Taking our Time

This morning we woke up in the darkness, our alarm theoretically going off the same time as usual, but in reality we had one less hour of sleep under our belts. Now we are yawning a lot, sipping our coffee and staring into the blackness out the window. Why? Because daylight savings time just turned off again. My mind doesn't object to the theory of this practice, but it hurts my body a little. My body is telling me it's not time to get up yet, silly.

Our house-hunt has continued with a great deal of earnestness and effort on our part and not a lot of cooperation from the Iowa City housing market. We have yet to find an adorable home in the handful of neighborhoods where we want to live that will both suit our needs and keep us out of a large, unrealistic mortgage. But that's really ok, because buying a house will be a much easier thing after we are officially married.

And the wedding in less than a week away. On Thursday we will touch down in Tucson. A couple days after that, we will tie the knot.

A V-Day to Remember

I can't say I've ever particularly been a fan of Valentine's day, but one of the many things I love about Brian is we tend to see eye to eye on how to celebrate various holidays. We like to thumb our noses at consumerism and go out of our way to avoid doing anything that resembles what we are expected to do.

This year we happened to have a particularly wonderful time on Valentine's day. We woke up early and had coffee like usual. Then Brian made us fancy (non-alcoholic) smoothies for breakfast.

After that, we went to the bank and opened a high-interest checking account, consolidated, and officially connected our finances. Nothing says "I love you" like "My money will be yours if I die," right?

Once done at the bank, we made full use of the small snow-cover that had fallen the night before and spent an hour or so on our cross-country skiis. It was only my fourth ski of the season, and the snow was far from ideal, but the glide was surprisingly good given the stickiness of the snow and I managed to both thoroughly wear myself out and work on my technique a little.

After skiing, we came home, ate lunch, showered, and then crashed out for a lovely late-afternoon nap. Then we woke up, made orangegingerduck for dinner, which we enjoyed along with a nice bottle of port we got for Christmas.

How we're going to top that next year, I have no idea...

Never Judge a Book By...

Over the last year or more, I have gotten fairly addicted to audio-books - mainly because I have discovered I can listen to them at work on slow days to take my mind off the slowness and keep the time moving along.

I am aided in my audiobook addiction by the fact that the Iowa City Library has an astoundingly comprehensive selection of books on CD. These books on CD are also astoundingly popular. So, to get a new book to listen to, all I have to do is watch their online catalogue like a hawk until the book I want is checked in, go to the library asap in hopes that no one will check it out again before I get there, find the book I want to read on the shelf, bring it home, transfer the contents of between 6 and 25 cd's to my computer and then move them over to my ipod in stages as I listen to them.

Yeah, it's kind of a pain, actually.

So, naturally, I have been watching the library's online audio-book service development with great interest. When I discovered it last year, they had a slim selection of books that could be downloaded and listened to on any mp3 player except an ipod. That did me very little good as my ipod is my only mp3 player. Lately, however, they have started providing ipod friendly files which can be downloaded and listened to. To get around copyright issues, after a certain amount of time these files simply corrupt themselves so you can't play them anymore.

Wonderful, I say.

It is true, however, that there isn't really a very big selection online yet. It is also true that I am not nearly as discriminate a listener as a reader. In fact, I often prefer to save books I'm really excited about for taking in the old-fashioned way - curled up on the couch and turning pages. The stuff I listen to has to be on the fluffy side or I can't follow it and concentrate on my work at the same time.

But we all have to draw the line somewhere. Yesterday I found myself listening to something I had downloaded simply because I could put it on my ipod and it was available for checkout. Five minutes in I realized it was pretty much vampire soft-porn.

Weird.

Needless to say, I deleted those files well before my time limit ran out. I also ran a google search on the book, just out of curiosity. This proved to me the dangers of indiscriminate downloading. Had I actually been in a library looking for something to read and somehow picked this book up off the shelf, the cover would have deterred me from so much as reading the first page.

Ah well. Live and learn I suppose.