THIS IS NOT WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE IN NYC

     As I was saying, this is not what Brooklyn looks like.  The trees have yet to blossom.  Tad took this on his trip to Washington DC two weeks ago.  I have been driving myself crazy without much respite recently.  Work work work, read read read.  Not that I don't enjoy it but it is doubtless an insular activity!  I need more social life than what Thoreau and my coworkers give me.  Next week Tad and I will journey up to Albany and spend a few days with his family for Easter on the train.  I want to make us food since I remember my hell of a train trip from Rochester to Penn Station.  I refuse to think about how pent up and hungry I was.  No, not thinking about it. 

     I have finished off another two books since updating.  I devoured Rudyard Kipling's Just-So Stories with annotations and everything.  It seems he was an aficionado for all types of mythos and his traveling led him to flavor them all together into a new and more amazing stories.  The neolithic stories about the alphabet and everything weren't very good and were a chore to slog through.  I had read 'How the Elephant Got His Trunk' before in sixth grade I think but many were new and rather adorable.  I could see the repetitious phrases mimicking Homer and the sing-song that children learn to repeat back.  I ordered from the library his masterpiece Kim so I will compare his children book with this.  I remember when I was maybe in middle school reading The Jungle Book and I think some of the grandeur of these stories were lost on myself.  I remember I read it after watching some movie that Tad assures me was the live-action version of the Jungle Book.  Let me check if my timing is right then.  Nope, that movie was released Christmas 1994 making it probably the summer of either 1995 or 1996 that I read it.  Geez, didn't feel that long ago.

     The other book I finished was On The Narrow Road which is a travelogue set in 1989 about following the road Basho took in his famous book The Narrow Road to the Deep North.  Fun bit of trivia: the title of Basho's book has the more accurate title of The Narrow Road to the Boonies.  Hah, poetry makes it sound much better.  I kept remembering the vivid and expansive landscapes of Princess Mononoke and the evocative music.  Lesley Downer wanders fruitlessly it seems over much of the more modernized Japan in search of the idealistic simple life Basho wrote about and the beautiful moments that are more cliche in Japanese poetry than the use of the work anon instead of soon in English.  She does find the poor rice villages deep in the mountains and even her yamabushi, mountain hermit priests.  Turns out that now for some money you can get a week of training on the Holy Mountains and become a yamabushi yourself.  I think Tad and I found Tim's wedding present.

     Today is Free Cone Day at Ben adn Jerry's and since I have work late tonight I am headed straight there after this.  I am currently reading Walden by Thoreau (yea, why else would I throw that reference in?) and A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century which I am still not quite half-way through.  It's a good read but very dense, like the best brownie ever that they forgot to put leavening into.  Oh, and I'm hungry and it's wet out so I might argue Tad into grabbing a milk tea at my bakery.  Maybe...

     I'm only looking forward right now a few days and keeping my head down until my vacation.  I'm hoping up there it doesn't look half-bad so we might explore Albany as well, or just rest and spend a few days around family.  I will take either one at this point.  Also, I saw this car for sale the other day:

     Sweet ride.

501 books count: 65 (I worked it out, I think I had too many highlighting systems, so I condensed them down.  Now I have read the yellow, started but had to stop due to library returns or lost books in green and blue numbers for books I have setting up in queue)

     Goal is now to read 100 by the end of summer.  BAM, no problem I have tons of time now that I don't do anything interesting :p