train, break, books. new year?

After writing a very odd post on my stopover in Chicago on the way here, I deleted it, and henceforth got distracted by home and Christmas and family and books and friends and being back in Minneapolis/St. Paul and winter and so on.

(Minnesota has snow. Minnesota has lots of snow. It was a little unpleasant yesterday, when it started raining and there was damp and wet and slush everywhere, but what can you do? And at least it still looks like proper winter outside.)

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( excessive description of my journey )

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Brief summary of books so far this break:
Freedom and Necessity, Bull and Brust, on the train, a reread: still excellent. Good train reading--long and dense enough to occupy my head for a while, compact enough to put in luggage.
A Fine and Private Place, Beagle: vcmw gave this to me a while ago and I kept forgetting to read it. I finally did! It was not quite what I had been expecting--to be fair I think I was expecting Spoon River Anthology by way of Peter S. Beagle, and it was not that. But it was interesting, and the voices (particularly the New York accent) quite distinctive.
The Well-Dressed Gentleman's Pocket Guide: A gift from my sister. A quote: "Instinctively, the gentleman craves a hat." Details on various kinds of coats, hats, etc; diagrams of several methods of folding one's handkerchief or tying one's tie. Lovely.
Fun Home, Bechdel: A friend was getting rid of this, so I nabbed it. I'd read it before, but didn't remember many details. Elegiac.
Mythic Delirium, Issue 23: In progress--I am a slow reader of poetry. aliseadae has a poem in this one, which is really the reason I got it (see: do not read much poetry), but the other poems are lovely as well! And a couple of other people I know in here too, which is neat.

I also got copies of Gaudy Night and The Jewel-Hinged Jaw for Christmas, which I haven't started rereading yet but certainly will at some point.

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Other than that (and finishing the solstice stories left over from 2009, which I did on the train) I have been fairly useless this break. This is okay, I think. That is sort of what breaks are meant for. (I just feel like I ought to be writing oodles of novels because I am me.)

But I started compiling my resume for physics-research applications yesterday. And today I did a copy of the second (first and a half) draft of A Returning Power to edit, and renumbered all the scenes in order so they no longer go 8.5 10 9 12/11 10.1 (my numbering system was based off an outline I did before I started the redraft).

And somewhere in there it became almost 2011. Which is just strange. But here we are.