And now we resume our regularly scheduled blogging

The family and I returned from our vacation yesterday, and a brilliant vacation it was. We spent nearly four weeks at a cottage near Ste-Agathe, Quebec, about 1.5 hours north of Montreal. The lake we were on is very small with pristine, clear water and doesn't allow power boats and only has about 25 or so cottages total. Activities included swimming, canoing, paddle boating, bonfires, reading, relaxing, watching old movies on VHS in the cottage, go karting, mini putting, bowling, only checking email once per week in the village, BBQing almost every night. We saw the most recent Harry Potter movie one day on a trip into Montreal and The Simpsons movie in Kingston on the way home. And speaking of Harry, we bought the new book in the village the day it came out; my wife and boys raced through it but I haven't gotten to it yet.

We spent a couple of nights in Kingston at the wonderful Casablanca B&B, which we would heartily recommend. We also went on the Kingston Haunted Walk, which was good cheesy fun.

My reading included:

• Stolen by Kelley Armstrong
  
• Clear and Present Danger by Tom Clancy
  
• Days of Infamy by Harry Turtledove
  
• Chinatown Death Cloud Peril by Paul Malmont
  
• Dreaming in Code by Scott Rosenberg
  
• Ghost Brigades by John Scalzi
  
• Ghost Road Blues by Jonathan Maberry

Reviews of all the above are forthcoming both here and on the other blog; I wrote two and a half science book reviews while on vacation. I'm finding Smolin's Trouble with Physics a tough book to write about, for some reason. Both The Yiddish Policeman's Union by Michael Chabon and The Map That Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology by Simon Winchester were started and are still in progress.