Does this feel slow to you?
The third time Baby M wiped her nose on her hand, then handed me her play-doh, I knew it was hopeless. I've been sick all week, not feeling bad so much as sounding completely horrible, and talking has been near-impossible. Tried reading Regretsy, but laughing sets off a touch of the pertussis (TM kitsune714 ) and I resorted to watching NASCAR, which is the perfect combination of painfully boring and extremely exciting for 7.8 seconds at a time. It's like radio baseball. True fact: I HATE watching baseball on TV. Love listening to it on the radio. I find TV commentary to be so inane, but radio knows how to fill dead air with completely off-topic but interesting stories. Much like the soundtrack inside my brain.
Summer reading: When I'm going through a rough patch, I prefer to distract myself with the non-fiction stories of other people's lives. It makes me less agitated than the fictional lives of novel protagonists.
The Living Sea, Jacques Yves Cousteau, James Dugan - Cousteau's second book, after The Silent World, where he talks about acquiring and fitting out Calypso, and the work his research group did in the 50s and 60s, primarily in the Mediterranean. I can't help but read his books with an outrageous French accent, but I enjoy the insight he gives into the development of both technology and scientific method for undersea research. Aside: If I had to
Guadalcanal: Decision at Sea, Eric Hammel - When "The Pacific" started up this spring I realized that my knowledge of the war in the Pacific was restricted solely to Cassin Young and the USS Vestal. (My AP US History teacher despaired of me. If it happened after Libby got her cotton loom, I don't know about it.) Cassin Young was commanding officer of the fleet repair ship Vestal at Pearl Harbor when Arizona was bombed, and his actions in the aftermath won him the command of the heavy cruiser San Francisco. While Vestal carried on her duties refitting the fleet at sea, San Francisco went to the Solomons and Cassin Young was killed during the naval battle at Guadalcanal. He was awarded the Navy Cross post-humously, and the destroyer USS Cassin Young was named after him. And I had a private tour of Cassin Young when I was living in Massachusetts, which is where I heard that whole story. If you want to read about the other 4 battleships, 13 cruisers, 27 destroyers, 1 carrier, the Tokyo Express, the Cactus Air Force, the 30-some thousand combatants and just about every painful detail, here's a book for you. Warning: not a narrative.
Mud, Sweat, and Gears, Joe Kurmaskie and Beth Biagini Kurmaskie - Man puts wife, three children, body, marriage to the test. Biking across Canada with his three sons in tow, and his wife for bear bait. Hilarious.
The Lobster Chronicles: Life on a Very Small Island, Linda Greenlaw - I read Greenlaw's first book, The Hungry Ocean: A Swordboat Captain's Journey, after I read "The Perfect Storm," she was a good friend of Billy Tyne and his crew, they both worked for the same boss. While Sebastian Junger's book chronicles the Halloween Gale of 1991, Greenlaw's book is about a typical swordfishing trip, with asides into what it means to be a fisherman, and a female sea captain, in this day and age. In "The Lobster Chronicles," Linda, ten years older, is living in her hometown in Maine, making a slim living catching lobster and living the small town life. Her town is full of characters, to say the least.
Seaworthy: A Swordboat Captain Returns to the Sea, Linda Greenlaw - Not long after "The Lobster Chronicles, Linda Greenlaw got an offer to return to sword fishing, and pulled together a crew for what I can only describe as a clusterfuck of a trip. When your boat is nicknamed "Shithawk," well, what can you do?