Vacation

Ahh...what a nice thing Christmas break is. I'm working 8:30 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. every day this week...and it's funny, when I did the same thing this summer it felt like some kind of unnatural torture, but now, after the incredibly strenuous semester I just survived, it feels like a vacation. It is a vacation. After all, I'm not getting up any earlier or getting off any later than I was during school, and I am getting every single evening to do whatever in the world I want to do. No long nights freezing at the observatory, or pulling my hair out over Greek at 1:00 a.m. And my weekends are my own. I love it.

So what do I do with all this time? Well, first, as mentioned in the previous post, I shopped like a crazy woman. Now, however, I have everything I needed or wanted, and I've settled in for a Tolkien break.

It's a pattern of mine that during Christmas break I tend to focus on one particular author or series, probably because four weeks isn't really long enough to branch out into anything else. Last Christmas was the Harry Potter winter break. I read all five of the HP books then in existence, of which I had only read the first one previously. Then I bought all three HP movies and watched them. Naturally, you all know how much I adore Harry Potter. But this break is the Tolkien break. I've almost finished watching (again) all three extended movie versions of The Lord of the Rings (I watch it in six installments, half a movie each evening), and I'm reading J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century, by Tom Shippey (which I highly recommend, by the way). I am also enjoying one of the best Christmas presents I have ever received.

My brother and his fiance gave me this gorgeous edition of The Silmarillion. It is absolutely wonderful, beautifully printed and filled with amazing paintings. Seriously, I want to buy prints of some of these illustrations and frame them for my walls. They're great.

This is exactly the sort of thing I would never buy for myself. It's simply too lavish and expensive, especially when you consider the fact that I already owned a paperback edition of this book (but had never read it). So naturally it is a perfect Christmas gift. I'm in love with this book. I've read about a fourth of it already (it just begs to be read), and I've been driving my family crazy with my constant raving about it: "Oh wow! Look at this map!" "Oooh, what a great painting, see?" "Listen to this, isn't it beautiful?" I'm such a nerd.

So, yeah, I'm a fan. And now I'm going to go back and bury myself in it again. My precious...