Deciding to take the summer off from college (yeah, all two grueling classes it would have been), I've got a bit of extra time on my hands and I've gotta decide what to do with it.
It's been more than a few posts since I last bitched about the amount of recreational and ideological reading I own and want to complete...so I'll bitch about it right here. To some degree, the following books are ones I have not started or have not finished:
- Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, unabridged
- George Reisman's Capitalism
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago
- Gordon W. Prange's At Dawn We Slept - The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor
- Scott Hunt's The Future of Peace - On the Front Lines with the World's Great Peacemakers
- Joseph W. Esherick's Reform and Revolution in China - The 1911 Revolution in Hunan and Hubei
- Leonard Mosley's Hirohito - Emperor Of Japan
- The Tibetan Book of the Dead edited by Dr. Walter Y. Evans-Wentz
- Sindey Fine's Laissez Faire and the General-Welfare State - A Study of Conflict in American Thought, 1865-1901
- Leonard Peikoff's Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand
- John Stuart Mill's On Liberty
- Ayn Rand's Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal and Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology
- Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series
Can It Be Done? Hell of a lot of reading.
I want to improve my front porch by screening it in and installing doors to enclose the deck. Bugs are a nuisance problem right now, but I expect them to get worse as the season progresses. The screening will allow us to park our asses outside rather than inside. I suppose that counts for something in itself, but I always prefer drinking beer in the windy shade outside.
The back yard is also on my list of exterior improvements, but it'll go more slowly. We lack the tools and serious planning to proceed beyond the conceptual stage right now.
I really, really need a desk for my computer room. However, since I've chosen an Asian theme for that room, just any desk won't work. It's gotta fit the surroundings and "asian desks" aren't as inexpensive as I had initially hoped. Something simple with black lacquer would work fine, but I haven't run across one yet. As utterly sweet an antique would be, I don't have $800 for a freakin' handcrafted import from the early 1900's in China.
I'm a few thousand miles away from reaching 80,000 miles in my father's 2002 Volkswagen Golf TDI, so it will need its timing belt swapped out before it disintegrates on its own. The dealership will want something upwards of $600 for that job alone; it is scheduled along with a number of other maintenance items for that 80k check-up. Thankfully, I discovered an Austinite on the TDI Club website who does these things. I called him and he wants $250 (excluding the parts)...a hell of a deal, especially if I can be there to watch and ask questions and learn more about the diesel.
I want to return to both the jogging and weight training routines I abandoned last August.
Finally, as prodded by "Doc" in this thread, I will probably begin looking for another job, one that involves more of the private sector. Working at TASB has been great, but it is one of the most glaring compromises I've made with my life as I've changed politically. I can't keep it up forever and never intended to remain here this long. It'll be five years in October.
Oh yeah; I'll need to expand my beer bottle collection's display system. It won't be able to take much more expansion!
UPDATED 9/19/2005 9:48am
I passed on buying an asian desk and went instead for something more classy and traditional.
Posted by Drizzten at April 29, 2005 04:57 PM
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I picked up a dog-eared copy of Gulag Archipelago a few weeks ago for a couple of bucks. Started reading it and I can't put it down despite my own considerable backlog.
W.R.T. Rand's non-fiction, personally, I've always found these much more compelling than the fiction works - though, having said that, if you read CTUI and, say The New Left and *then* go back to the novels, you'll appreciate them a lot more (i.e. almost every sentence has much more meaning).
And the beer collection clearly needs another storey or two... I see my favourite Moosehead there, but no Fin Du Monde or Maudite - you'll have to get back up to Canada again to round out the collection.
Posted by: Jay Jardine on April 29, 2005 05:55 PMGood God man - you've been working on Peikoff's book for years now!
Posted by: Erik on April 30, 2005 09:16 AMJay, there are more Canuck brews on those shelves, but the angle hides them. These are authentic bottles and all were purchased and consumed up there in the Great White North. Alexander Keith's was one of my favorites.
Erik, I either get distracted or keep stalling out around chapters 4 and 6. It isn't that long a book, so if I can focus on it, I should be able to finish it in a week...assuming I can get to it before the summer rolls out.
Posted by: Drizz on May 2, 2005 08:25 AMAre those lambic bottles I see in the upper left corner of that display? Yum...
Fin Du Monde is good, but I was disappointed when I tried Ephemere (from the same brewer) the other day.
Posted by: freeman on May 4, 2005 02:49 AMMr. Freeman, those are indeed lambic bottles: Framboise (raspberry), Cassis (black currant), and Kriek (cherry). One of them is hidden due to the angle.
Posted by: Drizz on May 4, 2005 01:47 PM