"One winter night in my kitchen, as I poured peppermint tea into my friend Lisa's cup, she said that she liked my teapot. I told her that my happy yellow teapot has a kinky backstory involving a nineteenth-century vegetarian sex cult in upstate New York whose members lived for three decades as self-proclaimed 'Bible communists' before incorporating into the biggest supplier of dinnerware to the American food-service industry, not to mention harboring their most infamous resident, an irritating young maniac who, years after he moved away, was hanged for assassinating President Garfield."

--Sarah Vowell, Assassination Vacation

I devoured this book after the miracle that is the Bailey-Howe Library at UVM held the copy for me. After I was done, I flipped it over and started again. It is just that good. In between, I read lengthy passages aloud to El Yo, so that he wouldn't have to read type that couldn't be measured in pixels. I've proselytized privately about it and now I'm telling you, the Internet: go read this book.

Apart from the fact that Sarah Vowell is smart smart smart, she's also funny and geeky, and while this book is nominally about the assassinations of three American presidents--Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley--it's really much more about taking an extended road-trip with a super-snarky US history wonk. She details her phobias (driving, heights, snakes, to name a few), vomits all over a small boat to Florida and drags a variety of long-suffering friends and relatives all over the country to visit historically important and very weird places involved in the assassination. I now am compelled to visit Dr Samuel Mudd's homestead (run as a tourist attraction now by his descendents) just to read the cookbook.

Dr Mudd was the physician who set the broken leg of Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth, the leg he broke after jumping to down from Lincoln's theatre box to the stage and screaming the state motto of Virginia. Yeah, it's that kind of book. So go read it, lest I be forced to call you all and read you passages over the phone.

That's how the past few months have been: lots and lots of reading. Winter here in Vermont has been a strange affair this year. A ton of snow appeared in December, temperatures dropped, right on schedule, and then the next month it all melted, and the temperatures shot up to 50 degrees. And that was fun for about a week, as everyone ran around going, "Holy crap! I can feel my nose! Whee!" But by the second and third week of high temperatures, it just all became a little creepy. This is Vermont. It's winter. There's supposed to be snow. We're all supposed to wander round in many practical layers, congratulating each other on not dying of exposure. Not to mention that the sound of the skiing and winter tourism industry rocking and crying in the corner, is a little much to bear.

So while this is the first winter I've been here and not taking classes, we still haven't managed to go snowshoeing or snowboarding. Although it is nice to walk up the hill to work without having my eyelashes freeze shut. And it makes it easier to run around doing non-snow things after work. There's definitely something to this SAD business. When it's dark and nuclear-winter freezing day after day, week after week, it actually saps your energy, and makes a very convincing case for staying in bed, wrapped in comforters and surrounded by books and rabbits (your pets may vary). Of course, that also sounds like the perfect summer vacation to me, so perhaps this whole "writing thing" isn't for me. It's hard to express, but I think I would sum it up as: I like being able to feel my toes.