Family Visit

I’m up in Madison, WI joining a gathering of my mother’s extended family for the week. My mother’s side of the family is great fun for me; almost the entire family is over-educated, hyperfunctional, and a little bit snarky, just like the people I associate with when left to my own devices.
I’m currently spending the afternoon/evening holding down the fort; keeping the doors open and track of the whereabouts of the family, and setting up for dinner with ingredients as they appear, which means we will be having a boneless leg of lamb, slit and packed with garlic wedges and fresh rosemary (baked), fresh green beans with portabellini, and long grain white rice. I spent alot of yesterday helping with a proper (fussy, tedious) country ham and scalloped potatoes, but there were more cooks yesterday. I don’t often get to do large meal for large group type cooking, so I’m enjoying myself.
I’m also continuing my reading spree; I finished Outliers on the way down (the part of the trip not spent driving through disaster-grade construction+wide object transport). It had a very disappointing ending, the earlier part of the book had interesting observations… the last chapter was dedicated to trite, weak conclusions based on anectdotes. I enjoyed the useful part.
Now I’m on to Lolita. I’m finding it unusually intense to read because I vastly prefer hearing (or at least reading under my breath) Nabakov’s prose. I might consider an audiobook of it, even though I usually find them frusterating, just to save my throat. I tend toward short stories for the tight prose that even most excellent authors can’t maintain over any substantal length; Lolita isn’t quite the same, but it is really excellent stylized writing. I also started the Consciousness Very Short Introduction since it’s a PDF on the n810, and thusalways on hand.
I also found a used copy of GEB (and some other desirables) walking through UW Madison’s bookstore… which is indeed the kind of place I go for fun.