Somehow I actually read 38 books this past year. I just discovered another one I forgot - Eduard Morike's Mozart's Journey to Prague, a bizarre little novel I read as part of the "Blog a Penguin Classic" event. A lot of you signed up for this: did any of you finish your books?

I am being stymied in my efforts to get a hardback of my next volume of Proust. I even had a kindly person at Penguin send me the ISBN to help in my book searching. Number 9780713996081, where are you? It appears that everyone that got a hardback copy of the latest translation of The Prisoner and the Fugitive is holding on to it tightly. Seriously, the only place that's given me even a whiff of a hope of getting a copy is some bookstore in Turkey (go figure). Meanwhile, my addled brain has devoted rather a lot of time looking at sites about Proust. I am especially fascinated by the various characters said to inspire his characters. The seductive, secretive lady who convinces a well-placed man to marry her and ruins his social standing, setting herself up for a life in which she can never be invited to the same parties her husband is? Laure Hayman. The gorgeous duchess whose parties our narrator long dreamed of, and yet who turns out (in my mind) to love only herself? The Comtesse Greffulhe, whose husband cares not for art at all and is the perfect snob and looks exactly as I pictured him. (I also did some research on some Proustian places in Paris, so that I might visit them while we are there and have a remembrance of things passed, as it were. We'll see which we have the time to see, or if we'll just be talking about looking for the time we lost while we were there, doing other things.)

I've also put in a request for my boss and his boss to get funded to go to the conference in May. Keep your fingers crossed for me.

Well, despite being elbow to elbow with other commuters today, I did finally manage to finish Mozart's Journey to Prague. I did very much enjoy the description of people enjoying a preview of a musical piece by a composer they adored, even more so because it was Don Giovanni, the only opera by Mozart I really am enthusiastic about. However, the poetry in the back just isn't grabbing me and I'll be skipping that and calling it done. I'm not sure why this book was chosen as a "classic:" it's a bit melancholy (and perhaps Romantic?) with its foreshadowing of Mozart's early death, but I don't really see it as being particularly remarkable. I suspect the genius is really the poetry, which I can't enjoy because I don't read German and the translations are abyssmal. So it goes.

I had to upgrade my computer to Office 2007 yesterday in order to get some kind of special feature in Excel I need to write a particular report, and AARGH! It's like trying to cook when you've got dinner guests waiting and your kitchen has been entirely rearranged. Spices, bowls, butter, measuring spoons, EVERYTHING HAS MOVED! I don't like it at all and I especially don't like that it wound up messing up all of my other applications, too. Yuck.

Dinner last night was at Yoisho and it was fantastic. I'm looking forward to eating there every Monday after Pilates (ahem, I didn't actually go last night, but that's a minor detail) ,but I've got to learn to get the final tab down. I'm also going to not get the grilled chicken skewer plate in the 7 skewer size next time as that's the one that has the hearts and the gizzards. Bleah! (The wings were great, though. Yum!)

Today I'm back on Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair and Wednesday I'm starting Proust's Sodom and Gomorrah (in which he gets married). Is it not just too pathetic that I'm actually really excited about getting to the next volume in the series?

I got up this morning, refused to get out of bed, and went back to sleep for a bit. Finally I got up, found some clothes. and trundled across the way to the French Market thing they've got set up at the base of St. Mary's Putney for some "pave' fume'," smoked cheese with ham in it, and then over to the bacon stand across the street for (duh) bacon. Once home I made poached eggs on crumpets with melted hammy cheese on top, bacon on the side, and an extra piece of toasted rosemary bread with more melted cheese. Because, see, when I was walking back, I went by the Wagamama, which was FULL of people eating bowls of noodles and Curry Udon, and was a bit grossed out by having so much heavy food so early in the day, only when I got home I realized it was 12:30 and I was just getting around to making breakfast, so I thought maybe I should add just a bit more food to the plate to make it more of a brunch size. Man, I'm slow. I think I must blow all my energy going to shows and such during the week because I sure don't have any get up and go come Saturday.

So now I've eated and LJed and fed shadowdaddy his Connie Willis cracknovel (The Doomsday Book) and I don't really want to do a thing, though I will take a nap soon. I might hit the Primark in Hammersmith and see if I can find an outfit for the party tonight, but only after I've 1) hung up the laundry and 2) walked up the river, because that will be nice.

I'm not doing too well blogging my Penguin classic. Fortunately Mozart's Journey to Prague is quite short. Half of it is poetry and I'm finding the translations intolerably bad, so I'll just consider it "done" when I've finished with the story bit. Rather a lot of it seems to be absorbed with Mozart's inability to be responsible, financially or otherwise, though, once again, there seems to be a dinner party happening. I love this idea of people going to parties and sitting around playing the piano (or whatever) and singing to each other - what's happened to this tradition?

Goals for the second year in London:
1. Save up to buy a house here. Apparently 10K in Libre de Plato is considered about right.
2. Get my debt paid off in the US (first). I'm aiming for ... January or something.
3. Get four star kayak certified, if I can find some instructors I don't think are macho jerks.
4. Gosh, I had a good one. Oh yeah, get fully off of HSBC and converted to Smile, one step at a time, starting with getting Mr. shadowdaddy converted, then the autobillpay moved over, then some kind of miracle thing where the automagic rent payment moves ... etc. January is probably about right for this.
5. Start doing Pilates twice a week now that I'm near the Y in downtown London. I'm hoping to be doing this by the end of October.

Can you tell I just spent the last hour working on my budget? It was mostly painful except for the part where 1) we're not broke this month with a week until payday still (this seems entirely due to the fact that all three of our bimonthly bills were not, for some reason, due this month) and 2) the dual charges for $XXX obscene amounts of US money (my debt) turned out to be some kind of clerical error on the bank's part (the other option was that someone had snagged the mail on my old account and written a check for an identical amount off of my old account - not a sneaky thing to do, really).

Wow, that was so boring. I apologize. Today's fun stuff: we went on a bike ride from our house all the way to London Bridge, and I became pretty much 100% convinced that I will not bicycle commute in this city as I was nearly killed about four times (or it felt like it - and 5 if you include "by aggravating my spouse"), so this wasn't too fun though it picked up after we got to St. James Park and got free sandwiches (free food always being a day brightener in my book) and water bottles and a visit with julietk. Afterwards, we returned via train from Waterloo (couldn't deal with the maddening throngs any more) and I crashed on the couch for a bit. Second fun thing: we went to the Ritzy to see A Roll of the Dice, an Indian silent movie that stole rather a lot from the Mahabharatha and was gorgeous and jewel-like and quite a nice travelogue to boot. Third: shadowdaddy realized he was crashing hard after the movie, so we went to Fujiyama for some Japanese dinner. I realized while we were there that I am NOT going to work tomorrow, I'm going to an orientation in Sutton, so I get to sleep in. Woo hoo! On the other hand, I did nearly forget entirely and go into work so I am a bit of a moron. I'm also sore from my bike ride, but I think it was a good afternoon despite the aching right now.

Also (so exciting!), I've decided on a pseudonym for my new job: Tango Foxtrot. Everyone calls the company by its acronym, which I think is a bit twee, so I'm going for a longanym and changing the implied initials a bit. (Fun article on Nyms here for my word geek friends. I'll see if I can come up with a rightonym for the other word I made up and change it later - perhaps megalonym would work?)

Currently reading: Mozart in Prague (dull!), The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, The Guermantes Way (he's at someone's house and they are insulting his knowledge of furniture, page 554 and the finish line a mere 43 pages away), The Devil in Amber, and Queuing for Beginners. I'd really like to finish just one more book before the end of the month, but I'm having a hard time finding anything that's really catching my interest - pleasant, yes, but not gripping. With luck I'll get all of these books finished by the end of October.

Proust at 548. He's finally left the party! Now I'm on to the Penguin book and off to work.

Well, I made it through alive, and it wasn't that bad, really, other than the profound sense of disassociation, that it wasn't really happening. My boss has assigned me a project I have to plan and write tests for in rather a short amount of time, and it looks like to some extent I'll be covering for him while he goes on vacation ... next week. And I said I like process so now I get to go to meetings about how to improve process. Ooh boy. It's a living.

The girl next to me is a really cool Australian. She asked me if I'd moved to London to leave behind my checkered past. "Hell no, I moved here to get a new one!" Heh. Too bad her last day is Thursday.

After work I met the family and scarlettina at Inn Noodle for a yummy dinner, and were fortuituously joined by wechsler, which was very nice. Then shadowdaddy and my brother and I went to Spitalfields to do the Jack the Ripper walk, which was very interesting in many ways.

I came home to find my Penguin blogging book had finally shown up - Eduard Morike's Mozart's Journey to Prague.. I'll start in on it tomorrow.

And I'm to bed - it is far too late for me to be up as I actually intend on being in at my new job ON TIME tomorrow, as I DO give a rat's ass again.