hum-te-tum

Finished Midnight's Children a while ago now. I liked it a lot but Booker of Bookers? It wasn't THAT good. Now, I'm about 150 pages into The Mantle of the Prophet and almost done with No Country for Old Men. TMOTP is pretty academic in structure and tone but it's engaging and the subject matter (Iranian and Eastern Islamic history) is so new to me that I'm really enjoying it. The author focuses on individuals as a way to examine the larger history, which, considering the apparently huge volume of interesting characters in Iranian history, was a pretty good choice on his part. NCFOM is pretty much exactly the same as the movie version. I mean exactly. Plot, characterization, tone. If it were a graphic novel the Coen brothers would have just made a frame-for-frame recreation. Entertaining but ultimately not that interesting. One difference: The book does more overt philosophizing (think monologues) than the movie.

In other news, I interviewed for a new job at CHF but don't think I'm going to get it. That's alright, though, it was worth it just to get myself out there in a positive way as a possible candidate for other job openings. And it got me to update my resume and get some more experience interviewing. Both valuable things.

In training news, I hurt my back a little over two weeks ago but it healed in a week. I did some lower-intensity workouts last week and played in my summer league games and with Joose on Sunday and then yesterday got back onto the plan I set up last month. With frisbee 3x/week I think that big gains in the gym will have to wait until the fall. After (hopefully) Regionals in early October. We got the final tournament schedule for Joose and it is as follows:
August 1/2: Summer Daze Disc Harvest in Worton, MD
August 15/16: Summer Glazed Daze in Winston-Salem, NC (won't be at this one because of the beach)
August 29: Horsetown Throwdown in Poolesville, MD (I guess the team came together too late to get a bid to the Chesapeake Open, which is a much bigger tournament)
September 19/20: Sectionals in Upperville, VA
October 3/4: Regionals in Upperville, VA (se espera)

Hurray for frisbee tournaments! Continuing the disjointed and rambling nature of this post, I just opened the 2008 UNDP Human Development Report and haven't even started reading it yet but noticed that at least half the credited staff (some of the names are of indeterminate gender to my ignorant self) and a majority of the leadership of the report are women. Cool.