Blithering About Books

I’ve been plowing through Isaac’s Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History, by Erik Larson.  I have to take a break because reading about piles of dead bodies is starting to get a little unpleasant.

But the lead-up to the dead bodies, where Larson intersperses accounts of activities in Galveston (both general and individual), biography of Isaac Cline, politics at the national Weather Bureau, and the building and approach of the hurricane, reads like a thriller.

 I also have, on my kitchen table, another book by Erik Larson:  Thunderstruck, which appears to be about Guglielmo Marconi, his development of the wireless telegraph, and how it assisted in catching the murderer, H.H. Crippen (of dismembered-wife-in-the-cellar fame).

However, Marconi and Crippen will have to wait until I’ve read the biography of Queen Elizabeth I that’s waiting in my bookcase.

 I have abandoned the struggle to read A Fly for the Prosecution: How Insect Evidence Helps Solve Crimes.  This guy may be a leader in forensic entomology, a hard worker with a damn strong stomach, a genius with an infinite capacity for taking pains, and all the rest, but he sure writes a boring book.

Here We Go Again

Yet another incarnation of my diary, which I update so rarely that why the hell do I even bother?  (Except that I’m bored out of my mind at work today.)

It’s like buying new clothes.  So much fun to buy in the store, and then you get it home and realize that you already have something like it that you almost never wear.

Anyhow.  Tomorrow my sister and grandniece are coming over to play with my new kitten, which I was hoping my niece would adopt but apparently she’s back-pedaling on that, so I may end up keeping him.

I’m sure my failure to give him a name is a reflection of how ambivalent I am about having another cat, after almost 2 years of restful catlessness.  So far I’ve only been calling him Friggin’ Idiot Cat, due to his typical cat-like behavior of sneaking around my feet, trying to rub himself against my ankles, when I’m walking through the yard, thus forcing me to do silly half-jumps and semi-stumbles to avoid (a) stepping on him or (b) falling on my face.  Half-jump, semi-stumble, “friggin’ idiot cat!,” walk, repeat.

But yesterday evening, after talking to my sister on the phone and hearing how Niece seems to have changed her mind, I started thinking maybe I’ll call him Felix.

For my many thousands of fans who aren’t psychic, I found this kitten in the unpeopled north end of Mud-n-Flood Park a week ago.  I had taken Dog #2 there for a walk in the evening.  I heard a series of plaintive, cat-like meows and I went to find their source.  Turns out they were cat-like because they were coming from a cat.  He was sitting in a fallen tree and making a lot of noise.  I thought maybe he might be a far-wandering cat and belong in one of the not-so-nearby houses, but night was approaching and I didn’t want to leave an eight-week-old kitten alone in the woods.

According to the local humane society, nobody is looking for him.  Chez moi, he doesn’t wander at all, sticks close to the house, wants to be an indoor cat, all of which makes me think he was in the park because somebody dumped him there.  Friggin’ idiots.  How hard would it have been to take him to the humane society?