7 Belated Quick Takes (51)

1. We (the folks and I) went to Vancouver this weekend to see my place. That is, I wanted to see whether the room I was renting was real, lacked visible cockaroaches, wasn't terrible, and so forth. That's why I didn't post this on Friday.

2. Vancouver was beautiful, as was the campus. I am excited. I will have free access into all sorts of nice places, too, like the Museum of Anthropology and the Asian Garden. I'm sure there will also be studying and stuff.

3. Most of British Columbia, or that of it that we drove through, is beautiful. There are so many different ways for mountains to be mountainous, and so many different sorts of vegetation to adorn then. The forested areas in Vancouver are also nice, far more like rainforests than I had hoped to imagine.

4. On the way back I read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I wouldn't call it a great book, but it was certainly enjoyable, clever, and gripping. Leah has warned me that the sequels are not as good. That is a shame, because this book certainly set me up to want to read the sequel. Somehow Lisbeth's character... I want more for her than what she gets.
(This wanting itself bugs me. I don't particularly want to want happy endings. I should know better. Good books end as they end; they don't have to be comedies. And yet, occasionally, I do care strongly for a character, like some sort of fanboy, in the full perjorative sense of the word. It's irksome. But I'm being a snobby grump, of course. For most people, character empathy is what makes a book good.)

5. I got a fair amount of packing done last weekend.

6. I also bought some cheap used books. One of these was a pictoral guide to world religion. I finally found a book containing information about Sihkism, Jainism, and Baha'i. It also had festival calendars and diagrams of many of the traditions' places of worship. But it still had woefully little information on Mormons and Aboriginal traditions, and no information at all on Scientology, Wicca, Theosophy, Neo-Pagan Reconstructivism, and other new or smaller traditions. Sometimes I think that I need to write this book that I want.

7. I went to a barbeque last Sunday night. (Sorry for screwing up the chronology). This was with a former co-worker and a friend of his, who I had never met. We ate steaks and watched The Fellowship of the Ring, afterwards talking about high school demographics, working in call centres, theology, and people being ignorant.

That is all for now.

I may not post again very soon, as we have to move this coming weekend and a major event is coming up at work (Heritage Day), which means I'll be putting in overtime. If I can post in the next few days I will but otherwise don't expect to hear from me. I'll resume previous discussions in the beginning of August.