just going to mask it."

Bah. They're not all bad, but it's just so frustrating to sit there and watch a resident or attending make a total mess of a patient interaction (Patient, very apprehensive on being told they can try a nerve block for her pain: "What's a block?" Attending: "A block? A block is a block! Like at the dentist. We'll do you next week.") and not be able to speak up. I've been trying to catch patients on the way out and explain things if it seems like they're confused, but it's still awful to watch.

Two weeks until my family medicine AI. I cannot wait.

(In other, happier news, I've just made my first international yarn purchase - a cone of gorgeous pewter laceweight cashmere/silk. I think I'm going to attempt Frost Flowers and Leaves with it, once I actually finish a laceweight project.)


title from "Hands on Me" by Vanessa Carlton. I really need to find another album to listen to at the gym, so I don't keep outing myself as a Vanessa Carlton fan like this.

none of us forget about who we are

But, um, sometimes we forget to blog about it. I do apologize for all the radio silence around here lately - my only real excuse is that I've gotten back into writing fiction lately, and I've been trying to do that when I sit down to write. Nothing really ready for public consumption yet, but I've got about eight thousand words on a story that might have a viable plot if I can bring the fortitude to actually write it. (I'm trying to ignore the fact that it's going to require that I invent a religion from the ground up. There's already poems and folk songs involved, and I think it's just going to get worse.)

If you've been Ravelry-stalking me, you may see that I've uploaded some pictures of finished objects over there. I'm going to wait to post about them, though, in order to do an update sort of entry. (And it'll also give me some ready-made content while I try and remember to post regularly.) But here are some teaser pictures, from the Tuscany shawl and from the kitchen rug:


I've got two laceweight shawls on the needles, one of sort-of my own design that I'm very pleased with and another that I may end up frogging. The pattern isn't really speaking to me, and it's becoming a chore to knit it, which is, you know, not the point. I also started Eunny Jang's Endpaper Mitts, which are fun but may also get frogged and re-knit (I've only done most of one so far, but I learned a few lessons about colorwork in the process, which was most of my motivation for knitting them). I think it's interesting that I've reached the point in my knitting career where I can quite comfortably contemplate just ripping something out and starting over if it's not working out well. Gone are the days where every stitch was precious to me, and I think that's a good thing.

Non-knitting life stuff has also been proceeding in my blogging absence. I really liked my family med clerkship (surprise fun procedure I enjoyed? Botox, of all things. And I&Ding abscesses, but I knew that already) and I held on to the family-med love during my med-peds elective, so I think the winner is going to be family med in the end. I've set up two away electives in NYC (Beth-Israel in June and Columbia in November) so I'll be checking out some programs relatively soon. And applying not long after that, which is something I'm trying not to dwell on. I still need to work out where I'm staying in June, but I imagine Craigslist will come through when it gets a little closer.

I'm currently doing perioperative medicine at the Clinic, which lives up to its reputation of legendary organization. I'm already thinking about doing another core or elective over there. So I'll be hanging out in the ORs on the other side of the drape for the next little while, trying not to freeze to death. I have never missed being wrapped in non-breathable plastic-coated paper so much as I have today.

title from "La Familia" by Mirah; link goes to a remix that differs subtly but unfortunately from the copy I have sitting on my hard drive.

Anybody wanna join Pownce (messaging/social media/file-sharing network, now out of beta so you don't need an invite) and I can post these there? I'm theraveledskein over there, too - friend me and I can cross-post a copy of the next title-song for your listening enjoyment.

fail with consequence, lose with eloquence

So, I've never pointed you all over to xkcd, which is a fantastic webcomic about "romance, sarcasm, math, and language." And that's a tragedy I'm rectifying today, because it's absolutely hilarious (and will provide you with a few hours' entertainment browsing the old strips). I thought today's comic "How it works" was an excellent introduction to everything I love about the artist's comics, and also a pretty good reminder of how it does work, sometimes:


Go enjoy reading the rest of them. (Edited to add: And make sure you let the cursor hover over the comic to read the embedded pop-up text thing that I'm sure has an actual technical name. They're usually just as funny as - if not funnier than - the actual text.)

In other news, I just discovered this: Sea Socks Cruise and Yarn Expedition! I want to do this. I particularly love the question in the FAQ: Can you bring your family? As if you have non-knitter family members you might be able to convince to spend seven days on a ship surrounded by knitters, who probably would not be so much concerned with getting a tan on their vacation as protecting the handspun from harsh UV rays. It sounds like heaven. However, I think the family medicine AI is going to have to take priority.

....Also, I started Tuscany (lace shawl from No Sheep for You, scroll down for a pic) yesterday and am already one skein of Pure Silk into it. I'm ... not entirely sure how that happened. Further progress may have to wait until the arrival of my gorgeous new stitch markers from Etsy vendor SeeJayneKnitYarns, as I'm approaching the end of my stitch marker collection with two lace projects on the needles. I did get some good work done on it this morning, when I finally brought knitting to our completely useless Monday morning lectures. It helped some.

title from "Consequence," The Notwist

holidays are made for reading

There are free books on the internet! I wanted to pass along this link - SF publishing house Tor is trying out this whole viral marketing thing, and the rewards they're offering are pretty good: a link to a downloadable .pdf full-text book every week! I just received my first book today (Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn, which I know nothing about), and next week's text is John Scalzi's Old Man's War - I've actually been meaning to pick up a novel of his, so I'm pretty excited about this one. So for all you SF fans out there, Tor.com wants your email address, and in return they will give you weekly free e-books. I'm pretty okay with that.

This is also probably a good time to tell you all about my favorite sites to get free books on the internet. I've had these links on my side-bar for a while, but for those of you who are interested, LibriVox is an archive of free audiobooks, produced by volunteers, whose texts are in the public domain. For a fantastic free archive of such texts, check out Project Gutenburg, which has gotten much more tech-savvy and user-friendly since I first discovered it in, like, 1999. Both places are great for discovering interesting books written, you know, a hundred years ago - I particularly enjoy browsing the medical texts, which are mostly hilarious but frequently terrifying. Also included in the public domain are, of course, all the Victorian era classics - I've been listening to Emma recently while knitting, which has been fun.

I am woefully - woefully - behind on the booklog thing, and I may not return to it, especially since I don't know if anyone but me is interested in reading about what I'm reading. I also think my ability to read literature critically has declined in proportion to my increasing ability to read nonfiction and academic literature critically, so I feel that I have very little that's new or interesting to say about books I've read recently. However, for completeness' sake, here's a list (more or less) of the books I've read since the last booklog update - as I recall, all were pretty good and worth the time.

Three Cups of Tea, Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin, 2006.
The Invisible Sex, J. M. Adovasio, Olga Soffer, and Jake Page, 2007.
Salt: A World History, Mark Kurlansky, 2002.
Fledgling, Octavia E. Butler, 2005.
Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth, William Bryant Logan, 1995. (Truly excellent. Seriously. Completely entertaining and you will never look at dirt the same way again.)
Atonement, Ian McEwan, 2001.
Treatment Kind and Fair: Letters to a Young Doctor, Perri Klass, 2007.
Master and Commander, Patrick O'Brien, 1994.

I've also been reading The Bread Baker's Apprentice, by Peter Reinhart, which was a Christmas present (thank you, Lola and Peter!) and a fantastic reference on the art of bread-baking. I've made a few breads so far, including the pain à l'ancienne and the pain de campagne, both of which turned out to be pretty tasty.

I have an ungodly number of works in the "to be read" pile(s), especially after I stopped at a Half-Price Books yesterday out by my clinic in Mentor and left with 7 new books. (Total cost was something like $32, so it wasn't such a ridiculous splurge. But a splurge nonetheless. And here might be the time to mention how much I love buying used books: the sense of history that someone else has read this, the economics of it, the fact that it's effective recycling that works. Love it.) I picked up a Spanish-English dictionary, a pocket guide to Spanish verb conjugations (in anticipation of heading off to Central America next winter to learn Spanish) and some books I've been meaning to read for a while: Octavia E. Butler's Kindred, Toni Morrison's Paradise, and E. M. Forster's A Passage to India. Unfortunately, they had only really crappy knitting books, but you can't have everything.


title from "Things to Forget," Sarah Harmer. (YouTube has failed me on this one, unfortunately.)