My friend Sara was up visiting the NY metro area this weekend, so she came into Manhattan yesterday morning and spent the majority of the day with me. We had tea, walked a bit, did some shopping, walked some more, took the dog I’m sitting for on a super long walk in the park, ate some yummie vegan-friendly foods and had more tea.

Throughout the day, we were both finding it difficult to think of the words we wanted to use - this resulted in made-up words (I’d call them neologisms - but I’m pretty sure they’re not real), saying the wrong words (but knowing what we meant) and just lots of “I know this!” moments/”tip of the tongue” syndrome (lethologica if you can’t remember the right word; anomia is a more severe version of this that comes with aphasia - impairment of speech due to brain damage). In both our cases, this was due to lack of quality restful sleep - and I find that’s the first manifestation of sleep deficit in my world. All this week I’ve been struggling to think of words - words like “attrition” and “tomb”, for example.

Today, I’ve been feeling gross and headachey, so aside from walking the dog, my activities have included watching movies, reading and doing NYT crossword puzzles. Between last night and now, I’ve watched “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” (impressed), “Juno” (underwhelmed), “Hairspray” (surprised), “Bride and Prejudice” (Bollywood version of Pride and Prejudice - Naveen Andrews line-dancing = strangely hot), and, randomly, the E! True Hollywood Story of the Kardashian family (because I thought to myself, “What the hell are they actually famous for? I’m still asking the same question…).

Aside from seeing Sara, these are all just empty diversions and I am aware of it. I spoke with my mother in Poland today; amidst everything else, she had forgotten it was Mother’s Day. The service for my grandfather is tomorrow, and I lost it a little when she told me about picking out the urn (he wanted to be cremated, so that was done on Friday) and going over home renovation plans with my grandmother to make sure that she’s safe now that she’s going to be alone (another hard realization).

She mentioned to me that she’s reminded of my grandfather everywhere she looks… when coming back from a cousin’s house last night, she looked up at the balcony of my grandparents’ home where my grandmother and grandfather would always stand and wait for us when we were arriving from the airport or from being out somewhere anytime we came to visit. We would pull up and they would be standing up there together, waving down at us and smiling. I can see them; it’s an extremely vivid memory. Now, she said, it was just my grandmother standing there waving to them - and I can’t write about that anymore.

And this is probably too personal for the direction I want to be heading here, too much information, and I think I shall end this post now.

LibraryThing has this funky “view all your covers” feature.

So I fired that up and then did a little screengrab of the complete page. The books that don’t have covers (out of print or foreign books) don’t get included, but still - you can see the covers of something close to 900 books in one image. It’s pretty sweet.

Check out an image of the covers.

(You’ll have to click to enlarge to full screen size, btw.)

Welcome to aught eight.

I’m planning on making the next 365 days a period of time in which I will accomplish some of the things I’ve been hoping to accomplish for the last 730-1095 days. I’m not talking about making resolutions, mind you; they don’t work (”only about a quarter of us actually stick with our resolutions for more than a week or two” - so they say). I just think that I will finally see the fruits of my labor and more results from the groundwork I’ve laid out over the last year or so (or even just the last few months).

Author Neil Gaiman posted a nice (if a bit sentimental for my tastes at this very moment) new year’s wish on his blog. I am pasting it here:

May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful, and don’t forget to make some art — write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.

I’m all over the books, art and perhaps even the madness; I would very much like to surprise myself. I can’t really speak to the rest as it’s not stuff I have control over. It will be an interesting year, I suppose. My 30th birthday is only 3 months away and while I’m trying not to assign too much importance to it (it’s a number like any other… no more important than 29 or 26 or 23, except that it ends in a zero) it’s going to be difficult. People do like to make a bigger deal of it than required. I’ve had a few friends turn 30 recently (or who will be turning 30 soon) and I haven’t made and don’t intend to make a huge deal out of it - more so than any other birthday, anyway. That’s the key, I think.

Perhaps that’s my overall theme for this year - keeping things in perspective.

But here’s a list of 100 things we didn’t know last year, courtesy of the BBC. It includes fun things like:

3. Adding milk to tea negates the health-giving effects of a hot brew.
31. There is mobile phone reception from the summit of Mount Everest.
67. The brain can turn down its ability to see in order to listen to complex sounds like music.
92. Zsa Zsa Gabor is related to Paris Hilton. (It just amuses me that this made the list).

Über-marketer Seth Godin posted on his blog yesterday about… reading blogs. Sayeth he:

If you’re not currently reading your blogs through a reader, I highly recommend it. It’s possible to go through a hundred blog posts in four or five minutes once you get good at it.

Too right, Seth. Too right. Rather than a feed reader becoming a huge time suck, if you can learn to parse/process/sort that information as you skim, you can quickly separate the wheat from the chaff (to use the old idiom) and absorb mad amounts of relevant info in a relatively short amount of time.

What is relevant for you will, of course, vary (”YMMV“)… for me, this post from Seth was important and will be shared at work tomorrow. But this item from CuteOverload was also important as was this awesome vase posted to NOTCOT.

Godin specifically mentions Google Reader and Bloglines. I wonder how many people will be signing up for a Google Reader account when they get to work tomorrow (chances are they didn’t read his post over the weekend).

Coincidentally, I was talking about feed readers (and Google Reader specifically) with a marketing colleague at work a few weeks ago. I was pretty enthusiastic and even, perhaps, a bit of a zealot about it. Zealotry will get you in trouble - or get you invited to speak about your beloved topic to a room full of people and conduct a live on-screen walk-through of set-up and whatnot. That’s what I’ll be doing in a few weeks.

You can bet I’ll be using Godin’s post somewhere.