"If there is any left, I buy food and clothes."
I have a new job, which means I have a paycheck again, and now I can't stop buying books. It's like a sickness.
I seem to be buying them much faster than I am reading them, though. Part of that stems from the fact that I am trying to read 3 different ones right now, none of them fluff. So the reason I haven't updated the Recent Reads list to the right is that since The Help, there haven't been any recent reads.
I currently have bookmarks in the following:
Exodus by Leon Uris. Since I'm about to head to Israel, I thought I should do a little reading on the area. Luckily I've already read Mitchner's The Source, because there's no way I would get through that as well before the trip.
Border Crossings: American Interactions with Israelis by Lucy Shahar and David Kurz. Recommended reading from several people in the office, and the director of customer service actually brought in his copy for me to borrow.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. Was very excited when this was chosen for my online book club, and then fell behind on reading. Discussions were opened up on Sunday and I'm still in the first chapter.
And despite all this reading on my nightstand, here I sit, playing on the internet.
Hiking exploits, experimental cooking, general nerdery, and cat pictures.
Seriously. Do not call me Katy.
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
Monday, April 25, 2011
3 Months, 1 Week, 5 Days
I survived unemployment. I guess I should be thankful that it wasn't worse. After all, being out of work for only 3 months is pretty good these days; I know several people who were/have been out for much longer. But man, it was rocky.
I was 100% unhappy with the job, the company, and the commute, so you would think that I would have been thrilled when they basically paid me 2 months' worth of salary to look for a new job and not have to drive into the office. Unfortunately, it was winter, it was cold, I was terrified of burning through all my cash and then not being able to pay the mortgage so I never went anywhere or did anything. I wound up hermiting in my house for a few weeks, which was not a good thing. I've been reading back over some emails and Skype conversations that I exchanged with Le copain français, and I can definitely see where I started to come off the rails towards the end of January. I didn't notice it at the time; it took about another 3 weeks (and my relationship completely imploding) for me to actually realize I needed some outside help.
Thankfully the low point was also the turning point. The week after everything with LCF went to hell (and I did start getting help that week, as I thankfully still had health insurance at that point), I got calls from a recruiter and an HR rep about job openings. Both were interested in me, and over the month of March I had phone interviews and in person interviews. The interview schedules for both jobs were pretty much on the same timeline, and at the end of the month, it paid off. I got one solid job offer, and I think I would have gotten an offer from the other company, but they were dragging their feet on making a decision, and I had really wanted the first job anyway.
Last Monday I started, and so far I am still really excited about the job. My title hasn't changed, I'm still an Applications Engineer, and still working in a customer service role. Unlike my last job, though, I'm going to be almost entirely focused on technical support, and the job is 100% post-sale. They already have 2 apps engineers who deal with pre-sales/marketing/prospective customers. So I get to do technical problem solving, advise customers on materials (yay, I'm going to get to use the graduate degree after all!), and eventually do some user training for customers. The company's product is something I knew about from working at my first job in Rochester; it's technology that I've always found really cool, and it has grown leaps and bounds from when I was working with it back in 2004 and 2005.
So now I'm back to 8-5 Monday-Friday, and trying to get used to getting up, going to work, and being productive for 8 hours every day! First week was exhausting, and I'm hoping it gets better damn quickly. I've had just over 3 months off, and for what feels like the first time in my life, I was actually ready to go back to work. I've done just about everything I could around my house without spending any (or much) money; now it's time to go earn some again so I can plan more expensive projects!
What did I do during my unemployment? A little bit of everything:
I was 100% unhappy with the job, the company, and the commute, so you would think that I would have been thrilled when they basically paid me 2 months' worth of salary to look for a new job and not have to drive into the office. Unfortunately, it was winter, it was cold, I was terrified of burning through all my cash and then not being able to pay the mortgage so I never went anywhere or did anything. I wound up hermiting in my house for a few weeks, which was not a good thing. I've been reading back over some emails and Skype conversations that I exchanged with Le copain français, and I can definitely see where I started to come off the rails towards the end of January. I didn't notice it at the time; it took about another 3 weeks (and my relationship completely imploding) for me to actually realize I needed some outside help.
Thankfully the low point was also the turning point. The week after everything with LCF went to hell (and I did start getting help that week, as I thankfully still had health insurance at that point), I got calls from a recruiter and an HR rep about job openings. Both were interested in me, and over the month of March I had phone interviews and in person interviews. The interview schedules for both jobs were pretty much on the same timeline, and at the end of the month, it paid off. I got one solid job offer, and I think I would have gotten an offer from the other company, but they were dragging their feet on making a decision, and I had really wanted the first job anyway.
Last Monday I started, and so far I am still really excited about the job. My title hasn't changed, I'm still an Applications Engineer, and still working in a customer service role. Unlike my last job, though, I'm going to be almost entirely focused on technical support, and the job is 100% post-sale. They already have 2 apps engineers who deal with pre-sales/marketing/prospective customers. So I get to do technical problem solving, advise customers on materials (yay, I'm going to get to use the graduate degree after all!), and eventually do some user training for customers. The company's product is something I knew about from working at my first job in Rochester; it's technology that I've always found really cool, and it has grown leaps and bounds from when I was working with it back in 2004 and 2005.
So now I'm back to 8-5 Monday-Friday, and trying to get used to getting up, going to work, and being productive for 8 hours every day! First week was exhausting, and I'm hoping it gets better damn quickly. I've had just over 3 months off, and for what feels like the first time in my life, I was actually ready to go back to work. I've done just about everything I could around my house without spending any (or much) money; now it's time to go earn some again so I can plan more expensive projects!
What did I do during my unemployment? A little bit of everything:
- Read 60 books. Yes, sixty. 6-0. I know, I can't believe it either. Blame shitty weather and depression that made me not want to get out of bed for the second half of February. I availed myself of the many free ebooks for the Kindle on Amazon. Some were surprisingly good, and a few were hysterically bad. I also reread a bunch of favorite "comfort reading" books.
- Went skiing a handful of times. Not as much as I would have liked, given how much snow we had, but I was trying to be frugal.
- Spring cleaned my house from top to bottom. Thanks to my mom for coming down for a weekend to help!
- Finished 2 cross-stitch projects that I had been working on for a while. One for myself, which I will get framed once I have a little extra cash again, and one as a gift for my Great Auntie, my grandma's twin.
- Lost somewhere around 5 or 6 lbs. Completely unintentionally, and I'm not entirely happy about that since it was kind of a result of the not getting out of bed. Ooops. Eating again, and doing much better now, thanks.
- Re-joined the gym! And actually went a few times! Hoping I can keep it up now that I've started working again.
- Went to Maine a couple of times to visit family; watched a bunch of movies; shoveled a lot of snow off the decks several times over; and was available at a moment's notice for napping with the cats. I'm not sure how they are taking this back to work thing!
Saturday, April 11, 2009
Saturday Night Book Reading
Today was disappointingly uneventful, but I dragged myself out of the house and went to a book reading and signing tonight. The author was Kate Jacobs. She wrote Friday Night Knitting Club and its sequel, Knit Two, and also Comfort Food. Comfort Food just came out in paperback, so the tour was in support of that, although Ms. Jacobs talked about all of her books.
It was very interesting. The reading was at The Toadstool Bookshop in Milford, which is a nice little independent bookstore I've never been to before. There were about 40 women there for the reading. Ms. Jacobs talked about her life and writing process for about 20 minutes, read for 15, and then answered questions for another 20 minutes.
It was very interesting. The reading was at The Toadstool Bookshop in Milford, which is a nice little independent bookstore I've never been to before. There were about 40 women there for the reading. Ms. Jacobs talked about her life and writing process for about 20 minutes, read for 15, and then answered questions for another 20 minutes.
Thursday, October 23, 2008
A Book Meme
The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed.
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
48.5 out of 100. Or maybe only 47.5 out of 100 (obviously Heller didn't make a huge impression on me)
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible (some of it anyway, the talking points)
7 Wuthering Heights - E. Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy (reading right now)
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller (or did I read Something Happened?)
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen (also reading right now)
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (isn't this part of #33?)
37.The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
48.5 out of 100. Or maybe only 47.5 out of 100 (obviously Heller didn't make a huge impression on me)
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible (some of it anyway, the talking points)
7 Wuthering Heights - E. Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy (reading right now)
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller (or did I read Something Happened?)
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen (also reading right now)
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (isn't this part of #33?)
37.The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
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