Wow that's a long long time between posts.

Well, I figure I should start this one slow and easy. With topics that are in my comfort zone like books.

I'm currently reading Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters by Matt Ridley. And Shantaram: A Novel by Gregory David Roberts. I'm on chapter one of both books so I'm not sure I can comment with any authority. Genome is written in Matt Ridley's usual easy to understand and yet gripping style (See The Red Queen.) Shantaram is an interesting beast. The descriptions of Mumbai are familiar and nostalgic (especially when he reaches Colaba. I lived there for quite a while,) but his prose is slightly flowery so the book might start to feel heavy in my hands soon. (It is a heavy book. 994 pages!) Interesting both books also have subtitles. I've never quite understood subtitling. Must be a publisher driven trend.

In vacation news, I've been traveling all over the place. Let's write about the involuntary vacations first. A trip to Menominee that involved some driving, some bad driver/dongle issues and an almost-bought pasty from Schloegels. This was followed by two consecutive trips to Philadelphia. Both involved 12 hour work days and mysterious driver problems. (Stupid multicore processors and stupider driver developers who can't handle multi-threaded programming.)

The voluntary vacations were many but all restricted to Wisconsin. There was a trip to Wisconsin Dells and Lake Delton. This involved time spent at the Mt. Olympus water park, a drive-in theater, sushi and four missed exits on the way back home! (Four!) And a week or so later, Lake Delton disappeared. No kidding!

This was followed by a camping trip to Kohler-Andrae State Park. The water at Lake Michigan is freezing! But the dunes cord-walk was awesome and so were some of the pictures I was able to take of a red-winged blackbird.

After that was a nice long trip to Door County. This probably needs a post by itself. It was very eventful and involved trips to Potawatomi State Park, Peninsula State Park, Washington Island (where the wheat for Capital Island Wheat is grown!) Cana Island Light and Whitefish Dunes State Park. (The water at Whitefish Dunes wasn't that cold!) Lot's of pictures of gulls and terns.

Finally, there was some impromptu camping this weekend too at Governer Dodge State Park. We were pretty underprepared for this one as we weren't expecting to actually get a spot. So underprepared that we didn't even carry a flashlight! Of course, smart as we were we ended up purchasing a hand-crank lantern from Walgreens instead. It was ridiculous the amount of cranking we had to do for a small amount of light. Overall, apart from a spider-bite sustained by Red K it was fun. (At least we think it was a spider-bite. If she starts sticking to walls we will know for sure.) We also stopped by at the House on the Rock and the Frank Lloyd Wright visitor center but didn't take the tours (of the House and Taliesin) as they were prohibitively expensive. (Thanks to Red K for being my fellow traveler and navigator.)