Thursday, September 27, 2007

Idle Dreaming

A little over half way to Melbourne. Need to rack up 165.000 points on my amex to get two tickets to Melbourne (and we'll need to get to SFO to use it, but that's okay.) Is it fine in September there? If I have 100.000 points now, I need to average about 65000/11 (11 months since I'd need to book at least a month out) = $5909 per month to get this by next fall (or spring, depends where you stand!). Assuming a balanced work schedule, it's just out of my reach. If airfare is suddenly a higher percentage of my spending due to more flights or higher costs, this could be obtainable. Isn't a shame the things I think about. That would also get $1,650 worth of Home Depot giftcards, but what's that all about?

I am a little annoyed at NWA for not linking up with Qantas. The only way to Melbourne on a northwest mileage game is Alaska air to LAX, Air TahitiNui to Papeete, Air TahitiNui to Melbourne. The mild advantage is that a stopover in Tahiti is included. I can't begin to imagine what the cost of this would be in miles.

Middlemarch some more.

How was it that in the weeks since her marriage, Dorothea had not distinctly observed but felt with a stifling depression, that the large vistas and wide fresh air which she had dreamed of finding in her husband's mind were replaced by anterooms and winding passages which seemed to lead nowhither? I suppose it was that in courtship everything is regarded as provisional and preliminary, and the smallest sample of virtue or accomplishment is taken to guarantee delightful stores which the broad leisure of marriage will reveal. But the door-sill of marriage once crossed, expectation is concentrated on the present. Having once embarked on your marital voyage, it is impossible not to be aware that you make no way and that the sea is not within sight—that, in fact, you are exploring an enclosed basin.
...
With his taper stuck before him he forgot the absence of windows, and in bitter manuscript remarks on other men's notions about the solar deities, he had become indifferent to the sunlight.
...
She was humiliated to find herself a mere victim of feeling, as if she could know nothing except through that medium: all her strength was scattered in fits of agitation, of struggle, of despondency, and then again in visions of more complete renunciation, transforming all hard conditions into duty. Poor Dorothea! she was certainly troublesome—to herself chiefly; but this morning for the first time she had been troublesome to Mr. Casaubon.
...
Both were shocked at their mutual situation—that each should have betrayed anger towards the other. If they had been at home, settled at Lowick in ordinary life among their neighbors, the clash would have been less embarrassing: but on a wedding journey, the express object of which is to isolate two people on the ground that they are all the world to each other, the sense of disagreement is, to say the least, confounding and stultifying. To have changed your longitude extensively and placed yourselves in a moral solitude in order to have small explosions, to find conversation difficult and to hand a glass of water without looking, can hardly be regarded as satisfactory fulfilment even to the toughest minds.

Wednesday, September 12, 2007

Middlemarch

Women were expected to have weak opinions; but the great safeguard of society and of domestic life was, that opinions were not acted on. Sane people did what their neighbors did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.