So the flight from Denver to Boston was lousy: the guy in the middle seat next to me kept poking me (and the man in the aisle seat, I suspect) with overactive elbows. I got hardly any sleep, arrived in Brookline around 6am, and tried (and failed) to have a brief nap. As a result, after a busy Friday I slept for over 12 hours.
This morning was spent clearing out tons of stuff from the attic, carting most of it to the kerbside but shredding things like old tax returns and bank statements. (I hate emptying shredders; the stuff inevitably goes all over the floor.) Then Kate and Mark brought Tommy round, claimed some of the stuff from the attic (thanks!), and drove it home, leaving Tommy with us. (Here’s one picture for now; I’ll upload some more when I get back to Seattle.)
Eventually they returned in a noticeably emptier car, and we all went out to dinner.
As I think I’ve mentioned, one of the few drawbacks of living in Seattle is that all of one’s Amazon.com purchases are subject to Washington sales tax. So I decided to order a book and have it delivered to me here in Brookline, and although I still have a couple of other books in progress (Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys, and Rob Harrop’s Pro Spring), I couldn’t resist dipping into my new acquisition this evening. It’s Andrew Sullivan’s The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It, How To Get It Back. I fully intend to write a longer review of it when I finish (although I’m well aware that I said the same thing about Richard Dawkins’ wonderful book The God Delusion). However thus far I can say that Andrew Sullivan has produced a somewhat idiosyncratic definition of conservatism, followed by a devastating indictment of fundamentalisms, both religious and political. Since a significant part of his criticism is directed at the contemporary Roman Catholic church, it will be interesting to see how he manages to square this with his avowed Catholicism. Perhaps he will resort to more creative semantics – we’ll see.