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Some of you may have seen this coming, but I'm guessing a lot of people weren't paying close enough attention. As of the night of May 24, 2008, Sarah and I are officially engaged. This happened at the end of her week-long trip to visit me in Nashua and was really sort of the only big thing we did the whole week. That's probably for the best, since it's a really big one. Well you might want to know how it went down.

I'd made reservations and purchases well in advance, but had been keeping it a secret. The plan was we'd get really dressed up, go to the Federalist near the State House for drinks, then walk over to No. 9 Park for dinner, then the next day we would just sort of walk around downtown Boston and see whatever Sarah wanted to see. I sort of left out the whole engagement part when I went over this plan with her. The dressing up went well. I wore my new pinstriped suit, and she wore her new blue silk dress. She looked very pretty, even though she was uncomfortable walking around in the shoes.

Going to the Federalist didn't go quite so well. This is a bar that had been recommended to me by my friend Jared (who also happens to be a bartender in Nashua). He said they made a great old fashioned and was a good place to start an evening. Well, the Federalist no longer exists. It has since been renamed to Moo and redone on the inside to look a little more hip. We found it without too much more trouble, sat down, and ordered some drinks. Since we had a late (9pm) dinner reservation at No. 9, I was in no real rush. Sarah ordered some sort of lemonade drink and I went with the old fashioned. It was quite expertly made. We debated ordering an appetizer but somehow neglected to. That would end up being a tactical error.

After lots of talking with each other and the bartenders, it was closing in on 9pm. We left Moo and walked around the corner to No. 9 Park. What a tiny place, both inside and out. It was pretty busy but since we had a reservation, all we had to do was sit around and wait for the table to be ready. While they were preparing the table, Sarah and I sat in the bar area and I ordered a flight of Aviators. Then it was time to move to the table. Strangely, everyone in the dining room sat so we faced away from the entrance to the kitchen. Our waitress was very knowledgeable and attentive. No problems at all with the service. The only real problem I had was the portion size of my duck meal. This combined with the very late reservation made me start to feel pretty out of it. I don't think Sarah had any problems with her meal at all. After eating, drinking, talking, and waiting around for the check, it was nearly 11pm when we left.

I suggested we walk over into the Boston Common, which is right across the street. Sarah agreed but had to take off the shoes before her feet fell off. We wandered around for a while in the dark until we got close to the lake. This looked as good a place as any, so I stopped her, took the ring out of my jacket pocket, and WHAM! I believe her exact response was "Of course." And then that was that - all the thinking and planning and it was all over very quickly. How strange. I only felt slightly awkward doing it. I don't think it was quite what I wanted it to be given how I felt with the late meal, but she was happy and that's probably all that counts.

The next day we spent wandering around downtown. We saw the park again by daylight, the Boston Public Library, some fancy mall down in that area, more of the North End, and some other stuff. Basically we just walked around. There was also gelato involved. Then it was time to flee the city and go back up to Nashua so we could spend some time around my house. Back in Nashua, we took a bunch of pictures of ourselves to mail to people. Above is the one picture we decided came out pretty good. Too bad you can't see the ring.

The long national nightmare of no washing machine is finally at an end.

Today I woke up late for some reason (probably because I didn't set an alarm) and left for work without first jumping on the VPN to see what was going on. Another important piece of information here is that my cell phone has been off almost the entire time I've been here because it's $2.50/minute so I haven't even bothered with the thing.

Anyway I rolled into work sometime just before 11 and Hanka (the office manager) appeared very excited to see me. As soon as I got in the door she was waving me down. Well it didn't really turn out to just be friendly. She'd been trying to get in contact with me via IRC (didn't check the VPN) and text message (didn't have the phone on) all morning because the washing machine repair man was on the way. So as soon as I got to work, I turned around and went back to the apartment.

The repairman wasn't waiting for me when I got back. He arrived perhaps 30 minutes later and got to work. He didn't speak any English so there wasn't really any talking going on. At one point he did plug in the machine and kill the power, confirming what I already knew. I'm not sure what exactly he did, but it involved replacing some coil from the inside of the machine and making it work again. Hooray for clean clothes.

Anyway after that it was almost noon so I figured I'd stay home a while longer. It wasn't like work was really missing me. So I went for a run. I went down the path beside the river and made it to the last road crossing before the Ikea, for a round trip distance of somewhere around four miles. I didn't quite run the entire way since that's a lot longer than I typically run, but I still got a good workout. It was also good because now I have a goal of being able to run there and back before leaving in another week and a half.

After that I finally went back to work sometime around 2pm. It's a good thing I don't have fixed hours.

I don't have anything specific to say, so it's time for another installment of unusual things I have noticed since I have been here. This time, here's what I have seen:

• People take their dogs with them everywhere. This includes into restaurants. Just think about how well that would go over in the US for a bit.



• You can have any kind of beer you want, as long as it's pilsner. I'm going to make what might be a very unpopular statement for someone in the Czech Republic, but pilsner is not my favorite style of beer. There's nothing wrong with it. I just don't find it all that exciting. Well that's too bad, because that's your only option in this country. There are loads of breweries and tons of bars, but they all really only serve pilsner. Sometimes you can also get a dark pilsner.



• Public transportation is quick, efficient, and useful. This is a shocker coming from places that have MARTA (which is none of those things), or the T (which isn't really quick or efficient). The system here is all three AND you can take some form any time of the day. I don't even miss my car, except in the sense that I'm still paying for it right now while it sits in the Clocktower garage.



• There are no obese people in the entire country. Okay, that's not quite true. I did see one the other day. But seriously, that's one in two weeks as opposed to the dozens you see daily in the US. Given the continuous consumption of liters of beer, fatty ground beef, and fried pork I am not at all sure what it is. My current theory is that not everything is filled with high fructose corn syrup.



• Phone booths still exist. Quick, think of the last place you saw a pay phone, let alone one in its own enclosed booth.



• This place is full of herna bars, most of which proudly proclaim that they are NON-STOP! A herna bar is like a miniature casino, complete with jackpot
  signs out front, flashy ads, and promises of riches and good times. They usually also have attractive people on the signs in the windows - the kind you just know would never be seen in such a place. They're usually extremely depressing looking from the outside what with the covered windows and bad neighborhood. I can only imagine how soul-destroying they are inside.



• All the appliances in this apartment are tiny. They look pretty small from the outside, but that's only a disguise. From the inside they are just laughably small. The washing machine holds approximately three towels. The dishwasher holds about four plates and four glasses. The fridge is basically pocket sized. I guess that's just the way things are done over here.

That's about all I can think of for now. I'll be sure to keep up a list of more unusual things and post it when I batch up enough and have nothing better to say.

Last night was an interesting experience. I'm here for three weeks total, but I only brought about a week's worth of clothes because there's a washing machine in the apartment. There's no dryer, but I can take care of that part easy enough. This sounded pretty good to me since it meant I wouldn't have to haul twenty pounds of clothes across the ocean and I wouldn't be taking twenty pounds of dirty clothes back with me. I hate that.

Anyway I'd been told the washing machine was tiny and a little unusual to work with. In fact I'd been told all the appliances were unusual because they'd pause if turned off and resume when turned back on. Oh also all the controls are pictures and all the measurements are in Celsius instead of "hot"/"warm"/"cold". Whatever.

On the outside, the washing machine was every bit as small as I'd been led to believe. On the inside, it was even more hilariously small. I crammed in two shirts, pair of pants, couple socks, and locked the drum. Then I added detergent, closed the lid, and deciphered the directions to my satisfaction. I turned some knobs and pressed the start button, which caused the machine to immediately begin making a series of grinding noises and pauses.

A quick check with previous residents verified that such noises were to be expected. So I sat down at the laptop to do something while the washer ran. About half an hour later, the power went out. At first I didn't make the connection. I wandered around in the dark until I stumbled across the front door then checked and made sure the power was still on in the hall. Okay, so it's just my apartment. I wandered around a while longer looking for a flashlight by cell phone screen but none was to be found. So I took the cell phone and found the breaker box. Sure enough, the main had tripped.

Well the pieces were coming together now. I went and unplugged the washing machine and reset the main breaker. Everything except the washing machine came back on. Success! Now to test my theory... I went and plugged the washer back in. As soon as the poles made contact in the socket, the breaker tripped again. So my theory was right.

Unfortunately now I had a washer full of wet, soapy clothes and no way to clean enough stuff for the rest of my trip. I spent the rest of the night rinsing clothes out in the sink and hanging them up around the apartment. Now I just need to find a laundromat (do such things exist here?) and get someone to come repair the washer. I can only imagine how warranty service works in other countries. More to come...

Well I have been here in Brno, Czech Republic for a couple days now. I've made it in to the office every day this week, wandered around town a bit, and even navigated the grocery store. The only significant troubles so far were on Tuesday where I decided it would be a good idea to walk to the office (actually, the smallest coin I had was 50 Kr and the tram pass machine didn't take it), took a couple wrong turns, and got lost. It didn't turn out too bad since I saw a lot of new stuff and in the end basically ended up walking around in a big circle back to my apartment. After that I was able to buy a drink and use the change for tram fare.

Anyway here are some random things I have noticed.

• Almost no one walks across the street when they have a red indicator. Compare this to how any big city in the US works with people crossing whenever they feel like it. I think this is probably because all the trams make it slightly more dangerous to do that here.


• Just like the rest of Europe (so I'm told) they love their sparkling water over here. If you want the genuine article, the magic words are "voda neperliva".


• You probably don't want water anyway, as beer is by far the cheapest drink around. A little thimble full of juice costs about 30 Kr (around $2) while a big half liter glass of beer costs about 25 Kr. Remember, the Czech Republic drinks the most beer per capita of any country in the world. It just happens to be largely pilsner.


• The first floor on buildings is called the ground floor, and the second floor is called the first floor. Remember that when pushing an elevator button.


• If you like 24 hour video poker, this is the place for you. There are non-stop herna bars all over the place, especially down near the main train station.


• Doors usually open inward, which anyone from New York, Chicago, or San Francisco will tell you is a recipe for disaster. They also tend to have knobs that don't turn. Oh, and they don't close flush with the wall but stick out a bit. A picture would illustrate this better but I don't have one right now.


• The trams go basically everywhere. I'm not really sure why you would own a car here unless you did a lot of travel (even still, the buses between towns are really cheap) or had a lot of stuff to transport. When the trams stop running, the bus system covers much of the same territory.


• There are a ton of students in this town. Seriously, the place is mobbed with them.


• The language is every bit as impenetrable as I expected. I can understand a couple words like place names, beer, water, one, yes/no, good day, thank you, and please. But even when I know what to say, I keep screwing up the ending of the word leading to some confusion and someone else having to translate. Lucky for me most people in the office speak English because of all the nationalities in one place.


• It's really the little things that make it seem the strangest. Toilets work differently. Light switches work differently. The controls on all appliances are completely different. Washing machines and dishwashers are hilariously small. All the beds are singles that have been stuck together to form a larger bed. Ventilation fans tend to turn themselves on and off. Windows lean in to open rather than slide up and down.


• I went into a store and asked for a Coke. The lady didn't know what I meant despite having an entire cooler of the stuff. I thought it was supposed to be the most recognized brand name in the world.

But you know, it's really not all that different. The language makes things seem a lot stranger than they are, but when it comes down to it they just have different ways of doing all the same things. I'm sure our ways would seem every bit as unusual. If I could get a rudimentary understanding of the language figured out, I think I could get around quite easily. I'd also feel less like a bumbling tourist. Over the next couple days, I'm going to try to wake up early and wander around parts of town to take pictures and get a feel for the place. That sort of stuff is hard to do when you're on a work trip and in the office all day.

I'll try to post again tonight with some more information.

Sometime around 10pm Sunday night, I got to the office apartment in Brno, which was a quick 30 hours after leaving my apartment in Nashua. Sure that includes six hours of time difference, but it's still a very long trip. As I write this it's 4:25PM local time on Monday. Who knows what time it is where you are. There was some confusion at the office as to whether I made it or not so this post is mostly directed at them to let them know I'm still alive.

I left the apartment around 3:30 on Saturday. I had to catch a cab to the bus station because the city buses don't run when I need them to on Saturday. Stupid small towns and its stupid transportation system. Then I caught a bus to Logan airport. The bus ride was uneventful though I wondered about how profitable it was to run a bus when only seven people were on it. Anyway I got to the international terminal with plenty of time to spare since my flight was at 9:40PM. Getting through security with a passport was way less interesting than I thought. The international terminal was too. It was just like a regular terminal, except with a currency exchange and a duty free store. It was kind of boring, really. Anyway I grabbed some food, talked on the phone, played video games, and eventually it was time to go.

Nothing notable happened on my transatlantic flight to Amsterdam. I actually ate a real meal on the plane for the first time since I can remember and I got free booze. But neither of those are really noteworthy events. I was able to carry out stage one of my plan to beat jet lag by sleeping a little bit on the plane. I got woken up when the sun came out and ate a little breakfast. Then we landed in Amsterdam around 11AM local time.

The Amsterdam airport was nice, but food was very expensive. My lunch of a sandwich and Coke cost 8 Euro. To get to lunch, I first had to pass through passport control. Once again, it was not very interesting. I stood in line for ten minutes or so, the guy looked at my passport, asked me where I was going, and stamped it. I was expecting more of an interrogation. I ate, wandered around aimlessly for a while, checked out the duty free shops and other stores, and started working on "Against the Day". Most everything in Amsterdam was in both Dutch and English so I got around with no troubles. The liquor in the duty free shops was very cheap. I should remember this for the way back. Overall it was a very modern and clean, though pricy, airport.

The flight to Prague was on a Czech Airlines flight. Here is where I noticed things were getting more interesting. I was no longer in the land of English-first. All the announcements were in Czech, usually followed by English. Fine, it's their airline so their language should be first. Also it was kind of nice. If I wanted to be able to understand everything, I would have stayed home. I got a snack and a free beer on this flight which was only a little longer than an hour. The in-flight magazine was bilingual so I read that.

At the Prague airport, most thing were still in two languages. I recovered my checked luggage without incident and got through the lack of customs too. It seems that the theme of this trip is no bureaucracy. I wandered around for a while and found the bankomat (ATM) to get some local currency then went in search of a phone card to call people and let them know I was down. No luck - they were either all sold out or they didn't have cards that worked at the airport. That was pretty surprising. And since my international roaming rate is $2.49 a minute, I didn't call anyone to tell them I had landed.

The bus to downtown Prague was also easy to find. I was beginning to think that maybe this whole trip would go without a hitch. Well, I was wrong. All I had for a bus ticket was a printout with a reservation number on it. I mumbled something to the lady working at the bus that I was going to Brno, and she responded to get on and I would have to change buses downtown. I knew that. We weaved through Prague which looked pretty dirty to me. I guess the bus station side of town is not the best side. Also, it was overcast and raining. I have been assured that I brought the bad weather to town.

When I got to the downtown station to transfer, I assumed I would be getting on the next bus to Brno. But no, I got to the front of the line, explained how I only had the number and not an actual ticket, and the lady told me I would be on the next bus. Then she promptly stepped onto the bus and off it went. She had a clipboard with a bunch of numbers on it, and my reservation number was nowhere to be found. This was at 5:30PM. At 6 I repeated this procedure but with a different lady. Same thing at 6:30. I was beginning to get really anxious, not to mention cold and tired of travelling. Were these people just telling me I was always going to be on the next bus just to get rid me of? Finally I went and asked at the information booth which bus I should be on. She told me I would be on the 7PM bus. Okay, I'll get my hopes up. When that bus pulled up I got back in line and got the same answer - no, you're not on this bus. Lucky for me, there were two buses to Brno at that time and I was really supposed to be on the second. It sure was nice to hear her say "seat 45" instead of "no, you're not on this bus" like I've been getting for the last ninety minutes.

I guess this is where people at the office started to worry, since I was supposed to be in Brno around 7:30 to meet with my coworkers and see where the apartment is. I of course didn't have my phone on. So two hours later when I got to the bus station in Brno, I had old messages asking me where I was. I responded and soon after stepping off the bus I saw Martin wearing his red work fedora so I knew just who he was.

The apartment was only about a five minute walk away, which gave my knees some time to stop screaming at me from all the cramped transportation seating. Once there, we debated going to get some food (not a lot of options at 10PM on a Sunday, but still) but I decided bed was a better plan. So I sat around the place for a little while just checking things out and got to sleep.

And that is my transportation story. Want to hear about the office or the apartment or my first impressions of this place? You'll have to wait until tomorrow.

Today, I leave for a long work trip to Brno, Czech Republic. This is my first time flying outside of the continent so it's about equal parts exciting and terrifying. While I'm looking forward to being over there and seeing some place totally new, I'm not really looking forward to the two bus rides and two plane rides I will be experiencing over the next eighteen hours. I would say that my flight is through KLM, but due to the maze of twisty code shares I am actually flying on Northwest. Whatever. As long as they serve some drinks I should be able to eventually fall asleep. I arrive sometime around 8pm local time tomorrow, which works out to 2pm Eastern. We'll see how my body handles that.

The Czech language looks pretty impenetrable - full of strange combinations of consonants like zd and dz, and vowels I've never heard of like k. I've got a lot of maps and other information printed out so I should be able to find my way around reasonably well the first day or two, but I think there are going to be a lot of really disoriented moments and times where I just can't understand what people are yelling at me. It should be a lot of fun.

While I'm there for work, I am hoping to be able to do some sightseeing as well. Brno looks like it should be an interesting mix of very old architecture, Soviet-era block buildings, and ultra-modern construction. As long as work doesn't have me sitting behind a keyboard the entire time, I should be able to wander around the city and check everything out. Conveniently, I'll be staying in a company apartment very close to downtown. I'm also planning a weekend trip to Prague (where I'll be flying in and out of, incidentally) to tour that area. It's supposed to be a very scenic place.

For English language entertainment while traveling and staying there, I'm taking Against the Day, Pynchon's latest work (you're on notice, Death Pact people) and my stack of Mystery Science Theater DVDs. That way when I get sick of listening to crazy Czech pop on the radio and soccer (or is that football?) on the TV, I can look at something whose sentence structure I understand.

Anyway, I had better step away from the computer and get this travel thing started. Updates to come in the future, hopefully more frequently than I've been doing. Having something new to talk about every day should help that.

Any trip under a couple miles from home will now be done by bike. This includes the grocery store, liquor store, Home Depot, homebrew store, post office, and so forth.

Well, I finished the book. Actually I finished on Monday since I had a whole lot of spare time sitting around the Cleveland and Philly airports, not getting home. Hooray for me or something.

The story really picked up in section three. The last two hundred pages are much more interesting than the first two, which I blame on the fact that Varvara and Stepan aren't doing very much talking anymore. There's lots of plotting and scheming, plans for revolutions and murders, fires, and all sorts of chaos. I found all this much more interesting than old washed up philosophers talking about their problems with their vast estates. In the end, it turns out that all these high notions of working for the betterment of society and all amounted to nothing more than an excuse for killing some people and running off in the dead of night to print tracts in another town. Doesn't sound quite so noble that way, does it?

I guess I didn't really get much out of this book and there's a lot left that I don't understand yet. Sure, I get the point that ideas running out of control can lead to serious problems. But I don't understand what the purpose of Varvara and Stepan are at all. Why do these characters even exist? In the end, neither of them contributes very much to the story of the book. Nikolai looks like he's going to be important, but doesn't go very far either. Pytor seems to be the driving character and he's never even presented as much of a lead. I guess I just don't understand why the characters are constructed the way they are.

Also I have problems with the narrator going between omniscience and not, though I can put that aside. Other people doing the reading have already expressed their problems with this book much more eloquently than I have. On the plus side, I don't think I have quite given up on Russian literature. One book (and admittedly one the author took a completely different approach to from his usual work) isn't enough to judge an entire country by. However much as I have decided to take a break before tackling more Pynchon, I think I will have to do the same here.

So while we are waiting around to pick another (hopefully much more interesting) Death Pact book, I will finish up reading that cheap copy of War of the Worlds that I bought, and follow that up with Breakfast of Champions. I have a lot of catching up to do with the rest of the world.

I've slowed down quite a bit as lots of other things have come up recently, but I'm still on pace to finish by the end of the month. Even with all the breaks, I've averaged about the same speed as with Gravity's Rainbow. I guess I'm not slacking off as much as it feels like.

Finally, things have started to happen. The sons of the main characters have made their reappearance and immediately got to screwing things up. There's been a duel, a promised suicide, talk of denunciating people to the government, and some implied hired killings. Of course they're still concerned about polite high society so all these things are done in secret. It's much more interesting now than it was a mere fifty pages ago. The sons seem to be much more interesting characters than the parents as the parents are too caught up in worrying about society and preserving their status. On the other hand, the sons seem more free to do what they'd like. I'm betting there will be some interesting consequences later on.

After some thinking, I've decided that we are supposed to detest Stepan and Varvara (the main characters throughout the first third of the book). I've mentioned before how I just don't care about their problems or concerns since they seem so petty and ridiculous. Being embarassed by someone tripping in some rich landowner's salon just isn't an event that I can identify with. I think that's the whole point. We're not supposed to like these people, perhaps to feel more sympathy for whatever is coming. Regardless, I think the narrarator is giving us his biased opinion about the main characters regardless of what he might explicitly say.

I talked to an English Ph.D student last night who was writing her thesis on narrator bias, so she was very interested in this part. She suggested that there was certainly some bias in the narration and also that I should get used to caring about the problems of the idle Russian rich since they may not be anything else to care about in the book. She also suggested that I would enjoy Ulysses, a book that we have previously considered for a Death Pact. Perhaps that's the next one. I recommended Gravity's Rainbow, of course.

Does the dialog from this book remind anyone else of the dialog from Final Fantasy? You know: choppy, repetitive, lots of meaningless tangents.

I didn't read yesterday, so today I'm trying to do twice the reading to catch up. I'm writing this before doing the second half of the reading to get my current thoughts out, before anything new happens.

Those idle Russian nobility sure do know how to have fun, huh? So far the main characters are a manipulative, borderline mentally abusive old woman and a washed up scholar who spends most of his time losing at cards, fainting, and crying in rapture. Like most of the other people reading this book right now, I don't really care for the characters and I am not very interested in what's going on with them. To top it all off, the style of writing is so wordy that I spend a lot of time looking over the top of the book at the wall, or asking the writer to just get on with it already. At least this makes for a quick read, unlike Gravity's Rainbow where I might spend ten minutes on just a handful of pages over and over again.

I'm a little bored with this book right now but I'm optimistic. I am hoping that we're currently being flooded with the petty troubles of life in high Russian society so that the inevitable change in politics completely broadsides us. I think there must be something dark and sinister building up behind the scenes and it's suddenly going to jump out. There's been hints of things not going quite right - like Nikolai's sudden demotion, promotion, and retirement from the military or all the weirdness going on with the new governor and his wife. At least, I hope things are going to take that sort of turn. If we get 300 pages farther in and there's still marriage scheming going on, it's going to feel like reading Jane Austen in high school all over again.

I've set up an RSS aggregator for the new Death Pact. For those of you not in the know, an RSS feed is where you get website updates automatically sent to you from time to time. An aggregator takes a ton of those feeds and condenses them into a single one, so you only have to subscribe to one thing. So now you only have to remember the following URL:

http://dethpakt.bangmoney.org

Enjoy living in the future, with its many many buzzwords.

Once again, it's fall. And like every year at this time, I am looking at moving. The reason for moving this year isn't because I am getting a new job or because I don't like where I live but that David is moving to Hawaii. That's just a little too far to share an apartment and the rent on a two bedroom place is way too much for one person, so I'm having to move out.

I did some looking around Nashua and came to a couple realizations. First, you can't get a one bedroom apartment for much under $900/mo. Second, all the one bedroom apartments are relatively tiny (around 600 ft^2). That doesn't leave a whole lot of room for my stuff. I did not look at places to buy since I don't have the money saved up for that yet, and I didn't look at multifamily homes because I used to live in Home Park and that soured me on the whole idea. Having done that research, I decided the best idea would be to move within Clocktower. Luckily for me, there's a large one bedroom place opening up this very month.

Unfortunately I don't know a whole lot about this move yet. I put in my notice to move out at the end of November and the new place is coming available right at the same time. However, it might be available several weeks before if the dude in there now moves out fast enough. Regardless, I will still have to go through the pain of moving utilities and changing addresses. However I won't have to get a moving truck or load and then unload my stuff, and I will still be in downtown Nashua for the next year.

Of course, a new place means a housewarming party. Stay tuned.

Hey what do you know? I fail at blogging, just like I have the several other times I've had one of these things on my website.

Anyway there's been a recommendation for another reading death pact, this time Dostoevsky's Demons. I haven't read anything by this author before though his name and the size of most of his books already intimidates me a little bit. That's not a serious problem, though. We got through Gravity's Rainbow so I'm not terribly concerned.

Anyway, what do other people think? If this is a good choice, we could start it up in November. Are there other books we should suffer through first?

UPDATE: It's official, we're going to do this. Go to the bookstore and get your copy because we start reading on November 1. Luckily I don't have anything else to do that month, like move or travel.