Random - 7/29/07

So I've been doing alot of reading with the extra time I've had to lay around with my knee elavated. I borrowed some books from a friend who, like me, has varied taste in books. I just finished a book set in China in the early to mid-1800's and it was fascinating (Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See). It had a great story line about a deep friendship, but it also had all this cool stuff about the customs like footbinding and the role of women in that society. I got to read a great book and pretend I was doing something intellectual at the same time.

Now I'm reading a John Irving book, The Fourth Hand, and it is odd odd odd, but entertaining. One character is a handsome, womanizing TV journalist who is doing a fluff story about a circus in India and while holding out his microphone for viewers to hear the lions roaring, gets his hand chomped off by hungry lions, (at which point the cute blond German sound technician faints into a pile of raw mutton that is meant for the lions) all caught on camera and watched repeatedly the world over.

The other character so far is the oddball hand surgeon who is going to do a hand transplant on him. You would not believe how many pages have been spent so far describing the hand surgeon. He is a near-anorexic compulsive exerciser who is obsessed with the evils of dog poop and whose favorite thing to do when he is running along the Charles River in Boston is to scoop up dog turds with his old lacrosse stick and fling them at the rowers (he thinks rowing backwards is absurd). The great news is that, courtesy of his nutso ex-wife, he ends up with a dog (he hates dogs) who eats everything - sticks, paper, garden hose and best of all, his own and other dogs' poo. (No, the dog's name isn't Molly and she doesn't live in my house - our Molly would never touch sticks, paper or garden hose - she had standards after all). And I'm only on page 70.

I'm sitting at the desk with a giant stack of papers that need to get filed or action taken in some way and what am I doing but writing a blog entry? My friend, Laura, is coming from NC on Tuesday with her 6 and 2 year old girls so Dave and I are frantically trying to get things cleaned and organized, all while entertaining a 1 and 2 year old! On the topic of the boys, they have been such a dream for the last month. Kyle just spent all of snack time sharing with Grant, and the biting has dropped dramatically. We'll see how things go when there is another toddler in the house in a few days!

I guess I'd better go. Enjoy your day,
MJ