That much further west

Finally.

I'm here. Only a few hours late. You would think after 100+ years of history Canada would get used to the snow but no. To be fair it is a little bit of a strange year when the is snow in Las Vegas. So i really can't complain about my minor delays. My thoughts (prayers if i was christian) are with those trying to fly somewhere today. at least i made it alive. No on to the gauntlet of christmas obligations and festive family merriment.

I really shouldn't complain, as families go mine is pretty awesome. We have the occasional odd ball but i love them all dearly and have mostly learned how to deal with them. Okay maybe we have more then a few odd balls...

And for the first time in a long time i'm not going to work over the holidays. It's just not worth the stress and the lost time for a few lousy dollars. It is time for me to kick back for a little while. So day one i'm still in bed, well thats not true, i got up and had a cup of coffee and now i'm BACK in bed. The point is i haven't done this in a while and it is very nice. The plan for today is read, eat, visit, read. Pretty good start to my first ever ttempt at a more traditional "holiday".

I'm really excite to just read. While i was packing i had to lay out all the books i WANTED to bring with me and just say "no you're not going to read all those, choose 2."

okay 3
4
5
...

So i somehow doubt i'll read everything that i brought with me but it'll be fun trying. The big project for the break is Atlas Shrugged. It's much slower so far then The Fountainhead was, and what can you say about a book where 200 pages in the action is just starting to pick up...but i must say Rand has pleasently surprised me. I still think she and her philosophy are bat shit fucking insane but here books and beautiful, powerful, and eloquint. (why does the spell check on blogspot stop working part way down? i know i misspelt eloquint...and probably mispelt) SO yeah, i encourage everyone to read the Fountainhead, not so much Atlas Shrugged but they are quite good books if you seperate the author from the work.

I'm also reading the two books i'm going to base my english coloquim (sp? again) paper on. I'll probably talk more about this later but here's a teaser. There's a slew of books out there right now with the same theme which is captured fairly well by the title of my current endevour, "the dumbest generation" (may have mentioned it before) and it talks about how computers are making us dumb and the crisis that creates for clasic literature. I'm contrasting that with Jon Careys "intellectuls and the masses" which bemoans universal education and thinks that uncultured people should be excluded from literature.

So just the kind of progression over the last century from "common people are reading and dumbing down literature how do we stop them from reading" to "the common people aren't reading literature how do we get them to read"

kind of a funny change.

So i guess that's it for now, christmas is off to a god start hope it stays that way. I'm going to try to get in to see a doctor before i start doomsinging, but the downside to my break might be my wisdom tooth just popped up. I'm not a doctor so i'm not sure that's what it is but intense pain just behind the rear molars...hopefully that disapears soon.