Progress: Substance Disorders, Picture Books, and other Bargains

So, this last thursday I bought a treasury of Harper Collins Picture Books at a nearby thrift store. First time I read most of them too. I'm fairly certain everyone's been exposed to Goodnight Moon or some variant of it thanks to Stephen Spielberg's Animaniacs, but the other picture books in the Harper Collins collection I was not familiar with. I really liked 'Harold and the Purple Crayon' and 'If You Give a Mouse a Cookie' in the Harper Collins collection. And, that's saying a lot considering how much I liked Reading Rainbow. The picture books I had access to growing up were Dr.Seuss/Geisel, and Scholastic works such as Mercer Meyer, Arthur, Clifford and Curious George. Heck, I even know how Curious George dies in the end.

But, all the anthropomorphized critters aside I did have limited access to Joy Berry books. I think my mother got a subscription and they would show up every once in a while, unfortunately my dad didn't approve of the content being that he was a self-sabotaging tyrannical A-hole and had a major issue with me enjoying any form of cartoons, much less anything else, after I turned eight years old. To give you an idea of how ridiculously rigid the control structure of this man was you should be aware I had a 6:30pm bedtime while I was in __middle school__ . I negotiated it briefly to 9 o'clock when I was in fifth grade, graduated with a ton of awards and he still reneged on it. There's no accounting for taste I guess. And, if you've ever seen The Boondocks, my old man makes Uncle Ruckus Dad look like a charmer.

At the same thrift store I also picked up John Lithgow's Micawber, which was missing the CD, not that I need to hear the actor's enchanting voice when I can imagine it just fine. It was a cute story about a Squirrel that lives over a carrousel somewhere in New York, who stalks some woman he met at a museum, before he sneaks into her apartment to rob her blind, and opens an art gallery using the tricks, tools, and media he borrowed and reverse engineered from the masters of impressionism and pop art. I suppose Micawber's victim was lucky he was only a squirrel and not an underpants gnome or the story would be very macabre indeed. Next, we have 'How To Live With a Neurotic Cat' by Stephan Baker. This was a surprisingly good discovery as I found the whole book very amusing and inspirational... even if it only has eight chapters the last being a single word answer to a ridiculous question. Basically, this satirically tongue in cheek book covers everything you need to know about your cat. Covering just about anything from training, to grooming, to feeding, and psychoanalyzing your cat among other prodigiously irrelevant information you could ever need to deal with your cat's pathology.

I also picked up a few strategy guides for World of Warcraft, as well as a few books on drafting and design. Everything was 50% off, which was great because the Harper Collins book cost less than a dollar and I have no reason to doubt I'll read it more than once in a blue moon. I did finish reading the section of the DSM-IV on Substance Disorders, and I finally made it to the section on Schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders. And, thanks to the DSM, I now know how to make Speedballs and Crack... Then again, I did take chemistry in high school and that seems to be more than enough knowledge for me to remember how to make sugar spontaneously combust even if I've never actually tested it. Which is odd, because I can never seem to remember how much baking powder to put in biscuits. Is it four times the amount of baking soda or 1/4 the amount of baking soda? Whatever, I'll take cooking classes when I start looking for romance.