If you could give up one domestic chore forever what would it be?

Thomas13 Comments

Out of all the chores of daily life, the one I hate most is doing laundry. Even more than dust constantly settling on furniture or dishes piling up after every meal, there is something about the constant stream of laundry that annoys me. I think it is because doing laundry well requires skill, perhaps even talent, in a way that other domestic duties don’t. Keeping laundry clean can really take its toll on the laundry itself if it isn’t done properly. Stain removal, proper temperatures for both water and dryer, ironing, even folding require more skill and patience than I have.

So imagine my delight when we handed over our laundry to the hotel staff at each stop on our recent trip. We decided to pack as light as possible but doing so meant that we needed to have things laundered over the course of 18 days. And since I wasn’t about to waste vacation time doing laundry or even trying to find a luandromat in foreign land we decided to pay through the teeth to let our hotels take of it.

In addition to not having to actually do the work, they also return it to you as if it were a luxurious Christmas present. If only I could do this every week…

Which daily chore would you most like to give up?

I didn’t want to, but I HAD to buy a book today

Thomas12 Comments

You might think that I would always be in the mood to buy a book. In fact, I would have thought the same thing as well. But today I left the house without anything to read and I ended up having down time in the middle of the day where I had nothing to do. I had already done the daily Sudoku on the Metro and I still had about an hour to kill. And I was too tired (jet lag) to just browse for an hour.

Here are the reasons I didn’t want to buy a book:

  1. I am already actively reading four books. I wanted to read one of those, not temproarily move on to something new.
  2. My TBR is so big and so jam packed with wonderful things I want to read, I really didn’t want to add to the pile.
  3. It was Borders Books. If I am buying new it is not my favorite place to do it. If I am going to a big chain I would prefer Barnes & Noble where I have one of those discount membership thingies. But more than that I would prefer to buy some used and fabulous from Books for America.

But in the end I did find something that piqued my interest and proved a worthy tome with which to kill the hour. I ended up buying Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here. I am a huge fan of Sinclair Lewis. I have read about seven of his novels and I really dig him. He was not only the first American to win theNobel Prize for literature, but he also hails from my home state of Minnesota. Plus, this one imagines Americans marching off toward facism in 1935. Following my recent re-read of Atwood’s dystopic The Handmaid’s Tale it kind of makes sense to get another take on America run amok.

Asia Trip 30: The LAST vacation post! My reading…

Thomas10 Comments

I have already reviewed all of the books I read while we were away. I lugged the gigantic War and Peace many, many miles and didn’t make much headway.  And I read the first 100 pages or so back in early December, so although I remembered what happened, I started to get confused by who was who. So I took some time to go back through and make a little chart to help me keep everyone straight.

Showing a bit of leg reading Maggie O’Farrell’s The Distance Between Us.
I know, I know, I am defiling this copy of Her Fearful Symmetry. But I was so sleepy I fell asleep before I could locate a bookmark.