Still here

I've been on vacation now for over a week and it is amaaazing. I don't feel guilty doing nothing because I truly deserve this break. Or so I tell myself.

The ai class went alright, surprisingly. I expected a lot worse. The proff didn't question us too much and I ended up doing no work on the paper/poster. First time I got a free ride, I think. Its not bad but the stress of not knowing if it'll get done or not is almost as bad as having to do the work yourself. 

I've gotten myself a hanukah present: a whole bunch of books off my wishlist. Books are probably the love of my life. When I was a little kid, I'd daydream about having a library in my house; imagine the extravagance of having a separate room just for your books where you can go and read. And now that I'm working I can afford to buy all the books I want. Still don't have a library for them. And my mother refuses to let me store them in my room because apparently they collect dust. So she stores them in the basement. Whatevs, at least I own them. Someday, I shall have a real library...

I'm real excited about finding a book by this fellow "Fisk". He got the Chomsky stamp of approval and he writes history/journalism books. My contemporary history collection is rather sparse. Additionally, I'll be the proud owner of prozac nation, 1st ed. The pre-movie version. As well as a work from O'Brien, the bloke who wrote leaving las vegas. A couple of others I can't recall right now.

What with the vacationeering, I've had the time to spend an afternoon in bed with a book. Haven't done that since college. Its perfect on a rainy day with a glass of hot chocolate.

I didn't go to kindergarden so I read instead. We had a very large collection of books in Russia. None of them children's. I grew up on Jules Verne translations and masters of russian science fiction - a series of at least 30 tomes that you had to buy on the black market. We threw ours out when we moved to America; to my regret. The librarians all hated me cause I read all of their recommendations and its not like a real library where you can check out what you want; you check out what they give you. So I ended up re-reading the books in our library over and over again. I think I read most books at least 2-3 times and my favourites, much more than that.

In fact, one of the games I liked to play is try to calculate the total price of all the books at our house on a toy abacus I had. Never was able to do it.

I think I might spend the rest of my life trying to build a library that was as large as the one my parents had back home. Strangely enough, I'm ok with that.