I love to read. I have loved to read ever since I was a kid and my best friend’s Mom would feed me books (her kids weren’t readers so she adopted me :) ) like my favorites The Scarlet Pimpernel, Anna Karenina, Three Musketeers, The Man in the Iron Mask, Count of Monte Cristo, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, multiple Greek & Roman mythology books, and more and more classics. I would soak up all these books. Then throw in all the comic books I would read and it seems like that’s all I did! (even though I know I did more as I was outside all the dang time!)
Summer is a great time for me to read as I lay in the sun and read…for hours. My current “To be read book right now” stack on my nightstand is:
8th Confession – James Patterson (JUST FINISHED LAST NIGHT!)
Capitalism & Freedom – Milton Friedman
Gossip Girl: A Novel (Book #1 in series)
Breaking Dawn (#4 Twilight series) – Stephanie Meyer (once I start this I know I cannot put it down!)
Wishful Drinking – Carrie Fisher (Just finished today ! 7/1)
New X-Men: e is for extinction
New X-Men: imperial
New X-Men: new worlds
The Daily Coyote – Shreve Stockton
Shutter Island – Dennis Lehane (need to read before movie comes out!)
Free to Choose: A Personal Statement – Milton & Rose Friedman
Illiad – Homer
Atlas Shrugged – Ayn Rand (I need to finish this: I put it down after I could no longer take how close to reality it is becoming with the new administration and it depressed and sickened me.)
Then there is my 2nd stack under my nightstand of “I need to read very soon”:
Lipstick Jungle – Candace Bushnell
Assassin – Ted Bell
The Fountainhead – Any Rand
Gossip Girl (books 2 and 3 in series – I bought the boxed set!)
entire Harry Potter series (I know, I know..slow)
The Road to Serfdom – F.A. Hayek
The Wealth of Nations – Adam Smith
And in my cart at Amazon…
Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire – Amanda Foreman (movie The Duchess was based on this book)
The Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinburg – Helen Rappaport
Swimsuit – James Patterson
The Lost Symbol – Dan Brown (pre-ordered for 9/15!)
Run For Your Life – James Patterson & Michael Bennett
Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology – Ayn Rand
Outtakes from a Marriage: A Novel – Ann Leary (Denis Leary’s wife)
This is a lot of stuff to read! And I still have more I want or will definitely find and want it soon!! So I better get on this!!! I was hoping to get at last 4 books read this vacation week. I’ve finished 1…I am waaaay behind…yikes….
Today was a fun day! I did sleep in till about 7am like a lazy slack! Huskies said HOT outside already Mom! I took them down to a forest walk so it was mostly shady so they could stay cooler. They had the same reaction today that they had last fall on this same walk – something wicked this way is! They smell a bear? Or a dead body? Ghost? Angelus is afraid of nothing (ok, well…bees…) and he was acting strange and not wanting to continue on down the path. And Storm had less than zero interest in continuing. So I of course made them continue on…but then was imagining a scary movie…where the dumb girl makes her dogs keep going down the scary path even though every person watching the movie is screaming at the screen to listen to your dogs!!! So we turned around :)
After doggie walk and coffee and email..I went on my hike. About 6 miles with 3 of it straight uphill. Beautiful though. A great hike. The goal was making it up to Hawks Peak. And I did :)
Hawks Peak view 2
There was still snow in some of the higher elevation areas. And the best part – I saw 1 biker in the distance but other than that – came across no one. Very peaceful. It was windy up on the tippy-top rock at Hawks Peak so I had to be careful not be blown off the rock!
Hawk's Peak View 1
I was using my iPhone app TrailGuru and it said about 6 miles and almost 2 hours but then my battery died – doh!! Good thing I didn’t run across any bears and need the phone camera!
Then it was lunch (turkey burger!!) and sun/tanning time! I just started reading James Patterson’s “8th Confession”. I realized today as I was going through my stack of books that I brought that I *always* read a James Patterson book on my vacation. So I moved it up in the priority pile :) These are always fun summer reads. This is the Women’s Murder Club series he does. I really like this series. ABC made a short-lived TV series based on it last season which I also liked. But not as much as the books obviously. Although Angie Harmon (who played the main character – Lindsay Boxer) was quite likable. I find his books, and this series in particular, to be very fun reads. And when you are baking in the sun, “thinking” books are not always the best (Milton Friedman’s “Capitalism and Freedom” is next in my pile…might get pushed down for “Gossip Girl” till after vacation..)
After sun time, it was chore time – laundry, cleaning guest bedrooms used this weekend, vacuuming house (I am ALL FOR 1 story houses btw…truly….stairs suck), hosing off deck pollen & spider webs (Angelus was VERY happy with this), and taking the garbage and recycling out to the bear box for pick-up day tomorrow. Now…I considered “accidentally” dropping garbage in the driveway and entryway to “accidentally” attract a bear or 2 (they LOVE and know when garbage day is – very smart bears!)…but I didn’t (dang it!)
Then we did another short buddy walk. I wore flip flops when I did this…unwise…I stabbed my foot on a big stick. OUCH! Bleeding!!! Crazy that the buddies can walk on all the sticks and rocks like they do. What pansy feet I have :)
I set myself a time limit on chores so it was time to make dinner and pick a movie! I made my tofu spaghetti – yum! And watched “Doubt”. Good movie. Not as dark as made out to be…but perhaps that is because A) I like the actors (Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Amy Adams) and B) I’m not Catholic. Good watch though.
But now just about time for sleepy so I can do it all again tomorrow :)
