In the latest Curmudgeon’s Corner Sam and Ivan talk about:
Recorded on 15 May 2013 Length this week – 1:17:20 |
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Once again writing these years after reading the book. Perhaps I’ll catch up someday. Ha! Well, in any case, this is the classic Woodward and Bernstein narrative of their watergate investigations. More than two years later, my main memory of this is being disappointed that it ended before the resignation, so didn’t take the story the whole way. Yes, I know they did another book that covered the last days of the Nixon presidency, but I still wished this just continued. I have a vague memory of thinking that while the events themselves were interesting and of course are historically important, than the actual tone of the writing was a bit dry and “this happened, then this happened, then this happened” for my taste. But it has been a long time since I read it, so who knows. I’ve been toying with giving a star rating or some such when I do these things, but realize I actually have a better measure of how much I enjoy a book, and it is already listed above. When I am really into a book, I make time to read. I read in the spare moments during the day. A minute here or there whenever I catch a chance, and I end up choosing to read instead of watching TV or even instead of sleeping sometimes. I end up reading it faster. Not in terms of how fast I actually read while I’m sitting with the book, but in terms of how much I read per day. Meanwhile, for books I am NOT enjoying, I end up forcing myself to read a little every once in awhile, but don’t actually seek out time to read, so those go much more slowly. Of course, this is also effected by how much free time I have. Although there are exceptions, in recent years this has been relatively steady, so I’ll just ignore it at the moment. :-) And yes, this is also somewhat determined by the “difficulty” of the reading. A light fiction book is going to “flow” better than a dense textbook. But I think that also matches up with my enjoyment. The dense textbook may well provide me with valuable information, but I’m not sure “enjoy” would be the right word to describe my interaction with it. With physical books, if you look at pages, that is of course a measure that depends on the size of the pages, the size of the print, if there are photos or illustrations, etc, etc, etc. But if I’m reading on a Kindle, most of that is abstracted out by the “location”. And look there above, I already have locations per day. With my patterns of reading (one book at a time, always finish any book I start), this is a good measure, at least for books I read on Kindle. So, for All the President’s Men, I give an enjoyment score of: 326As context, here is where this fits with the last 10 books I’ve reviewed (in order by score):
So yeah, I guess I wasn’t all that excited by it compared to the last few things I’d read previously. Finally, my usual two Kindle adoption graphs… % of the last 20 books I reviewed that are now available on Kindle:
% of the last 20 books I read that I actually read on Kindle:
(I bought my Kindle when the first ratio hit 50%. I’ve said before that I’ll do these charts until the ratios get to 90% or so.)
Despite taking part of a day off on Monday, progress on the garage/driveway slowed dramatically during the work week, with me generally only able to spend an hour or two on it in the evenings before it got dark. (Yes, it might have been possible to do some after dark, but since it was dark, it was hard to see what I was doing…) Anyway, by early Saturday UTC (Friday evening local time) almost everything that was either stuff we knew we wanted to keep, or stuff that we might or might not want to keep but would have to actually spend time looking at it to know, was back in the garage. For some reason I didn’t post then, but here is what it looked like at that point:
Looks so much better than it started! Everything all I’m nice neat stacks and such! Unfortunately, there were still huge piles of things we know we want to get rid of (either donate, recycle, or trash depending on the specific things and their condition)… Quite a bit of which were large items like furniture… and we haven’t quite yet made arrangements to have those things picked up and taken away to wherever they are going to go. So all that had to go back too. That process just finished. At this point everything that came out of the garage (with a couple minor exceptions that were claimed by Alex or Brandy and actually are now being used or unpacked) is now back in the garage. So what does it look like? Here ya go:
So… Well… Just as full looking as it started… Almost. It is now possible to walk a little bit in there. But just a little. But it is still very very full. I certainly didn’t reclaim 40% of the floor space as I had hoped. But… Everything that was added between early Saturday and when I finished is stuff that is fully ready to be gotten rid of. Brandy has collected the information on who to call to come get all that stuff, and those arrangements will probably be made soon. All that stuff is fit up front and ready to go. It is no longer interspersed with everything else. Once that stuff goes, I ink my 40% goal is indeed actually met. Perhaps even 60% or more actually. And at that point, what is left is neatly stacked and accessible, not thrown in haphazardly like it was before. It will be in a state where it will be easy to grab one box a week or whatnot, in order to go through the box and reclaim what is still wanted, and trash what isn’t. I suspect 80% or so of what is in the boxes will actually be trashable, but unfortunately that can’t be determined on a box by box basis. We actually have to go through the boxes. That will be a long term thing though, not a project we will attempt in the same way I did the garage straightening. For now, next step, call the trucks to take away that big bulk of stuff we know we don’t want any more… Brandy will do that though. I’m going to take a nap. :-)
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