Educated

Education is often a hot topic around our home. We're both information junkies, we want to know everything about anything that interests us. Jeff veers towards movies, video games, computers, history, military and wars, and so many other things. I generally focus on literature, history, psychology, and more literature. I love books, didn't you know?

I graduated with a B.A. in English in 2010. Well, I emailed my final exams from my laptop while sitting on my parents' floor at midnight chatting with my brother about my current move to Japan. It was a few weeks before anyone else was even thinking about finals. I moved to Japan and missed the ceremony. My degree is sitting at my parents' house, I haven't even seen it in person yet.

The Office is Stacked

When we moved here, we made the office/2nd bedroom into a pseudo-man cave for Jeff. He had his desktop and it was his room to escape into. I didn't mind the clutter if I could shut the door.

Framed Out

In the midst of all the living room and office loving, I felt the need to spruce up the bedroom too. It didn't need much. We recently bought a dresser and TV, and that gave us all the storage we needed for clothes and books. I don't put much else in the bedroom since we mainly just sleep there. But there was one little nagging "to-do" left in that room.

Re-arranged Living

I posted a sneak peek at the "big changes" we were doing in our apartment a week or two ago. We moved furniture all over the place, deep cleaned, de-cluttered, and made a lot of purchases. It's been a little crazy, but exciting.

The living room is finished enough to take a ton of pictures and show it off! I just put artwork back on the walls last night, which means it's done. And not moving for a while. After living with the new layout for a few weeks, I'm in love. Let me show you.

What Book Did I Read Last Month?

I have a lot of books.

I have a lot of Kindle e-books.

I get confused on what I've read, what I meant to read, what I plan to read, etc. etc. etc. I forget I downloaded that book a month ago. I forget about that book that got thrown into the office last week. I forget a lot.

I tried Shelfari a few months ago. I loved that it linked with Amazon and automatically added my Kindle purchases, but otherwise found it pretty useless.

I still love the idea of having a digital collection of all my books, my wishlists, and favorites, so I tried again.

Round Two : My Goodreads Profile

This one was a pain to set up. I never finished my profile on Shelfari, so it wouldn't let me download my book collection. What? Annoying. All I wanted to do was delete the damn account, not finish it. I added all those books to Goodreads, then quickly glanced at my bookshelves and Kindle history to see what pieces I've missed in the mean time. I'm sure I'm still missing plenty here and there...

But it's a start! I even have a little collection in the sidebar of this blog. Now I just need to find all my random "books to read" lists on paper and computer and compile them in once place. I'll save that job for another night though.

You're On My List

One of our favorite date nights in the states was dinner, a movie, and a bookstore. We'd take the hour drive into the city and get some delicious food. We always had some down time before or after the movie, so we'd wander to the nearest Borders.

I love wandering through the shelves and picking up whatever catches my eye. Jeff would give me a limit that I'd usually break, coming back with an armful of books and the most hopeful eyes I could conjure to convince him to let me buy more books. He'd have one, maybe two if it was a good day. He's a picky reader. I am not.

I miss those trips desperately. All the bookstores over here are in...Japanese. Not so easy to browse. Not to mention Japanese read their books in the other direction. The bookstore on base has a handful of shelves, but for an avid reader, not so enticing. I swear some of those books have been stocked since we moved here...

Thank God for Amazon. Not only do they have the largest selection around, their affordable prices and quick shipping let me keep up my ever growing book collection. The Kindle is the ultimate lifesaver/troublemaker - books in 90 seconds? Yes, please. It's a little dangerous though, which is why Jeff threatens to hide my Kindle at least once a week.

Anyways, I've been reading Sherlock Holmes for the past few weeks. I'm halfway through the first large collection (900+ pages!), and I have Volume II to get through. I'm getting antsy for a new novel. I have a pile from a friend, but that doesn't stop me from browsing.

Here's what caught my eye today...

Anne Lamott - Some Assembly Required

 

 

 

 

In Some Assembly Required, Anne Lamott enters a new and unexpected chapter of her own life: grandmotherhood.

Stunned to learn that her son, Sam, is about to become a father at nineteen, Lamott begins a journal about the first year of her grandson Jax's life.

In careful and often hilarious detail, Lamott and Sam-about whom she first wrote so movingly in Operating Instructions-struggle to balance their changing roles with the demands of college and work, as they both forge new relationships with Jax's mother, who has her own ideas about how to raise a child. Lamott writes about the complex feelings that Jax fosters in her, recalling her own experiences with Sam when she was a single mother. Over the course of the year, the rhythms of life, death, family, and friends unfold in surprising and joyful ways.
By turns poignant and funny, honest and touching, Some Assembly Required is the true story of how the birth of a baby changes a family-as this book will change everyone who reads it. (Copied from Amazon)

Jenny Lawson - Let's Pretend This Never Happened: A Mostly True Memoir

 

Jenny Lawson realized that the most mortifying moments of our lives—the ones we’d like to pretend never happened—are in fact the ones that define us. In Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, Lawson takes readers on a hilarious journey recalling her bizarre upbringing in rural Texas, her devastatingly awkward high school years, and her relationship with her long-suffering husband, Victor. Chapters include: “Stanley the Magical, Talking Squirrel”; “A Series of Angry Post-It Notes to My Husband”; “My Vagina Is Fine. Thanks for Asking”; “And Then I Snuck a Dead Cuban Alligator on an Airplane.” Pictures with captions (no one would believe these things without proof) accompany the text. (Copied from Amazon)

Jane Maas - Mad Women

 

What was it like to be an advertising woman on Madison Avenue in the 60s and 70s – that Mad Men era of casual sex and professional serfdom? A real-life Peggy Olson reveals it all in this immensely entertaining and bittersweet memoir.

Mad Women is a tell-all account of life in the New York advertising world by Jane Maas, a copywriter who succeeded in the primarily male jungle depicted in the hit show Mad Men.  
Fans of the show are dying to know how accurate it is: was there really that much sex at the office? Were there really three-martini lunches? Were women really second-class citizens? Jane Maas says the answer to all three questions is unequivocally “yes.” Her book, based on her own experiences and countless interviews with her peers, gives the full stories, from the junior account man whose wife almost left him when she found the copy of Screw magazine he’d used to find “a date” for a client, to the Ogilvy & Mather’s annual Boat Ride, a sex-and-booze filled orgy, from which it was said no virgin ever returned intact. Wickedly funny and full of juicy inside information, Mad Women also tackles some of the tougher issues of the era, such as unequal pay, rampant, jaw-dropping sexism, and the difficult choice many women faced between motherhood and their careers. (Copied from Amazon)

Ellen Ullman - By Bloo

San Francisco in the 1970s. Free love has given way to radical feminism, psychedelic ecstasy to hard-edged gloom. The Zodiac Killer stalks the streets. A disgraced professor takes an office in a downtown tower to plot his return. But the walls are thin and he’s distracted by voices from next door—his neighbor is a psychologist, and one of her patients dislikes the hum of the white-noise machine. And so he begins to hear about the patient’s troubles with her female lover, her conflicts with her adoptive, avowedly WASP family, and her quest to track down her birth mother. The professor is not just absorbed but enraptured. And the further he is pulled into the patient’s recounting of her dramas—and the most profound questions of her own identity—the more he needs the story to move forward. The patient’s questions about her birth family have led her to a Catholic charity that trafficked freshly baptized orphans out of Germany after World War II. But confronted with this new self— “I have no idea what it means to say ‘I’m a Jew’”—the patient finds her search stalled. Armed with the few details he’s gleaned, the professor takes up the quest and quickly finds the patient’s mother in records from a German displaced-persons camp. But he can’t let on that he’s been eavesdropping, so he mocks up a reply from an adoption agency the patient has contacted and drops it in the mail. Through the wall, he hears how his dear patient is energized by the news, and so is he. He unearths more clues and invests more and more in this secret, fraught, triangular relationship: himself, the patient, and her therapist, who is herself German. His research leads them deep into the history of displaced-persons camps, of postwar Zionism, and—most troubling of all—of the Nazi Lebensborn program.

With ferocious intelligence and an enthralling, magnetic prose, Ellen Ullman weaves a dark and brilliant, intensely personal novel that feels as big and timeless as it is sharp and timely. It is an ambitious work that establishes her as a major writer. (Copied from Amazon)

What to read first? Jeff has a new video game releasing soon, so that should be a good bargaining chip to download some new books...

I Think I Can. I Think I Can?

Well, shoot.

How many weeks months years have I been saying I need to get in shape?? We said we'd climb Mount Fuji this summer since we found out we were moving to Japan. Back in 2011. Oh, yeah.

I've made attempts to get back into shape here and there. But nothing stuck. I think I need to make it stick already if I'm going to have any chance of making it up that mountain...

Can I do this?

I'm not really sure. I should probably stop my love affair with the couch and fall in love with my sweat instead.

Spring Cleaning/Chaos

Things have been a little chaotic over here lately. We've been dreaming of a new TV for years, and finally decided to take the plunge.

That sparked a whirlwind of change. Jeff actually came up with the majority of the decor ideas. Crazy, right? Even crazier -- he encouraged me to buy organizational things! I don't know what's gotten into him, but I love it!

By the time we're done, our office and living room will look completely different. Our living room is 90% done, and it already does. And I'm finding all sorts of new reasons not to leave the couch...

The big re-arrange sparked some major cleaning too. We've got a gi-normous pile of clothes waiting for thrift store donation. We took piles and piles of things down to the trash. Bulk garbage like our old computers, unnecessary CRAP like old papers and magazines. I also went through our storage cage and trashed a lot of things we didn't need to make room for the new TV's box, and some things that didn't really need to be in our apartment but we wanted to keep. I'm tired just thinking about all we've done since we decided impulsively to start this process.

I'm waiting to share until it's all done, which could take a few weeks since we ordered some things online and have to wait for them to make the trip across the ocean.

But I was too excited about the whole change not to share a sneak preview.

New TV, new surround sound, new woven baskets. Drastically altered entertainment center. And a really close crop because there's so much new going on to the left and to the right.

And that's it! No more until it's finished. We're down to the simpler tasks, like running clothes to the thrift store and a TV to its donation spot. Once our packages arrive, we've got some organizing to finish in the office and one more big purchase to buy and assemble.

We're having people over for St. Patrick's day, so I'm hoping we can have mostly everything done by then. In the meantime, I promised some of Jeff's co-workers some cookies and I've got some black bananas just asking to become bread. I think a baking session is the perfect way to spend this Sunday afternoon.