On books and golf
Apr. 7th, 2011 07:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenayWell, apart from a tiny bit of nausea (enough to make go 'huh', not enough to send me running for the bathroom) and an increase in my brain-numbing exhaustion, it looks like I escaped the worst of Humira's side-effects. Go me! It will be a few weeks before we can be sure that it's working, but I am going to start hoping anyway.
The Master's start today. It's unlikely that I'll see any of today's coverage, but I think that I know what I'm doing with my afternoons/evenings for the next few days :-) I quite enjoy watching golf, but rarely find the time to actually sit down and deliberately watch it. The Masters is different for some reason, perhaps because I find Augusta to be one of the most stunningly beautiful courses out there, and I do try to catch as much as possible.
It's also a good excuse to spend quality time with my knitting. I'm nearly at the armholes on the back of my waistcoat. The combination of tiny needles, tiny yarn and a pattern based on 1x1 rib is making this a slow project but the end result is going to be stunning so I don't mind. It would be nice to think that I can have the back nearly done after a weekend of golf watching, but we'll see.
At least there are no sleeves to do :-)
In book news, I finished two books this week. Go me! April is off to a good start. One was read over the weekend, which is really the only way to do a Mercedes Lackey Valdemar book because I know better than to expect to get anything else done as well. The last time I opened a new Valdemar book with intentions to only read five pages, I blew off an entire day of home study and didn't emerge for eight hours. Lessons can be learned :-) The other was the final part of Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn trilogy, which I thoroughly enjoyed and couldn't predict the end to. It's nice to find an epic fantasy that's not entirely predictable :-)
Now I'm reading an Inspector Lynley novel on my Kindle, the last of the batch of books I bought to take to England, and then I'll be onto the Arthur C. Clarke nominees.
My dead tree book is a biography of Edward III. Understandably, this is going slowly. Not because it's bad (it's actually quite compelling) but because it's deep, thinky and reading too much in one sitting makes it hard to keep all the facts straight in my head. I do now understand why he's regarded as one of the great medieval kings, though. Although his father (or maybe grandfather) was the first king to call common people to Parliament, Edward III was the first king to make it a regular part of Partliament and the first to require that his tax requests be approved by both the nobility and the commons. That body of representatives from the non-nobility (they were still not exactly peasants - wealthy merchants, knights, etc.) formed the basis for the House of Commons as we know it.
So, er, Edward III sort of established the beginnings of the modern Parliamentary system. How cool is that?
He's also the first king to introduce tax relief for the poor, when he made one of his taxes only apply to households over a certain income level.
He's also the chap who started the Hundred Years War, but put into context it's not actually as bad as it sounds.
Interesting tidbit: the English claim to the French throne was not formally renounced until George III removed the "and France" bit from his official title, due to the collapse of the French monarchy. Heh.
Yes, I'm a bit of a geek sometimes about so many different things.
The Master's start today. It's unlikely that I'll see any of today's coverage, but I think that I know what I'm doing with my afternoons/evenings for the next few days :-) I quite enjoy watching golf, but rarely find the time to actually sit down and deliberately watch it. The Masters is different for some reason, perhaps because I find Augusta to be one of the most stunningly beautiful courses out there, and I do try to catch as much as possible.
It's also a good excuse to spend quality time with my knitting. I'm nearly at the armholes on the back of my waistcoat. The combination of tiny needles, tiny yarn and a pattern based on 1x1 rib is making this a slow project but the end result is going to be stunning so I don't mind. It would be nice to think that I can have the back nearly done after a weekend of golf watching, but we'll see.
At least there are no sleeves to do :-)
In book news, I finished two books this week. Go me! April is off to a good start. One was read over the weekend, which is really the only way to do a Mercedes Lackey Valdemar book because I know better than to expect to get anything else done as well. The last time I opened a new Valdemar book with intentions to only read five pages, I blew off an entire day of home study and didn't emerge for eight hours. Lessons can be learned :-) The other was the final part of Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn trilogy, which I thoroughly enjoyed and couldn't predict the end to. It's nice to find an epic fantasy that's not entirely predictable :-)
Now I'm reading an Inspector Lynley novel on my Kindle, the last of the batch of books I bought to take to England, and then I'll be onto the Arthur C. Clarke nominees.
My dead tree book is a biography of Edward III. Understandably, this is going slowly. Not because it's bad (it's actually quite compelling) but because it's deep, thinky and reading too much in one sitting makes it hard to keep all the facts straight in my head. I do now understand why he's regarded as one of the great medieval kings, though. Although his father (or maybe grandfather) was the first king to call common people to Parliament, Edward III was the first king to make it a regular part of Partliament and the first to require that his tax requests be approved by both the nobility and the commons. That body of representatives from the non-nobility (they were still not exactly peasants - wealthy merchants, knights, etc.) formed the basis for the House of Commons as we know it.
So, er, Edward III sort of established the beginnings of the modern Parliamentary system. How cool is that?
He's also the first king to introduce tax relief for the poor, when he made one of his taxes only apply to households over a certain income level.
He's also the chap who started the Hundred Years War, but put into context it's not actually as bad as it sounds.
Interesting tidbit: the English claim to the French throne was not formally renounced until George III removed the "and France" bit from his official title, due to the collapse of the French monarchy. Heh.
Yes, I'm a bit of a geek sometimes about so many different things.
