Odds and Ends

...from another weekend gone forever:

I attended my fourth funeral (three of them of the out-of-town variety) Saturday in the last 8 weeks.  In that short period of time, I've lost a cousin, two aunts, and a good friend who was my department's administrative assistant.  I don't remember anything even close to this pace ever happening to me before, so I'm hoping it's over now.  Twice a year is bad enough, but four times in two months is getting to be as scary as it has been heartbreaking.

Do you ever get the feeling that no matter how many books you are exposed to in a given week or month that you are just seeing the tiniest tip of the iceberg?  It happens to me all the time, and seeing something like someone else's "library loot" post really brings it home.  Take a look at today's post from Pages Turned.  In this picture are 17 books brought home by a person whose reading taste is usually very similar to my own.  17 books, and I have not heard of a single one of them.  Since we do share a similar taste in books, this kind of thing always makes me wonder what I'm missing while I'm struggling to finish up something that does not quite work for me as I thought it would.  If anyone needs a good reason to abandon "bad books" midstream, this is it:

I'm not a big fan of prime time television programming and have not been since at least the early nineties when I moved out of the country for the first time.  When I got home a few years later, I found it near impossible to close the "culture gap" that developed while I was gone.  I have never cared for all that celebrity gossip stuff, and I found that I couldn't even recognize the faces of any of the new crop of actors that had grown popular in my absence.  I never did catch up, really.  But along came a NetFlix application for iPad, and I'm suddenly hooked on Grey's Anatomy, a show I barely knew existed until I started watching it in late February.  Now I've burned through the first four seasons and seven episodes of the fifth (it's amazing how quickly they seem to go by without commercial interruptions) and I'm still hooked.  It's great fun to watch that many episodes so close together; it is much easier to be impressed by the slow evolution of the characters as they move in and out of the show.  Any suggestions for another series for me to start after I finish season 6 of Grey's Anatomy?

And, finally, my Houston Astros have two wins for the season.  They played their best game of 2011 yesterday against the Florida Marlins, outscoring them 7-1 and outhitting them 16-4.  In the process, the team doubled its number of victories in one afternoon.  How sad is that?  Well, it took them 9 games to win 2 and they are hugging last place in the NL Central all by their lonesome.  I suspect that's a spot they will grow very accustomed to as the season progresses.

happier days