Inklings Week - Library Lists!

I'm guest posting today over at my friend Jamie's blog for #InklingsWeek!
Check it out here!

Quarantine Day in the Life

I was thinking, this is a pretty unique time in the world. And I feel like I'm never going to forget the weird feelings and the strange desolation that this time brought,but I know I'm going to forget what happened on a day to day basis. I'm not interesting or thoughtful enough to keep a diary, so I thought I would put a typical weekday in the blog for future Wesley with a bad memory :)

7:09-isham - Wake up, dink around on phone

7:20am- Actually get carcass out of bed, put on work out clothes

7:25am-8:10am - Talk to Josh, tell the dog she's pretty, maybe walk or feed her depending on what Josh hasn't done and then go downstairs to our creepy basement to work out. I found a good app for a leg workout but it's an ass kicker so I do that ever other day. On the off days of that I get on our ancient treadmill that we got from Saint Vinny's for like $20 or do yoga or whatever. Working out keeps me from feeling too sloth-y and it's about the only time during quarantine I get to be by myself, so I'm taking it!

8:20amish - Queenie and I go upstairs and shut ourselves in our home office and start our day. Our house is like so many other houses right now with more than one member working from home. Josh interacts with his students through their virutal learning in the morning from the living room downstairs. Because Josh is a notoriously loud talker and he has to take a lot of calls and his computer beeps alot (all things that Queenie hates and makes her anxious) she comes upstairs with me. We close the door and put on some music (lately it's been a lot of cello music or the Chernobyl soundtrack) and try to drown him out. If this day happens to be a Monday I consult my list that I made on Friday of things that I need to do and make sure nothing has changed. I also make a sign that goes on the door of all of the times that I will be on phone calls/Zoom meetings so Josh knows not to barge in or if he is upstairs he knows to be quieter. Then we work.

via GIPHY

10:15am - About this time I realize that I need a break. And that I smell from my workout that morning. Time for a shower break! Queenie curls up on the bathmat and it's super cute but she also gets dripped on because she's between me and my towel.

12:00pm - Lunch break! Sometimes I get really luckily and I do virtual lunches with friends, or sometimes Queenie and I break out of our almost soundproof fortress of calm and productivity and eat with Josh.

1:00pm-3:55pm -  Workworkwork (while trying to be consciousness about getting up to stretch and walk around and take a few breaks. No one is trying to come out of quarantine with a bad back). Queenie usually ditches out during this stretch since Josh isn't being as loud during this part of the day. And I'm just not that entertaining!


4:00pm-4:10pm - Quick dog walk and talk to Josh about dinner. We try to switch off a little bit but he is our primary cook. Especially because he has shorter work days than I do these days.

4:15pm-4:45pm - Quick sprint to the end of the day. Make a list for tomorrow, answer some last emails, tidy up so I don't come into a pigsty the next morning, log off sign out stop thinking about work for the rest of the day because work/life balance is important. 

The rest of the evening is some combination of: eating dinner, trying to talk myself out of eating too many snacks, working on a craft (crosstitch and coloring have been favorites lately), reading (though this has been hard to do lately, I don't know why. It's like my attention span is too short or I'm too fidgety . I don't know), watching tv with Josh, doing a zoom meet up with friends, social distancing with our next door neighbors who are always trying to get me drunk with them and I'm like "but I have to work tomorrow" and they are like "oh but really?" (they have a large patio and we bring our own chairs and sit at least ten feet away from them. We are being very safe), putting on lotion, washing hands, talking to the dog, walking the dog and then finally going to bed.

Book review: "Sovietstan: Travels in Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan" by Erika Fatland.

I know I am in for a treat when my friend Soulmate Sarah puts a link on my facebook page and says "BOOKCLUB?" Sovietstan was such a book. We both have a love for the slightly more obscure European countries - I lean more eastern european and she leans a little more central Asian/south eastern european but this book had something for both of us. And even if you don't have a strange niche like Souldmate Sarah and I do, I still think this is a book you could enjoy! These countries are often punchlines, if thought about at all - and most Americans can't even find them on a map but they are intriguing enough to fill several books.The countries that the book covers are: Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan. 

Here's some interesting tidbits from the book:

• Even though we tend to lump all of the "-stan" countries together they are incredibly different from each other in so many ways (geographically, politically, economically). Turkmenistan is 80% dessert, Tajikistan is 90% mountains. Kazakhstan has become super wealthy due to oil, gas and minerals. Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan have dictatorships on par with North Korea but Kyrgyzstan people have deposed to presidents.So, let's not lump.
• Ashgabat in Turkmenistan has the most marble clad building per square kilometer in the world. (The people at Guinness say so).
• The losses that Kazakhstan had during WWII fighting as part of the Soviet Union were monstrous. 10% of the Kazakh population died in connection with "The Great Patriotic War" a loss comparable to Germany's.
• There are 1400 leftover Soviet nuclear warheads in Kazakhstan - making it one of the world's nuclear powers...which is...weird.
• At anytime between 1 and 2 million of Tajikistan's 8 million residents is in Russia working and sending the money back home. Not much work to be had in Tajikistan.
• Kyrgystan is the only post-Soviet country in Central Asia where a sitting president has stepped down of his own volition

There's also a chapter about bride kidnapping - which is awful and terrifying and messed me up for days. 

This was a really interesting book that expanded my knowledge of this part of the world exponentially. Special shoutout to my local public library who didn't have this book and ordered it to have in the collection specifically for me :) All the heart eyes.

Book Review: "Fallen Glory: The Lives and Deaths of History's Greatest Buildings" by James Crawford

This book will have a special place in my reading history as the first book that I started and finished during quarantine! I might have to make a special shelf for that on my goodreads page :)

This books is large, more than 500 pages but chapters are shortish and self contained. They are also in chronological order so you could do some skipping around if you would like and it won't hinder you. It starts way way back in the day with the OG of doomed architectural projects  - Tower of Babel and  ends (almost) with the World Trade Center/One World Trade. (Hello all the feelings on that chapter). If you're like "Wesley, Im not a structural engineer - I don't care about i-beams and load bearing walls" I would say do not fret my friend, it is a book more focused on the historical than the logistical and engineeri..cal.

Here are a few of my favorite tidbits:

- The Russians took a bunch of artifacts from the excavation of Troy in Turkey at the end of World War II as trophies, you can find them in the Russian State Museum.

- So many interesting facts about the Library of Alexandria: if you were coming into the city and you had a book you had to immediatley report to the library and if they didn't already have that book you had to hand it over. They would copy it and you would get the copy back and they would keep the original. Which is such a hard librarian flex. I hate it but respect it haha.You gotta have a plan if you want a copy of every book ever made, right?

-Did you know that a "milestone" is a symbolic central point of a city from which all of the distances within the city is measure from? Like if I was like "how far is it from Rome to Florence?" the distance is measured from their milestones.

-St Paul's Cathedral is the first English cathedral to be completed within the lifetime of it's original designer

-The guy who designed the Bastille in Paris was it's first prisoner - accused of, among other things, sexual acts with a Jewish woman

-There's a whole chapter on Panopticon prisons and it's bananas

-If you look at Berlin from space you can still see the divide where the Wall was - some will say it's because of the different street lamp lights, some will say it's because of standing economic differences #probsboth.

I really liked this book, it was a good friend during a weird time. 4 out of 5 stars!

Rapid Fire Mini Reviews #???

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline - I can see why so many people like this book. 80s nostalgia, a likeable protagonist, big faceless corporations are the bad guys, good world building. I also thought I was the only person who ever saw Ladyhawke, a personal favorite, until this book so #solidarity.

The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories by Ken Liu - This is a great little short story collection, with the connector between them all being something of the Asian variety. Set in Japan, a Japanese spaceship, an Asian folktale, Asian mobsters, etc etc. The titular story had me with tears in my eyes, eating my lunch at work. I want a paper menagerie to play with!

Tulip Fever by Deborah Moggach - Interesting setting, ok plot, underwhelmed by character development which made it hard to get invested in the characters.

The Pyschopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry by Jon Ronson - If I had been more on the ball this one would have gotten full review, but I had to get it back to the library before I got around to writing the review. Whoops! I LOVED this book, and I can't wait to find more books by this author. It scratches that Mary Roach itch for me :)

The Poet and the Vampyre: The Curse of Byron and the Birth of Literature's Greatest Monsters by Andrew McConnell Stott - This book was too much "oh my gosh, these people are ridiculous and make all of these problems for themselves while hurting everyone around them. Gosh, are they awful" and less "so, you want to hear about "Frankenstein"? Though I did pick up some tips on how to be an efficient grave robber, so that's helpful. If you are looking for a book with scandal and intrigue, this may be the book for you!
  

Why squid are terrifying and great - a kind of book review.

I recently read the book "Kraken: The Curious, Exciting, and Slightly Disturbing Science of Squid" by Wendy Williams. And I will tell you, the name delivers.


Here were a couple of my favorite take aways:

- Squid/Octopi could be clutch in developing treatments for neurological disorders. I saw so many words in this book that I usually only see at work (dopamine, ubiquitin). I think a lot of neuroscientists are going to be keeping a close eye on these tentacled guys.

- I knew that these things were smart, but they are probably smarter than we are, comparatively. Aquarists who care for them have struggled to develop puzzles and games that keep them interested and engaged for more than a few minutes. They've even started the "Octopus Enrichment Notebook" to share ideas with each other! (Not having bones really helps you wiggle into those tiny puzzle boxes to get the prize inside.)

- The blanket octopus might be the most savage sounding animal ever: "The blanket octopus has developed a special immunity to the Portugese man-of-war's poisonous tentacles and can rip them off with it's own arms,, then wave them in the water to warn off predators".  I will rip off your poisonous arms that don't bother me and wave them at other people. 

-The cephalopod brain is wrapped around it's throat.

-Cephalopods live in all of our ocean's except the Black Sea and the Baltic Sea

-Humboldt squids are known to be cannibals

What I thought was really interesting about this book was that very very often a paragraph would end with something like "I mean, that's what the scientists think they are doing. It's kind of a best guess. We aren't sure. Some of them live in the deep deep parts of the ocean and don't like to be watched doing things, even when they are in captivity sooooooo....we need to keep researching!" it's exciting/scary that there is so much out there that we don't know about them. Especially since they are so smart. If they ever can figure out to live outside of water we should probably be scared.

Book review: Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design by Charles Montgomery

If you've been along this blog very long at all you will realize that I love some nonfiction, and what I have for you today is a nonfiction book that I hope will be of interest to everyone because it's a book about how the design of the places that we live dictate how we live our lives and how happy we can be.

There were so many interesting points in this book that I don't know if I can do them in a reasonable paragraph type of set up so you're getttttttting bullet points!

• You know how you could have a big old house, a shorter commute and a stress free commute if you lived in a smaller city but a lot of people would rather live in a shoebox of an apartment with an awful commute and in general a more expensive hectic environment? That's called "hectic thriving". You know "if you can make it there you can make it anywhere" type of thing

• There was a whole super interesting/depressing section about how a long commute negatively effects almost all aspects of your life - your relationship with everyone (spouse, children, neighbors), how often you see your friends, your neighborhood, even how you participate in things like politics. (Shorter commutes, you want it.) 94% of people in Atlanta commute by car. Average commute? 44 miles a day. The stats on commutes for the SF Bay area and Atlanta were *gagging noises here*.

• This probably isn't super surprising but the advent of the mass produced automobile DRASTICALLY changed the layout of our cities. In a very short period of years we went from a "people hanging out on their stoops, kids playing in the street, everyone just kind of hangs out in the neighborhood" to a lot of people getting hit by cars and people being relegated into very small, sometimes pretty useless public spaces.Cars are king in most places and it kinda blows. Amsterdam, you are my complicated queen, as usual. Here is a sobering statistic about traffic deaths: "Imagine a completely full Boeing 747 crashing every three days, killing all onboard. That's how many people die on US highways every year".

• Did you know that there is a perfect depth of front yard that "is shallow enough for conversations but deep enough to allow for retreat?" It's 10.6 feet deep.

That's just a couple of quick highlights from this book that I thoroughly enjoyed. I give it 4 out of 5 stars!