Book of Days: asher553

Sometimes I sleep soundly through the night; more often, I'm awake at 2 or 3 in the morning and may or may not get back to sleep. Sunday night must have been one of my rare nights to sleep like a log, because it wasn't until Monday afternoon that I learned from Debbie that there had been some trouble outside our building overnight. Apparently someone had tried to break into one of the units neighboring ours and made some three separate attempts between 1 and 3 o'clock in the morning. The Hillsboro Police had been called in; we never learned what, exactly, had happened.

This morning it wasn't an intruder but my own USB power adapter that seemingly tried to kill me. I got up at my usual 5:00 and powered on my cellphone, which was plugged into the charger. A few minutes later, there was a wisp of smoke and a burning smell, and the insulation on the USB cord running to the phone was starting to melt. The cord was hot enough to blister my thumb when I gripped it. I hastily cut the power from the power strip and threw the charger in the trash bin. The phone, miraculously, appears undamaged.

And that, thankfully, is as exciting as it gets around here, although that's plenty excitement enough. I am glad I don't live in Portland anymore.

I sign the lease Monday. Studio unit at the Admiral. I'm hoping to be able to start sleeping there right away - I'll move a few necessaries in, and start getting cozy. I'll still have five weeks before the lease at my old place (I'm calling it Shadowdale here) expires. That'll give me time to triage my belongings into what I want to move to the Admiral, what I want to put in storage, and what I need to get rid of.

At this stage in life, I am really understanding the meaning of the expression "You don't own your stuff, your stuff owns you."

Yom Kippur was beautiful - the weather was great, the services were inspiring, and I survived the fast. Oh, and I lost a couple of pounds!

Now the rainy season is well and truly upon us. I'm looking forward to spending more time with books, in various formats - audio, Kindle, and (of course) print.

I'm re-"reading" (on audio) Toni Morrison's fourth novel, 'Tar Baby'. It is her only novel to date set mainly outside of the continental US (a pastoral, in genre), and therefore is, georgraphically speaking, literally an outlier. Uniquely among TM novels, the setting is heavily personified, so that the island becomes a 'character'. 'Tar Baby' is Morrison's first novel to be set in contemporary times (the post-Vietnam 70s, contemporary with the time of the book's composition) and her first to include major non-black characters (Valerian Street, the retired candy tycoon, and his wife, the red-headed former Miss Maine, Margaret).

The book has many of the familiar Toni Morrison trademarks: the role of folklore (as in, for example, 'Song of Solomon'), problem mothers, anxiety over skin color (Jadine's, but also Margaret's), and ambivalence toward identity. At the end, as Jadine and Son are drawn inexorably back toward one another, I wonder if the island itself is the 'tar baby' of the title. Anyway, I hope to post a full write-up on the book soon, when I'm finished re-reading it.

Also, I want to get active on Goodreads. (Readers, ping me if you're on Goodreads.)

I'm hopefully close to getting that studio in my old apartment building, which for convenience I'll call the Admiral here.

Okay, now I've got to get to work.