flemmings | (no subject)

All last summer I kept the windows in the side bedroom closed but still smelled the workers' cigarettes. I still keep the windows closed and still smell cigarettes but my next door doesn't smoke. Most peculiar.

Finished Pamela Paul's My Life With Bob which I learned about from a double crostic puzzle. (Bob is her Book of Books, a list of everything she reads starting just before her senior year in high school.) It's a fun book but a puzzling one. She reads everywhere- on the road, in the hospital, at home. She takes three or four books with her to any country she goes. And she writes the titles down in BOB, twenty to a page, and at the end of twelve years has filled twenty-five pages. So 500 books. Over twelve years. Either I've finally met someone who reads more slowly than I do, which is scarce possible, or- and on the evidence- she reads nothing but door stoppers. Buddenbrooks, Anna Karenina, The Magic Mountain, War and Peace. She did read The Hunger Games after giving birth to one of her children, but that (and her book club reading of kidslit and YA) comes much later. Mind, I spent chunks of my 20s reading Dickens and Thackeray and George Eliot and Cao Xueqin and Genji too, so I suppose it's A Thing.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

How annoying to smell cigarette smoke! Speaking of smoke, if you get forest fire smoke there, now is the time to get your box fan supplies! Once the fires happen, they'll all be sold out.

I don't think we get forest fires much. Box fans and filters, do you mean? Usually I just turn on the AC when the air quality is that bad.

Yeah. Our A/C house filter isn't enough when the forest fire smoke hits. So we run box fans and with filters inside the rooms to clean the air. It's especially important for people prone to asthma.

I can well imagine that would be necessary on the West Coast. Here, not so much.