Sick days, books

This photo has nothing to do with this post. --Ed

Gotta say, I love some parts of being sick. Not the feeling like crap part of it, or the loss of many quality hours of my life I won't get back or the bizarro dreams under the influence of over the counter medication (involving hand-sized wooden puzzle piecess, people with huge bat-like wings and fangs and a large, red, noisy timer). I don't remember the first two days of my sick days. I know I was here...?

But I get to read books just because I love books. Not because I have "some time" here or there. I get to just read them. Whatever I want. I got a whole house full of em. I dutifully finished...okay. I dutifully skimmed the second Norah Roberts: The Pride of Jared MacKade. At the end of the book, I have no idea what he was so proud of, nor what Suzannah Morningstar, the fiery single mom with A Past (must've skimmed past what the past was) was so proud of. Except they had the same boring sex as the last book, and now they're happily ever.

I read the whole New York Times on Friday. The WHOLE THING. It was FABULOUS.

I read the Sisters Grimm, book 1, a young adult series of fairy tale detectives living with their grandmother. Very good. I started Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner, which is THE end-all be-all environmentalist word on water rights in the American West. I can see why. It's not only thorough and well-researched, it's got a whipsmart humor about it, too. Not in the ha-ha funny sense, but the....you know what? John Wesley Powell WAS kinda funny-lookin sense. I'm getting a little pissed, and thinkin we should bomb Phoenix. All those cities cramming with boomers who want water fountains and green lawns in the saguaro deserts? Fsck em. Not to say Denver is better, it is not. Probably we should bomb Denver, too. In Denver, water-sucking evilness like certain golf courses put signs up to say, "We use well water." And this is supposed to be okay. I'm learning that this is not okay, either.

Reisner quotes Alexis de Tocqueville: "To clear, to till, and to transform the vast uninhabited continent which is his domain, the American requires the daily support of an energetic passion; that passion can only be the love of wealth; the passion for wealth is therefore not reprobated in America, and, provided it does not go beyond the bounds assigned to it for public security, it is held in honor."

Just found that interesting because the words were written in the 1820s.

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I'm napping, too. Oh. I washed the cats. That was my productive task yesterday. They are poofy and smell good today. A little annoyed, but they'll get over it.

Tomorrow I have to go back to work, and I'm well enough. I am going to be glad of this last day of rest (I wasn't scheduled to work today anyway). Isn't it sad when you wish your sick days weren't over?