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I read for a little on the train, then tried to sleep.

There were noisy children in front of me and a group of friends behind me who seemed to find *everything* hilariously funny. But I had no seatmate, and managed to make myself reasonably comfortable, after some trial and error. I probably got 5 hours of sleep or so in the end.

The next day we mostly followed a river, with lovely green hills all around. I also find the human activity by the tracks kind of interesting to look at. Trains, houses, trailers, mysterious industrial works, ruins, graffiti, etc.

I had an omelette in the dining car for breakfast, sat in the observation car a while, and read some more at random from House of Leaves, which continues to be interesting.

The train arrived at Union station an hour and a half late, about average for that train, I think.

I met Sara for dinner at Eastern Accents at 6:30. I had a couple buns for dinner. We walked up to the Amtrak station and she waited with me till the bus came, a few minutes late, at around 8.

When it came I took silly pictures of her waving outside the window. I wondered what they needed such a big bus for to take a half-dozen people from Ann Arbor to Toledo. As it turned out, it was by way of Detroit, and by the time we got to Detroit it seemed nearly full.

Anyway, I got a start on House of Leaves. With the unusual format I felt particularly free to dive in however I felt; so I went through the table of contents, tried to decipher some of the appendices, read a couple random passages from the middle, then finally went back and started the introduction.

By that time we were in Toledo, and I was pretty hungry. The train to DC was only running 25 minutes late, leaving me with maybe a 40 minute wait. It was dark and chances of finding food outside the station at that point seemed slim so I just got a couple snacks out of the vending machine and figure I'd hope the snack bar on the train hadn't sold out yet.

After my snacks and a bit more reading I found myself a wall outlet and wrote this, while I copied my random blurry pictures from the full camera card.

I finished my Lupin book the last night, and it was back to "La Vie, Mode D'emploi" for the bus ride to work.

But the book group Sara and I go to is reading "House of Leaves" for next time, and it looks very long and complicated. So I picked up a copy at Dawn Treader and plan to get a serious start on that on the train to DC tommorow.

The "train" is actually a bus that leaves Ann Arbor at 8pm to meet the train in Toledo at 10:45. Given Amtrak's record, that's likely to be closer to midnight. It'll be interesting to see how that works.

Anyway, with lots of reading to look forward to, life is good.

Listening to the stirring BBC News Hour theme this morning, I realized that someone needs to start a band devoted entirely to covers of the theme music for news shows. It could become the first band with a full-time typewriter player.

Saturday night I played with hydrogen a bit. It's fun for a while, but no matter what you do with it seems to sound too much like a drum machine....

Sunday I mostly sat around and read the Arsène Lupin book I started last week. It's kind of preposperous at times, but mostly fun.

Sunday night I watched Renoir's "La Grande Illusion", which I expected to be boring for some reason, but I ended up liking a lot.

My folks finally got their DSL up and working last week. They only have the one laptop hooked up to it right now, though. I'm visiting next weekend and figure I'll spend some of the time trying to get their network set up.

I've been keeping a blog of sorts by hand for a while now. But I'm going to try out Drupal for a while just to figure out whether I like it better.