Some time results, a book completed

According to this program, I have "distracted browsing" 85% of the time.  I've been on Firefox for about an hour and a half today.  Over forty minutes of it has been on the avclub.  I haven't tried to change my browsing practices, so that the data is a realistic picture of my typical habits. 

I finished The Master and Margarita!  It was okay.  Finishing it was like scratching through an item on a to-do list.  I felt grim determination to push through its end.  Should you read it? Eh.  I don't really recommend it.

Now I've started Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell.  It's an interesting set up - it's told in different sections that are all written in different genres.  The beginning is told as the journal of a nineteenth century explorer.  I read Black Swan Green and Number9Dream by Mitchell, and really enjoyed them both, so I'm looking forward to this one.

Time

I never made my pie chart about my time usage, but I have been paying some attention over the past few days.  Yesterday TWO HOURS got sucked away on avclub, slate, facebook, and the like.  How does that happen? I was reading Amanda Bynes' Twitter page, for God's sake.  Today already I've lost about 45 minutes.

Now, granted, it's summertime and I'm not teaching, so I have a lot of free time.  But is this how I want to spend it? In two hours I could've made a lot of headway on that blouse I want to sew - maybe even finished it.

It has to stop.  So, I looked around a bit and found something called RescueTime.  It's an add-on for Firefox (which means I'll have to use Firefox instead of Safari, which is unfortunate mostly because I made my Safari icon a nice yellow giraffe).  It tracks how much time you spend browsing, and on what sites, and shows you reports.  We'll see how I like it, and if it helps.

Fashion of the future

Yesterday I was walking past a shop and saw tiny floral prints and plaid shirts in the window.  Now, I've been aware for awhile that the 1980s are back again, fashion-wise, but all these florals and flannels are distinctly 1990s.  It was alarming.  I mean, I remember the eighties, but the nineties? I was a teenager! I was at the mall, buying these things, feeling original!  Designers just keep recycling trends!

It wasn't the first time I've thought this.  But yesterday my thoughts continued.  You know how movies that take place in the future always show some weird fashion (picture a 1950s vision of the future with silver spacesuits, for example).  Well, how are we ever going to get there if designers just keep jumping back twenty years to steal old trends?

Think about how differently we dress now than we did 100 years ago.  Quite different, yes?  But now things don't seem to be going anywhere.  Denim leggings? Yes, I've been there.  And when I was wearing tie-dye and bell-bottoms in 1994, my mom had seen it already.

Fashion designers - or maybe us, the masses - need to come up with some original ideas.  Things need to get weirder.  Otherwise our vision of 2100 should just be maybe some women in low-riding jeans carrying Coach bags.  Boring.

Where is my silver jumpsuit, darn it?

My Rainbow Library

We have a spare bedroom at the new place that has been made into the library/office.  I've organized the books by the color of their spine.  Some people think this is nonsense, but it actually really works for me.  When I'm looking for a given book, I have a much easier time remembering its appearance, than, say, the author's last name.  Also, it's gorgeous.  I did it at my last place, too.  The exciting new changes are that I've done it in ROY G BIV fashion (after black and white), and there are no shelves with work stuff or photo albums intermixed - only books, books, books.

The Man of My Dreams

I finished The Man of My Dreams by Curtis Sittenfeld last week.  (I've been moving in the interim, and have therefore done nothing but put things into and take things out of boxes.)  It was great, just great.  I love her writing.  The book is a series of episodes in a young woman's life, each of them focused on a different romantic relationship.  The characters are three-dimensional, the problems are realistic, not contrived, and the thoughts on male/female relationships are so well-observed and wise!  There were passages in it that were good enough that I'm going to have to copy them down somewhere. 

In the meantime, still working on The Master and Margarita.  It's a slog, because every now and then it flashes back to parts of Pontius Pilate's life, and I don't care for those bits.  The rest of it is intriguing enough, but I don't think it's MY sort of book - there are too many characters and I don't think the reader is encouraged to feel much empathy with any of them. 

More Curtis Sittenfeld

I'm on dangerous ground.  I'm in the process of moving to a new place, but I just picked up The Man of My Dreams by Curtis Sittenfeld, and I can feel it wanting to eat my brain, just suck me in the same way Prep did.  I have packing to do, but the book is hard to resist.  Once again I find myself wanting to shout "Yes!" at her main character's observations.

I'm still reading The Master and Margarita.  I'm about halfway through it, enjoying it, but not in a rush to reach the end.

An Off Year

Yesterday I read the young adult novel An Off Year by Claire Zulkey.  I know Claire a little bit, through facebook, because she knows my cousins and because we're dog twins (we both own greyhounds and have parents with shelties).  An Off Year is about Cecily, a teenage girl who abruptly decides, upon arriving at her dorm, not to start college that year after all.  I read it all evening, and loved it.

Cecily has an actual sense of humor, something I feel like is missing way too often in female characters.  Also, something else I liked, there are no tidy resolutions, no perfect tying together of threads.  It felt like real life, like a real girl trying to sort out what she was doing with herself.  It dodges a romantic subplot, which I adored.  I hate that books (and TV and movies and everything) seem practically required to have a romantic subplot.

The romantic subplot thing reminds me (though it's not really the same) of how in action movie trailers, towards the end there will be a bunch of quick shots of the (male) characters doing exciting things: blowing things up, leaping from cars, punching someone, whatever.  And one of the exciting things is always kissing some hot woman.  Watch for it.  It's annoyingly predictable.

The Master and Margarita

I'm currently reading The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov.  It was written in the 1930s in Russian, but this translation was published in 1995.  It's a bit slow going, I'm not sure why.  I'm having a hard time feeling attached to any one character.

It's a retelling of Faust, apparently, which I don't know much about beyond "deal with the devil."  It opens with two men, both poets, walking in the park on a summer day in communist Russia.  They meet a stranger, a foreigner, who accurately predicts the death of one of the poets.  After the poet dies later that day, the other poet, Ivan Nikolayevich seeks out the foreigner, to accuse him, but is thought crazy and put in a mental hospital.  That's what's happened so far, anyway.

I ordered a bunch of books on Amazon last week, and I'm really excited about them.  Thirty-one bucks for six books, pretty good.  Two I've read before and just want to own, but the rest are new to me.  I got another Joseph Kanon novel, a young adult book by Claire Zulkey, Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, and The Man of My Dreams by Curtis Sittenfeld (author of Prep!).  I can't wait to break them open.

Vegan Double Downs

So you may be aware of the KFC Double Down. It's a bacon and cheese sandwich with chicken breasts instead of buns. Tony and I decided the vegan community shouldn't be left out from such a disgusting part of our culture, so we created vegan double downs.

We realized after a little googling that we were not the first to come up with this idea. It's rather like Leibniz and Newton simultaneously inventing calculus.

Below, step-by-step photo instructions for making your own.

The two geniuses

Vegan cheese is pretty unappetizing.  And grey.

We used Vegansaurus's advice for making the sauce.  

You can read it here.

The corn is not part of the recipe.  Unless you can think up

a use for it...  Also, how funny is the fake, white fat on soy bacon?

And now a confession: I didn't actually eat it! I was super-full from eating a bunch of chips and watermelon, and I set it down, wandered away, and much later came back and saw it had been eaten by someone else.  I was relieved.  But Tony and others said it was actually quite good!