divine angst

My dad is our family’s resident moving expert. Not so much because he has moved a lot but rather because he worked for a moving company while he was in college. This means that he knows a fair amount about how to best load a moving truck, how much truck a given house will need (though he’s underestimated this at least once that I can recall), and, most importantly, how to drive a behemoth of a moving truck.

So he’s volunteered (though I would have asked him if he hadn’t) to help Mr. Angst and I move to Our New City at the end of the summer. He’ll help us load the truck, he’ll drive WITH US all the way to Our New City, and help us move our stuff INTO our new place. (I will be trying to bribe one of my brothers to come along also; I figure free one-way airfare is a good offer, if he can take the time off. It would be nice to have an extra back.) I’m heartened by my dad’s generosity, even though he remains certain that we’ll be heading straight back here after we graduate.

At any rate, he called today and we were chatting about moving dates. My dad is one of those people whose calendars fill up FAST. So he’s got me thinking already about when we’re going to move, which is kind of freaky. We haven’t been up to Our New City to look at apartments, we don’t know when we’re going sign a lease, and we don’t know if we’ll be signing our lease for the first of August or for some day after the first of August and before the 19th.

But I wanted to get us on his calendar, and he’s already got the weekend of the 6th and the four days prior to it booked. Ack! This last move was so stressful, with just the two of us (and only moving a mile away), that I dread the thought of undertaking a cross-country move without more and better help. So I have tentatively told my dad to reserve the 10th of August and immediately after for us. I also told him to tentatively hold the 30th of July for us as well, in case we need to go up earlier.

Putting down dates like that gave me pause at first. After all, I have to talk to Mr. Angst about it and make sure those dates sound reasonable to him. But there’s a part of me thinks at least penciling in a moving date is a good thing. We’re leased up in our current place through August 14th, so there won’t be too much rush to get out of here. Hopefully, we can swing a lease start-date in Our New City that’s sometime around the 10th or so, so we’re not double-paying TOO much rent. And we can both still leave our jobs when we were planning and have a good solid week-plus to do the packing thing right this time.

Now that I’ve planned all of this out in my head, of course, we’ll get to Our New City next month to find that no one starts a lease anytime except the first of the month. (I am almost sure that can’t be the case, but you never know. Ack.)

Man, I’m really falling behind on this Book Challenge thing. Whatever, we moved and reading has been falling by the wayside—or, rather, has become something I try to catch 30 minutes of before going to sleep at night, between working all day, cooking dinner, spending time with my husband, doing laundry, and (oy) reading blogs. Also, I read magazines at the pool because I don’t care if they get wet and I can read little snippets in between tanning rotations.

Not that I’m trying to excuse myself for falling down on the book challenge thing. Or maybe I am.

In any case, here’s my review of my latest read.

Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

So this was a re-read for me. I read it the first time on our honeymoon, starting it about two days before we left Italy, when I finished the books I’d brought/bought, and finishing it on the flight home. International flights are great for reading.

I liked the book then, but I wanted to revisit it, hoping to pick up some of the subtleties I missed the first time. Knowing what happens in the end helps with these kinds of books, I find, because you enjoy picking up the clues even more. Besides, this book isn’t much about the suspense of the story, it’s more about the journey.

And that’s the crux of my only gripe with this book. For all the time Stephenson spends building up the big climax at the end of the book, he speeds through it in about 10 pages. This from a writer who can spend twenty pages dragging you through a character’s momentary sexual frustrations. He creates a really interesting group of characters with some very complex interactions—across generations, no less!—but when they finally all intersect, he races through telling THAT story.

It irked me the first time I read it, and it irks me still. Maybe it’s just that I’m a girl, and I wanted a little more detail about what the characters were FEELING and EXPERIENCING at those critical moments, there at the apex of this story. And Stephenson doesn’t exactly fall down when writing abotu FEELINGS and EXPERIENCES, he just seems tired of it all by the end. I get the feeling he got to the last chapters and realized he’d gone 10,000 words over his target, so he just tied up all his plot strings and stopped writing.

Ah well. No big deal. I enjoyed getting there, so I’m not too disappointed at the destination. This is a good book, part historical fiction, part techno-thriller. Stephenson doesn’t give you a lot of warning before plunging you into the story, and I like that—I don’t want a writer to coddle me through the backstory, just let me figure it out on my own—and he really does create very interesting characters. It’s worth your time if you’re a history buff (particularly a WWII history buff) and if you are interested in technology.