Hows my little Cutter?

Laura and I recently acquired a new knife for our kitchening needs and HOLY CRAP!

It was like we were living in the dark ages of cutting, I sliced a green pepper with absolutely no sawing motions, not even the slightest!

I hereby recommend one nice knife to everyone who slices and chops. Your slicing life will improve greatly.

Hows my little weekend Warrior?

What a weekend!

Laura and I have had quite the adventure with travel this weekend. We ventured up to Duluth for a weekend chock full of wedding planning and whatnot. Earlier this winter we found out that there are direct flights from Chicago through United Airlines late at night, awesome! Wednesday night we packed our gear and headed out from from work Thursday to catch our 9:15 flight. We made it up to Duluth without a hitch and stayed in the Canal Park Lodge compliments of Laura's generous parents.

Friday was stellar, I got up early and had a chance to strap on some rental skis, which didn't suck surprisingly, and headed up to Spirit with my old pal Tasha, a comp ticket from her made the morning even better. Afterwords, I met up with Laura's family and began our reception food tasting at Blackwoods. All of it was SO good it was hard to narrow our choices down to just a few dishes. That evening back in Washburn we hung out and watched the Opening Ceremony for the 2010 Olympics. I loved watching the projections on everything!

We went to bed and at about 2am I got up with a horrible stomach ache and ran downstairs and unloaded from both ends. Ugh, nothing like being sick away from home. My sickness lasted on and off until about 10 am where I had absolutely nothing left in my digestive tract. Thank goodness by the evening I was able to move around enough to get upstairs eat some chicken soup and watch some more of the Olympics.

Sunday I felt like a new (emptier) man and we headed to Duluth in the snow to catch our convenient 3pm flight to Chicago where we were excited to get home early and veg out for the night. But our plane had a different plan in mind. Due to mechanical errors we were being delayed. An hour later we find out that for some reason the Duluth Airport could not support our plane and they had to fly a mechanic up from Minneapolis another 2 hour wait. It wasn't until 9:45 and a lot of Pokemon/facebook/thankdearlordforfreeinternetsurfing that our flight got canceled. After another debacle at counter we eneded up with a free room for the night with a complimentary shuttle back to the airport, no need for a cab, right?

After some much needed Luce pizza at midnight we set our alarms for 4:20 am to catch our 4:45 am Shuttle to the airport for our flight set to leave at 5:25 am, cutting it close? Perhaps. But in the tiny Duluth airport and their two gates, shits a breeze. But no, Laura and I learned the value of the E-Ticket and the online boarding pass/check in. Instead of walking right through security and sitting in our seats just before the door shut, we waited forFUCKINGever it seemed like for some old lady and some dumbasses to check their luggage 10 seconds before their flight to work their shit out. We get our passes hop through security like expected and the attendant says, sorry you're late, it seemed like she had some pleasure in the back of her voice too.

After another half hour battle at the check in counter Laura and I decide instead of wasting another day at the Duluth airport we shall rent a car and drive to Minneapolis for some better luck with getting a flight to Chicago. Pt.2 begins at 7:30 when the rental places open up. Which blows because the car rental will most likely end up on our dime.

We found a car! We got hooked up with a Prius to drive south to Minneapolis. Once we got there we had a really smooth check-in and flight. To ice the cake from our weekend when we arrived in Chicago to have a $50 parking ticket stuck on our window. Its great to be back finally.

Hows my little astute intellect?

I'm not sure when exactly I heard of War and Peace, I think probably in cartoons of yesteryear when they made jokes about big books or something. I'm not sure I've ever met anyone who had read it and no one has ever told me to read it because it is a good read. In fact, up until this past July I didn't even know what it was about, aside from what the title implies. Now that I am back into my old reading habit again I decided I finally needed to give this one a go, as a sort of life goal check mark thing.

It should be noted when I set out to read this book I needed to get a hardcover version. This was because since I've outgrown my plastic trophies from high school I need something to display as an accomplishment, and War and Peace has proven to be just that. My arms are probably measurably stronger since reading it especially because it is a physically (and mentally) heavy book. At no point in the 1215 pages did I read it lying supine with the book in the air. I haven't weighed it but I would guess it would weigh in somewhere near 10 pounds, no joke.

So for whatever reason I decided to read Tolstoy's epic. Right away I needed to figure out why its called an epic, which pretty much means that he took a long ass time (five years) and effort (historically accurate) into writing this book. I learned about halfway into reading it that the book has more characters than any other novel, which I believe. Since nearly all of those characters are Russians or French it took me about 300 pages to figure out which character belongs to which storyline. Eventually that didn't matter since they were all tied together by the end.

Since I think everyone has heard of War and Peace and few have read it I naturally assumed this book was profound and profoundly difficult to read. I thought it was going to be a twelve hundred + page test of patience, but it turns out the story isn't bad at all. In fact at times it gets very engaging and exciting. But mostly it is long. Many people will argue but I think it really only boiled down to 5 different main characters: Price Andrei the man who found out what is beautiful and necessary in life; Fat Pierre Bezukhov, who absentmindedly pondered the meaning of his existence; Natasha Rostov, A beautiful woman who embraces life and love to the fullest; Her Brother Nikolai Rostov, who embraces the military fully; and as much as I didn't want to admit it, Princess Myra, who largely goes unnoticed throughout the book because she is boring, is a devout believer in god and unconditional love.

The version I got had a preface saying that in their translation from Russian to English they tried to keep it as true to Tolstoy's original words as possible, and after reading some examples and the whole book I definitely got the impression that great care was taken to rewrite it in his style. That said, the hardest part of the book was at the beginning and end. At the beginning there is a large amount of french mixed right in with english and footnotes to bounce all around the page for translations and more footnotes for historical references. I think when I first started I was reading about 10 pages each lunch hour. The end was a whole different monster entirely though, which I really really wanted to believe that the second book of the epilogue was completely unrelated to the rest of the book but after some long reflection about it, one can find correlations. But god did it suck. He just ranted for like 40 pages about how historians interpret history and how everyone is free but no one is free. Ug, I was telling Laura about this and she said why don't you just stop you finished the story already, and I could only tell her if she had spent the last seven months doing something would you quit right before the end?

There are some parts within the story which Tolstoy goes on these ridiculous tangents on the nature of wars and those who fight in them as well as how history is interpreted. Here is of one of my favorite offshoots that actually made sense:

"A bee sitting on a flower stung a child. And the child is afraid of bees and says that a bee’s purpose consists in stinging people. A poet admires a bee sucking up from the cup of a flower and says that a bee’s purpose consists in sucking up the fragrance of flowers. A beekeeper, noting how a bee gathers flower pollen and brings it to the hive, says that a bee’s purpose consists in gathering honey. Another beekeeper, who has studied the life of a hive more closely, says that a bee collects pollen in order to feed the young bees and rear a queen, and that its purpose consists in reproducing its kind. A botanist notes that, as a bee lands with pollen on the pistil of a dioecious flower, it fertilizes it, and in that the botanist sees the bee's purpose. Another, observing the migration of plants, sees that the bee contributes to that migration, and this new observer may say it is in this that the bee’s purpose consists. But the final purpose of the bee is exhausted neither by the one, nor the other, nor the third purpose that human reason is able to discover. The higher human reason rises in the discovery of these purposes, the more obvious for it is the inaccessibility of the final purpose."
It was parts like this that I went, WTF Leo, W.T.F.

Before reading the book I thought I wasn't going to understand it, and that was my biggest fear. Now that I'm done I think I understand the different ideas and themes to the story, and I'm happy I spent my lunch hours since July tackling it. Since I didn't know what it was going to be about I thought it was going to be full of ideas from a man who wanted to write about the nature of war and peace. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that it was a book about a guy who wanted to write about war, love, and god. While staged it in Russia during the momentous year of 1812. As a man who has recently had love on the mind quite a bit some of the ideas presented in War and Peace were really helpful in teaching me new ways to think of love and what its purpose serves in life.

"Love hinders death. Love is life. Everything, everything I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love."



So would I recommend it? Sure, if you've got time and patience.