Where the treetops glisten

Oh, now, figures this would happen. I'd been resolving pretty seriously to slowing the rate at which I buy more and more books, and I had done pretty well the last couple of weeks. But then Kinokuniya sent out a notice about an early Christmas special: ``Towards An Early Enlightened Christmas,'' a twenty percent discount for all is privilege club members for any books bought this Friday and Saturday. Well, that's hard to resist, particularly considering that Christmas is coming up and books are really good gifts to bring home what with them being flat, even if they're heavy. Plus, after all, I will be flying home for Christmas sometime soon and I'll need to have something to read on the plane.

Well, on top of that, I stayed on the bus about a stop longer than I needed to, because this put me in convenient range of another new bookstore that's recently opened up. It's not in the most convenient location relative the bus stop -- up an elevator, then across a parking garage, then to the back of the building -- but it is a lovely place that seems to specialize in history, sociology, and biography books, many of them pretty hefty tomes. All the better, they got them in at used bookstore prices, so that I can get the ideal of nice hardcover books at about what the softcover was selling for in Kinokuniya. It's so like a little niche store in a college town, down to the Persian rug on the floor that the people wandering in are afraid to step on.

The major reason I was afraid to step on it was that my sandals were sopping wet. It was a lovely, bright, sunny day, all the time that I was staying indoors and trying to sleep in, and when I took some pictures of the courtyard and the attractive hillside just outside my apartment block. But on the bus downtown, it started raining, and got to pouring by the time I got out. The rain kept up heavy and showering until I got on the bus to go home, when things cleared up. It's hard to not take that personally. Still, good thing I didn't plan to go to the zoo.

Trivia: The word ``seismograph'' was created by engineer Robert Mallet in 1854. Source: A Crack in the Edge of the World, Simon Winchester.

Currently Reading: Time Lord: Sir Sandford Fleming and the Creation of Standard Time, Clark Blaise. ``Sir Sandford Fleming would have won the possibly self-ironizing title of `outstanding Canadian of the nineteenth century' ...'' You know, that national self-esteem will never heal if you don't stop picking at it. It's not necessary to go to the American extreme, where bands of people with faces painted in stars and stripes roam the streets shouting ``AMERICA! YEAH!!'' and composing flag-waving country/western songs, but it's possible to say something nice about your own group without immediately nullifying it.