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Thursday, March 23, 2006

 

Link love, books and housework

Aside from all I've said this week about blogging being about community, and connection, and empowerment through information sharing, and giving people a voice, there's this whole other aspect to blogging that I love.

Blogging is a hell of a great way to waste time. Link surfing has to be one of my favourite guilty pastimes. Most of the time I have no idea how I ended up where I ended up, but getting there is half the fun.

Some of my favourite recent discoveries came from the Salon article I blogged on earlier this week, about the changes to Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. From the Salon article, I clicked through to Book A Day, an incredibly ambitious project to read and post a review about a great work of literature every single weekday.

She takes her definition of "great work of literature" from the next click on our tour, Robert Teeter's list of Great Books. It's an amazing series of indices and lists that correlate the greatest works of Western, Eastern and World, and Contemporary literature.

And although I found that a little too much to digest all in one go, I found Time Magazine's list of 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to the present much more accessible. And within that, I found that they have reproduced the original Time reviews to many of the 100 novels, which I found extremely cool. There's the 1925 review of The Great Gatsby, and the 1962 review of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (but you have to subscribe to read the entire review.)

I mean, no wonder I can't get any housework done!

And speaking of housework, here's the latest update of the Housework Challenge 2006 (it sounds more important with a fancy title, no?)

On Tuesday, Beloved spent the usual half hour doing morning clean-up and meal prep for the boys. We both worked all day, and then went out for dinner with my folks (woo hoo!) When we got home, I spent half an hour pretending to play trains with Tristan while I actually tidied the playroom formerly known as the dining room, and Beloved spent the same half hour doing the cat litter and taking out the trash. Can I count bath time as a household chore? If so, and I'm guessing you won't let me get away with it, I scored an extra 20 minutes there.

Yesterday was pretty much a write-off. I didn't go to work before the TV thing, so Beloved and I shared the morning wrangle at the usual 30 minutes or so for breakfast, clean-up and general disaster-recovery. Since I had the car, after work I picked up the boys and drove over to Quebec to pick up Beloved at work, and by the time we got back into town and stopped for a hamburger and picked up a few groceries (30 minutes!), it was bedtime for the boys and we were all too tired to do anything but a cursory pick-up.

Tuesday/Wednesday totals:
Beloved: 1h 45 mins
Me: 1h 15 mins