Blogalanche

I can't sleep, so here's a blogalanche of stuff. Since I've been going through a period of not being motivated to put stuff onto my blog, this is a smorgasbord of completely unrelated topics that have been knocking 'round my folder of things to post. The upside is that I'll now consider this folder cleared. The downside is that none of them will be developed fully to become what I had originally considered, but, um, that's that.

Carmelita's on the radio, the godmother of Boston rock, and I'm enjoying hearing some good and some not-so-good bands from the Boston area on WAAF's Bay State Rock program.

Everybody likes pictures. Why is that? Who knows ... but we do. Whenever I'm on a particularly boring conference call or have a few minutes to kill I'll click on this link that shows me the last 50 pictures uploaded to LiveJournal. I'm not a member of LiveJournal, and don't even know anybody who is. But I get a kick out of seeing what people are choosing to share with the world.

So here's my little contribution to sharing pictures with the world.

Isn't my daughter the most adorable girl ever in the history of the world? That's not rhetorical. The answer is yes. She's absolutely precious. She was a pink cat for Halloween, so my wife Ann bought a can of "washable" pink hairspray. Ha. Um, no. It's washable with what? Sulfuric acid? Nair? More than a month later she still has pink highlights. So be it. It's cute.

A couple of weeks ago in the midst of my goatee experiment I was in the bathroom shaving the scruff from my cheeks. In my peripheral vision I noticed a short person dressed in pink watching me. "Whatcha doing, Daddy?"

I explained to Nicole that I was shaving.

"But what's that thing you got there, Daddy? Why don't you shave with a razor and white stuff on your face?"

Once I got over my chuckling at the look of her youthful curiosity, I told her that I didn't want to shave all the hair off my face, just some of it, so I was using an electric razor, and it doesn't need the white stuff. She asked if she could try it. And, hey, since I didn't care if she made a mistake or two or three, I agreed. She accepted the task with a reverent seriousness that awed me. No kidding -- she embraced the job with a maturity belying her years.










Next is a picture I took last week of one of my cats, Sonny, in all his autumnal glory. He's experiencing a modicum of celebrity status lately due to a guest appearance in the household of a blogger with umpteen-million weekly hits. I think his fame is going to his head. He bit my dog Lindsay on Friday. Lindsay whimpered and ran to me for comfort. Who's the pussy in that pair?

Short Reviews

Recently I've been cleaning off my reading table. This means that I sit down in my favorite chair, pick up one of the books which has disappointed me after I've suffered through three quarters and then put aside. When the pile of books starts looking overly sloppy (which for me is quite a statement) I force my way through them.

Here are a couple of decent reads that were never relegated to my Group W Bench along with the literary father rapers and mother stabbers.

The Lisbon Crossing by Tom Gabbay got my attention because I'd heard good things about his first book The Berlin Conspiracy, and I enjoy period fiction.
A moment of silence for James Michener, one of my all-time top five writers, and the best historical fiction writer of all time. To be fair, Gabbay never claims to write historical fiction, just fiction that's written around a particular time or event in history. Big difference.

The Lisbon Crossing was almost tossed into the "I'll finish it later" pile, but the plot kicked into gear by the third chapter and held my attention. Set during World War II, it's centered around a Hollywood stuntman of questionable history but strong character. He needs to leave America quickly because he's got a price on his head after having an affair with the wife of a wealthy movie executive. Conveniently, a starlet in decline hires him to accompany her to Lisbon in search of a childhood friend that's gone missing after escaping Nazi Germany.

Right about here is where I had to force myself onward. The story is just a tad too improbable for my taste. The book recovered with a cat-and-mouse game between Allied spies, German intelligence, the French resistance movement, and some good ol'-fashioned car chases, casinos, gunfire, and fists. The improbability factor soars higher as the novel progresses, but I found it entertaining to find out how Gabbay intended to tie up all the loose strings.

All in all, an okay read for purely entertainment purposes. 2.5 out of 5 stars.

If you want a really good read, I strongly recommend The Fall of Rome. I'm getting tired now, so I'll come back sometime soon and explain why I enjoyed this book so much.

This weekend my gorgeous wife Ann worked both Saturday and Sunday. It's the busy season for selling books for kids. Here's a picture I took of her and Nicole over the Thanksgiving break at her parent's vacation home in New Hampshire. Ann's gorgeousness aside (sigh), that meant I spent Saturday and Sunday with not only my biological kids, but my extended family of kids. Yes, Karlee helped me, Joey and Nicole cook an artery-clogging breakfast two days in a row. We also had Donnie and his buddy Brad on Saturday night and all of Sunday.


I'm going to have to revisit this blog post and fill in more details later, because now is getting to the point of being ridiculously late at night (morning). Here's the extremely short version. Karlee from Friday night through Sunday night. Haircuts for everybody. About a cord of wood burned in the fireplace. Five pounds of bacon and two dozen eggs. Kids eat a lot.

Yeah ... this post's layout of pictures and text is horrible. I'll clean it up later.

I only got through a few of the six items in my "to be posted folder," but that'll have to do for now. I've got to get some sleep, then get to work in a few hours.