Miscellany
Nov. 5th, 2013 10:36 am1. Whatever was going on with my Friends page went away after a day or two. Much relief.
2. With the onset of November, I'm beginning to think about this year's Thanksgiving feast. I'm leaning towards letting it be the debut performance of the slow cooker I bought a while ago (and which is still in the box).![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
mmegaera's quasi-gumbo, a nice side salad of some kind, and home-made apple pie (a la mode? maybe) - sounds right.
3. My acquisition of e-books has slowed, but not stopped; I've got 159 books on the Kindle now, and read 23 of them. Most of them are still freebies, but I've bought a couple, includingmmegaera's Repeating History (I'm about a third of the way through it now). Mostly, my trips to Project Gutenberg have been triggered by one or another event: remembering how I was fascinated, in childhood, by stories of Roy Chapman Andrews' expeditions to the Gobi (which resulted in my acquiring his Camps and Trails in China, and also the life and letters of Louis Agassiz); finishing The Thirty Years War: Europe's Tragedy (prompting me to get Schiller's Wallenstein trilogy, and several others of his historical dramas); a mention by al_zorra of Frances Trollope's Domestic Manners of the Americans; listening to albums by Pete Seeger and Stan Rogers (I got an anthology of Robert Service and another of "Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp"). I've also taken to browsing, scanning, say, all the PG authors with such-and-such an initial ("K" netted me Kyd's Spanish Tragedy, a history of Japan by one of the first Japanese students at Oxford, and a collection of Kalidasa's poetry). Reading Tim Powers' Hide Me Among the Graves prompted me to get Polidori's The Vampyre and Le Fanu's Carmilla; I've added Baha'U'llah's Book of Certainties (I knew a couple of Baha'is in high school); and, well, a lot of other stuff. The novelty hasn't worn off yet.
4. The other day, I was hanging around in my office, waiting for the time to go out and catch the bus home, when someone poked her head in the door and asked, "Did I remember to thank you?" It was one of my students from last semester's History of Math class, which apparently she had really enjoyed. (She's currently in her classroom observations, preparatory to becoming a high school math teacher, and is rather depressed by the level and nature of the material covered.) Always nice to hear from ex-students. (Another one - K, whose Master's thesis I'm still trying to get published - stopped by yesterday.)
Being lazy today. It's chilly and wet outside, and I don't have any classes.
2. With the onset of November, I'm beginning to think about this year's Thanksgiving feast. I'm leaning towards letting it be the debut performance of the slow cooker I bought a while ago (and which is still in the box).
mmegaera's quasi-gumbo, a nice side salad of some kind, and home-made apple pie (a la mode? maybe) - sounds right.3. My acquisition of e-books has slowed, but not stopped; I've got 159 books on the Kindle now, and read 23 of them. Most of them are still freebies, but I've bought a couple, including
mmegaera's Repeating History (I'm about a third of the way through it now). Mostly, my trips to Project Gutenberg have been triggered by one or another event: remembering how I was fascinated, in childhood, by stories of Roy Chapman Andrews' expeditions to the Gobi (which resulted in my acquiring his Camps and Trails in China, and also the life and letters of Louis Agassiz); finishing The Thirty Years War: Europe's Tragedy (prompting me to get Schiller's Wallenstein trilogy, and several others of his historical dramas); a mention by al_zorra of Frances Trollope's Domestic Manners of the Americans; listening to albums by Pete Seeger and Stan Rogers (I got an anthology of Robert Service and another of "Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp"). I've also taken to browsing, scanning, say, all the PG authors with such-and-such an initial ("K" netted me Kyd's Spanish Tragedy, a history of Japan by one of the first Japanese students at Oxford, and a collection of Kalidasa's poetry). Reading Tim Powers' Hide Me Among the Graves prompted me to get Polidori's The Vampyre and Le Fanu's Carmilla; I've added Baha'U'llah's Book of Certainties (I knew a couple of Baha'is in high school); and, well, a lot of other stuff. The novelty hasn't worn off yet.4. The other day, I was hanging around in my office, waiting for the time to go out and catch the bus home, when someone poked her head in the door and asked, "Did I remember to thank you?" It was one of my students from last semester's History of Math class, which apparently she had really enjoyed. (She's currently in her classroom observations, preparatory to becoming a high school math teacher, and is rather depressed by the level and nature of the material covered.) Always nice to hear from ex-students. (Another one - K, whose Master's thesis I'm still trying to get published - stopped by yesterday.)
Being lazy today. It's chilly and wet outside, and I don't have any classes.
