Long Weekends

This is the tail end of my second long weekend in a row, two four day weekends one after the other, wonderful.
However, before you get too jealous let me tell you what these weekends have consisted of. Last weekend, which began on Wednesday evening with a lovely meal at a Japanese restaurant to celebrate our third wedding anniversary, went on to involve me learning how to point the brickwork. There's not much to do, just half the house!
I'm doing okay at the moment at ground level but am not looking forward to going up a ladder. But it has to be done; I've been overdosing on Grand Designs on TV recently and began to feel guilty when I saw one wife nailing tiles onto a roof, and thought that while J was replacing floors I could be doing something more constructive than just breaking up kitten fights. So I am now a brickie.
Then this weekend, August Bank Holiday which we have extended to include today, there has been more pointing, more disentangling kittens from the curtains and, to top it off nicely, I am now recovering from the lorryload of insulation boards that we've just had to carry in. Don't you envy my life?
All this has not left much time for anything else, but I have managed some reading and have actually finished a book for the first time in weeks! Colin Wilson's The Occult, which has led to a number of other books on the subject that I want to read, a couple of which I've ordered: a book by Eliphas Levi (who, incidentally, Aleister Crowley claimed to be a reincarnation of) and The Mystical Qabalah by Dion Fortune which arrived on Saturday. I had always avoided her books because I think her name makes her sound like a Sunday supplement astrologer but Wilson said that this book is the best on the subject. Qabalah (or however you want to spell it) is something that has interested me since I read Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum.
At the moment, however, even writing this brief blog post is causing me pain because it is tearing me away from my current read, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke. Elaine commented a while back that once I started I wouldn't be able to put it down and she was absolutely right. It is a wonderful world Clarke has created, with such a clever mix of historical fact and fiction that I am finding it hard to believe that magic did not really exist in the eighteenth century. The book is just over a thousand pages long but I can't help feeling that it will be far too short. It is nice to be able to feel this about a modern book.
So now, as the kittens have come down from the curtains and just fallen asleep, I am going to sneak back to it and squeeze a last few minutes of reading from this long weekend.