Weekend Round-Up

In between steps of lasagna-making, I finished Kindred yesterday evening. What a compelling, riveting book. I hope I can coax my library's book club into a thoughtful, compelling discussion tonight.

The lasagna turned out nicely, though that sauce (yeah, Mom's recipe calls for doing the sauce from scratch, too: I missed that 40-minute step when I skimmed the recipe in the morning!) seemed awfully thick.

Sunday morning we went bird watching, beginning by the River in a stiff, chilly wind, and finishing at Forest Hill Park. We didn't see anything special for our trouble. After lunch, we picked up step-kid and ran a few errands. By the time the three of us wandered over to Byrd Park with some kites, the wind had died down enough to make flying Phil's fancy one nearly impossible. The SpongeBob kite did okay, reaching tree top level for a while. Ever since I followed the advice of the kite store fellow and cut the cartoon character's legs and arms off the kite, it has been a reliable flier.

Saturday we floundered through some house projects. Somehow, we never got to the yard, even though it was about 70 degrees. Oh wait: P did re-plant the elephant ear. Since I am not doing it right now, I don't think I will be cutting back the monkey grass this year. And now that the daffodils are blooming away, I hate to bend them over in the cause of raking up the last of the leaves. . . . I thought I planted other new bulbs where the pond used to be; so far I see the signs of exactly one new leaf.

I wandered into the City Library and picked up:
- Alice in Sunderland, an interesting art-book / graphic novel which has less to do with Alice that I thought it might, and
-How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read, not because I need to study that skill (heavens no!), but because I want to see how someone built a book on that theme.

Still reading:
- My lib's copy of Life Stories: Profiles from The New Yorker. Only, here's an email from our ILS saying it's due, so I guess I better note this quotation and bring it back: Paul Broyard, who moved to Connecticut after years and years in NYC: "'People in New York have psychotherapists, and people in the suburbs have have handymen. While anxiety in the city is existential, in the country it is structural.'" (p. 292) Personally, I have a lot of structural anxiety, and a handyman. I thought it came with home-owning.

This morning, in order to avoid housework before a 12:30 start to my workday, I'm trying a few things on this Wired how-to list to speed up my computer, but I am too timid to try a lot of it. I might need User Switching and Secondary Logon, right??