I suck at eyeballing things and I suck at it in the worst way: my memory of the size of things is always smaller than the reality, so when my husband hears me say "Oh, that'll fit in our living room easy!" we both know it's not going to end well.  Luckily he's quite good at eyeballing things so we don't have a 6 foot couch in a 5 foot space.

This is the reason why I grabbed this book from a closing down sale; I like comparisons; I find them much more relevant to my mind than actually measurements.

The book succeeds at its goal: it creates a standard of comparative measurements for objects of all shapes and sizes in every part of life.  The illustrations are excellent and the writing is fun.  My only complaint and the reason for the 3 stars instead of a higher rating is that the author tries to codify these representational measurements.  For example, he calls the length of your arms spanned wide open a Len (in homage to Da Vinci's Proportions of Man).  This is fine, and it works, but only when he remembers to actually tell you what his made up measurement means.  I often found myself reading about something being 2 MEiff long without having any idea what an MEiff is (short for Monsieur Eiffel - the height of the man who designed the Eiffel tower) because it was described after it was used.

All in all, a fun reference to have when kids are around, but not particularly practical in its usefulness.

A small independent chain here is shutting down one location, but it's in a pain in the butt area of town (probably why it's shutting) and I couldn't con MT into going with me (so he could sweat the parking).  Until today, when I got an email from them saying starting at 10am you could buy all the books that would fit into a box for $30.  He sighed heavily but grabbed his car keys.

We got there when they opened and they pointed to the boxes - they were big boxes.  If we didn't want to go the box route, everything was $2.  Snort - of course we wanted the box; we I was sooo gonna fill the box.

I tried.  It was my first "everything you can fit for $x" sale and it turns out with those parameters I was open to all sorts of titles I'd normally pass up.  MT picked out three books for himself in about 15 seconds (how???) and then ferried my stacks back to the register for me and generally hovered in that way only bored husbands and teenagers can do.

Once I'd been through every shelf, (hovering be damned) I ended up with 17 books.  I'd have gone for a second pass, but a combination of the vein in MT's forehead and the metered parking running out brought me to the register.  They packed the books into the box and there was an embarrassing amount of space left; I'm such a rookie.

Next time...

(I included the covers of the more interesting titles above, except the first three - those came in the post this week.)

I usually do a running tally, but I think I'm just going to leave it at the TBR pile got bigger.  ;)

Have a great weekend everyone.