"It's Dead, Jim" and other miscellany

Last night my DVD player died a spectacular death (its last words? "No DISC..."), leaving me no choice but to worry myself to sleep rather than be lulled into slumber by the flickering lights and lulling sound track from the greatest soporific I know: television.

Now, I am not exactly a TV person, as some of you know. I've still got the 20 inch old hulking set I bought when the boy was a baby; none of your wall-mounted surround-sound flat-screen jobs for me. I have no cable, and peasant-vision doesn't reach me out here in the boonies, so I don't even get the CBC. TV has almost always sent me directly to sleep, especially in times of stress, when otherwise I just lie in bed and worry about things I have no control over.

In fact, now that I think about it, my tendency to fall asleep minutes into any movie is partly why I learned to knit. I wanted to know how that Harry Potter movie ended, so I needed to do something with my hands while I watched.

Anyway, I don't have much of a plan at the moment, because I secretly want to be the kind of person who can airily claim "Oh, I don't even have a tv!" while the truth is that I do, in fact, want to be able to watch a freaking movie at night after the kid goes to bed. Surely I've earned a little brain-dead time for myself!

So, naturally enough, I stopped at the book store on the way home and spent the money that could have gone towards a new DVD player on books. (What? They were having a sale!) I bought Juliet, Naked so I can keep up with the Well-Read Hostess, and I picked up the sequel to The Hunger Games at the library, so I'm pretty well set for reading material, at least on Saturday.

Sunday, though, will have to take care of itself.

(And, in keeping with the "other miscellany" part of today's post, I read The Book of Negroes by Laurence Hill last weekend and loved it. The friend who passed it on said that it was published under another title in the US - Google tells me that title is Someone Knows My Name. I find this most curious. Also, I like the Canadian title better. That is all I have to say about that.)