Life Update - Birthday Trip

Note - This was originally published on my other site "The Geology P.A.G.E." but due to the content I have moved it here and backdated the post.

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It the single best day of the year. That's right, it's my birthday! I know you are all jealous. And I got the spend it with the most wonderful wife in the world.

We started out going to the neighboring county where the annual Maple Weekend was being held. I ate at a pancake breakfast (Veronica didn't eat due to a diet that was soon thrown by the wayside).

Then we traveled off to see some of the farms. The first place was pretty cool, after we drove by a place we couldn't find. It was a nice little three room shop that sold some candies and had stainless steel equipment. Overall very clean. Then we went back to the shop we drove by and it was a shanty to say the least. Very small but the people were very nice. We went into the room they were boiling the sap and it was so foggy in there we could barely see. We would have purchased some syrup from them but the guy we were talking to said the sap just started running and that it was the bad stuff. It's the kind of stuff they send to Aunt Jemima. Apparently, the big companies only need 1% maple syrup to be considered 100% pure maple syrup.

The next place we went to was an Audubon Museum, it was not a real maple syrup ranch but they had a bunch of activities. But since it was not a real farm we left to go somewhere we could get some syrup. We randomly drove down this one road towards a town we knew had a farm. We ended up seeing massive amounts of smoke/steam so we stopped there. That ended up being the best one, they had a good tour, lots of free samples and a snowball gun. Also they had hot dogs cooked in maple sap, which were also very good.

Then we came home to a decorated house. Veronica apparently had her mom and sister decorate the house for me. I then went popping all the balloons looking for prizes and notes in all them. This also came with a giant cookie cake, my first. Like a wonderful wife that she is, we ended up watching a geology movie, Volcano. Ending the evening off we went to Olive Garden for some wonderful food.

All in all, a good birthday. :-D

The 306 Greatest Books #43 - The Aeneid

I am going back and posting all of my previous book reviews so that they are listed on my site in chronological order. The reviews are dated for the time when I read the book, hence the reason many of them will be listed for times before this website existed. 

The next up on my reading of the 306 greatest books is The Aeneid by Virgil. This book can be found on the Sybervision, and the Norwegian Book Lists. 

We head back to the ancient classics with this Roman telling of the travels of Aeneas, a Trojan who ultimately became the ancestor of the Romans. The Aeneid feels like it was written to fulfill the Roman need to copy all of the Greek mythology, and unfortunately that is how this book reads. The first half follows The Odyssey almost to the point of going to the exact same places as Odysseus. The second half is much better and kind of reads as its own story, although it is still reminiscent of The Iliad. The one thing that The Aeneid did do that Homer skipped over was to establish the use of the Trojan Horse as a means for the Greeks to enter the city of Troy during the Trojan War. Overall, I feel that despite this being considered one of the major works of fiction from the ancient times, it feels too much like a rehash of Homer's much better duology. I would personally say you can skip this remake and stick to the original. 

The 306 Greatest Books #42 - The Portrait of a Lady

I am going back and posting all of my previous book reviews so that they are listed on my site in chronological order. The reviews are dated for the time when I read the book, hence the reason many of them will be listed for times before this website existed. 

The next up on my reading of the 306 greatest books is The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James. This book can be found on the Sybervision and the Observer Book Lists. 

The Portrait of a Lady, and Henry James in general, fall into my unmemorable category. Neither of the two stories that I have read of his on my lists I can recall at all. The Portrait of a Lady follows an American woman, Isabel Archer, who moved to Europe and ends up having to adapt from the free thinking American way of life to the more rigid thinking of England at the time. This follows the main theme of the novel, which is the mixing of the old and the new, with often disastrous consequences for the old way of life. Overall, the story is well written with an easy flow to it, however unremarkable it may be. I enjoyed reading at the time but after many years I cannot recall the plot off the top of my head at all.

The 306 Greatest Books #41 - The Call of the Wild

I am going back and posting all of my previous book reviews so that they are listed on my site in chronological order. The reviews are dated for the time when I read the book, hence the reason many of them will be listed for times before this website existed. 

The next up on my reading of the 306 greatest books is The Call of the Wild by Jack London. This book can be found on the Sybervision, Observer, and My Book Lists. 

When you think about one of Jack London's Alaskan dog books, you would likely think about White Fang, I assume due to the popularity of the movie a few years ago. However, before White Fang was published, London published the much shorter The Call of the Wild. To start off I must say that this book was fantastic and I highly recommend it to anyone, especially dog lovers. It is gripping and intense, so much so that it makes you want to read more. And to top it all off, its short, only about 80 pages. I was able to read it in about 2 days without trying very hard. It is about a dog, Buck, who was kidnapped from California and taken to Alaska to be a sled dog. The book is entirely through the dogs perspective but it does not have any of the cheesy "dog voices". Not once do you hear what they are saying but you get how he is feeling, especially among his interactions with other dogs and humans. Again I highly recommend, you won't be disappointed.

Dogs - Our new dog, Twix

Note - This was originally published on my other site "The Geology P.A.G.E." but due to the content I have moved it here and backdated the post.

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Introducing our new dog: Twix.

We got her from the SPCA and she already had that name so we didn't want to change it. Although she doesn't really respond to it she is getting better. We have had her a week and two days now and when we first got her she seemed really sad and terribly thin. She really didn't like to be left alone at all and she was over-joyous whenever we came home. But now she is starting to get used to us and whenever we go out she is getting better. We had to use short breaks to teach her that we would always come back. She loves to play, more and more each day. She plays fetch and tug of war with a rope and a squeaky football attached to a rope. She it so very energetic, she absolutely loves to be chased around the yard and she will always vie for our attention. If I stop petting her she will run over to Veronica and then back to me when she is done. It's rather humorous.