7ToF: Nerd Central

1. I thought it would be so fun to do book puzzles on my bookstagram account. The first one was books with numbers in the title, and I spent hours gathering up the obvious ones (1984, Fahrenheit 451, The Two Towers, Station Eleven) and combing my shelves for less obvious ones (The Thirteenth Tale, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Tenth of December, Hyperbole and a Half). I even created rules: the number had to be in the title, not in the subtitle; collections like Best American Short Stories with the year in every title didn't count; Stephanie Plum didn't count, because it would have taken all the space.

2. Perhaps not surprisingly, no one else thought this was as much fun as I did. Only two people bothered to respond, and no one took up my challenge to think of more (although I have to admit I took all the easy ones). When I told MadMax about it, he started laughing and said affectionately, Oh, Mom, you are such a nerd. (I'm sure he meant it in the nicest possible way.) I already had a list of possible future puzzles going before I posted, though, so I will probably keep doing it. I may put less time and effort into future versions, though.

3. Best outcome: I re-discovered Eight Cousins, by Louisa May Alcott, which I adored as a child and read several times. I always liked it better than Little Women, which-- to be honest-- I never read all the way through until I was in my twenties. But now I can't really remember either one, so I'm in the midst of a re-read. Thirty pages in, all I can say so far is that Rose (from Eight Cousins) is more of a prissy snob than I remembered, sort of like Amy in Little Women, but we'll see.

4. Not long ago I wrote about my obsession with finding the perfect tea. I mentioned that I always warm the cup before I put tea in it. My reasoning was that if my tea was made in a warmed cup, it would stay hot longer than it would if made in a cold cup, and I lose interest in tea (or any hot drink) once it's cold.

I decided to put that to the test. We have a motley assortment of mugs, but we do have two that are the same. So I pre-heated one with hot tap water, then heated water in the electric tea kettle and poured it in each cup. After one minute, the water in the pre-warmed cup was four degrees warmer than the other cup; after five minutes, the difference was three degrees. Not as big a difference as I would have thought. NOW YOU KNOW.

But being a creature of habit, I still made my cup of tea the same way this morning.

5. Once again I got in a discussion with some friends about genre fiction. It just astonishes me how anti-romance people are. And honestly, I think it's a completely false opinion. I'm pretty sure if I handed them one of my favorite romance novels and actually forced them to read it, they'd come back and say, that's not a romance novel! It's just a good story! And yet it IS a romance novel, and the problem is that they don't know what they're talking about because they've never read one. Or maybe the problem is, as one Book Riot editor realized in this week's Interesting Read, our culture's misogyny has created a disdain for romance.

6. But having said that, I have to say it's been a long time since I've read a current romance novel (published in the last couple of years) that I finished. I'm all in favor of occasional escapist reading, but all of the ones I've read recently have been of the fantasy type-- the hero is fabulously wealthy, drop-dead gorgeous, and his only faults are the adorable sort. And/or they're so insanely attracted to each other that there is almost no story besides their physical attraction. I'm good for one or two of those a year--they can be fun to read-- but that seems to be all that's being published these days.

7. Summer is here. I lose faith every single year--winter lasts so dang long, and then spring never really seems to come, and then suddenly it is gorgeous and I almost get teary-eyed when I go outside to feed the chickens. We had record breaking heat and then wildfires for most of last summer, so this year is especially appreciated. Here is the picture I snapped this morning, strategically aimed so that you don't have to look at chickensh!t (you're welcome)(Past the fence is our neighbor's field).

And that's it for me. Have a great weekend.