Watching: Bride and Prejudice. Aside from the woefully miscast (as in: he can’t act to save his life, at least not in this role) actor who played Darcy, this was a fun film. Austen meets Bollywood! (With a bit of postcolonial social commentary, even!) What’s not to like? And wow, Sayid can dance!
Reading:The Inheritance of Loss,
by Kiran Desai. It won the Man Booker Prize in 2006, and I was originally motivated to read it by the prospect to joining a local Meetup group that’s working its way through the Booker Prizer winners in reverse chronological order. (Scheduling issues will likely prevent me from participating in this group, but I may continue with the reading list on my own.) This is clearly a great book, in its scope, language, themes. It’s very well written, and it had no trouble keeping my interest–I wanted to know what would happen next. But I’m not sure if I like this book. I had a hard time relating to any of the main characters–not because of differences in our life experiences but because I didn’t find any of them likeable.
Traveling: To New York last weekend, to see my brother (who lives in the West Village). We spent most of the day at the very awesome American Museum of Natural History, and I have to admit that some of my favorite parts were the old-school exhibits (even though the scholar and anthropologist in me cringes a bit to see them). Truly, no other museum’s dinosaurs can hold a candle to those at the AMNH (no, not even yours, Smithsonian).
Eating: Cream puffs at Beard Papa’s. (Yes, they are worth the hype.)
Knitting: A shawl. Yes, me–the person who is allergic to lace knitting. I am knitting this one with sportweight yarn, though, and the pattern is simple enough that I haven’t yet cried or tried to claw out my eyes in frustration. So that’s all good.
Laughing my head off: At this blog. Cute Overload has some good moments, but this blog is pure gold nearly every time.
I ran some errands today, one of which was to my local post office to mail a birthday package to a friend who lives on the other side of the planet (in another hemisphere, even!). Her birthday isn’t until next month, but planning in advance lets me avoid the outrageous airmail costs and send stuff by surface mail (which, almost always arrives within two weeks anyway, even though the official estimate is “six to eight weeks”). Among the various items I enclosed was the shawl, which I knit for her some time ago and just haven’t been organized enough to send. It’s my first–and only, so far–shawl, and I knit it of a synthetic suede yarn that was a lot of fun to work with. In my effort to get as much mileage as possible from the yarn, I started new skeins mid-row–not, as it turns out, the best idea with this yarn, whose woven-in ends are difficult to conceal. So it’s not the most polished-looking shawl (in the future, I’ll incorporate the ends into the fringe), but I think it looks–and feels–quite nice!
