Book Problem

It is Sunday morning again, and there are many things that I want to get done today. Too many things! I have been wanting to go sit and read in a coffee shop on the weekend for weeks, but I never get to it, because there are too many other things that actually have to get done. Other people manage to do it. How do they do it? I don't know. I did actually sit in a coffee shop and read yesterday, but it doesn't really count, because it was in Seattle and I was kind of in a hurry and instead of having a nice cup of tea, I had a bagel and cream cheese to ward off starvation. It was yummy, but there was no lingering. I want to linger.

I have a book problem. Last fall, I told myself that I could buy more books only after I read 3 of the 15 or so unread books I already had. So I read 3 books. But then it was Christmas-time, and you can't buy yourself things right before Christmas, so I didn't buy myself any new books. Instead, I received 5 books for Christmas. So then I had to read 5 books before I could buy any new books. I read one. Four to go. I am working on 3 concurrently, plus some other long-term books. Then my birthday came, and I received 2 books, both of which are the next books in two series, thus opening up access to 3 other books which follow those 2 books, so if I wanted, I could get 5 read in one or two fell swoops. Except that I don't want to rush through them. Still, that is good, but now the number of books to read before buying new ones was up to 6. Yesterday, I worked in my office for awhile, and then decided to ignore my plan for reducing the unread book burden at home, and spent an hour or so browsing at Elliott Bay Books, finally buying two books. So now I am up to 8 books to read before getting any new ones. The book burden increases. So does the stack of books on the floor by my bed. On the other hand, the need to buy new books has been temporarily assuaged.

Here is what I bought yesterday:
Better, by Atul Gawande. Gawande is a staff writer for the New Yorker, and a surgeon, so he must be very, very busy. I have read some of the essays in Better already, I think, because they appeared in the New Yorker. He is a good writer. Hopefully I have not read all the essays already.

The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath. I have never read any Sylvia Plath, and the only way I will read poetry is if I own the book it appears in. Does anybody check out books of poetry from the library? Only die-hard poetry-loving freaks, and they would also buy it, unless they are poor. So only impoverished die-hard poetry-loving freaks.

At any rate, now I have filled up the card from Elliott Bay Books, so I can now get $20 off my next purchase. That store is one big enabler, that's what.

birfday

Enter the ICHC online Poker Cats Contest!

Shoot, I don't know how to make it not get cut off on the right. Silly blogger.

TGI Sunny

I love morning. Clean with sunshine and new possibilities. "Salt shining behind its glass cylinder. Milk in a blue bowl," and all that. Coffee, and this morning, pancakes and E.B. White, whose writing is of summer and Camp, and lazy days by the lake in Charleston, bull frogs and duck weed, grasshoppers humming, sun and shade, nothing to do. In actuality, people (me) were hot, sticky, headachy, and irritable, and E.B. White actually writes of Maine, not Pennsylvania and Illinois, but the memory of it and what it could be is nice. I want to go to Camp, and am glad that it is in August this year.

It's a holiday and it's sunny and chilly, with a beautifully blue sky. Tomorrow it will rain again, but I think that this part of the country does not actually need rain.

Okay, that quote is from Mary Oliver; see the link. I can't not state that, as footnote-ish as it is.

Sense of scents

Lately I have been noticing scents. Some are good and some are really bad, and some just are. I won't go into detail about the bad ones, except to say that yesterday, my usually clean coworker really needed to take a bath. Let's bathe every day, people!

Happily, most of the scents I have been noticing are good ones, and I am very glad to notice them. For the past month or so, I have been having flashbacks to the office my mother worked in when I was a kid, taken there by the combined smell of strong coffee and a dentist's office. Mom's office was a doctor's office with lots of coffee, so that makes sense. I get these scents in the lobby of my office building every morning (where there is a both Starbucks and the entrance to a dentist's office), and they make me curiously happy. I liked going to see Mom at work, and there was something friendly and reassuring about the building she worked in (despite the scary medical-ness of it) and the room she and her boss (our doctor) shared as an office. The people were friendly, and the music (oldtime jazz/swing music) was entrancing and promised all sorts of untold wonders. I loved that music.

Happy scent number 2: On the occasional morning this winter, when I leave the passenger cabin on the upper deck of the ferry upon arrival in Seattle and walk out onto the deck itself, I have noticed a lovely, rich bakery smell. It's faint, and it smells like the scent that pours out of the open doors of Specialty's Cafe and Bakery, which I sometimes walk by on my way to work. Specialty's is not that close to the ferry, so I may be imagining it, and the bakery scent I noticed on the ferry yesterday was not the same bakery scent that came out of Specialty's when I walked by 10 minutes later, but it was a scent that they often produce. They keep their doors open, and I think they actively pump their rich, buttery scent out to the sidewalk from multiple outlets up to a block or so away. You can almost see the currents of good-smelling air pouring out of the doors, and you can definitely see the currents of people pouring in, like water swirling down a drain. Keeping those doors open is a really smart marketing idea, although they are heating the outside. I can't eat any of their lovely warm cookies (nut issues), but I can enjoy their smell. I think I enjoy their smell much more than I would if I could eat the actual cookies.

Happy scent #3: On Valentine's Day, I stopped by a sidewalk flower vendor and bought myself two bunches of tulips - one bunch has beautiful light orange petals, and the other has delicate white petals. Both have lovely green stems and leaves, and the whole thing is just really pretty in a light blue vase in my office window. The flowers opened once they got in water (and next to the heater vent), and they have a scent. I have never noticed a tulip scent before, and would have scoffed at anyone who said that tulips smell. But they do. The orange ones have a stronger scent than the white ones, but they are also open more. I never noticed that daffodils have a scent before, either, but a friend proved me wrong the other day. Either that or the flower vendors are adding scent... Horrible thought. We are still months away from flowers blooming in yards here, but it is supposed to be 60 degrees and sunny on Monday (oh, happy day! and a holiday), so there is hope!

Vitamin D Blues

Apparently, I am deficient in Vitamin D. I don't know that this explains my fatigue and nausea, and the doctor did not say that it does, but I am definitely deficient, so hopefully taking mega-doses of Vitamin D will make me feel better, or at least help prevent all sorts of nasty things like osteoporosis, MS, cancer, depression, etc. So now that I know that I am super super low in Vitamin D (but still on the scale), I am now nervous that I am on the verge of having all of those things, or perhaps past the verge. Cindy printed out something for me that says that 6 days of sun exposure supplies enough Vitamin D for 49 sunless days. So apparently it's easy to get, but I can't get it. Nevermind that the sun has come out here maybe 3 times in the last 49 days, so we should all be deficient in it, and that we probably all are. So I am all raring to go with my Vitamin D supplements, if only the prescription would come in the mail. For some reason, the doctor's office is mailing it to me. I don't know if they are mailing the piece of paper that I take to the pharmacy, or if they are mailing the pills. If it's the piece of paper, I would have preferred that they just handed it to me, since my pharmacy is in downtown Seattle, near the doctor's office, and I could get it filled right away. Whatever it is, they sent it Monday and it has not arrived yet, and I am feeling abandoned and depressed. I am going to go buy some Vitamin D tablets over the counter tomorrow, just in case it doesn't come tomorrow. Even if it does come, I will still need them after the megadose pills run out, since you aren't supposed to take it at that high a dosage for very long. And let's face it, I don't ever get much sun, even when it's out, because I work inside.

This may explain why it takes about 3 years or more for people to really get good and depressed during the winter here - they have to really deplete their Vitamin D stores. And we have higher rates of MS here than elsewhere in the country, as do other northern areas, apparently. That's freaky. And even though I now know a possible cause for my feeling yucky, I still feel yucky. My muscles feel like they have worked really hard, but they haven't. They are kind of twitchy. I felt better on Wednesday, even though I didn't get much sleep on Tuesday night because of choir. However, I ate both salmon and tuna on Wednesday, and they both have Vitamin D. That's the second time I have felt noticeably better the day following a tuna-salmon day. Hmm. So I came home tonight and ate a lot of tuna and milk. Anyway, the upshot is, get sun (but not sun cancer - you figure it out), and drink milk and eat your fatty fish (but not too much because we are depleting the stocks of fatty fish).

I'm alive, really

It has been so long since I posted anything that I had to re-enter my username and password into Blogger. It had forgotten me! wah! But then, I had nearly forgotten it, so I guess it was mutual. Sorry for the long periods of silence. When I have been at my computer at home, I have had nothing to say (still don't), and when I have something to say, I am not at the computer. Such are the trials and tribulations of modern life.

A perk of modern life - I just purchased my first ringtone, a nice recording of birds in the forest in Costa Rica. This website has links for ringtones of birds that are much closer (i.e., within 10 miles of here), but they are not available for Verizon phones. Phooey. So I found something similar on the Verizon website. yay! And also, I have reached my Weight Watchers goal, which is just dandy. The news effectively put the cabash (kabash? kabosh? cabosh? Blogger likes none of them) on my plans for a nice peanut butter and sugar snack. I knew that wasn't really what I wanted for my snack, but I haven't yet found what I really want. Anyway, Weight Watchers helped me celebrate by lowering my daily point value, the bastards.

Now I'm hungry.

comfort foods

I wish I had something interesting to say, but I don't. That's the main reason I haven't updated my blog in a month. The other reason is that it is generally too cold in the computer room to want to be in here for long. True, I am here now, and I remembered my password to the blog tonight, so here I am. But with nothing much to say. I am nauseated and have been for almost two weeks, and am tired and just am going to whine for awhile. But I'll stop now.

I finished reading another Jan Karon novel, a Christmas one this time (and the next one in the series - how's that for planning, eh?). They are nice books, about nice people who have real doubts and fears and struggles, and they always make me feel good. I would not say that they are meat and potato books, but they are not brain candy books either. They are more like comfort food for the soul. Dare I say chicken soup? No, I don't, mostly because that is not my comfort food. But they aren't all sweet and overly carbohydratey, either, which is generally what my comfort food is, so maybe they are like chicken soup.

So what is your comfort food these days? And (big question) are you allowed to eat it?