The Toy Truck

I've been MIA. Again.

Reason #1: Josh and I have been hard at work on my jewelry website, which I've wanted to do ever since I opened my Etsy shop. My friend Katie of Making This Home recently unveiled her new site, Gadanke, to sell her handmade journals, and between the inspiration from seeing such a beautiful new site and Josh's semi-constant reminders to start designing mine, we finally sat down, hashed out a mock-up in Photoshop, and dove right into Wordpress. It's still under construction - but looks, if I may brag about my fiance's imposing php skills, FANTASTIC - and I'll post the url here when we're ready to roll. Though from my shop and blog names, it shouldn't be too hard to figure out. ;)

Reason #2: Lost. I never would have guessed it either, but I got bored one day while Josh was out. That's what happens when you poke around netflix long enough. Long story short, I started leisurely in early/mid April, kicked it up a bit when I realized I could watch an episode on Hulu over my lunch break every day, and knocked it into high gear when a colleague asked if I'd be caught up in time for the series finale (yes, I said, I will gladly finish two whole seasons in one week if it means increasing my hours awake : watching Michael Emerson act ratio). Result? I did it. It may have done some weird stuff to my head (I have a minor, slightly distracting obsession with Ben Linus now), but yeah, it happened. Thoughts on the finale? Short answer: I'm ok with it; it got me thinking about a few things. Long answer: ...maybe I'll save this one for another time. Until then, I leave you with this, courtesy of afore-mentioned colleague:


(I tried to embed the video, but it's being wonky. Here's the link: http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1936291)

You know...if we knew where the toy truck came from, I think everything else would have made a whole lot more sense. Just sayin'.

The Influential Books Game

So much for posting every (or almost every) day. I've been very pleased with our wedding planning so far, because it's been surprisingly low-stress. And then we hit our RSVP due date. I guess it's still not super-stressful, there are just a lot of things to do and remember now - forms and lists to send to our venue, a dinner tasting to go to (ok, this part I'm really looking forward to), a photographer to haggle with, honeymoon flights and accommodations to book...I feel like there's always at least one thing that I'm forgetting to do! It doesn't help that I started watching Lost last month, and I'm totally, tragically hooked. I found out this week that Hulu has the entire series, so now my lunches are 43 minutes long, instead of 30. Yikes.

At any rate, here's an interesting little activity that Claire (provider of all links funny, whimsical, and gorgeous) forwarded to me ages ago: The Influential Books Game.

In mid-March, a blogger started a listing exercise, urging readers to compile a list of the top ten books that have influenced their view of the world, and recommending a "go-with-your-gut" approach, rather than thinking about it for a long time. Another NYT blogger wrote an opinion piece on the idea, and listed a few other bloggers who had compiled their own lists; they made my head hurt (he says of Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past: "This is still the best book on interiority". WHAT?! Who says that?!) until I realized that most of them are economics bloggers and thus their "literary" range just barely intersects with mine. This is the original blog post. This is the NYT article it was in.

Firstly, these comments from the original blog post make me giggle in their earnestness:
"Heidegger is out of fashion."
"...the claim about [Willard van Orman Quine's Word and Object] demands an explanation. It strikes me less as a heterodox reading and more of a non sequitur."
"Hayek adds an informatics complexity element that some of the other authors mentioned simply don't. Also missing from the list is growth theory, in which case a bit of Solow would be a good addition too."

*cue my brain exploding*

And secondly, here are my top ten influential books, in vague chronological order and mostly without defense or explanation:

1) The Little House, by Virginia Lee Burton
2) The Stray, by Betsy James Wyeth (illustrated by Jamie Wyeth)
3) Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll
4) Love in the Night, by F. Scott Fitgerald
5) Watership Down, by Richard Adams
6) The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood
7) "The Maze", "The Ogre" and "The Unknown Citizen", by W.H. Auden
8) Othello, by William Shakespeare
9) The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien
10) Galatea, by Philip Pullman
...er, I mean, top 15:
11) Lamb, by Christopher Moore
12) The Road, by Cormac McCarthy
13) Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand (lay off - it got me all riled up in a way no book had ever done before)
14) The Giver, by Lois Lowry
15) The Tin Drum, by Gunter Grass

Eat it, economists.