Reading & Madison

Haven't updated on our Madison activities -- but suffice to say, I've been doing a lot of reading. Since getting back from Oregon, I've (re)read Sense & Sensibility, Jane Eyre, Heart of Darkness, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Mrs. Dalloway, some T.S. Eliot essays, modernist poetry (Yeats, Heaney, Eliot, Larkin, Auden), The Importance of Being Earnest (woo hoo, 4th reading), and, basically, Women in Love (50 pages to go). What rather bothers me, is that I've read all this stuff before. The experience of re-reading has been intriguing (what I missed before, what it's like to read knowing the ending, so I'm reading for the pleasure of the text rather than the plot, seeing my old notes on the texts, etc.). I'm about to hit the American portion, so I guess this will soon cease to be a problem. Although I'll still be rereading Moby Dick, The Scarlet Letter, etc. Hmm. Quals reading isn't quite what I expected it to be, but it's also exceeded my expectations a bit. I didn't really expect to get as much as I did out of re-reading.

Anyway. As for real world activity... We had dinner with Katie & John the night we returned from Oregon, and stayed late. We've done the farmer's market thing (yay for early apples!). Last week we took a trip to Devil's Lake (where we read, waded, and played frisbee) & then revisited Pedro's for dinner. The veggie tamales were excellent (and I love their corn cakes), but I was a bit disgusted the next day when Andrew ate the remains of his 3 lb. burrito. Someone in the kitchen had (inadvertently, I assume) gotten some plastic wrap mixed into the burrito's insides. Yuck.

Last week we also took a drive to Blue Mound State Park. There's a nice loop through meadows (butterflies, and ever so many wildflowers), down by a creek bed (buggy -- could hear a strange vibrating hum of bees), and back out by an apple tree. Also climbed their look-out towers, which have a magnificent view of Wisconsin (since these mounds are like the highest point).

Well -- should go now. We're going to watch the finale of America's Got Talent. I hope Bianca wins...

I get terribly addicted to summer reality tv.