While poking around the bookcase abutting the train cases, I started reading one of the many books i own and haven’t read yet. Tim Moore’s Do Not Pass Go, his loveletter to the hours time sucked playing endless rounds of Monopoly with his siblings. In this ‘travel’ book he visits all the places on the UK monopoly board.

Also on that shelf, are a couple of books by Philip E. Orbanes Monopoly: The World’s Most Famous Game–And How It Got That Way and The Game Makers: The Story of Parker Brothers, from Tiddledy Winks to Trivial Pursuit Which I read eons ago.. board games were never a huge part of my childhood which actually made these more interesting to read.

On the other hand I did a LOT of crosswords and jigsaws which yielded Crossword Obsession: The History And Lore of the World’s Most Popular Pastime by Coral Amende and The Jigsaw Puzzle : Piecing Together a History by Anne D. Williams. Both were fascinating reads, Obsession for its social history aspect and Jigsaw was quite valuable vintage puzzle shopping info.

Scrolling very far back on the shelf…are Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.i.t. Students Who Took Vegas by Ben Mezrich and Eudaemonic Pie: The Bizarre True Story of How a Band of Physicists & Computer Wizards took on Las Vegas by Thomas Bass….neither of which are particularly useful for ‘get rich quick’ schemes…but lovely reads for practical application of theoretical math. Yes there was a time when I was a geek.

The most recent addition to the shelf was Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive ScrabblePlayers by Stefan Fatsis which is well worth reading…his A Few Seconds of Panic: A 5-Foot-8, 170-Pound, 43-Year-Old Sportswriter Plays in the NFL is also worth the read if you are a fan of the original Plympton Paper Tiger.

I can also recommend Rick Reilly’s Who’s Your Caddy?: Looping for the Great, Near Great, and Reprobates of Golf . I remember that i liked it…but i can’t quite remember WHY I read it…i am not fond of golf…but you put something on a dollar table and the damn book takes on a completely different appeal. That’s probably how I got a LOT of this stuff…unless of course you buy 2 and put them in the dark.

Recently written Around the World on Two Wheels: Annie Londonderry’s Extraordinary Ride by Peter Zheutlin entertainingly documents the circumnavigation of Annie Kopchovsky on a much saner looking contraption.
But my favorite so far on that front is Dervla Murphy’s 1965 book Full Tilt: Ireland to India With a Bicycle Travel writer Murphy, on a bicycle very similar to the one I own, pictured above, traveled through Iraq and Afghanistan in 1963; difference being her bike was named Rozinante and mine is named Daisy.

Jerome K Jerome also sent his ‘three men’ on a bicycle tour with 1900′s Three Men on the Bummel. You can look up the word “bummel” in wikipedia and it just refers you back to Three Men itself which describes it as”  a journey, long or short, without an end; the only thing regulating it being the necessity of getting back within a given time to the point from which one started.” William Anderson, authored a number of humorous books about adventures with his own family, a la Jack Douglas, put his family on bikes for their Grand Tour of Europe in 1973 with The Great Bicycle Expedition Free-wheeling through Europe with a cockamamie family, a potter plant and bicycleseatus. Sadly another book you can find for a penny if you look. Perhaps humor writers fall into obscurity as fast as novelists.

Families aren’t as popular in biblio-bicycle as soloists, but couples do turn up from time to time: Bicycle Built for Two Jim and Elisabeth Young wrote about their US grand tour by tandem in 1938; as alien a world as Murphy’s 1960s Iraq. Contemporarily, in Just the Two of Us: a Cycing Journey across America by Melissa and David Norton crossed the US only a few years ago.

In the here and now some folks have even made a writing career out of documenting travel from a bicycle saddle. Josie Dew has a number of this sort of book. Though I only found the US book Travels in a Strange State worth finishing, The late Anne Mustoe’s books are much more travelogues than personal meditations. Start with A Bike Ride: 12,000 Miles Around the World (1991)

A couple of other silly cyclists worth tracking down are British Humorist Tim Moore’s reenactment of the Tour de France in French Revolution , and a couple of BBC host Tom Vernon’s Fat Man on a Bicycle and Fat Man on a Roman Road.

I have finished most of these though I do keep a few unread just in case I have the desire to travel and none of the wherewithal.

A small collection of Sam LLewelln’s funny boating magazine pieces called The Minimum Boat. the more of this type of thing i read the more I scan the dinghy ads in craigslist.

On the Water, discovering American in a Rowboat by Nathanial Stone (yes i know I said i couldn’t find any US books about Rowing, i lied) Stone is a serious rower and he set off for a six thousand mile tour around the eastern US. Entirely readable, i just need to finish it you can’t row and read. it’s a definite drawback.

Also in that pile is Robert Sullivan’s study of the urban wilderness that is the Meadowlands a lot more involved than my study of the local woodlands but enough to inspire. Sullivan is also the author of that great book on rats called shockingly RATS, observations on the history & habitat of the city’s most unwanted inhabitants. I am partial to this sort of pop non-fiction title. The weirder the better. I have more of that sort of thing in the bookcases.

I also have this little item which I haven’t finished but tend to read in great chunks. Attention All Shipping a Journey round the Shipping forecast by Christopher Connelly. Another book i saw for a penny and couldn’t resist. As you an guess it’s an ejoyable travelogue where Connelly circumnavigates the British Isles visiting all the points mentioned in the shipping forecasts…yes those 4 times a day cryptic announcements of weather intended for ships. Important to an island nation meaningless to someone landlocked in the US. Our nearest equivalent is the traffic report.

Yesterday I even sat on a bridge with my legs hanging over the river…something i have NEVER been able to do.  Still not the least bit interested in swimming but boats don’t scare me anymore.

I couldn’t find any American books on jon boats or row boats, though lots of material on canoeing and kayaking.  Americans are really only interested in sporting around, anything beyond that involves motors or at the very least sails. But poking around in the UK databases I found a few very readable books. My favorite so far is The Unlikely Voyage of Jack De Crow: A Mirror Odyssey from North Wales to the Black Sea by A. J. Mackinnon. This is hysterical nearly as funny as my favorite Three Men in a Boat. Apparently the ‘Mirror’ is a particular kinda of dinghy beloved to true Britishers or at least those that hold the Swallows and Amazon children’s books dear to their hearts.

I have this still to read by Sam Llewellyn, yes a mystery writer in the US, but basically a UK boating writer The Worst Journey in the Midlands: One Man, a Boat and the British Weather sounds tragically funny.

Another funny book on the list is Two and a Half Men in a Boat by Nigel Williams, wherein he follows the course on the Thames of the original Three Men in a Boat, not a very well known travel book I guess, I got it for a penny.

For more practical reading AMC has the Quiet Water Series, Canoe and Kayak Guides to the Best Ponds, Lakes, and Easy Rivers I am ordering Quiet Water New Hampshire and Vermont I don’t know if i will use it much, but its entirely possible I will get bored puttering around in my little Sanctuary.

I had also been trolling for local birders to pester. The first thing I asked was which book was ‘THE’ book these days.   Sibley is the HOT author in the field right now. So I picked up his Birds of Eastern North Americaas well as this little number Birding Basics which I highly recommend, as it has stopped me from asking a bunch of newbie questions and even answered some I hadn’t thought to ask.   I still wanted a pocket guide to have in my pocket for those occasions when I’m sitting in a boat staring at a damn little brown bird that is sitting in front of me clear as day and I still can’t blood well figure out what it is….so I picked up Birds of Massachusetts.

Nice, but there’s no armchair reading in that pile except for this little goodie   Good Birders Don’t Wear White: 50 Tips From North America’s Top Birders.

To enjoy an activity vicariously you need to read personal accounts of people who REALLY make it a large part of their life.  You can’t swing a dead pigeon in birding without hitting a book by an obsessive birder and most of them are highly readable. I taste tested these from the library electing to buy and only two of them so far.

I am happily reading  A supremely bad idea : three mad birders and their quest to see it all by Luke Dempsey who has been compared to Patrick McManus and Bill Bryson. I always go for the funny in anything if I can find it.

Birding like any hobby can be highly competitive. Who am I kidding, it IS competitive, it can’t NOT be. Even if you are only competing with yourself and mother nature. One of the formal competitions is the North American Big Year which is as you would expect to see how many species you can see inside of one year. (in case you are wondering 745 is the record.)
• Kingbird highway : the story of a natural obsession that got a little out of hand by Kenn Kaufman, documents his own personal big year in 1973.

• The Big Year: A Tale of Man, Nature, and Fowl Obsession by Mark Obmascik, tells the stories of the three top contenders in the 1998 American Big Year.

Birder Phoebe Snetsinger famously saw 8,400 species between the day in her 40s when she was diagnosed with 1 year to live and 18 years later when she was killed in a bus accident birding in Madagascar. Her biography is quite fascinating Life List: A Woman’s Quest for the World’s Most Amazing Birds by Olivia Gentile

The other book I bought is The grail bird : the rediscovery of the Ivory-billed woodpecker by Tim Gallagher.

Indeed there are other books on the search for the Ivory Bill such as Ivorybill hunters : the search for proof in a flooded wilderness by Geoffrey E. Hill and In Search of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker by Jerome A. Jackson

I found Gallagher’s wider reaching, it’s not just about hunting for evidence of the Ivory-Bill but about the history of hunting for the bird and this entire obsession of hunting for this ghost bird. Anyway I found I couldn’t put it down once I started it.

Speaking of ghost birds, In Hope is the thing with feathers : a personal chronicle of vanished birds, Christopher Cokinos covers an entire range of ghost birds and what we are doing to completely destroy all hope of their existence.

Well that’s what’s in my birding book pile.  Once I start the annual dust off I may uncover a pile of books from my past worth mentioning.

That’s another way my reading habits have changed…I have so much non fiction reading and studying to get through, I can’t rationalize time spent reading fiction. Whenever I curl up with a good novel I feel guilty. But not so with the audio version. I can get through books twenty discs long if I have work enough to keep me busy. I have reread Stirling’s Island in the Sea of Time at least three times but this time I am merrily in the middle of the audiobook while I do some editing. Sometimes when I am through typing away, I shut the overheating PC off and just put my head down to get to the end of the disc. Wait did that sound weird? it was weird wasn’t it. whatever….meanwhile I have a stack of books from the library and three that arrived in the mail that I am ignoring in favor of a book where I know the ending. now that was weird.

I recently broke the 50 species mark in my inventory of the Nevins Bird Sanctuary. This place hasn’t really been ‘birded’ in a few decades, so this is trippy. I have NO idea what I am doing but I am having a hell of a time.

YES, this is what I do with my summers….I try to stay busy or pretending I am so, because the orders are few and far between. If i had another steady source of income i’d just close Sicpress.com in the summer. I never did figure out why orders slow to a crawl, but they do. I ship a couple everyday, but not enough comes in to keep body and soul together nevermind pay for product restocks. I try to double up on the other incomes what there is of it. I will confess to NOT rebuilding any bikes this summer, we have had too many 90 degree days. I suppose I should just do it in the living room like a normal person. Perhaps I will do that this weekend….unless there is water in the river.

You would think after the first offering, they’d learn their lesson and not come back.  No fear.   My friends always know I’m a soft touch for internet advice, software advice, photography advice, advice advice.

This week I had a friend and his wife rope me into advising his elderly unsuccessful real estate agent mother on what to do with her career.  They were ecstatic with my advice (I think she should specialize in elderly downsizers.) The mother on the other hand who has  only sold 1 mobile home in 4 years doesn’t think she needs any.  I agree, if she’s happy don’t screw with her qi. (chi for the rest of us)

Another friend whose work I have been editing for over a year has been offered a promotion to assistant editor and wants to know if she should take the job…maybe that was her way of asking me to keep on doing her work for her.

Let’s not forget the friend of a friend who is asking me to market his self published book, unfortunately I can’t in good conscience help inflict such a badly written book on the unsuspecting pubic. He doesn’t seem to think gramadic erors matter.  And I agree, unless he pays me to reedit the damn thing, then it will matter.

I guess I need to ask someone else’s advice on starting an advice column.

Today one of my customers seems to have been sucking extra deep from the crazy fountain. She ordered a DOZEN FINE Inkredibles. So I shipped a dozen FINE Inkredibles which happen to be GREY.

The Coarse are white and the Extra Fine are black..though after this batch of black, the factory may start making them beige..i don’t care as long as they work.

Anyway…in the mail comes back FOUR of the Grey Inkredibles and a piece of a white one in a baggie. The note indicated that she had really wanted EXTRA FINE Inkredibles erasers and that I had sent her the wrong ones.

So I explained the whole thing about the color and offered to send her 4 WHITE ones as per her SAMPLE. Now she is screaming at me that I obviously don’t have what she wants and that she deserves a full refund for all the wrong erasers I ever sent her. yeah like THAT’ll happen.

I have issued her a refund for the 4 returned grey erasers and once again tried explaining the difference between black and white. But I think the problem lies bigger than that. The damn things keep going up in price for me to have manufactured nevermind shipping.   I think I may stop offering the Inkredibles by the dozen, this isn’t the 1st time someone has had buyers remorse when they open the box and discover just a box of erasers.  Really excellent ones, but erasers none the less.

Today I passed the CPR course (my last certification was like 5 presidents ago) and became another volunteer with the Community Emergency Response Teams…so far i am not called upon to do anything more than that. But what the hell, I have all these excess free time that needs killing.

Yesterday I …was it yesterday? that seems so long ago….i went out at 5am birding.  A buddy of mine wanted to tag along so I ran around to 3 different walmarts to find her a vest.  (don’t get me wrong this is a real friend whom I love dearly, but i have been doing her editing for a year and now she’s been offered an asst editor job.  So for ten minutes I DID actually think about hiding her body in the swamp….)

But on the other hand it was so far my best birding day ever – 32 species PLUS …an immature bald eagle just hanging around the great blue heron rookery.  I figured out I don’t really want to Bird (big B) as in another bloody hobby I need to spend time and money feeding, I just want to know what’s living in the Sanctuary that is 9 blocks from my house. So far the guestimation is over 50+ species of birds – THAT ought to keep me busy birding (small B).

Later the conservation officer made me fill out a bunch of official endangered animal sighting forms.   Directly afterwards he and I went out and hiked half the rail trail, so we could discuss the trail design, or actually how to integrate the wild life sanctuary trails and the rail trail, so as not to piss of the birds, the animals or the people.   Basically I was out rowing and hiking until about 1PM and spent the rest of the day completely dead to the world.   Sooner or later people are going to figure out I am just making this all up as I go.