This is a long neglected blog. Does anybody blog anymore? I can't post in Caughttraveling.blogspot.com because I'm not traveling now and I don't have traveling to speak about.
So, to dip my toes in here again, I'll speak about where I am and what I'm doing.
Books
I've been reading historical biographies and related books as a personal project. I've known about It's funny (?) but as I started this journey, I realized how little I knew about all the great men of the time. Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson from various media before. Now, I started with "1776" by McCollough. Great book with a lot of information not only about the Revolutionary war itself, but more insight on Washington as a General. Also in this time period, I read Kilmeade's book about Washington and his spy network in New York. Then I read another McCollough book, "John Adams". I knew only about his part in the writing and presentation and promotion of the Declaration of Independence. As I read the book, I got the impression that William Daniels really caught the flavor of the man in his portrayal in the musical "1776". Then I read Chernov's book on Hamilton on which the play is based. I followed that with books on Madison, Monroe, JQ Adams and Jackson. Throughout all that, I also read books by Kilmeade about Jefferson and the Barbary Pirates, The Battle of New Orleans, And the fight to avenge the Alamo. I've queued up an autobiography of Martin Van Buren, but decided to finally read De Toqueville's "Democracy in America" first as it was written during the Jackson administration.
It's been interesting reading a number of accounts through the lenses of different biographies.
I also read a lot of books on social and political ideas.
I've been reading some other books as well as a break. I'm a fan of the Amazon series, Bosch. So I thought I'd start reading Michael Connelly's books which include various heroes including Bosch and Micky Haller the Lincoln Lawyer. Also, we used to listen to books on audio while traveling, and there were a bunch of Jack Reacher books. I only remember one of them, and so I started to reasd them as well.
I frequent thrift stores so the Connolly and Lee Child (Reacher) books come from there.
Lego (the plural of lego is lego)
Because I could, I started collecting set of Lego and added them to all the Lego I have from the ones we bought our kids. I've built a number of various building sttuctures and play around wirh them. Little Dash is the most amazed by what I do.
Records
I have a generous collection of vinyl albums. Close to 1000. I've tried for years to get a turntable that would connect to my laptop so I could transfer all that music to digital. I generally listen to music mostly when I'm in my car, and if I can get something in MP3 format it's great. I'm about halfway through.
Geocaching
Laurie and I began doing this years ago. I've introduced the 4 older ones to it and even started an account for them as a group. Last year, I took each of them out separately and did a bunch of finds.
Gaming
We became huge fans of the card game Magic the Gathering. I've taught a couple of the kids to play but we don't much. I also taught Eliza to play and she and I play a lot. Anouther game we play is Catan which is a board game a lot like risk. all the kids, Eliza, Brett and their friends like to play.
Model kits
I used to make plastic model kits when I was in school. I started back doing that. The kits are a lot more in cost, but when you consider how much everything costs today compared to then, it's not much different.
Well, that's what I'm doing. I'll be posting rants on many topics as the time rolls on.
11/17/2021 12:51 AM Fargo
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