Puttering in the Study

Great Ancient Civilizations of Asia Minor - Prof. Kenneth Harl

Prof. Harl from Tulane is one of my favorite lecturers from The Teaching Company and this was my third course by him.  I got it principally to get some background before our October trip to Turkey and Greece since I knew we'd be seeing more thing than we'd seen before.

I liked the course okay, but by the Mycenean period I had started questioning the idea of a history of a geographic area whos history frequently overlapped with other continents.  For example, much of the classical period the history was of the Greek penensula, not Anatolia proper, but as the activity was of the entire Aegean worls, it counted.  Same with the Byzantine empire - the city of Constantinople got an entire lecture even though it isn't even in Asia Minor, simply because of its influence.  So after a while it became how Asia Minor was influenced by what was happening around it which, while it made sense, was still not quite as clean a historical subject as, say, the history of England or Greece or Russia.  So there was that.  But it was still interesting, although the first, due to that structural issue, that I didn't just absolutely completely enjoy.

Sailing to the Edge of the World: Journeys of the Great Explorers - Glyndwr Williams

I just finished listening to this series of audio CDs on the great explorers, starting (more or less) with Columbus and going through Cook.  It was my first lecture by Portable Professor (as opposed to The Teaching Company) and I enjoyed it.  (Only real frustration was that I had downloaded it to the iPod which was then supposed to run through the car's audio system, and the former was often mislabeled and the latter only worked right about a third of the time, so it was annoying trying to get the thing to actually play what it needed to when I wanted it to.  Would have been easier to just load the discs one by one).

The series was good and I learned a lot about medieval nautical exploration, and who did what when (something I didn't know before).  Interesting side stories that he doesn't go into in great detail were the difficulties calculating longitude (I think Dava Sobel's book Longitude is a must-read here) and the search for the Northwest Passage, which I suspect there's a lot of interesting stories about.

Cowboys/Eagles - post w/o pics

I tried all during the game last night to post on Facebook and nothing would go through, and then when I got ready to post today I discovered Jamie took the camera with her to Shreveport so I don't have the pictures from that yet either.

But we had a great time, and Jamie got Emmitt Smith, who was there as well, to sign a football for Grayson.  No, seriously - I'll post pictures later today.  We picked up 2009 Cowboys Stadium Inaugural Season mini-footballs for the boys to have as a keepsake on the way in and Emmitt was in the box behind us so she took the only pen we could find (the mini-pen I keep in my Levenger pocket note pad) and just marched up there and handed a ball to his daughter sitting next to him and asked if she'd get her daddy to sign it for Grayson, who was standing there looking all pathetic.  (Is this woman smart, or what?)  Well of course if his daughter asks him to do something, he's going to do it - wonder where Jamie learned that?  After that the big win over the Eagles was almost anticlimactic. 

Almost.

Lost on the Ocean Floor: Diving the World's Ghost Ships - John Christopher Fine

This book looks initially like a diver's memoir, like a couple of others I've read recently, covering various hstorical shipwrecks a diver has explored.  Not so.  While the author has dived on one or two of the listed wrecks, the book is really just a series of chapters - in generally chronological order - describing great underwater archaeological sites.  It's irritating to me to read about these places without pictures, maps and diagrams to help me see in my mind's eye what's going on.  And while the chapters are quite good in isolation, I was still disappointed in the book as a good read.  It's a good short guide to various sites, but it doesn't tell - and really, you can't expect it to - an overall story.  And perhaps the real problem for me is that it fits each story into a neat chapter when I previously had seen book, documentary and even movie-length treatment of the subjects.  For example, the Titanic as a chapter?  I have a solid shelf of Titanic material.  So that was a bit jarring.

There was one nice surprises, though.  Chapter six on ancient shipwrecks was boring as usual (that's just not my field of interest) as it talked about Mediterranean shipwrecks.  But then when Jamie and I were walking through the "Underwater Maritime Museum" in the old crusaders' castle in Bodrum, Turkey, we came face to face with the actual artifacts from the shipwreck the book had been telling me about.  There was a large recreation of the ship salvaged in part by a professor from Texas A&M University with its hold full of copper ingots in the shape of ox hides and I was thinking "wait a minute, I know what these are..."  The book didn't bother to tell me that all these treasures were preserved in Bodrum, which by coincidence I'd be seeing a few weeks after reading the chapter.  So I was getting this weird sense of deja vu, thanks to this book.  So that was pretty neat.

Overall, a good introduction to the field, but the thing sure needs more and better pictures.  I would enjoy it far more as a documentary, with lots of pictures, particularly of the Scapa Flow wrecks and their salvage, which was fascinating to read about. 

Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father and Son

I've liked Michael Chabon's writing ever since picking up a prior collection of his aricles in a really cool three-part dust jacket.  This collection is a little more focused on fatherhood and manhodd and kids and, uh, well, that sort of stuff. 

I liked this collection okay - it had some really nice observations and several of the chapters I could easily relate to (I have figured out that Chabon and I are about the same age, and with some similar interests, although he has a lot more time to think than I do).  As always he has some good turns of phrase, but more than with his other work here I began to have some trouble with his writing.  It's a bit dense, the phrase turns sometimes don't quite hit and I have to slow down and think about them a bit, and there's the overriding problem with a "book" like this that what you're reading is nothing more than a collection of articles, and there is no overarching theme or story that you can use as a framework to follow when you get a bit lost.

Still, I enjoyed it, and particularly liked the observations of fatherhood, as that's something I have a bit of an interest in these days.

Fresh Aire V - Mannheim Steamroller

I had some time over the holidays to actually listen to a little music while puttering in the study (ah, that phrase!) and this was one old album I pulled out from my ET days.  I particularly liked at the time the idea of basing an album on a fictional dream by Kepler of traveling to the Moon because I had always liked the experience of reading Wells' The First Men in the Moon. 

I'd like to say that I really enjoyed the album on listening again, but unfortunately I really didn't.  There were still definite parts that I liked but overall the thing is just too bouncy and synthesizer-heavy to wear well after - oh my God, 27 years!  I should probably listen to it again soon - I usually like music better the more I beat it into my head.

Emily's 40th birthday party / Baylor visit

Wednesday the 30th meant another road trip with the herd, this time to Waco for my sister Emily's surprise 40th birthday party.  We had a great time visiting with family and watching the boys play with their cousins.  There was the traditional poem by cousin Ann (read in her absence by cousin Cathy), and towards the end of the evening we played Tripoley, which as best as we can tell is a game where the hostess  changes the rules every hand based on what her cards look like.  But it was fun anyway, and Grayson had a great time learning how to play cards.  (It was the proverbial hoot when he started announcing he was playing "the club of seven" or "the heart of ten" and couldn't figure out why we thought it was so funny - he thought that was the same thing we were saying). 

The twins got their cheek beat on a heater edge and their chin bitten by a dog, but they took it well, napping contentedly after the other cousins left while we played cards.

We spent the night in Waco, had lunch the next day at the famous Elite Cafe on the circle (which has stopped serving fried cheese, which was a major disappointment) then went over to Baylor to show the boys the campus.  The bear pit was closed for the day so they couldn't seen the bears, but we took a picture of them on Judge Baylor's lap in front of Pat Neff Hall, and in front of Daddy's brick at the new law school.  They very very tolerant of their parents boring them with "That's the apartment complex where Mama lived" and "that's the apartment complex where Daddy dated, uh, never mind" over and over.

Christmas 2009 (Noland and Smith editions)

Well, it was a great Christmas - we had Jamie's family in for about three days at Chez Smith, then my sisters descended with their respective herds for a couple of days, which is just how we like it!  We're fortunate that once we get home after Christmas Eve Mass at about 5:30 pm, we don't leave the house again (Walmart runs for cooking supplies aside) for about three days, and our families come to us.

As is traditional in Jamie's family (although I still contend it's wrong to open Christmas presents before Christmas morning) we opened presents Christmas Eve after going to Mass and having a delicious Christmas dinner at the house.  We started with oldest and everyone opened all their presents in turn.  The evening ended, as tradition requires, with Daddy reading Twas the Night Before Christmas to the boys before tucking them in.  Mother came and spent Christmas Eve at our house so she could enjoy watching Christmas Eve and morning without having to get out in the cold.  She did that last year and really enjoyed it, so we made sure she came again.

The next morning the kids were excited to see what Santa had brought them, which included their first handheld computer games.  They immediately retired to the dining room where our three and Kathy's two lined up and played - silently - for hours.  Why didn't we think of this sooner?  We then hosted Jamie's family for a spectacular family lunch, followed by dinner.  The only things that would have made it better were naps and football, but we had to do without this year.  (Actually that's not correct - we watched the Cowboys/Saints game from the DVR again on Christmas Eve - some things just never get old).

The day after Christmas the Moores and Bottoms checked out and the Smiths and McKenzies checked in, and we did Christmas morning all over again, this time going in order of age but opening one present at a time.  We then took Mother's picture with her grandchildren for next Christmas' card, since we never know when she'll have all eight in one place again.  As you can tell, it was chaos, which, again, is just how we like it.

All in all, a great Christmas, capped off with the Cowboys posting a convincing win over the Redskins Sunday the 27th as the cousins were leaving, setting up a monster game next Sunday!

Yep, Papa set the front meadow on fire. Again.

The fun just never stops when you live in the country.