I'm back... with news and a book review!

We have made it safe and sound into our new home in Georgia! We were super pleased that our mover was able to get us our belongings yesterday -- a mere 5 days after he picked them up. Because we took 3 days to travel, we only spent a couple nights on an air mattress!

Goose was a little freaked out and excited about our new place, especially when we didn't have any of our stuff yet. He just kept running around, looking at us and then back at the empty room as if to say "are we here? Is this home? Where is our stuff? My blanket?"

For the next few days we'll be getting settled back in, but things have been going rather quickly. Our dining room is all set up, our living room is set up but still has a couple of boxes left and our kitchen is all done, minus figuring out what needs to go. I'm hoping to finish the kitchen and to finish our bedroom today. 

Last but not least, the aforementioned book review. While on the road for 15 hours the first day [gotta love DC/NoVA beltway traffic!] and then 9 hours on the third day, I was completely engrossed in an audiobook -- Malcolm Gladwell's What the Dog Saw.

It was SO good. 

It will open your eyes to "minor geniuses" [Ron Popeil, Cesar Milan], the creation of birth control and the tastes involved in making ketchup successful. It will challenge your beliefs on the collection of intelligence [so fascinating] and make you understand why spending a little money to solve homelessness could save the country millions of dollars each year. It explores choking vs panicking, plagiarism, criminal profiling, pit bulls [and how the prevalent ban on them may be just plain 'ol ridiculous] and how job interviews may not really prove anything after all.

My favorite chapters delved into the Challenger explosion and the argument that disasters like that, or 3 Mile Island may be caused by small errors and that what we define as "acceptable risk" may make these disasters much more common. And that there is no one to blame. I loved the chapter on picking the right person for the job -- it made a seamless analogy of selecting college football quarterbacks for the NFL to which teachers are stellar vs bad and how teachers unions are kind of doing a disservice to the children of our country. I thoroughly enjoyed the chapter on intelligence reform and even more so the chapter  "Mammography, Air Power, and the Limits of Looking." Who knew that mammography may not be the best way to discover breast cancer?

Overall, this has easily slipped into my top 10 books that I've read, not only because it's entirely fascinating, but also because it covers such a broad range of subjects while making valid arguments to challenge the way you think of the world.