• It’s so beautiful outside!  It is like joy for my soul.
• I turned in the second draft of my thesis last night and it felt oh so good.
• The Wood Wife is amazing.  It’s a great read and just what I was looking for.  Something I could read slowly without getting bored with the story, just enough mystery to be interesting but not frustrating, great characterization.
• I think you should know how much I love Jurassic Park, in both book form and movie form.  We are not friends until you know this about me.  Jurassic Park the movie is in my Top Ten Movies of All Time.  Jurassic Park the book is a comfort book, I’ll reread it when I just need something to make me happy.
• This poem, by Philip White, made me cry:

Cricket

A frigid morning, the trees outside nearly
leafless so the ticking now is limb on limb,
a few ice grains slithering on metal flashings,
roofers scraping shingles a block away, wind
hollowing out some other space to be here.
And some of the dead rustle back, bodily,
hunching out in the cold just as they did.
I approve the particular ways they shoulder
the burdens of themselves, remember by feel
the knot to the side of one’s spine where the pain
never stopped, note this one’s voice: she had a snap
inside her coat sleeve once that chirped exactly
like a cricket when it touched her watchface;
I’d listen for it as she moved along creaking
in spite of herself, laughing.  Whose life is this?
And was it the dead who left it, or we?  We close
our eyes and someone vanishes, open them
and another life is there to be seen.  Time
for a new roof, someone thinks, and calls in
builders, an odd, unplaceable, wind-blurred
rasp at dawn.  At first I thought it was a man
out in the cold trying futilely to clear
his throat, about to speak.  But it went on
and on.  It was only the builders out there.

• I currently have 32 books checked out from the library right now.  It’s a disease.  The best kind of disease.
• I’m currently listening to a lot of Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell.   If I Could Build My Whole World is my favorite.
• Did I mention it was beautiful outside today?
• Book I’m most excited about from my recent library run: Living to Tell The Tale by Gabriel García Márquez.  He’s one of my favorite authors, but very elusive.  And apparently has recently given up writing.  We’ll see.
• I got 1001 Books for Every Mood from the library, too.   But jeez, it’s just another list for me to make an excel spreadsheet of and read, which is 2 parts awesome and 1 part slightly ridiculous.
• My favorite kind of ice cream is cake batter with rainbow sprinkles.
• This is awesome.  So is this: