ciroccoj | Feb. 11th, 2007

Somehow I haven't posted here in over a week. ::squinting at screen:: I don't see how that's possible.

Not much in the way of news, other than yesterday I learned how to give a cat insulin shots (not my own cat) and we went skating on Friday but had to give up after only an hour because I couldn't feel my toes at all. Oh, and the kids started swimming lessons again.

And Family Law is depressing, yo.

Books read:

Me:
- Whiteout, by Ken Follett. The plot was about terrorists and a virus. The story took place during a storm. The storm was over Christmas in Scotland. There were many characters. Some were good and some were bad. I wanted to find out the ending. The ending was good. It just wasn't worth the boredom of the stilted prose. ::yawn::
- Aztec, finally, again, and I loved it the second time around. I'll probably read it again some day, and, in the meantime, will be on the lookout for other books on that period in history.
- Gave up on Poland, by James Michener. It's good, I'm just not that interested in Poland, I guess. No offence to any Poles reading this. I also wasn't thrilled that, for the first few chapters anyway, it was written very much in the manner of The Source, his book on Israel, where, instead of just telling one chapter per period, it's one chapter per tragic ending of an episode of the country in question. The Jews get driven out of Israel. The Crusaders finally lose. The Arabs are driven out of Palestine. Death and mayhem and rape and pillage and utter destruction of the same bloody village, over and over and over again. Cheerful reading. Really. I was able to push through for The Source; not for Poland.
- Tesseracts⁷, a bunch of short sci-fi stories by Canadian authors. Some good, some bad, one that had me actually laughing out loud with the following lines:
  
  Jerry 1 definitely looks a little flustered. He keeps blurting things about Posse Comitatus, anal sex, Roundup and Atlantic City.
  
  Yeah, Jerry's jerking and twitching, trying to do a meringue and crunchies and recite the Bhagavad Gita at the same time.
Daniel: Finished the Half-Blood Prince, and is now doing some wrap-up on it for English. Laughed like an idiot at a picture by seviet entitled Santa's Dilemma, Christmas 2006. He'd like to read some fanfic, but, um... yeah, I'll have to hop over to SugarQuill and find something suitable. The answer to the question "Couldn't I read one of the fanfics you read, Mama?" was a decided Um, no ;)
In the meantime, he's started on a bunch of Jackie Chan books. ::shrug:: Fluff, but enjoyable fluff. We'll have to find another series for him to read for English. I may take out my Black Cauldron books; he's definitely old enough to read them, and I think he'd really like them. I have some grammar and stuff for him to do for English, but I kinda don't want English to turn from the one subject that I hold out as a treat to the one he needs prompting to do. Math became that when he finished the Grade 4 curriculum and got into multiplication and division practice.
Chris and the Boys: finally finished reading Chamber of Secrets to the boys at night, and they are now fairly far along in Prisoner of Azkaban. I've got two night classes a week and choir Wednesday night this month, plus a few choir concerts, so he puts them to bed far more frequently. And Justin's a bit older, so he's able to stay awake for more of the story. They're going at a pretty good clip right now.
Justin: hasn't been reading much, but seeing as how he may be home schooling in the fairly close future, this may be changing soon.