Consuela - as stressful as it may be, good on you for donating blood. CJ and I go tomorrow morning and then I get a bonus dentist appointment.

Theo, I'm so sorry.

I kinda want to kick everyone out of my house and have a day or two alone. I love my kids and K-Bug's boyfriend is nice enough, but I have a case of the grumpies and I want a break from being social.

The hardest thing is sorting through their stuff

I got given all my MIL's stuff when she died--that my BIL's family didn't want--and I despise having to pass judgement on the things she thought were valuable. Piles of old pictures without any identification, etc. When we go to the thrift stores around here, I can always tell when someone's estate got dumped because there are lots of things of a similar theme, and I can't help feeling sorry for the person who loved them who thought their kids might love them too.

Theo, that's so terrible.

We still have the only house that counts as a childhood home (I haven't lived there since the early 80s, but they moved back there), and I realise I don't know who gets it when they're dead.

Sorry--stuff is on my mind because my father just gave up two years of trying to add me to his investment accounts, and finally gave up (probably legall messy on a number of levels, since I work for an investment firm, never mind tax issues) and put my sister on them instead to hold them for me.

I have no idea what any of that is about.

GO GRACE.

And now I'm making calls and doing laundry, and hoping the minutes on my phone hold out. I only have 300 minutes on my account, and I've exceeded it the last couple of months. But I don't want to upgrade because I keep hoping this will ease up once I get them into this place and I'm not doing all this coordination.

Klein bottle bottle opener - Boing Boing

Yes, it's $72. But this 3-D printed metal sculpture/bottle opener is fantastic. And so is its marketing copy.

The problem of beer That it is within a 'bottle', i.e. a boundaryless compact 2-manifold homeomorphic to the sphere. Since beer bottles are not (usually) pathological or "wild" spheres, but smooth manifolds, they separate 3-space into two non-communicating regions: inside, containing beer, and outside, containing you. This state must not remain.

I'm not shilling for my employers or anything, but I can't recommend Google Voice highly enough when it comes to trimming down my T Mobile bill. Since I can make just about any land line "my phone", I can make from-me calls from my work phone as well as use my home land line and cellphone interchangeably.

Doesn't apply n all situations, but just for cost alone it was worth the small effort. When it comes to convenience...that's a whole new can of improvements.

I'm not saying this tumblr [link] has made me neater (jesus, no), but it has given me a new nervous tic when it comes to my desk, or my bathroom counters, etc.

Did I share here that I bribed mac to read more? He has this 40 book challenge thing at school, read 40 books by sometime in the spring and they must be in certain categories and whatnot. So until this weekend, he had read 1 book. I kept trying to explain that he would never complete the challenge by reading 3-4 pages an afternoon on the weekdays only. He was unmoved. The second book he selected to read was a 300+ page Percy Jackson book, which is about the biggest book he has ever read on his own - larger books in the past were often partially read aloud by me. He was not making fast progress, so I told him that if he finished the book by Thanksgiving, he could have his Christmas gift from me on the day after Thanksgiving. Well, he finished on Sunday and his iTouch has been ordered and is shipped, so it might make it here by Friday, maybe Saturday. I had him start his next book last night, a biography on Abraham Lincoln that is well below his reading level, but still a book and a non-action fiction book. He will finish that book today. I am so thrilled. He most assuradly has not caught the reading bug, but he is reading more and not fighting about it. We have already selected the next two books from his bookshelves. I am making him read at least 4 things that we already own before he can buy something new. I am also taking that advice myself and reading some each night also - trying to read through things on my TBR shelves that in all likelihood I will not want to hold onto, thus getting more things out of my house.

Sounds like a positive reinforcement per book may be a good idea for him -- sounds like he needs a milestone to make the goal more attractive.

I could use a couple of those myself....

This week is so stupid.

Agreed. Though at least today I managed to come to work with both my cell phone and wallet, which puts me ahead of yesterday.

Vibing for Grace!

Consuela - as stressful as it may be, good on you for donating blood. CJ and I go tomorrow morning and then I get a bonus dentist appointment.

Good on you and CJ too, Suzi, though I'm sorry you'll be following up the blood donation with the dentist. May they go easy on you. I'm giving blood on Friday morning, which will totally be my excuse for overindulging on Thursday -- I've got to keep up my strength, you know!

So, the conversation has moved on, but since I'm actually reading NW right now, I wanted to comment on that Zadie Smith quote:

"I grew up reading a generation of American and English people like [Saul] Bellow, [John] Updike or [Martin] Amis. Everybody’s neutral unless they’re black — then you hear about it: the black man, the black woman, the black person. Of course, if you happen to be black the world doesn’t look that way to you. I just wanted to try and create perhaps a sense of alienation and otherness in this person, the white reader, to remind them that they are not neutral to other people." Zadie Smith, discussing how she never mentions the race of any of the characters in her new novel, NW, unless they are white

The assumption here seems to be that white people don't mention race of white people. I can't work out if it is also that black people don't mention race of black people. How do Asian people deal? Are they in the book?

The explanation at the end of that quote ("she never mentions the race of any of the characters in her new novel, NW, unless they are white") seems like a rather inaccurate description of the book. Of the four narrators, one is white and three are black (two of them have Jamaican parents; I haven't gotten to the last one's section yet, but the first narrator mentions that he has an afro). The races of various characters are mentioned in different ways, depending on who is speaking, so certainly some black characters are identified by their race, and there are a few Asian characters whose race comes up in conversation or narration as well. I see the point Zadie Smith is making in her quote, and I think it works well in the book -- at least, the way that characters speak about race feels pretty natural to me. But it's not only the white characters whose race is mentioned.

Anyway, I'm quite enjoying the book! It's not long on plot, but she's fantastic with dialogue and I love the way she sketches her characters and settings.