Altar'd State

This doesn't look like much yet, my green altar. (Green as in dried but not yet fired, not green as in color, or even as in environmentally friendly.)

Hard to tell, but it's maybe twelve inches tall, maybe eight inches wide, and around six inches in depth. Once it's glazed (blue? pink? on the inside only) and fired, it'll go onto the patio; I intend for it to hold eggs of one kind or another.

I've completed four altars so far; this is the first, the next two are larger, the final one smaller. As always, the next question is: Where do you/I go from here?

On the Reading Front

I finished up Wired, the John Belushi biography, finally. Talk about tedious. Reading about addicts turns out to be as tedious as dealing with addicts. Who knew? Toward the end I was like, oh god, just OD already. (I would not make a good interventionist.) Anyway, now I'm reading the most amazing book: Giving Up the Ghost: A Memoir by Hilary Mantel. (Here's a review of it in the The Guardian UK. And here is a sizable chunk of the book in The London Review of Books.) I'm just snobby enough literature-wise that it's not often I come across a writer who makes me think that what they write is worth killing trees for, you know? But goddamn can this woman write. I don't want this book to end, like, ever.

The Mantel book is the 16th book I've read this month, one of thirty-two books so far in 2013. I was telling David yesterday that even at this pace (which admittedly feels much less breakneck two months in), and given my expected lifespan, I'm realistically only going to read around 6,000 more books. Like, ever.  Now, maybe 6,000 books sounds like a lot to you, but honestly it sounds like next to nothing to me. Google tells me that in all of modern history, only around 130,000,000 books have been published. 6,000 is 0.0045% of that figure. In all my years, past-present-future, of dedicated (and not so dedicated) reading, I'll have read far fewer than nine-tenths of one percent of all published books by the time I'm dead and buried.  Can't think too much about any of that though.