Library Studies

I’ve just finished looking at a book called The Library of Benjamin Franklin by Wolf and Hayes. I’ll admit this may sound a bit dry, and I was the first one to check it out from the OU Library. However, the book is a ridiculously well researched reconstruction of Ben Franklin’s extensive personal library. The introduction is a quick and interesting look at how Franklin amassed such a huge library and how it was dispersed after his death. While useful in my upcoming work on Richard Kirwan’s library, the book is interesting in its own right at looking at how Americans read at the end of the 18th century, how libraries developed in America, and the biblomania of the nation’s founding fathers (Jefferson was apparently one of the few Americans of the time with a larger library than Franklin’s). The book is also extremely well produced and seems to have been targeted at bibliophiles with its colophon and well crafted text and binding. Check it out if you get a chance.

Allergies

I’ve done so much cleaning today. Lisa and I washed three loads of laundry, I cleaned my room, swept and swiffered my bathroom, washed dishes, and put away Christmas stuff. I spent at least 4 hours just cleaning today. Household maintenance is exhausting.

Lisa and I are both getting allergies and/or a cold right now. We both have sinus pressure in half our faces; the right side of my face feels swollen and full of snot and the left side of her face is doing the same (isn’t that cute, we match). Anyway, I hope we don’t get sick right as everyone gets in.

We are currently watching the Pats vs. Giants game, and it’s at the half. Man I hope the Giants win. I hate the Pats like I hate USC. Their arrogant bastards, and their philosophy of 60 minutes is an asshole justification for running up the score. I hope Brady’s leg gets broken and the bone shrapnel hits Belichick in the jugular.

I should do some work, but I’m just going to watch the game.

A Thought on John

Here is a random thought I have about John:

While in some ways, it might seem as if John is very laid back and does not necessarily care about a lot of things, he actually puts quite a bit of effort into the things that he does care about.

This blog for instance. We are currently on our third counter, because John cannot settle on one that he likes. Some people (possibly most people) would have settled on one of them by now, but I have a feeling John will continue to change the counter until he finds the perfect one. I find this to be a very endearing quality of John’s. I especially like this quality because it is not immediately obvious to most people.

So, there you go. I am also glad to be home, mostly for the Wii.

Back Home

It’s so nice to be back at my apartment. I really enjoyed seeing Jeff, Joe, and Sarah and appreciated eating my mom’s cooking even more. However, there’s nothing like the freedom of laying in your own bed, with all the random shit all over your own floor (oddly, cleaning was the only thing on my To Do list not scatched off today). Lisa and I went grocery shopping today, went by the mall, and framed a few mementos from the Indy trip (Lisa’s Wicked poster is currently being worked on). I went to Winans and the department and actually got work done. Lisa was able to work from the couch and play some Wii. All in all, it was great to just be home.

While we were at my parent’s place, we got our hopes up about a property that showed up online. One of the Edge condos (Normanites will know where I mean) came up for sale as a bank owned property, meaning it had been foreclosed on. The normal Edge condo sells for around 120-160k, but this one was up for 17k. We did plenty of research, decided to buy it as quickly as possible, and then found out it had been sold sometime in November. While the economic advantage of it would have been amazing, so much of the excitement was just in having our own place and moving in right away. I get along great with Zach and genuinely enjoy rooming with him. Still though, it would have been great to have owned a place of our own. We are still going to look around and will buy something by August, but to have moved in so soon would have been nice.

PodCasts

I’ve been trying to find History of Science so as to further eradicate any notion of non-work related activity from my life. However, I’ve been fairly disappointed in this endeavor so far. Elizabeth Green Musselman hosts a fairly interesting monthly HSCI podcast:

missinglinkpodcast.wordpress.com

I particularly like a new segment that she added in the fifth episode featuring a newly published HSCI book that would be accessible to the general public.

However, this has been my only successful find so far. If anyone knows of other related podcasts (History of Science, History of Astronomy, History of 18th century England and France, etc.) please let me know.

Pictures

Here are some pictures from the trip. I’m too lazy to go back to each post and put in the appropriate pictures.

This is me, looking at my shoes. They were pretty hot.

John and I, pretending we just won the World Series, outside of Busch Stadium.

Our horrible hotel room in Indy. Please note the bathtub just sitting in the room, the vomit pink walls, and thin industrial carpeting.

Me: “John, get in the picture and look dismayed.”
John: “I am dismayed.”

Pacers game.

The Colts warming up before the game.

So, we asked a guy sitting behind us if he could take this picture of us, and when he did the woman behind him goes “Alright! Good picture.” Colts fans are so nice, they’ll cheer for anything.

And the long-awaited play kitchen.

Christmas time in Dallas

Since getting back from the road trip I’ve gotten online twice, both times to check how my fantasy sports teams were doing. Kind of sad.

Lisa and I spent Christmas Eve with her parents; first we had lunch and went shopping with her mom (we got cookware, hurrahh!!! Seriously). Then we went to her Dad’s and played with Kim and had a huge dinner. Santa brought Kim a play-kitchen and Bob and I put it together. I think there’s a not insignificant amount you can learn about a relationship between two guys in how they put something together based on a few questions: 1) Is the mocking in good nature or ill? 2) Who makes the first screwdriver joke? 3) Are the instructions read and if so by whom? etc. (good, Bob, John). Between two friends, you see how strong the friendship is. Between the father-in-law and son-in-law we established that he wasn’t going to kill me and I wasn’t going to abandon Lisa and our 12 babies.

Christmas morning went well and after we let Kim out of her suspense (where’s the play kitchen?), everyone relaxed and had a good time. Lisa and I came down to my parents after lunch, and opened presents here. I counted 12 pairs of socks moving in different directions along with 2 hotel robes, and 2 twice regifted sausage and cheese baskets. More happily books were also popular as were large checks (yay food and rent). After a wonderful dinner (best part of Christmas is always the turkey and canned cranberry sauce), Lisa and I met up with my highschool friends Jeff, Joe and Sarah. Joe is a unique character and lived up to his billing for Lisa. Jeff, as always, smoothed tensions with jokes, and Sarah reminded the engineers to avoid shop talk. In all it was great to see the old-timey folks and get somewhat caught up.

Today, we saw Sweeney Todd with Tracy and Zach. I didn’t like it at all, but I think that was largely due to the horrible sound and film quality from my theater. I think that if I give it another shot I might like it more, but I thought the gore was unnecessary and actually took away from the enjoyability of the movie. I was expecting it to be a dark comedy along the lines of Edward Scissorhands, but it wasn’t a comedy. Knowing that now, perhaps I would enjoy a second showing more.

After the movie, Lisa stumbled upon some black high-heels that she wanted on sale. The register guy couldn’t find the price even after several tries at various register / UPC tricks. Finally he gives up, and to save the labor of research, declares the shoes to cost $9.99. Lisa is thrilled. Even more so when the register guy gives her the 20% discount advertised to make the shoes $8.65. The register guy declares himself a beast when the register allows him to make this sale, Lisa agrees and admits that she is now in love with the 16 year old (“he told me to say it, but he did have pretty green eyes”), and then volunteers “you are a beast….muah!” She didn’t kiss him…just made a kissy sound. While somewhat jealous, I do recognize that you don’t get a nice pair of black high-heels every day for $8.65 and will let it slide.

I can’t wait to get back to Norman. I love my parents and sister and high school friends, but man, I love my own bed and the freedom of being in my own apartment. I’ll get to do some work (much needed), play some video games, and take care of random chores that I’ve been avoiding. All of which are mundane but rewarding when completed. I think that’s a sign of maturity.

In random, blog-related notes, Lisa notes that I’m negligent in my updating. This is a relative comparison. If she continues to update daily and I continue every-other day, that’s still a very well-maintained blog. You’ll also notice that I can’t spell and have a terrible memory. To pretend otherwise would be false-advertising.

Dallas

John and I are currently in Dallas for Christmas. We have been so busy lately, but it’s been really fun to not think about work for a week or two.

Christmas Eve we went over to my Mom’s house where we ate lunch and then exchanged presents. Mom really liked the presents that we got her (a book of cat pictures with funny captions and the whole Firefly series on DVD), which I was very happy about.

Then we went to my Dad’s place, where we had Christmas dinner and then stayed the night so that we could open presents with Kim on Christmas morning. It was really kind of sad because she has wanted a play kitchen since October, which for a two year old is a very long time. So, every one in the family knew that she was going to get one, so they sent her all of these things that would be put in a play kitchen. Each time she opened one, someone would say “Oh Kim, wouldn’t it be cool to put that in your play kitchen…too bad you don’t have one.” She finally started to look very unhappy about the fact that Santa had not brought her a play kitchen, so we finally let her go in her room, where (tada!) the play kitchen was set up. And, in Kim’s own words, she was “very happy, because it was the only thing I ever wanted in the whole world.” It was very cute.

Then we drove some more, this time to Dallas, to spend Christmas evening with John’s family. So that’s where we have been for the last day and a half. We’ve been hanging out mostly with John’s friends from high school, which has been pretty fun. They’re pretty crazy, all in their own unique ways.

By the way, Sweeney Todd really sucks.

Home

We are back home after driving from Indy for almost 12 hours straight. Needless to say, we dropped like rocks onto the bed and fell asleep for a good 10 hours. In a few minutes, we will be headed to my mom’s, my dad’s, then Dallas to see his parents and high school friends. But first, a few highlights of the trip:

1. Seeing Wicked (it was so much better than I had imagined, and I had imagined it to be pretty good.)
2. Singing the entirety of Third Eye Blind’s first album to stay awake
3. The Colts game
4. John telling me at 1:30 last night on the road that he was sleepy but that he wasn’t going to go to sleep and then literally 5 minutes later leaning his seat back and starting to snore
5. Making John laugh and having him make me laugh in return
6. The god-awful hotel room in Indy
7. The bath that we took in the non-functioning Jacuzzi in the aforementioned god-awful hotel room
8. Taking pictures

That’s all I can think of now. John is starting to get that impatient look that I normally wear so well.

Indianapolis

Lisa and I are in Indy right now on our Winter Break road trip. Originally we were going to see three cities on our trip: St. Louis, Chicago, and Indianapolis. On Friday we drove up to St. Louis to see Wicked at the Fox Theater and had a wonderful time. The play made Lisa happier than I’ve ever seen her (including when I proposed), and we had a good time wandering around the city. This morning we took a few pictures of the arch and Busch park and then hit the road. While we both would have liked to have seen Chicago, we would have had to drive an extra 300 miles to spend a few hours in the city. Lisa pointed out that it might be better to leave the Windy City for a later trip and spend more time in Indianapolis and I agreed.

On getting into the city, we first tried to find a hotel and stumbled upon a seedy but well placed Day’s Inn. While the outside looked like the work of a drunk 70’s architect (the hotel sits on stilts over the parking area), the lobby was ok and the rent was cheap. We got what I hope was the last room which turned out to be a “suite.” In this case this meant that it used to be part of the work out room, but was converted into a gigantic studio with almost no furniture other than the jacuzzi in the back of the room. On the other side of a divider wall was the rest of the bathroom, which looked as if it hadn’t been cleaned in a couple of weeks. The absurdly cheap, vomit pink wall paper is peeling from the walls in a few places, and there’s some sort of trap door into the ceiling. The equally cheap carpet clashes with aforementioned wallpaper and doesn’t fit all that well with the green tile around the jacuzzi. On the upside we have a door directly into the workout facilities in case we want to work out in the middle of the night. However, Lisa assured me that this would be a fun adventure type memory to share and promised that we wouldn’t be murdered in the night by vagrants or the hotel staff. I eventually decided to take her word and agreed not to ask for a refund or just run screaming across the city.

After begrudgingly acclimating myself to our lodgings, I asked Lisa if we could go wander aimlessly around the city and suggested we check on getting tickets for the Pacers game. We were already going to the Colts game tomorrow, but we both like sports and decided to give it a try. Luckily the coliseum is only like a half mile from our luxurious abode, so we walked over and were able to get pretty good tickets for $25/per. I was surprised both by how nice the Conseco Field House is and how empty it was. Despite the empty seats (by my guess about 50% attendence), the people around us proved interesting. Lisa’s favorite was the emo-kid sitting directly in front of me. She noticed him first when he was trying to straighten the curled ends of his unshorn hair, but it was his later text messaging that really make him noteworthy. Lisa noticed his attention on his phone at some point in the second quarter and was easily able to read, “I want our mouths to make love when you get back.” He later followed with the breathtaking metaphor, “I want our tongues to dance like two lovers in the night.” If only he could have been wearing a Fall Out Boy t-shirt, the image would have been complete. I was worried the kid was going to catch onto the fact that Lisa and I couldn’t stop laughing at him. My favorite person of the game was the fan who walked out onto the court during the 3rd quarter. After meandering between a few confused players, he jumped to try to touch a rim, and then spent an impressively long time evading security before being tackled and restrained.

After the game, we rushed back to our hotel to try out the jacuzzi and were only marginally surprised to find the jets didn’t work. C’est la vie. (Lisa shouts La vie!). Tomorrow, I’m hoping to get up early, check out, and go wander around the city. I’m thinking that if we check out by 7 we can minimize our hosts’ time to attempt murder. The Colts game should be great and make up for our poor choice in hotels.