I love Amazon deliveries. They always cheer me. Today's haul:

The Devil in the White City by Eric Larson. Am I the last person on earth not to have read this book? Possibly.

In Harm's Way by Doug Stanton. Feeding my natural- and man-made-disaster festish, a book about the sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis and the survivors' efforts to, well, survive some more. Lots of shark attacks in this one, so you know I'm on board.

Activism Inc. by Dana R. Fisher. You know those folks who come to your door asking for money to support their urgent urgent URGENT cause? This book is about them. Which is to say, it's about me. Not only was I one of those folks for a summer, but for a year and a half following I was one of the folks who manage the offices that send out those folks. One of my largest regrets from that era is that I didn't keep copious notes during the experience; it really does lend itself either to a research project or a roman a clef. Sounds like the author went with the first approach, although in the preface she mentions that she canvassed herself for a little bit. This one I'll be reading first. A full report will follow, involving lots of comparing and contrasting.

Eh, you know, actually, I've decided to turn this into an ancillary blog -- one of those run-of-the-mill, "here's what I did with my day and here's what I think of it" type blogs. Why not? I always enjoy reading those too, and this will get me writing a bit more.

So today I went apple picking with the hubby and friends j. and n. And Watson the Dog. This was one of our first true experiments as dog owners: treating the dog as a necessary apendage as we went about our weekend. And it went pretty well -- one of us would run all around the apple orchards with Watson while the others picked apples with this weird milk carton-attached-to-a-broomstick tool (quite effective too, although I did unintentionally kill many apples on the way to picking a bushel). But when the cider house got going, Watson was done. The noise scared him senseless and he spent the rest of the visit slunking about in a state of shivery despair.

Also, he peed on a beet garden and a raspberry bush, but no one saw, so all was well.

Tonight is beer and baseball. I love beer and baseball.