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What's New 16 June 2003 -- Life Strategies On 30 May my father bought a new lawnmower to replace one that had defied his attempts at repair once too many times. It came in a large cardboard box (including a can of oil) and he began immediately to assemble it in his living room. The new mower lacks the self-propulsion system that so endeared the old one to my parents and to myself. Ah well. On 29 May I ordered a book through the local library system. The library I use had a copy and I had once checked it out. It is Phil McGraw's Life Strategies. I did all the exercises and felt very good about doing them, but the effort did little to improve my life. So I've decided to do them again, this time with more heart. I also did the exercises in his Self Matters and made, I think, even less progress. I checked out J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. I didn't want to at first but reading it in the library became too much of a challenge. It's one of the noisiest libraries I've ever seen, and the book is 734 pages long. It's worth the bother, though. I finished it on 9 June, the seventeenth day of reading. I rarely read that much in such a short time, but I find them so enjoyable that once, in one day, I read one hundred pages of Goblet of Fire. As Stephen King, who has read three of the Potter novels, has said, you could do worse than read these; they're pure story. My reading quota is down so far this year. Last year, I read fifteen books. The year before that it was forty. I would like to read at least one book per week, but at sixteen so far, the rate comes to 0.8 books per week. At that rate, the total number of books read would amount to forty-two by the end of the year. Stephen King reads something like fifty to eighty books each year. This is what he calls �reading a lot�, which I assume excludes the rest of the material he might read. I hope I don�t have to do as much reading and writing as he is doing in order to develop decent proficiency at writing. One question I would like to pose to King is, �How do you tell the truth in fiction writing?� If he and I write about the same thing then what makes his account more truthful? Maybe I�ll send a letter to him through his website. In the previous entry I said I would paraphrase information from the Intuitive Flash newsletter if I felt that the information was important. So, I would l like to say that a warning sign for earthquakes in the western United States would be quakes in South America. The quakes in the western U.S. would follow within two months, and the magnitude of the quakes would exceed the magnitude of the South American quakes by at least one whole number. That's it for now. |
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