An archive of my old LiveJournal
This reminds me of the apocryphal round-robin story written by two people with very different sensibilities as to what makes a good story: Pride and Predator. Starts out as Pride and Prejudice but then an alien lands and starts stalking everyone.
It’ll either be awful or it’ll be hilarious. Possibly both.
Took a half-day on Wednesday, then went home and took a nap. Went over to help my parents set up for their New Year’s Eve party, planning to come home later & watch LA Confidential, and ended up staying. Watched Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog and the “auditions” for the Evil League of Evil submitted by fans. Some were good. Some were…not.
Slept in Thursday. Started out reading Greg Keyes’ The Hounds of Ash, a collection of short stories set in the same world as The Waterborn and The Blackgod. After 2 stories, decided to re-read the novels. Fortunately, we recently pulled them out of storage since alenxa was thinking of reading them. Ran some errands, ended up across from the Apple store in South Coast Plaza. We’d already discussed replacing the mostly-dead PowerBook, both wanted to replace it with another Mac, and we’d even worked out which model we were going to get, so we just went for it. Then headed over for dinner w/ my brother & his fiancee (who flew back on Friday) & my parents, where we helped work through leftovers from the party.
Friday: more reading. Made a point of walking to lunch. Laundry. Working on my Flash site after a long delay. Watched 2 episodes of “Walking with Monsters: Before the Dinosaurs” (computer-generated nature show with prehistoric animals). Nice visuals, but I was bothered by some of the things that I can’t imagine could be extrapolated from fossils — like protective coloring & behavior that’s not based on skeletal structure.
Saturday: Shopping. Finished “Walking w/ Monsters,” watched “Helvetica.” More interesting than expected, but less interesting than was led to expect from reviews.
My brother and his fiancĂ©e drove down from San Francisco to visit last weekend, and we ended up spending a lot of time hanging out with them at my parents’ house. And playing Munchkin. Which was fun, except for the interminable turns when someone needed to discard a bunch of cards and, because most of us were new at the game, agonized over which cards to toss.
Family gathering on Thursday at my grandparents’ house. In the old days we’d drive to my parents’ house, then pile into their minivan and carpool the rest of the way, but since my mom traded it in for a Camry, we had to split 6 people across two cars. I’d planned on driving since I knew neither Brion nor Marti was going to want to spend ~2 hours driving in holiday traffic after spending the entire previous day on the road.
Other than visiting family, I mostly stayed at home. No Black Friday sales. I did order tickets to a play (The School of Night, about the death of Christopher Marlowe), and tried to order tickets to Man of La Mancha only to discover it was in presale, and I didn’t have the code. (Subsequently signed up for Reprise’s newsletter. Next time…)
Did a lot of reading. I’m about 100 pages into George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones, and decided I needed a break. I picked up Robert J. Sawyer’s Flashforward the day before ABC announced the first casting for the TV pilot. Jack Davenport — yes, Steve from Coupling and Norrington from Pirates of the Caribbean — is playing the lead , and Courtney B. Vance (Law & Order: Criminal Intent) is playing a character who is either new to the adaptation or shows up at least halfway through the book. I get the impression from earlier articles that they’re not adapting the plot so much as they’re taking the concept and using it as the basis for an ongoing series. I also reread Girl Genius from the beginning, which is much easier to do in book form than on the computer.
alenxa completed Nanowrimo over the weekend, having written 50,000 words during November, though she’s pretty sure the full novel is going to be more than twice that.
Also, on Tuesday we went out to Huntington Beach’s street fair to see Gigi Edgley, Farscape’s Chiana, do fire twirling (write-up w/ photos at K2R).
Today, I’m tired. 9 days of antihistamines plus 3 days of getting to bed late and getting up early plus a couple of weeks of not sleeping well. Okay, back to work.
Last Friday (Oct 3): attended alenxa’s cousin’s wedding, held on a boat that cruised back and forth in Newport Harbor. Lots of people I’d only met once before — at our wedding.
Most of the week: fixing Katie’s computer. Drive dying. Needed to (a) verify that it was the drive, and just the drive. (b) get a new drive. (c) install it. (d) install Mac OS X on the new drive. (e) Transfer all the data. (a) and (e) took the longest.
Tuesday: Finished watching entire series of Blake’s 7. The good episodes hold up quite well after ~30 years. (The bad ones… well, they were bad to start with.)
Yesterday: Checked out the restaurants at the new "Diamond Jamboree" center at Jamboree and Alton. Decided to try Tokyo Table sometime when we weren’t wearing funny T-shirts.
Friday: Finished reading Gateway. About to start on Neil Gaiman’s latest, The Graveyard Book. (I skipped the reading in Santa Monica on Monday, but my brother and his fiancee went to the one in San Francisco last week…and were kind enough to send us the extra copy of the book!)
1. Finally took the time to finish reading Victory of Eagles. Very good — on a level with Throne of Jade, which had previously been my favorite in the Temeraire series.
2. Also took a bunch more boxes to storage, including 4 comic boxes. I’d intended to put half my comics in storage when we moved back in May, but I wanted to catalog them all first so that I could find them easily. Then my arms fell off after we moved, and I didn’t want to carry the boxes, and then I just kept putting it off. Now we’ve got a chance of clearing a patch from the co-ax outlet to the TV, so…
3. Arranged for cable. I’d been hoping we’d be somewhere more permanent by the time the fall TV season started, but we haven’t had much luck.
They’re coming on Thursday, but we’ve made arrangements for the second ep of Bones and the premieres of Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles (try typing that three times fast) and Fringe (that was easier!). Seriously considered Time Warner’s DVR package, which is only around $10/month, but it’s only available with their digital cable package… which starts at around $50/month. And there isn’t really anything we’d be watching that isn’t on the $15/month broadcast-only package, at least not until BSG comes back sometime next year.
4. Finally saw Wall-E, in a theater with 4 other people, including a kid who kept making comments and hadn’t yet learned the art of moderating his volume. And a sound system that went wonky during the second-to-last preview and stayed that way through most of the film, even after I went out to report the problem during the short. Fortunately it was just an undercurrent that sounded kind of like a high-pitched refrigerator warble, and not distortion of the soundtrack. Also, the print was rather badly scratched in the middle third of the picture. Despite all that, the movie was still quite enjoyable.
After spending Friday night and most of the daylight hours Saturday and Sunday moving furniture and boxes around, putting stuff on shelves or in closets, hooking up electronics, sorting stuff to keep/sell/donate/take to storage, and generally trying to make the new place liveable, I decided to just relax on Monday.
That morning I finally got around to reading The Stardust Kid (which I volunteered to index at the Grand Comics Database last summer when I figured I’d pick it up any day now. Oops). Then in the afternoon, after a quick grocery run, I finished rereading Ringworld. alenxa made purple potato salad from scratch, and we watched “Once More With Feeling” with dinner. We followed is up with an episode of Bones (which is decidedly not dinner material, as far as I’m concerned).
Today: back to work, trying to remind myself that it’s not Monday, it’s Tuesday.
Very unsteady energy today. Aside from 2 nights without enough sleep — last night I stayed up finishing Julie E. Czerneda’s A Thousand Words for Stranger — I seem to have come down with something cold-like. I could feel the beginnings of a cough yesterday, then woke up with a nasty sore throat this morning. Copious amounts of water and juice helped, but I’ve only had energy in 1-to-2-hour segments of the day.
It didn’t help that alenxa and I had planned a full-afternoon shopping trip. It started out with me just wanting to pick up the 2 sequels to the book I finished last night, and her wanting to stop by Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory to try their sugar-free offerings, but we both kept remembering other things we needed to look for, including groceries.
And I woke up sick.
I really wanted to get those books, though, and since the sore throat settled down, we went. I just washed my hands a lot and tried not to cough on anything.
In the end, I had to go to 3 different stores to find the books. The Borders near Whole Foods had full sets of 2 other trilogies (one of which I zoomed through last October), and about 4 copies of the book I’d just finished, but neither of its sequels. So instead of starting book 2 while Katie picked up groceries (I figured I’d keep my germs to myself instead of wandering around a ton of other people’s food), I browsed the sci-fi and graphic novel areas as my energy level dropped.
We dropped by Barnes & Noble on the way home, but they had even less selection — just the most recent series (again, the one I’d already read) and a stand-alone novel. I’ve decided that when I start the remaining series, I’m going to just pick up all 3 at once, since I know I’m going to want to read them all.
While I found myself hard-pressed to focus on just driving the rest of the way home, Katie had the practical suggestion of just calling stores in the area. I figured I’d do that, then pick the books up tomorrow. Fortunately, a little rest, some more water, and the satisfaction of actually finding a store that had the books got me going enough to drive down to South Coast…to the Borders where I remember looking at the books back in October, trying to decide which series to pick up.
So now I’m lying on the couch, half-ready to sleep, half-ready to read, trying to decide which I’d rather do.
After katyakoshka:
Finished reading The Man Who Was Thursday on Friday.
Went to see Stardust again. It holds up quite well to a second viewing. Ever since seeing it last week I’ve been desperate to reread the novel, but maldis still has my copy. Since we were near a bookstore, I decided to pick up the paperback version, though, since it’s actually a different format than the one I’ve got already. The downside is that it doesn’t have Charles Vess’ illustrations. The upside is that it’s more portable.
I ended up rereading the whole thing last night. short comparison.
We’ve been trying to be out during the hottest part of the day, since our air conditioner isn’t terribly effective. It’s not really the AC’s fault, it’s the airflow in the apartment (or lack thereof). I’m out on the balcony right now, which is really nice. Step through the giant open screen door into the living room, and it jumps up considerably. Further back, into the room with the computers? Forget it!
So I’m sitting outside, occasionally glancing out at the trees, or up at the not-quite first-quarter moon, typing on the laptop.
It seems that the question of the day is, “What page are you on?”
No spoilers.
I’d pretty much figured on not picking up Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows until after Comic-Con. I had some things I wanted to make sure I got finished first, in particular some website updates. But then alenxa finished the book on Saturday, and I decided that the updates I had left weren’t quite so important as the ones I’d done Saturday afternoon. So I picked up the book Sunday afternoon, and put it down around 11:00 at night, a little over halfway through.
This morning I took the car in for some fairly major maintenance. They’d offered a complementary rental, which I happily accepted, and arranged for Enterprise to send someone over. (I would have been quite willing to walk, since it was hardly even sprinkling, but figured if they’d made the arrangements, I might as well. As it is, I think it would have been faster to walk.)
Naturally I pulled the book out in the waiting room. After a few minutes, the 50-ish man a few chairs over asked,
“What page are you on?”
“428.”
“432.”
I found it funny that we were not only both reading it, but within a few pages of each other.
After picking up the rental, I drove over to my allergist. Afterward, as I was making my next appointment with the new receptionist, I noticed the book on her desk (open and upside-down, but it was recognizable by size, color, and a name which jumped out at me before I looked away). Before I had a chance to mention it, the doctor walked up, noticed my copy sitting on the counter, and said, “Oh, you’re reading it too?” She then explained that her son and daughter (the latter turned out to be the unfamiliar receptionist) had each gotten their own copy so they could both read it immediately. At this point the daughter asked me,
“What page are you on?”
I opened the book. “448.”
“Oh, I’m on page 530” (or something around there). “I’ll close it so you don’t see anything.”