Stop The World

I found myself humming this as R. and I drove home from Siam Sushi Friday night.  A great tune from the golden age of music videos.  1983: I was twenty-nine, and we had just moved to Austin, Texas.  And now, twenty-nine years later, I am "embedding" the same music video on my blog.

I am indeed stopping the world, taking eleven days off from work.  On Saturday, we took down our Christmas lights and decorations, and took a car load of electronic devices, (parts of an old IBM PS/2 system, a VHS player, a dead coffee-maker and an old toaster oven), to a hazardous waste collection event at the county operations center.

Today I raked leaves from around the house, moving them to mulching areas, swept the driveway and back porch, wiped the mold on the bathroom ceiling and shower curtain with bleach, took Claudius the cat out.

I'm reading War and Peace., which is a change even  from another 19th century novel, Barchester Towers, which I just finished.  In the recent Pevear & Volokhonsky translation, the first part of book one, which is almost entirely dialogue, is largely in French, with English translations in footnotes.  I respect the translator's reasons for rendering it this way, but it does get tedious.

This evening we watched The Journey Home on EWTN.  The guest was a man whose father had been a missionary  for the Reorganized Church of Latter-Day Saints, a different group from the Utah Mormons.