In the saddle

Whoops! No sooner do I get my new domain-name and reconstitute the blogs than I go underground again! Thanks so much for the well-wishes. The moment I sent out that e-mail last week, I thought, “You just used a teaser about your engagement in an e-mail to drive traffic to the new blog. You geek.”

It was a busy weekend; sorry for the lack of updates. Saturday morning was spent looking over wedding sites, figuring out possible dates, making preliminary lists and checking them twice, etc. The afternoon was spent dumping the contents of a psychiatric office into a dumpster. Harder work than it might appear. Sunday was more of the wedding stuff, less of the psychiatric office stuff, but I was pretty tired by the time I got home last night, and didn’t get to writing.

I promise to get back to more frequent blogging. I think I’m going to write up a great Mad Mix tonight, after I get home from my evening stint of getting Dad’s ass onto the treadmill.

The other thing keeping me away from blogging has been my year-long effort to read Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. I was afraid to mention it early on, because I didn’t know if I’d have the dedication to read the whole thing. I read the first two books–Swann’s Way and Within a Budding Grove–in college, but never read the other five. At my birthday, I thought, “Hmm: 34 years old is just about middle-age, so why don’t I get started on Proust?” Sure, I could’ve bought a Corvette or something, but hey.

So I’m starting over. I’m nearly done with the fourth book now, Sodom and Gomorrah. There are “only” three books left, and they’re actually on the short side: 500 pages each (if you haven’t read these before, trust me: 500 pages feels like a walk in the park). Since the end of January, I’ve been reading at least 15 pages a night; if I skip a day, then I make it up the next day. It’s an insanely rewarding series of books, and the discipline involved in sticking with it has helped me a bunch, too.

Anyway, I bring it up because there was a pretty neat passage about marriage in the part that I read last night. Idiot that I am, I forgot to bring the book with me to work today. I’ll transcribe it tonight and post that, too, along with whatever ruminations I manage to put together.

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