All over the place.

Everything in my life is jumping around too fast to pin down right now.  Yesterday morning it was 30 degrees F. This afternoon we hit 77. I took the dogs for a longer than average walk, and they both came back and collapsed like we'd walked for miles. They are lazy and out of shape, like their mom.

After I deposited their tired, grumpy little butts back home, I went out and walked a couple of brisk miles.  I'm 5 pounds heavier than I was 3 months ago. I am a stress eater, and I was very stressed about my business (the lack thereof) and job hunting, and that training class was a dietary disaster. We sat in a conference room for hours at a stretch, dining on take-out and snacking on crap to stay alert.  Remind me to rant about every freaking real estate trainer I've ever known sometime. They are nearly all full of shit.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to a structured life starting on Monday, and also looking forward to money making regular appearances in my bank account, and the return of Daylight Savings Time, so evening walkies will be possible.  I am already scratching mosquito bites like crazy, and I saw lizards today.  Yes, one day after a brief but real record low temp, those tough little guys are out sunning themselves.  They are resilient.

I have a Grumpy Grandma Book Review. A Facebook friend mentioned that he'd just finished Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief and said it was fascinating. I had an Audible credit to burn and no idea how to spend it, so I took a look. 17 hours! I like a nice, long audiobook I can stretch through many dog walks and make it last a month. Boy, did I go wrong with this one. I was so fascinated, I couldn't stop listening. Instead of lasting for half a month of dog walks, I blew through it in about four days.

I started this book with few preconceived ideas about Scientology.  I knew about it, of course, but basically thought of it as a pseudo-scientific religion of some sort that separated rich people from their money in exchange for some sort of psychological training, and that it had high profile celebrity adherents, like Tom Cruise and John Travolta (two celebrities I don't give a rat's ass about).  Oh, and that it was founded by a guy who wrote science fiction in the 50s, and that it is a very wealthy organization and owns a ton of real estate in downtown Clearwater, is highly litigious, and is frequently accused of being a cult. That was about it.  I thought it was goofy and a scam, but really had no idea what it was all about, and didn't particularly care. I was just looking for an entertaining read, and this had nearly 5 stars on Amazon and somebody I know thought it was a good book, so I went for it.

Holy crap.  Just Holy Crap.  As I said, I blew through this book in 4 days, and I'm intrigued enough to want to read more about the subject.  It's just so...bizarre.   If the author wasn't a respected investigative journalist who has a Pulitzer under his belt, and if he and his publisher's lawyers hadn't vetted every crazy story to the best of their ability (and offered careful disclaimers for the parts they couldn't independently verify) I'd have found it just too crazy to believe.  As I said, this was my introduction to an organization I'd happily ignored, and I'm now discovering that there are a lot of books about it. It's just so damn bizarre.

My beef about the book is one raised by a few of the otherwise glowing reviews - it feels like it jumps around a lot, especially after the death of L. Ron Hubbard (who ends his days obese and sickly, living on a converted bus).  I can appreciate the difficulty of weaving a coherent story out of what feels like an avalanche of absolutely amazing, horrifying, and crazy information, and it's still very readable and fascinating, but it is a bit disjointed at times. 

The thing that was missing for me was the WHY? Why on earth did so many otherwise intelligent and successful people buy into (and I do mean BUY into - many individuals spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on "training") what seems to an outsider to be the mother of all nutty scams?  The author doesn't really address this, and that makes me want to read more about it. 

So I give this two thumbs up, but be prepared to have a new subject you want to research. Or maybe that's just me.

I also must note that my first source for this book was my local library, where it is not in their catalog.  If you want to read anything by James Patterson or Jodi Picoult, they've gotcha covered.  New non-fiction, not so much.