Post-Christmas Daze
I had a lovely Christmas, even if I was sick throughout it. (And kind enough to spread my illness to some other select family members.) Sadly, I never did get to do the baking I was planning, but that's probably a good thing as we're still working our way through two cakes and a good few plates of gift-cookies. I'll just use that bulk sack of bananas, pounds of butter and extra bags of flour and sugar to make festive New Year's treats, is all.
Sorcery and Cecelia was finished all too quickly, mainly during Boxing Day. Much fun. And I love the description of the Letter Game as the authors describe it at the back of the book; certainly something to think about for my post-student life. Just one more writing project to add to the list...
Unfortunately, my school-related reading, which has occupied my time since Boxing Day, is not nearly so entertaining. My reading project has become
The Brothers Karamazov, which started a good few weeks ago and then ignored as hard as I could for as long as I could. But the days are flying by me and the book is rather tedious, and so I've made myself a quota: 100 pages a day, minimum. (Big pages. Small font. Much weariness.) It has become normal for people to speak to me mid-afternoon only to have me reply, "In a bit! I'm behind on my quota!" To encourage myself along I've started to use Ranma 1/2 episodes as rewards. I'm almost through season 1. (Also, cheater that I am, I've read a book on mediation and am working my way through a second, picked almost randomly off my shelf so I'd have something to read before going to sleep. It's not reading time nor reading speed that are exactly my problem, merely the reading material.)
I also went to see
Return of the King a second time. Almost as much fun as watching the film a second time was to watch the family and friends that I'd gone with, none of whom had watched it before. (The cries of "Oh no!" and small shrieks and burying of faces in jackets was highly entertaining, believe me.) I warned them to bring kleenex. Three and a half hours later, they thanked me for the warning.
Also entertaining was that before the film started, I and the woman sitting next to me had an entire container of popcorn poured over our heads. Unintentionally, of course. The man seated behind us in the theatre rested his bag of popcorn on his lap while he struggled to get out of his jacket, and tipped the popcorn over in the process. His knee-level was about eye-level for me, and so it was with a sudden shock that I felt popcorn hitting me in the head and shoulder and rolling down my back. Popcorn tickles.
I turned to see his shocked face, and the very interested faces of a good number of others in the theatre. He was very apologetic, but it took me a good while to be able to reply because the whole situation struck me as being so silly that I doubled over in laughter and couldn't get up for a good half a minute. And my laughing made it okay for everyone else to laugh, too. As the woman beside me said, "Hey, at least it was the popcorn, not the pop."
