I just got home from a Bible Study.  We are reading "Slightly Bad Girls of the Bible."  I guess the minister didn't want us getting any big ideas right off by reading the other more dangerous looking books in the series, you know, "Bad Girls of the Bible" and "Really Bad Girls of the Bible."  There are 20 pages of questions to review after the first chapter of the book.  Was the author seriously thinking a group of women could cover 20 pages of questions in any sort of reasonable amount of time?  We are taking three meetings per chapter.

Speaking of reading, "How is Mr Biswas?" you ask.  Ah, he has done nothing but move in with his in-laws and then move out again.  Mom finally 'fessed up to giving it to me.

>> I'm the one who gave you Mr. Biswas.  I got it at the library used
>> book sale and bought it because it was a literature prize winner.  I
>> started it four years ago and read half and got dis-interested.  This
>> summer I decided I'd looked at it long enough and just made myself
>> finish it.  What's so good about it?  I don't know.  It's pretty sad,
>> to me.  The poor man works so hard all his life to get ahead and it's
>> a project in futility.  Is it a metaphor for all of us?  Is there
>> something there I'm not seeing?  Put it on PBS when you're finished. Mom

> So should I finish it?  SP

Well, of course you should finish it.  It's a literature prize winner (I
forgot which prize, but an important one.) It's good for you to have the
discipline to do difficult things.    Yes, finish it.  And I'm going
to finish 100 years of solitude that Derek gave me.  I'm bogged down
with it and I wonder why Derek thinks it's so wonderful, but I told him
I'd read it and I will.  In the next two weeks.  However, I'm finding
that carrying it around with me isn't doing the job.  I may have to open
the covers. Mom

So there you have it, I am developing character.  I have about 150 pages left out of maybe 650.  Personally I think the Nobel Prize for Literature should go to those with enough steadfast determination to finish the darn book rather than the author.  I usually finish around two books a week, averaging 5-9 books a month.  November's page is looking pretty bare, empty in fact.  It is going to throw off this year's numbers big time.  I think I will make some sort of reading plan for this year, so I can return books like "Out of Africa" to my mother after what has it been, 15 years?

I found a reading site on Yahoo, and I am interested to find out what it is all about.  It will probably be a good way to waste precious reading time.

For my birthday my mother gave me tickets to see Itzhak Perlman in Omaha last Saturday.  If you don’t know who he is you can probably skip this post entirely.   I asked my husband first, but he begged out due to a conflicting football game.  Then I asked my friend Mary, then I asked about six other friends as well as four relatives.  Only one of the eleven had even heard of the man.  All of my friends were busy and my SILs all said, “If you can’t find anyone else who would actually enjoy it, I can go.  If I have to.”  Obviously I need new friends, maybe relatives too.  Thursday I was paging through my address book one more time and ran across Traci.  Her kids are grown and she isn’t a football fan, but she lives well over two hours on the other side of me from Omaha.  I called and asked if she was up for a road trip.  “Sure!”  She took the time to Google Perlman and had all kinds of info for me when I got in her pickup Saturday morning.  

We drove straight to the casinos in Iowa and invested in Iowa’s economy.  I still say Nebraska will never have casinos because we have a “no smoking in public buildings” law.  Whoo Hoo!  I dropped $22 between roulette and penny slots. Then we got all pretty for the show.  We got lost, or at least took a wrong turn everywhere we went, beginning with getting to Omaha.  Traci may never let me navigate again.  Some of them were honest mistakes, and some were…well just mistakes.  We found a parking spot large enough for Traci’s pickup in a garage downtown and we set off in our uncomfortable shoes to find an eatery which was both close and affordable.  We ended up with Asian Fusion.  I figure $13 isn’t too bad for an evening in the big town.  As we left we overheard someone talking about going to the same concert so we followed them right in the front door.

I can’t decide if the hall was small or large.  It seemed really small until you looked at how little the people across the room were.  Either way the acoustics were phenomenal.  We had seats in the far back row, and we could hear everything.  We listened to a couple of Mozart pieces then after the intermission as Traci said, the whole band came out and we heard some Bernstein (excellent) and Gershwin (long but good) followed by Schindler’s List (too short) and a couple by some guy named Kreisler.  Perlman only played the second Mozart and the last three pieces, but he was excellent.  Just excellent.

We made it home in time for lunch the next day at a bar where Traci got her hot wings fix.    (this would be the 9-11 flavored wings) Getting some "culture" didn't change her that much.  Later on Sunday my friend Rebecca called and asked what I had done for my birthday, so I told her.  She said, “I love him, he’s great!”  Now I have two friends who know who Perlman is.

And here is an in-focus photo of my costume.