Passive solar heat; books; politics

One of the great pleasures of the current house comes from the fact that the sunroom which attaches to the kitchen is a passive solar heat source. It's built on a concrete base; there is radiant heating in the floor to keep the slab at a constant temperature during the night. It works very well; I greatly enjoy getting up on a cold morning and standing on a toasty floor. Anja likes to snooze on it after she's awakened me and been fed breakfast. She seems to know this is an undignified posture in which to have her picture taken and has eluded me for several weeks but I finally caught her dozing off.

Hint to family knitters: socks for me would be very welcome in a Connecticut winter where the rest of the floors are cold. I know, though, that the queue is long.

The campaign moves along; what will we do with ourselves when it finally ends? It does have to. One of my very consistent reads is Real Clear Politics which consolidates all the news plus all the polls; this morning I found these film clips of Barack chatting on The View. Very enjoyable--it's nice to see him more relaxed, probably because he was just back from vacation. I watch the polls obsessively--there isn't as much of a rise in Pennsylvania as I'd like but there's still time.

Books: Jean sent Roger, I guess as a reward for his new commitment to reading, The Uncommon Reader, by Allen Bennett; I haven't started it yet but he found it very enjoyable and it keeps showing up on various friends' reading lists. On a different note, I've just finished an interesting book called An Autobiography of an Unknown Man by TS Grant. I met Mr. Grant through the Barack Obama campaign--I gave a gift to match others and one of the others was TS. The campaign had a system for sending me a note from him and we've chatted via email since then. I noticed he had a web page and found and bought the book. The copyright is from 2000, when he was barely 30 and the book at times is youthful and uneven--but it tells a fascinating story. He grew up in the projects in New Haven and was labeled as learning disabled at 9; he's now in a PhD program and in the interim has had several careers including some very successful time teaching inner city kids. Why is it that real stories like this, with all their rough edges, get relatively little attention when the fake "autobiographies" get so much play?

Weather still cold but getting better.