blogging again

I feel like I'm talking to myself here...but that's what I get for not blogging for a few months, and not being so frequent even before the hiatus. Oh, well.

It's taking awhile to get myself back in gear after the busy-ness of the past couple months. But work is starting to pick up, so I'm being forced to think about math, tutoring, teaching... and in the meantime I'm also trying to sort through years and years of stuff, hoping to get rid of a whole big huge lot of it. The sheer mass of papers, books, cards, photos, bookmarks (it seems I have a collection of bookmarks) and other paraphernalia and memorabilia is just getting to be too much. The little flood that occurred while I was away this summer convinced me that I really don't need to keep all this STUFF so this time it will go. If any of my readers want any of it (or don't!), please let me know. Hopefully my work won't pick up totally until I have done with this latest round of purgation....

In the meantime I'm going to distract myself with blogging, hopefully on a more regular basis than before. I thought I'd turn over a new leaf, and write a little about what I've been reading lately.
**I read a whole book (albeit not a long one) last night and this morning: The Summer of Ordinary Ways, by Nicole Lea Helget. It was a very interesting book for me -- it's a memoir, and the author grew up on a farm in Minnesota, my home state. This is not a book for the faint of heart -- some of the things that the author experienced were pretty crazy and brutal -- but it gave me a lot to think about, and there were a lot of ways I connected with the author.
**Politics Lost, by Joe Klein, which I have just started. I'm still on the Prologue, which is rather long, but I think it will be a good book.
**I've also started Anne Tyler's A Patchwork Planet, which I think is a re-read, but I can't remember it at all. If you haven't read anything by Anne Tyler, I highly recommend her books. They are lots of fun, very interesting & unpredictable. She is great at thinking up really interesting characters.
**I'm about to start The Light Fantastic, by Terry Pratchett, the second book in the Discworld series. I finished The Color of Magic this summer while on my trip, so I'm looking forward to continuing the journey. I'm going to try to read this one faster, so it might make more sense than the last one. (I kept losing the thread of the story in the first book when there would be weeks between the times I would have time to read during this past spring.)
I also picked up a few books at Mathfest last week, so there are a few waiting in the wings...not to mention a few books on tape and CD from the library, including The Game by Laurie R. King. I think I need to stay out of the library for awhile!!