It’s funny, but much as I love teaching, having a day off is even more enjoyable! I’m spending the day catching up on a combination of school work and personal writing, so that’s good, especially since this upcoming weekend I will not be able to do any work because we are leaving Saturday morning for a wedding in Maryland, and will not be returning until late Sunday.

I watched about 15 minutes of the second presidential debate, and I was stunned at how John McCain has degenerated from a viable candidate in 2000 to a “vote for me in spite of my lack of knowledge on the issues” candidate now. While I will vote for Obama since he at least offers a chance of saving the country, more and more it is obvious that Hillary Clinton was the best candidate for president this year.

Ever since I inventoried my book collection, I have been anxious to read some of the books in it which I have not read yet. While 300 are a lot of unread books, out of a total of 1,700 books it is not bad, only 17%. At my current reading pace (at which I read 20-25 new books per year and 5-10 older ones) though, it will take me the rest of my life to finish reading them all.

I have also noticed that there are several authors whom I like but have precious few books in my collection by, including 3 writers of historical fiction (Cecilia Holland, E.L. Doctorow and Elmer Kelton) and 7 sf writers (Kage Baker, Stephen Baxter, Arthur C. Clarke, Andre Norton, Robert Sawyer, James H. Schmitz and Jack Williamson), so that’s a gap in my collection I would like to fill in a bit in the future.

Books, books, books, where would I be without them? ☺