Books!

Recently I've read:
Till We Have Faces - C.S. Lewis
The Ghost - Danielle Steel
Out of the Silent Planet - C.S. Lewis
Perelandra - C.S. Lewis
That Hideous Strength - C.S. Lewis
The Phantom Tollbooth - Norton Juster
Rant - Chuck Palahniuk
The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding - La Leche League
The Magicians Nephew - C.S. Lewis
The Code of the Woosters - P.G. Wodehouse
Special Delivery - Rahima Baldwin Dancy

Currently I'm reading:
The Thinking Woman's Guide to a Better Birth - Henci Goer

I have in my possession these books to read next:
The Pregnancy Book - William Sears, M.D., and Martha Sears, R.N.
Homebirth - Sheila Kitzinger
Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven: Women, Sexuality, and the Catholic Church - Uta Ranke-Heimann
The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis

Books on my "to acquire soon" list:
Ina May's Guide to Childbirth - Ina May Gaskin
The Baby Book - William Sears M.D.
The next book club book (I don't have the list handy)
A Cooperative Method of Natural Birth Control - Margaret Nofzinger
Pregnant Feelings: Developing Trust in Birth - Rahima Baldwin Dancy, Terra Palmarini

Books of the above lists I recommend:
 Till We Have Faces - C.S. Lewis.  A retelling of a myth I'd never heard before.  I got very involved with the characters and though it was not necessarily an easy read, it was a pleasurable one.
Out of the Silent Planet - C.S. Lewis.  The first in his science fiction series.

Perelandra - C.S. Lewis.  Second in the science fiction trilogy.  I think this one is my favorite. 
That Hideous Strength - C.S. Lewis.  Final book of the science fiction trilogy.  It starts very slowly, but it's very worth slugging through the beginning bits. 
The Magicians Nephew - C.S. Lewis.  First of the Narnia series.  It was quite interesting to read, as I thought The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe was first.

The Code of the Woosters - P.G. Wodehouse.  Very amusing.  I think it's book three of a series.  I'm going to have to get my hands on more of this series.  I liked this one a lot.

The Phantom Tollbooth - Norton Juster.  A good book for kids I think.

The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding - La Leche League.  This book contains very good information on breastfeeding including advice for potential complications.

Special Delivery - Rahima Baldwin Dancy.  Very good, slightly bias book about home/hospital birth.  It outlines the potential complications one can run into while birthing and steps to take if they happen.  This book also has sections in it addressed to the husband/partner that I think might prove helpful to a father who is uncertain about birth.

The Thinking Woman's Guide to a Better Birth - Henci Goer.  I haven't finished this one yet, but I like it so far.  It's a collection of information regarding the procedures they do in the medical world of birth.  The author herself holds a bias - she says so in the introduction  - but she still presents the information in a fair manner.  I'd say that anyone looking to make an informed decision (regardless of location of birth) should read this book as it contains information you don't necessarily find easily on your own.  The only thing I'd say against it is she hasn't yet explained that women should refuse Misoprostol (Cytotec) because it poses a fairly significant risk to mother and baby if used for induction of labor.

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There you have it.  That was what occupied my time at work during May (and maybe a bit of April).

Not so New Ideas.

Their aim is, as far as possible, to use nothing which is the product of the factory system or of modern industry in general; for they think these things so iniquitous that every one is more or less party to a crime in using them. . . .  There is certainly something attractive about the idea of living as far as may be on the produce of the land about you: to see in every walk the pastures where your mutton grazed when it was sheep, the garden where your vegetables grew, the mill where your flour was ground, and the workshop where your chairs were sawn - and to feel that bit of country actually and literally in your veins.
Tolkien once remarked to me that the feeling about home must have been quite different in the days when a family had fed on the produce of the same few miles of country for six generations, and that perhaps this was why they saw nymphs in the fountains and dryads in the wood - they were not mistaken for there was in a sense a real (not metaphorical) connection between them and the countryside.  What had been earth and air & later corn, and later still bread, really was in them.  We of course who live on a standard international diet (you may have had Canadian flour, English meat, Scotch oatmeal, African oranges, & Australian wine to day) are really artificial beings and have no connection (save the sentiment) with any place on earth.  We are synthetic men, uprooted.  The strength of the hills is not ours.

-C.S. Lewis

(found in) Joseph Pearce, C.S. Lewis and the Catholic Church p81-2

(original source) Walter Hooper, ed, C.S. Lewis: Collected Letters I908-9

I finished this book (C.S. Lewis and the Catholic Church by Joseph Pearce) which was the previous month's book club book - I'm a  bit behind - today at work.  I marked the above quote yesterday as I hit a little past the halfway point before having to close up shop: I generally read only at work unless something is so riveting that I cannot put it down, but the thought of having nothing to occupy myself with during the lulls (which are pretty much all the time at my job) the next day usually deters me from doing so.  I had marked it because it struck a chord with me; I agree with Lewis in his calling us "synthetic men."  I think that we've done more harm than we may realize by disconnecting ourselves from the land immediately surrounding us.

This is not to say that I think we should pitch the idea of urban living in favor of the farming life.  That would be impossible.  The amount of land we'd need for such an endeavor would be (in my mind) staggering for the number of people that inhabit the States alone.  Instead, we might try and make a compromise with the limitations of society and farm a decent size patch of back yard. Barring that, purchase as much as you can from local growers.  The farming life may no longer be feasible for the majority of us, but this does not mean we should disregard it as obsolete; without farms, where would we get our food?

What I am saying is that I think it's an enriching choice for body and mind to grow your own produce and/or buy from local farmers.

Also, it was - as stupid as this is going to sound - enlightening, in a sense, to realize that people have been rejecting industrial farming for a very long time.  Most likely from it's conception.

I know that this, being a new idea to me, is not a new idea to others; it was just refreshing to know that it goes farther back than had occurred to me.

As a side note: do read this book if you are at all interested in C.S. Lewis.  It was a fantastic read.

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Good news!

I fixed my desktop computer.  What was wrong was a double whammy: I needed to flash the BIOS (update to the latest version) which turned out to be more complicated than it should have been because for whatever reason my computer refused to detect my flash drive.  I ended up connecting two freshly formatted FAT32 (standard format for flash drives, in case you were wondering) drives to the back two ports of the computer.  When that failed, I loaded the fail-safe BIOS and then the optimized BIOS (one after the other) immediately before entering the Q-flash utility.  Magically this worked (after trying five other times to get the darn things to show up) and my BIOS was successfully flashed...to no avail: I was still getting the "Main BIOS Checksum Error" dialogue instead of the operating system.  So, for giggles, I took a stick of RAM out - I had previously done this in hopes it was an easy fix with no result - and viola!  My computer turned on.

So there you have it, random BIOS failure and random RAM failure rolled into one.

My new 4GB RAM stick is on it's way; it's lame to try and World of Warcraft it up with only 4GB of RAM.  I'll happily take 8GB or more, thankyouverymuch.