Summertime Plans

Spent the afternoon cleaning up the office, throwing out old papers, finishing up a couple of letters of recommendation, and thinking about the summer. What do I have planned? Well, I have to put it into categories, of course:

Around the house

In the house, I need to do some repair work on the walls and corners. Three and a half years of kids banging around, plus parents who are constantly re-arranging the furniture, have left a good many scrapes, holes, and cracks to fill and paint over. I don't think it'll cost too much money, especially since my father-in-law has lent me all the tools I'll need. Now it's just a matter of buying the putty and paint and getting to work.

Outside the house

Melissa and I have been talking about putting a retaining wall around the garden for a couple of years now, and we'd like this summer to be the year we get it in. But that'll cost money--more than patching up ripped plaster and sealing over cracks will be, especially since we'd like to imagine this to be a permanent improvement to the yard, not just a makeshift repair for as long as we have a garden. I hope we can afford it, but we probably won't know for sure until July. In meantime, I have to put a new door on the attic of the garden shed, as the current one is falling apart and letting the rain and hail in. That one can't wait. Fortunately, I'll probably be able to get the wood cut for pretty cheap, and then I can weatherproof and install it myself.

Inside my head

Ah yes, the summer reading list, which has grown ridiculously long over the past couple of weeks, but which I'm not yet willing to engage in triage upon yet. It's only May! I can be optimistic! I will get all this reading done!! Of course, it's never worked out that way any summer before, but there's always a first time...

I could break this down into subcategories, but I think I'll just stick with an alphabetical arrangement. Some of these are part of research projects, some of these are part of the local DSA book club, some I'm reviewing for publications, some have been recommended by blogger friends, some are for fun, and some have just been laying around for months (years?), demanding to be read. Try to guess which is which:

Gar Alperovitz and Lew Daly, Unjust Deserts: Wealth and Inequality in the Knowledge Economy
Naomi Cahn and June Carbone, Red Families vs. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture
Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
Jean Bethke Elshtain, Sovereignty: God, State, and Self
William Least Heat-Moon, PrairyErth (A Deep Map)
Joseph Heath, Economics without Illusions: Debunking the Myths of Modern Capitalism
Thomas F. Jackson, From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Struggle for Economic Justice
C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, That Hideous Strength
Stephen L. Marglin, The Dismal Science: How Thinking Like an Economist Undermines Community
Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice
Tom Slee, No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart: The Surprising Deceptions of Individual Choice
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (No, I'm not kidding--I will get through it this summer! I will! I will! I do believe in fairies! I do!)

All right, whatever. It's almost 5pm; time to head home, and let the summer start. We've got more episodes of Firefly to watch tonight. (Oh man, I left out all my other assorted media goals, like getting familiar with the films of Satyajit Ray, or tentatively allowing myself to get sucked into The Wire...and then, of course, there's the paper on Mormonism, economic communalism and justice that I have to have written by July, and the paper on Confucian theories of civility and nature that I need to get started on for a conference next winter...oh, and what about my plans to overhaul my Christianity and social justice class before the fall? Crap, I'm not going to finish anything this summer, am I?)

Oh well. Your plans, your reading lists? Share them--I'm curious.