Booking It--Bedside

What books do you have next to your bed right now? How about other places in the house? What are you reading?

I think these pictures, and the columns on the left-hand side of my blog, might answer the question. The ladder bookcase is my nightstand. To the right are the books beside my chair. The rest of my books are in different places around the house. Oh, and this doesn't even show all the books in my office.

Women & Ageism

What I'm Reading Now

Although Cornwell's last few novels haven't been as good as the earlier ones, I'm too attached to the characters to give up on them now.

F

"Bestseller Cornwell's solid 17th thriller to feature Dr. Kay Scarpetta (after Scarpetta) finds Scarpetta—who's the senior forensic analyst for CNN—probing the murder of a Central Park jogger as well as looking into the disappearance of Hannah Starr, a wealthy financial planner. Quizzed on-air about previously undisclosed details of the perplexing Starr case, Scarpetta realizes that the tentacles of the case reach further than she imagined. Her niece, forensic computer whiz Lucy Farinelli, has her own reasons for digging into Starr's disappearance, along with Lucy's girlfriend, New York County ADA Jaime Berger. NYPD Det. Pete Marino, another series staple, is also in the loop as a member of Berger's task force. But it's the dark past of Scarpetta's psychologist husband, Benton Wesley—particularly his presumed death in Point of Origin and shocking reappearance five years later in Blow Fly—that binds the disparate pieces together and make this one of Cornwell's stronger recent efforts." --Publishers Weekly

Touche'

I've been around farming all my life. My Dad's a farmer, and one who didn't think twice about giving a hard, dirty job to a girl, either. No quarter there. And my husband's a farmer. He has more mercy on me than my Dad did, but still. I'm no stranger to farm-related chores.

The other evening, my husband was loading seed. Now, seed is very expensive. People will steal it, and rain will ruin it, so he keeps it locked up in the shop until he's ready to plant it. Then, each evening he loads down the trailer with the seed he'll need the next day and backs his loaded trailer into the shop, closing the door down as far as it will go to protect the seed.

I sat there, on top of one of the pyramids of seed sacks he'd already loaded, watching him move two 50 pound bags at a time from a pallet in the shop onto the trailer. He was dripping sweat; I was rather comfortable, sitting there enjoying the view and the nice evening breeze.

As I am wont to do, I started thinking. "I wonder," I mused aloud, "how much of my life I've spent sitting on sacks of seed?"

Without missing a beat, my husband replied, "A lot more time than you've spent loading them."

Ouch.

. . . To This

So, what all did we do? First, we laid a small stone patio off the back of the raised one. Then, we landscaped all around it with crepe myrtles on the west end (which we hope will, in the not-too-distant future, provide shade in the late afternoon and evenings), encore azaleas, firepower nandinas, and mountain snow pierises. We bought urns for the top of the columns and large pots for the stone patio, and we filled them with gorgeous red geraniums.

Of course, this patio-laying and landscaping required multiple trips to Home Depot in Cabot, where we loaded stones, and retaining wall blocks, and capstones, and edging stones onto carts, then loaded them into the back of the truck, then unloaded them from the back of the truck, then lugged them into place (or at least I lugged--my husband seemed to find it much easier to move all that heavy stuff).

A lot of work, but you know the upside? You can skip your weightlifting that day without feeling any guilt. You get a good tan. You feel a great sense of satisfaction when you survey the work that you've done, and that good feeling returns every time you enjoy the new outdoor living space you've created. And, you save a lot of money.

Another thing-- After several consecutive years of intense mental labor, it felt really good to spend a couple of weeks doing physical work instead. Although both types of work are hard, honorable, and make you tired, the tiredness is very different. When I spend whole days reading and/or writing I may accomplish a lot, but at the end of the day my brain is exhausted, my eyes won't focus, and my body feels awful. I usually have a headache, and I'm kind of sick to my stomach. Often, I don't sleep very well--I keep waking up thinking about what I haven't finished or some new idea that suddenly pops into my head. On the other hand, after a day of physical labor, my muscles may ache, but it's a good feeling. My vision's sharp, my head's clear, and nobody has to rock me to sleep.

Here are the results of our labors:

From This . . .

We are a family of do-it-yourself-ers. Oh, it doesn't always start out that way. Here's how it usually goes:

1. Decide we want something done.

2. Get a professional to give us an estimate.

3. Be shocked by the incredibly high estimate.

4. Decide that we can do it ourselves.

We did a lot of things ourselves when we were building our house. My husband did all the wiring and plumbing, and we worked together doing all the painting and laying the hardwood floors. And of course we weren't about to pay someone fifteen or twenty dollars an hour to clean up after the carpenters, so we did all that too.

The house was finished in January and we were in a hurry to move in, so the outside--lawn, flowerbeds, etc.--was not completed when we moved in. The first summer, we seeded the yard, poured sidewalks around the front and sides of the house, and landscaped those flower beds. The next summer, I designed a deck for the back of the house, and our oldest son built it (I'm sorry I don't have pictures of the completed deck to show off his excellent craftsmanship). We had not yet landscaped around the deck, though, when disaster struck.

We'd gone to early church one Sunday, come home and grilled out for lunch, and then had gone into town. Somehow, the air vent on the bottom of the grill came open, spilling hot coals out onto the deck, catching it on fire. If not for a wonderful neighbor who cared enough to stop and check as he was driving by and saw the smoke, we'd probably have lost our home. As it was, it destroyed the deck and did some damage to the back of the house, as you can see in the pictures below (The white stuff in the pictures is not snow--it's the foam sprayed by the fire department).

Anyway, to make a long story short, we tore down the deck and took a year to decide what to put in its place. We decided on a raised patio, drew out our plan, got an estimate, recovered from the shock of it, and began work on it late last summer. The only problem was, by the time it was finished, there was no patio furniture to be had (unless we wanted to pay thousands of dollars for it as a specialty store, which we didn't) and no plants left to landscape with.

So, this summer's project was to complete the patio, which we spent the first two weeks of my summer break doing. Tune in tomorrow for pictures of the completed project.

Christian Scholars' Conference 2010

Christian Scholars’ Conference 2010 Beauty in the Academy: Faith, Scholarship and the Arts

June 3-5, 2010

Lipscomb University, Nashville, Tennessee

I've really got to get back to work!

Since the semester's been over, I've been doing two things: landscaping (pictures coming soon) and reading for pleasure. But now, it's time to get back to work, at least for a little while. I'm presenting in two different panels at this year's Christian Scholars' Conference:

Paper and Panel Session I:

Mark A. Elrod, Harding University, Convener: “Social Networking and Christian Education”

• Jeff Baker, Thomas Goode Jones School of Law School: Panelist

• Edward Carson, Houston Christian High School: Panelist

• Stephanie Eddleman, Harding University: Panelist

• Michael Lasley, Pepperdine University: Panelist

• Jim Miller, Harding University: Panelist

Paper and Panel Session III

Larry Long, Harding University, Convener: “Beauty, Goodness and Value in the Anglo-American Literary Tradition”

• Leland Ryken, Wheaton College: “Valuing What God Values: The Persistence of Beauty in Christian Aesthetics”

• Stephanie Eddleman, Harding University: “Physical Beauty in Jane Austen: The Intersection of Aesthetics and Faith”

• John Williams, Harding University: “’The Light by Which You See’: John Updike’s Antinomian Aesthetics”

Most of the work's already done (it's nice to get a little extra mileage out of that dissertation), but I've got some revising and editing to do. I'm really looking forward to this conference. It's one of the few that I go to that is cross disciplinary, and that certainly makes it more interesting. It's also a Christian conference that's not afraid to ask the hard questions. I find that refreshing.

Booking It--Useful

What’s the most useful book you’ve ever read? And, why?

Man, I don't know. Too broad a question for me today.

Sorry, folks.

Another Ad

Bye, Bye BlackBerry

A little over a week ago I upgraded from a BlackBerry to an iPhone. Of course, I love my new iPhone. With all those great apps, it's just plain fun to use. But that's not the main reason I'm liking it so much better than my BlackBerry. It has to do, you see, with that little red blinking light.

With the BlackBerry, every time I'd get a message--text or email--that little red light would start blinking. And, of course, I'd feel compelled to check it. That red light was a tyrant. The really bad thing was that it blinked for every message. You couldn't set it to distinguish between a text message (which I did want to know about because it was usually from my husband or kids) and an email (which I didn't always want to be alerted of, especially because a lot of emails on my HU account were "colleagues" emails which often had nothing to do with me, at least not in any immediate sense, or because I didn't always want to handle student emails on my off time but after having read them I couldn't quit thinking about them; and emails received through my yahoo account were mostly things I didn't want to have to sort through in my work account, like confirmations of orders or newsletters, i.e. nothing I needed to be "notified" about).

Now, on my iPhone, I'm still alerted when I have a text message; however, although I have ready access to my email accounts, there is no immediate alert. I forget about my email for hours at a time and check it only when I feel like it. In my quest for simplification, I'd thought of doing away with mobile email access, just because of the control it seemed to exert over me and the subsequent rise in stress level, but I hesitated to do so because having immediate access to email has often saved me a lot of time and trouble.

iPhone to the rescue . . .