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Books And Brakes
The rain is out there on the other side of that window pane mainly in Spain. V caught her first mouse last night. I don't know what she did with it. I don't see it anywhere this morning. I must say it is one of the more repellent aspects of the well fed house cat how long they can go about the torturing of mice. I am by lack of intervention, complicit. I don't know if printing up Save the Mouse bumper stickers would do any good but it is an idea that runs through my mind.

I have taken to reading downloaded novels on this computer. It is something I have wanted to do for some time but found the format unpleasant until discovering that Google has actual photo-scanned copies of real books, which you can download in PDF format. Sometimes you can see the finger of a person from Stanford or Harvard or Michigan or the NY Library copied on the page. And the occasional check mark or underlined word of some past student. You are limited to older works whose copyright protection has expired but that hardly seems a disadvantage when you realize that that limit includes Twain, Dreiser, Maugham, Shaw, Turgenev, Chekhov, London, Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, Lincoln, Boswell, Epictetus, Spinoza, and Thoreau and Emerson and Blake and a good many others. I have finished Maugham's , The Moon and Sixpence, an accounting of Gauguin as played by Charles Strickland, and Maupassant's, Bel-Ami, an engaging tale of love and deceit and acquisition, and am now riding the rails with Jack London in his novel, The Road. I am looking ahead to Treasure Island, or perhaps Tom Sawyer.

I can see the light coming on now this early morning and so really must initiate a motion towards engaging myself in the real world. I should take the Jeep to that mechanic in Sperryville and get my windshield replaced and brakes redone. But before that I should go 16 miles to Front Royal for groceries and then back here to the Post Office and the bank up on 211. I don't have to get dressed because I fell asleep last night fully clothed.
- jimlouis 12-10-2007 3:17 pm [link]