Tag Archives: reading

Sunday at Fortress Jeff…

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As I sit down to start writing this, it’s just a few minutes past 8AM. There’s a roast roasting, fresh sheets are on the bed, the vacuum was run through, the creatures have been tended. Even the birds have received their ration of feed. The heavy lifting of the day is done. It’s one of the perks of waking up not far past 5AM (the other being that at such an hour the world outside is brilliantly quiet, though that’s less an issue when winter’s in the air).

Yesterday I uncovered a bottle of unremarkable champaign, sparkling wine from California if we’re to be technical, that I’d stashed in the basement at some point and promptly forgotten about. Usually, finding something in the basement wouldn’t pass for something worthy of mention, except for this morning it’s a good illustration of why I don’t mind so much the 5AM wake up call and it’s corresponding 9PM bed time.

Sunday’s aren’t always a day of rest here. I don’t know how any working person could manage to give away a whole day like that. From time to time, though, the too do list thins a bit, you find a bottle of champaign in the basement, and you get to spend Sunday morning in a comfortable corner with a good book and a mimosa while the sun streams in the window.

If it weren’t for this kind of Sunday at Fortress Jeff from time to time, I’m not at all sure how I’d tolerate Monday through Friday during an average week.

Goodreads…

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I’ve had a hit or miss relationship with a lot of different social media platforms over the years. Facebook is a net good overall with its snark and funny animal pictures. LinkedIn was useless for me given my utter lack of interest in professional networking. Goodreads, though, has always been something of an odd duck in my estimation. I like the concept, but so much of it was duplicative of things I was already getting from Amazon or Barnes & Noble – reviews, recommendations, and so on.

The tempo of my reading has picked up over the last year or so. I’ve found myself plowing through more fiction than usual. Given my habit of picking up bundles of books on the cheap at antique shops, Goodwill, and in other non-online places, more than a few times I found myself with two copies of the same thing – usually something that I had brought home but not yet read. The ability to set books into an own it, read it, want to read it, and host of other statuses could be just the trick to help me avoid this in the future. unfortunately it also meant that I had some homework to do.

I’ve spent a bit of time each of the last few weekends cataloging the collection. Today I can report that I can account for all of the physical books I have on shelves here on the homestead, all of the ebooks, and even what’s sitting out there on my Amazon wishlist waiting to be shipped over to me. It’s the first time I’ve ever had a comprehensive list of what I’m reading put together. I spect I’ll find it surprisingly useful to have access to it in my pocket at all times.

Both my inner geek and my outer compulsion to have a world that’s neat and orderly are well satisfied at the moment.

It staves off the madness…

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Spend enough days in a row sitting through meetings where nothing is ever decided, writing emails that no one ever reads, and dreaming up good ideas that will never see the light of day and one might be forgiven for tending to adopt a healthy cynicism about their profession. In a bureaucracy where every cog has its own agenda and can through even the best laid plans off the rails, frankly I’m surprised when anything gets done at all. It’s practically a cause for celebration.

I suspect that’s why I spend so much of my “off” time doing things that can demonstrate a tangible result. Reading and writing are easy. Finish the book, draft a new chapter, and either way at the end point you have something to show for the effort. It’s measurable. I suspect it’s also why I throughly enjoy mowing the grass, running string trimmer, and cutting back another few feet of encroaching saplings. Adding two hours of physical work after eight hours of repeatedly banging your head against you desk probably isn’t everyone’s idea of good times… but it makes me unreasonably happy, even as it leads to increasing exhaustion.

In that one small way, I’ve carved a bit of order away from chaos. It’s not making the world safe for democracy, or curing polio, but it helps stave off the madness and that contribution shouldn’t be undervalued.

Single white male…

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I’m always looking for new opportunities, which is why I’m contemplating posting a Craigslist ad to see what’s lurking around the area. In my mind it would read something like this:

Single white male, minimal baggage, and minor commitment issues seeks career opportunity in the exciting field of sitting on the back porch and reading. Willing to work days, evenings, weekends, holidays, and overtime as required. Will provide own reading material principally from historical fiction, fantasy, military and political history, and some philosophy and sociology. Health insurance required. Salary negotiable. A dog friendly workplace is not negotiable. Will also consider positions requiring significant written requirements.

An on site or video demonstration of my capabilities is available upon request. All reasonable offers will be considered. Thank you for your time, attention, and consideration. I look forward to working with you in the near future.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Reading badly written books. One of the small manifestations of my particular flavor of alleged OCD is found in the fact that even when I find something I’m supposed to be reading for pleasure and the sheer joy of the English language tedious, I can’t seem to stop. It’s the feeling of having a personal obligation to keep on with a book I’ve started no matter how badly it sucks. It’s infuriating. I hate to imagine how many books I’ve plowed through over the years long after I’d lost interest just because finishing what you start is the right thing to do. I’m getting better at ignoring that little voice in my head the older I get (and the correspondingly less I care about the “right thing to do”). Life is too short to read badly written drivel. Except when it’s something posted here, of course. Then you should definitely read it.

2. The Fight for Fifteen people. I wonder if these people realize that the minimum wage is exactly that. It’s the minimum wage set by the government. It’s not as if the government is telling business that they can only pay someone $7.25 an hour. It’s the absolutely minimum threshold for pay (as long as you’re not working a tipped position). Businesses are free to pay employees as far above that minimum basic wage as they are willing and able to pay – or more reasonably at any amount higher than the minimum than the prevailing market rates call for. It’s why you make more flipping a McBurger in Times Square than you do in Pig Knuckle, Arkansas. Wanting to make more money is fine – noble even – but you do that by making yourself a more valuable commodity and developing skills that are more marketable in the workplace. Expecting anyone to willingly hand over more money just because you show up with a sign still just doesn’t make any bleeding sense to me at all. It seems to me that if you have time to stand around on the sidewalk holding a sign, you might just be better served by doing something income generating with that time. I know I keep coming back to this well, but every time I forget about it and then see it pop up again, the annoyance mounts afresh. It can’t be helped.

3. People who put tartar sauce on a fresh made, Maryland lump crab cake. I can probably allow it if you’re feasting on fish sticks or if you lower yourself to buy flash frozen imitation crab cakes, but when you slather it on to the culinary gem of the Chesapeake, well, you’re just a monster.

(Temporarily) Embracing my inner slacker…

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This is one of those days where I’m reminded just how limited a scope of interest I currently seem to have. I could regale you with another in the latest round of stories about why the office is a shitshow. I could rant about any number of celebrities, political figures, policy decisions, or current events. In a pinch I could even bang out another about the alleged joy of home ownership. What I can’t do at the moment is give you a fresh and interesting take on any of those things. They seem to have become the background hum of every day.

I’m not an escapist by nature, but I find myself spending more and more evenings cramming my nose into a book and trying hard to ignore all the other noise. I don’t want to think about work. I’ve already had it up to my eyeballs with politics. I don’t have it in me to further ponder the expensive mud pit I’m about to have commissioned in the back yard. So for the moment, maybe I’m being a little more escapist than usual. Even so, spending the evening with a decent drink and a good story doesn’t sound particularly awful.

Conveniently I don’t have an inner adrenalin junky to satisfy or I’d probably be off signing up for sky diving lessons, so that seems like what it’s going to be for the time being – or at least until the other bits and pieces settled down a bit and are, on the whole, a little less exhausting. I’m usually inclined to try doing it all at once, but this one time I think it best to let my inner slacker lead the way for a while.

Allocation…

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When something is scarce, we tend to allocate it carefully. Gold, for instance, is a scarce resource in nature and therefore we value it accordingly. Of course you can buy gold at any of thousands of places online, at the corner jewelry store, or even go scrape it out of a river yourself if you’re so inclined. It’s out there for the taking as long as you’ve allocated the time or money for it.

Since I’ve gotten settled in to the new digs here at Casa de Jeff v2.0, time has been my most consistently scarce resource. I’ve gone from a 1000 square foot rental I was more or less happy to avoid doing maintenance on unless it was urgent, to a place pushing thrice as big where I want to keep every little thing in manufacturer-new condition. Let’s just say spot maintenance has grown to account for an increasingly large amount of whatever time is available. That’s not a complaint, really, since I’m the one in charge of making such decisions.

These last few weeks free time that’s left over has almost all been thrown towards reading – even at the expense of whatever writing I had hoped to get done this summer. I’m working my way through a series based around a dimension traveling World War 2 destroyer, a species of human-esque lemurs, their lizard enemies, oceans full of Very Bad Things, and a British colony that so far just begs you to hate them. It’s not my normal reading, but I’ve churned through the first 5 books of the series in unprecedentedly short order – one of the consequences of dumping every available moment of free time into the Kindle.

I swear it’s a better read than I just made it sound. If you’re at all into historical fiction or sci-fi I really highly recommend giving the Destroyermen series a look. After all, if I’m peddling someone else’s book on my site without getting any compensation at all, you can well imagine that I’ve been impressed with it from start to finish… Well not quite finish, more like the halfway point, but let’s not get hung up on semantics.

If I were a fancy big city psychologist, I might say that it has something to do with a deep-seated need for escapism, but since I’m not I’ll just go with it being a damned entertaining read.

Books…

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One of the first things I do at the start of every move is box up the contents of two large bookshelves. They’re the “quick hit” to get the process started and they’re not going to be something I can’t live without for the month or so it’s going to take me to get them unboxed and back into their proper place. As part of my current “ask the blogger” segment, someone asked what the books were and why I’d bothered hauling them around across 10,000 road miles and 15 years. There’s a story there, but I’m not sure it’s a particularly interesting one.

I’ve never counted the exact number of physical books I still have – at 13 boxes I’d guess somewhere in the neighborhood of 175-200. Measured by weight it’s got to be something on the order of 3,729 metric tonnes. Since I’ve loved books since long before the Kindle came along, they’re something I’ve acquired over a lifetime of reading. I’ve purged the collection before many moves and seem to have it down to a core group that I just can’t bring myself to part with. They’re mostly biographies and histories – covering everything from Cicero to the Iraq War. There’s a much smaller mix of historical fiction and the occasional “classic” a la Moby Dick, A Tale of Two Cities, and 1984.

As someone pointed out there are these buildings called libraries where large volumes of books live permenantly. Theoretically I should love libraries, but I’ve always had a hard time with the idea of giving a book back once I was done with it, especially the once I’ve found interesting or meaningful. The habit has gotten easier since the rise of the e-reader, but that doesn’t do anything about the stack of bound paper I already have.

I have a tendency to hold on to them for the usual reasons – maybe I’ll need to reference them some day (which I actually have done for more than a few blog posts and while I was working on my last short story). In all likelihood I know the only time most titles will ever leave the shelf is the next time I move. Still, I like the idea of having them. I like the way they look on the shelf. I like the way a room full of books smells. I like the way they feel in my hand.

Plus there’s the one I never talk about – the fact that the furniture has changed, the clothes of changed, the critters I have around change, the locations change, but the books stay the same. Maybe they’re the touchstone; the hearth at the center of what whatever house I happen to be in whenever I get where I’m going.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Failing to read for comprehension. When I send you a four sentence email it’s not like reading the entire thing is going to monopolize your day, especially when one of those sentences tells you exactly how to do what you’re trying to do. No, the answer isn’t to send me more “follow up” emails. The answer, as I will tell you over and over and over again as needed, is right there starting on line two of the original response, which you obviously didn’t stop long enough to read. You can feel free to “follow up” all you want, but damned if I’m doing it for you. Your inability to read and comprehend simple English is not so much my responsibility.

2. The value of time. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I know the value of my time. It’s the most limited commodity I have and it doesn’t come cheap. Unless you’re on the friends and family plan, it never, ever comes free. Whatever it is that’s so critical, unless it’s an immediate threat to life or property, really isn’t so critical and certainly doesn’t give rise to the need to give anyone a freebie. I’ve been around long enough to know that there’s always a tomorrow… and on the off chance there isn’t a tomorrow none of it is really going to matter at that point anyway.

3. Non-surprise surprises. For the love of Pete, when I’ve been telling you for weeks that X is going to happen on Y date how in seven hells are you surprised on Y-4 that Y is going to happen next week. It’s been on the damned calendar for 5 months. We’ve had at least 30 meetings about it, but whoa, every-damn-body but me seems to be taken by surprise. Look, I know we always try to kill the gator closest to the boat first, but there’s no way I’m letting anyone get away with the “Uh, I didn’t know” excuse on this one. I find it interesting that all the things we didn’t have time to do three months ago, we now suddenly want to cram into a day and a half. I hope you’ll forgive me if I don’t wrap myself in knots trying to do that which is inherently illogical if not downright impossible given the limitations of available time and manpower.

Bloggers in love…

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I read alot of blogs, but there are only a handful that I check on a regular basis. Two of my favorites are soooooo clearly hot to trot for each other. They’re bloggers in love. Which, from what I can tell based on the recent spate of posting, has much in common with teenagers in love. There’s plenty of cross posting, comments, and reblogging from one another’s sites. There’s plenty of not-so-subtile flirting flying in from every direction. Yeah, it’s alot like high school except the writing is better – which I suppose makes it not really like high school at all. Still, I suppose it’s better than pulling pigtails and running away.

Anyway, rather than reaching for something original this morning, I thought I’d plug my two favorite bloggers in love today. Go check out Becca at 25ToFly and the Adam at Chowderhead. You’ll be glad you did.