So, the good news is that I lost more weight; I’m now 11lbs below my starting point. The not as good news is that it was most likely at least PARTIALLY due to the fact that I got sick (although this time not sick to my stomach). The last few weeks have been pretty rough in our house. There was that week where I had the stomach whatever-that-was that took me out of the regular eating game for a few days. Last week, I caught a cold from ds that was brutal, and I ended up face-planting on our bed before dinnertime with a fever and a complete inability to be upright. Thankfully, I have the BESTHUSBANDEVAR, who stepped in and took care of everything for the four hours that I was tossing and turning in our bed. I then spent another 3hrs in our bed, reading with my booklight…at which point dh kicked me out of bed.

Well, I probably deserved it. I guess reading until 1am is bad form?

Anyway, I moved out to the den and waited out the rest of the fever there, which finally broke sometime during my sole nap (4am-6am)…but by the time I was ready to muster the strength to get to work, dd came into the den sporting a pair of slightly pink eyes. So, there went my Thursday. Thankfully, we have no shortage of DVDs and OnDemand options, so dd had some screen time while I worked away on all the things, waiting for her eye goop prescription to be ready.

So, short story quite long, I lost weight…but I’m not entirely certain it was for the best of reasons, if you catch my meaning. I’d rather that I lost weight because I was doing something really great, not because I wasn’t able to eat / interested in eating. My appetite is still off, a side-effect of not being able to breathe too well through my nose, but hopefully that’ll go away soon and then it’ll just be me vs the scale the way things were intended to go.

Now, not to get TOO down about a weight loss (I know, I’m clearly not looking at the bright side here), I did manage to use that long stretch of awakeitude to finish off my latest read…and I loved it.

Book #11: “The Inner Circle” by Brad Meltzer

I wasn’t familiar with Meltzer until fairly recently; I’m not quite sure what rock I’ve been living under, since Meltzer has been a best-selling author for some time, as well as the host of the History Channel show “DECODED”. RadioBDC got him to speak Live in the Lab back in January, and I managed to catch the stream on my computer. I found him charming, utterly engaging, and impossible to ignore. He’s just a great storyteller, someone who easily got the audience focused 100% on what he was saying. “The Inner Circle” is much in the same vein – something that captures your interest and becomes something you don’t want to put down, even when it ends.

The story revolves around Beecher White, an employee of the National Archives in Washington, DC. Beecher’s just been contacted by a middle-school crush looking for her father, and his help gets them both far more than they bargained for. Add in some serious historical references about…well, just about everything…a conspiracy theory or four, and you have a convoluted but manageable story that pivots on the Presidency and what it means to preserve that at all costs. Beecher stumbles into his future, clumsily at first – until he gets to the point where he runs at a breakneck pace to reach what he thinks is his destination. Along the way, he learns more about his former dream-girl, Clementine Kaye, and how truth and strength are really only what you want them to be to others.

For native Washingtonians who’ve migrated elsewhere, like me, Meltzer’s story is a treat, and it has enough to offer so that those from outside that sphere of interest would find it interesting, too.  I’d never even HEARD of the Culper Ring before, and now I’d love to read more about it. I’d also like to take a second crack at the National Archives, since I’ve only ever been there once or twice, and now I know there’s much more for me to see than just the “gasper” documents.

The other nice part of this is that I’ve discovered yet another writer whose works I need to plow through. If any of his other books are as good as “The Inner Circle”, I suspect the man will easily occupy a shelf in our library rather soon.