April is Ending

Overall, a much better month than March for me and mine here.

Lessee ... We all ate a wee bit healthier, and I’ve started a program of walking (now including both little ones with me) in hopes of leading up to running.  The wife and I actually found three –  (3) – three! opportunities to dine out by ourselves, sans children. I read two Edgar Rice Burroughs novels, a baseball book, some science and some religion.  Watched a whole bunch of Survivorman episodes (Season One from 2005 as well as the new Survivorman: Bigfoot episodes) – Great American Wild you are now on notice!  Began an interesting research project I’m hoping to turn into my first nonfiction book, though I’m only about ten percent in.  Work has been progressively less stressful (though that kinda makes me nervous that something bad’s just around the corner ...)  There’s no more snow, there are leaves on the trees, the bills are paid and the house is functioning, although we did have a spell of dead mouse odor in the basement we couldn’t get rid of.

Oh well.  All in all, things are in a slight upswing for House Hopper.

Hmmm.

What do I want to accomplish in May?

Prime Memories

It just dawned on me that a year ago was my sister-in-law’s wedding down in Austin, Texas.  We flew down for a few days at a ranch they rented for the ceremony and party and had a great time.  During the plane ride down, poolside, in a hammock on the ranch, in various rooms dodging people and guests, in my hotel bathroom, in the passenger seat of the black Volkswagen we rented, and on the plane ride home, I put away John Derbyshire’s excellent Prime Obsession, a book about German mathematician Bernard Riemann and his hypothesis (which attempts to predict the distribution of prime numbers in a given range of numbers).

The final page raised Everest-sized goose bumps all out on my arms, some 30,000 feet above Tennessee.

Ah, memories!

Relapse

Yes, it’s happening again.

I’ve relapsed.  I am now reading physics books.

It started innocently enough over the weekend.  During our errands, Little One casually informed me that she was studying the Periodic Table in Science at school.

The Periodic Table?

The Periodic Table!

Images and emotions flooded my very being at that moment as I drove us from the dry cleaners to the recycling center.  The hours I spent on the floor of my childhood living room, on my belly, chin on hands, feet flipping and flopping, as I memorized every box on that wonderful chart.  Atomic Numbers, Weights, the abbreviations of the elements (and the intriguing journey of discovery figuring out what the Latin / Ancient names of some of them were), the families, the series, gases, metals, the elements theorized but generated neither in nature nor laboratory.  Yet.

Ah!  Life is Good!

So Monday I picked up John Gribben’s In Search of Superstrings, which happened to be the topmost book of a stack of nearly two-dozen pop-sci physics books in the basement, and haven’t been able to put it down since.

I’ve relapsed.