Books and stuff.

This year's was a solid Thanksgiving. My two new recipes worked out pretty well. I'm almost done reading a fantastic book. I have the Seattle half tomorrow at an ungodly hour. I've had plenty of wine. I have an idea for a new project. I am mostly caught up on sleep. Things could be worse.

I need a new book discussion group. Not to replace my existing one, but to supplement it. I have a bunch of things that I've been reading that I want someone to talk with about, stuff like Righteous: Dispatches from the Evangelical Youth Movement and Schoolgirls: Young Women, Self Esteem, and the Confidence Gap. I know people who would happily join in, but they all live in Boston or Gettyburg or San Franciso or New York or Denver or Chicago and not so much in Seattle. Which is ridiculous. We toyed before with the idea of having an online book discussion group but it sort of fizzled before we really got it started. Why do my friends have to live all over the freakin world? Who's in Seattle who's going to read this stuff with me? I can find plenty of people who want to talk about software or technology more broadly, but so far very few who want to argue with me about other stuff that I want to argue about. Maybe it's an occupational hazard.

I don't regret studying linguistics at all, and I am pretty happy with my life and professional choices. But occasionally I do wonder whether I would have been more likely to stay in academia if I had studied something else. One weird thing that I'm discovering is that I am naturally much more an engineer than I ever thought I was. One other thing is that I value my autonomy much more than most careers will tolerate (in this sense, I have mostly been lucky). One other thing is that I'm pretty glad I didn't go to law school.

Four more weeks till vacation!