I did my Mom’s and Eileen’s and my bills.

Went Xmas shopping. Treadmilled.

My doctor’s office called and said that my cholesterol is up, my glucose is up and my PSA count is creeping up.

My doctor has recommended me to a urologist. Great. Blah blah blah.

Eileen and  I watched the Swedish movie based on Steig Larsson’s book, The Girl with The Dragon Tattoo. This is the first of the three books Larsson wrote about the same characters. Eileen and I had both read this one. I have read all three and think they’re decent mystery/whatever novels.

Movies can’t quite get books right. This probably because we readers can have so many varieties of experience of the same book whereas cinema is more of a common experience. In other words, each reader imagines the way the characters look, move and speak. In a movie, viewers all see the same actor moving and speaking.

Having said that, I enjoyed the movie adaptation of Larrson’s book.  It didn’t rub your nose in the gory parts of the plot. I did wonder how easy it would be to follow if you didn’t know the plot like Eileen and I did. But we did, we enjoyed it.

I was thinking of Peter Ackroyd yesterday.

I recently finished his novel, English Music. Loved it.

Returned to reading his London: A Biography.

Realized that I have also read 400 or the 1100 or so pages (He writes long books) of his biography of Dickens. Pulled that out for possible resumption of reading. Looked over his long list of works and realized that many of the titles interest me. Ordered Hawksmoor from Paperbackswap.

Ackroyd’s wiki bio describes this book this way:

Hawksmoor, winner of both the Whitbread Novel Award and the Guardian Fiction Prize, was inspired by Iain Sinclair‘s poem ‘Lud Heat’ (1975), which speculated on a mystical power from the positioning of the six churches Nicholas Hawksmoor built. The novel gives Hawksmoor a Satanical motive for the siting of his buildings, and creates a modern namesake, a policeman investigating a series of murders. [link to article]

Sounds interesting to me.

I’m still struggling with burnout or melancholia or whatever it is I’m experiencing.

I remain motivated but discouraged.

Weird. Mozart and Bach help. Brahms and Haydn, too.  I treadmilled to recordings of Haydn piano sonatas yesterday after spending time with them on the piano.

There’s a mess on my front porch. Water is no longer standing around in pools since I have sopped it up. I’m afraid some of my father’s sermons got wet. Bah.

One of the workers yesterday said he thinks our house was one of those built from a Sears house kit floated over from Chicago on a barge. I searched in vain online for one that looks like ours. Still cool idea.

The same worker asked me what music I had playing in the house. Mozart piano concertos. He liked them. I do too.