Cat Lion

What better way to prepare for school/teaching than to find inspirational pictures on the internets.  SB & I found this one yesterday.  It's a doozy.

I have my own cat-lion to look out for now, which makes me no end of happy.  Except, even after living at home with my parents for two years, it turns out that she hasn't forgotten how to wake me up at 5:45 AM by flipping books off my shelves.  Joy.

Gratuitous Pictures of Cake, etc.

In my quest for the perfect workout music, I rediscovered the late 90s and early Aughts, which right now means that if I had a band I would only be singing covers of Fall Out Boy (deal with it) and some Jimmy Eat World and, I dunno, The Killers, probably.  My Younger Self from college is cringing, despite the fact that Present Self is having a blast.

Mostly I've been doing a lot of reading and bingeing on television shows when I'm not slaving away at the restaurant to support my debilitating book habit, which I have tried extra hard to keep in check this summer.  You would think that free books from the library and recycled books from used book stores would sound appealing to a grad student on a tight budget, but no.  I itch for new things, all the time, and I can't help it.  Soon soon I should be getting review copies (I hope), which gives me little cartwheels of happiness.  Cartwheels!

I made it a goal to start reading more non-fiction, especially science-y non-fiction, so I've been reading Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which is such an impressive mix of biology and ethnography and investigative journalism.  Of course, I still have a soft spot for huge nerdy tomes about the origins of ideas, culture, & modernity, so I've been reading Peter Watson's The German Genius and Christine Stansell's American Moderns, too.  Both are way more fun and interesting than they sound, I swear.  On the poetry front, I read Ben Lerner's new book, Mean Free Path, and I like it so much I want to take a bath in it.  Or steal it from the library.  Which I won't, but I'm definitely not ready to give it back yet.  I love in a very different way Amanda Nadleberg's Isa The Truck Named Isadore, which I'm reading for the first time in its entirety.  She was long-listed for the Ruth Lilly Prize this year, which is pretty awesome.

All my projects are coming along at a snail's pace.  Turns out the longer thing I've been working on all summer has segued into a rather complicated story (who knew?) and so not that long at all and kind of a side project in the end.  One day I swear all the loose bolts rattling around in my head will make a book instead of morphing into other things.

Only a few more days left of writing and finishing up half-read books before I head south on the train for a week of sun and Thomas Jefferson theme rides.  Though the air is starting to feel so lovely in Massachusetts--at nights it almost feels like fall is here.

And now!  Your promised pictures of cake:

(Hot Milk Sponge Cake with Vanilla Custard and Dark Chocolate Icing=Boston Creme Pie, YUM.)

(So this is a tart, but you know.  Peaches and Plums.  No Pears.)