The Past Few Months

Although the body can be trained into a plethora of habits, there are some that don't ever seem to become natural. For the past three months, I have been working nights in a temporary job trying to bridge the gap between my life as an academic and my long awaited new career. I am now rather accustomed to being awake at night and sleeping most of the day, but besides being down right awkward for dealing with the rest of the world (such as insurance companies when my car was struck and totaled on my way to work), the body never quite looses its instinct to enter shut down mode when it is dark. However, since I am usually up when it is dark, and am not sleep deprived, I only feel tired but generally couldn't sleep if I wanted to.

I had hoped to write more blog posts during by nights off, but my wife picked up some audio books for me to listen to. During the Advent and Christmas seasons, the retail world was so busy that I had to use all of my nights off to work through the audio books before they were due back at the library. Now that business has tapered off, I have just kept up the audio book program, and work my way through them more quickly. My first project is to work though Patrick O'Brian's Master and Commander series.

Many of you may remember the movie that was based off of this series and was titled after the seventh or eighth book in the series. Before reading the books, I had thought that more movies might be made to continue the series, but upon listening to the first three and a half books (45 CDs or so), I have already encountered most of the pericopes present in the movie. While I can see that this is useful for developing the main characters (Jack Aubrey and Steven Maturin), it does rather preclude the option of making any of the earlier books into movies.