Tuesday, March 14, 2006

Today I:

  • had a bowl of cereal for breakfast
  • imbibed some seriously strong coffee
  • am having a Vending Machine Lunch
  • have already been scolded twice for it, so save your breath, I am incorrigible
  • am going out to dinner with the North End Knitters and one San Diego knitter

I need to get LEED Accredited. I know this is sudden, but that's how it is. I haven't read all the details of the process yet, but it shouldn't be impossibly difficult.

Keep in mind, I will nevertheless whine a lot, of course.

I've been doing a fair amount of thinking about that whole career path thing lately and I think the LEED tests are the first step. I need to make myself desirable to a green firm based on something more than my past as a portrait artist or my obsessive way of constructing models. True, I used to install passive solar water heating systems for swimming pools, but I just don't think that's enough. Besides, that was over three years ago, and I never did the pump work.

Books

I got a book this weekend that I'm wildly excited about: Bogs, Baths & Basins - The Story of Domestic Sanitation. (I know, I'm really living on the edge here. I knit, I have a cat, I read about toilets. I'm am spiraling into a pit of decadence. Really. Any minute now.) I'm almost as excited about this book as I was about The Comforts of Home: The American House and the Evolution of Modern Convenience.

This proclivity on my part is what drives me to post pictures of dirty old sinks on the internet. So don't be surprised if I show you old toilets or something, too. I'll try to soften the blow by having a half-finished sock on top of it or something, don't you worry.

In the area of fiction, I'm supposed to be reading The Life of Pi. It shouldn't be too hard, since I've been reading everything from contemporary Japanese fiction to lesbian erotica these days, but I just can't seem to get into it. I don't know why. I was rifling through my bookshelf today looking for an adequate substitute (okay, so maybe I was looking for my camera chord) and I found a cop of Camus' The Plague that I had picked up somewhere. Two paragraphs in and I was hooked. Which is completely bizarre. Esp. since last night I started reading A Princess of Mars. What do these books all have in common?

Me, I guess.

Last night, I:

  • finished reading Lunch while doing laundry
  • had tater tots for dinner
  • drank half a bottle of water
  • ate half a carton of Ben & Jerry's Dublin Mudslide

3 comments:

Carrie K said...

Hey. There is never a bad time to read Camus' The Plague.

I was endlessly mocked for reading Mark Kurlansky's "Salt" for some reason. I like non fiction. Domestic sanitation is unbelievably important.

I had to go back a few web pages to find out what LEED stood for. Oh! Sounds like a good thing. And a good thing to be accredited by.

Martha Spizziri said...

Those toilet and modern convenience books sound right up my alley. (Although maybe a bit too specialized even for me.)

Love watching those PBS shows about people trying to live the way they did in previous centuries.

A book I just finished, What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew, was pretty good, although not exclusively about toilets and such.

Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash also sounds like a good book.

Life of Pi is a really good book. At least I thought so. Hard to take in places, though. But I'd recommend it.

Martha (from the Stitch 'n' Bitch boards)

Unknown said...

"The Comforts of Home" is a good layman's book to read, I think. It's really more about history.

I used to watch 1900 House obsessively when I had TV. Recently I watched that one about the manor house. But they never really dwell on the parts I think are really interesting.