Weekend Update August 26, 2012

Since my last update:
I finished reading The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime that Scandalized a City and Sparked the Tabloid Wars by Paul Collins. This is non-fiction by a local author. It’s part true crime about a murder in New York in 1897 and part story of the tabloid journalism wars between Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst. I enjoyed it and will have a full review up later this week.

I read a short story by Debbie Macomber called When First They Met. I plan on reading the first book in her new series set in Cedar Cove but discovered from BookfanMary’s review of The Inn at Rose Harbor that this prequel short story gives a bit of background to the new series. It’s certainly not required reading prior to the book but this is something that ebooks are great for – in fact I read this on my computer instead of my ereader. I often do that with short stories.

I started The Absent One by Jussi Adler-Olsen. I’m actually reading a UK edition and that edition is titled “Disgrace”. I’m always intrigued when there are different titles and I like knowing both of them because the different titles can give different expectations or interpretations of the stories. I’ve barely started it but so far I like it. That’s not a surprise given the good reviews I’ve seen so far and also how much I liked the first book in the Department Q series.

On audio I’m still listening to Guardian of the Horizon by Elizabeth Peters. I love Amelia Peabody and now that the children in the family are older it’s fun getting their perspectives on events interspersed with Amelia’s.

Other than books and reading:
I think I only read about 10 pages yesterday because apparently the “Back to School” mindset has kicked in even though I don’t have kids and haven’t been in school since . . . well . . . before some of you were born.

I don’t know what it is but every late August to early September I get into an organizing, reorganizing, need a fresh start mood. This year I’ve been able to channel that in some good ways. Yesterday I did a long overdue major closet purge and cleanout. This is something I need to be in the right mood to do and I guess I was.

The Great Closet Purge of 2012

These are the hangers I emptied and all of what was on them is headed to Goodwill.


Abby of course “helped”

Abby of course “helped”

The other thing I did this week was reorganize some things in the way I use my online/phone To Do list application. I’ve used Remember The Milk for a long time and I’m already a huge fan, but my organizational urge this week led me to browsing the tips and tricks to learn how other folks have found ways to use the application. I found some great ideas and have started using a new way of tagging items on my list that I’m really finding quite useful. I also found a fabulous tool that integrated Google Docs that will allow me to generate my standard “Book Checklist” whenever I start a new book. I use this checklist to make sure I get all the updates I do to my spreadsheets, Goodreads, Pinterest, my blog, etc. for every book I read. It’s really pretty slick.

Browsing the iphone photos I took this week . . .

At Piazza Italia in Portland

Our 18th anniversary was this week. We went to a fun little Italian café for dinner and my dessert was a flute glass full of awesome. Lemon gelato with limoncello. YUM!

And yes I get the irony of following up a dessert photo with this. I ordered myself a FitBit and it arrived this week.

It’s like a pedometer on steroids. It tracks steps, distance, and flights of stairs or hills climbed. Since we live in a two story house and any walk I do from our house ends with that 100 foot hill back up to our door I like that I get ‘credit’ for elevation climbing in addition to straight distance. It’s a fun little device with interesting tracking graphs and stats. I also like that it’s much smaller and less bulky than my old pedometer. After nearly a full week with this thing I’m quite impressed.

Hope you’re having a great weekend.