A meditation on hating the Yankees
( Cut for those uninterested in baseball )

...this is smokin' hot.


I think I finally understand what my Dad meant when he used to say that he never cared for the Beatles until the Boston Pops covered them.

(Jammie Wearing Fool)

An essay about growing up in the shadow of the Bomb
( MADness has its place )

...the heat kicks your ass all by itself. Thank God my niece Val is easily bribed with anime; I think hauling those seven boxes of books, magazines and some wargames out to the Kia -to say nothing of from the Kia to my apartment- would have messed me up but good. Especially since it's about nine million degrees out there right now...okay, maybe just 93, but that's still too damn hot to be carrying stuff around in the heat at my age & weight. (I brought a couple of small ones in, actually.)

( Holy crap, there's a lot of books here... )

Ganked from rinnytintinny on Facebook.
It made me think for a minute about how much time I've spent at conventions and/or working on them.
( Would you like to know more? )
I don't tag people, but I am curious about my friends' experiences, especially oldermore experienced fans like badger2305, materia_indigo, chebutykin, qob...you know who you are, people.

So last night I got into the Kia, stopped by Chipotle for one of their excellent burritos, and rolled out for Silver Spring and the first meeting of the Potomac River Science Fiction Society that I've been to in...20, 30 years?
( Background info )
So after missing last month's meeting due to family drama, I went into the hinterlands of Montgomery County and attended a PRSFS meeting. It was mostly good (let's face it, some fans are annoying people) and I wound up staying after, chatting with the hostess and her two older kids about convention war stories until 0330 or something like that, after which I drove to Laurel, hit the Denny's for breakfast*, and then went home, where I logged on to find that I was off the Goonfleet purge list. Praise Lowtax! ;)

Drugs were taken, insulin was shot, and I crashed hard. Hello, Saturday night...

*No carrot cake and/or hot tapioca pudding were consumed as part of breakfast.

This post is pretty much about my relationship with baseball, which has had its ups and downs and a consistent absence of sensibility & logic.
( So if you don't care about baseball, shove off. )

Because I am the kind of person I am, this post by chebutykin made me remember the worst meals I've ever had.
( Bad times and bad food ITP )

Slept in late, into the afternoon in fact, which isn't too surprising considering I was up until a little after 0100 this morning and went to bed in a melancholy mood.
I had come across some pictures along with the StippleAPAs (APAe?) and it was unsettling, looking at those people and their dog, only one of them having a clue about what was coming down the tracks to wipe those smiles off their faces like an industrial-strength belt sander. Yeah.

NO SURRENDER. Hell yeah!

Going out to do shopping for bandages, cables, and some foodz this afternoon. Already paid the bulk of my bills; all that's left is the truck insurance. Cables will actually be waiting until tomorrow since Walmart doesn't stock them and Best Buy's prices are twice what MicroCenter wants. Don't want to head out right now since Walmart will be a mob scene; better to go around 1700 when people have gone home for dinner and it's less crazy. Of course, it's possible that a lot of what I want will be gone from the shelves, but there's always Plan B.

Ganked from chebutykin
( Cut to spare the f-list )

I happened across this post by GVDL last night, and it got me to thinking about my own situation. Which wasn't very much like his, tbqh; I'm not sure whether it was worse (or better) because I don't really know if there are any good endings in situations like that. There are, of course, a lot of bad endings, one of which Gerard discusses here, but for various reasons most of you are well aware of, the Bad Ends that were possibilities for GVDL were not an option for me.

All that having been said, I don't see much point in rehashing what in many ways was the worst and longest part of an extremely fucked up year, made even worse by its seeming to start out so well. The situation was sufficiently different from the norm that I doubt any description of it and the way I went about cauterizing my emotional wounds would help anyone else. Me, I'm not likely to forget any of it until Alzheimer's sets in - at which point I will arguably be in Hell, because with my luck I'll be remembering nothing but that year. So that pretty much wipes out any reason to go on talking about it here.

In happier news, I had a second interview with H&R Block tonight, and they seem inclined to hire me as a part-time customer service rep for the 2009 tax season. This will bring me an extra $10-12/hour, and a shot at attending their tax preparation course next year for just $20. It might also allow me to get free/discounted tax preparation, with any luck. Paid training will start next month, and with my luck it'll fall in the week between Christmas and New Year's.

Drove over to Fox Way by way of the Checkers on St. Barnabas Road, for it had been a while since lunch and I was faunching after the tasty Checkerburgers and fries. Carlos was of course asleep, but the dog was very happy to see me*. Valerie was also glad to see me; we chatted some about her classes at PGCC, her tentative plans to visit Colorado, and the ongoing search for work.

I was surprised and pleased to find my senior yearbook sitting under an old Touch-tone wall phone in the kitchen. Looking back with thirty years' perspective, I think it's more likely that I misplaced it rather than that someone stole it (and later returned it), but either way I was glad to see it. Lots of odd, half-forgotten memories were dredged up as I flipped through it.











*The dog is an attention whore, but that's okay since I like dogs. Especially big dogs.

It was a weird experience going through the Classmates.com directories for my old high school, DLI, and my unit in Germany. Some names stuck out pretty well in my mind, others not so much, and that bothered me a little. I don't claim to have a perfect memory, but I used to be able to match up names and faces pretty well back in the day, and now (thanks to politics >_<) that's pretty much gone, and now when I look at some of my classmates' names, I can't remember a damn thing about them. I suppose this is much ado about nothing, since the ones that really mattered stayed in touch, and the others, well, *shrug*. I may pony up for the more expensive membership later, when I have the cash to waste on such things, but for now I'm going to try not to stew too much over it.

I'm probably not going to go to Otakon next month, if only because expensive hotels are expensive and cheap hotels are too far away...I'd considered staying at the Laurel Days Inn Suites and commuting via BWI and the light rail system, but this program was clearly full of fail and almost certainly would have led to losing my hat. Bad plan. Still mulling over Capclave, the successor to Disclave; while some acquaintances of mine will be there, I have less than no interest in the GoH and the vibe I get from it is Minicon right after the HRMP Wars ended. Sod that for a game of "trufen". So most likely the next con I'll go to will either be Katsucon next February or Detour. (Because I pretty much HAVE to go to Detour.) Whether I'll do anything at these conventions is another matter, as far as volunteering or being on staff goes.
( Why? Why not? )

Good things: Meeting Rob Balder, who writes Erfworld, and giving him some egoboo.
Reading Connie Willis' GoH speech from the most recent LA Worldcon, which was reprinted in the program book and is full of win, awesome, and inspiration.

Okay things: The "How to write Military SF" panel, which featured Steve White and a bunch of folks whose names I didn't recognize...one of whom had an excuse since his first novel is coming out in a few days. Anyhow, it was adequate and didn't make me wish I'd spent the time watching the first volume of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya instead. Didn't learn anything, but that's the way it goes sometimes.

Crappy things: Finding out that Yang the Nauseating and Paul Parsons (a Washington-area fan Mark and I know) had died. I realize I'm getting older, time is passing, and people who were adults in their prime in the 1970s are starting to die off, but when it's people I know, it bothers me some. Yang, along with Kelly Freas and Gordy Dickson, was one of the folks who sat up all Sunday night/Monday morning at Discon II singing "the old songs". (It was years before I realized "Tomorrow Belongs To Me" was from Cabaret and not some Great Dark Horde hymnal.) So, that really hurts. Paul, as I recall, was one of the founders of PRSFS (pronounced "Prissy-fish"), the Potomac River Science Fiction Society. PRSFS was founded by people who got tired of going to WSFA meetings, where nobody actually talked about SF. This will no doubt sound familiar to some people...

And now it is half an hour since I planned to go to bed, so I think I'll wrap this up and crash.

...I could have noted that yesterday was Debbie Harry's 62nd birthday. I'm not sure whether to be grateful or annoyed with Jack M. at Ace of Spades for pointing that out, although I think the clip of Debbie singing a duet with Kermit the Frog is kinda cute and Jack's story about discovering Blondie (and with it, Debbie) is definitely one for the books.

( My discovery of Blondie wasn't nearly that exciting. )

Looks like she'll be on tour at the 9:30 next week, unfortunately before payday. It's probably sold out anyway. :(

Well, that didn't take long. There's a couple of two-foot-high stacks left, but until somebody comes up with another box that's all the packing I can do. I boxed up most of the books from the Times Reading Program and the Andrew Greeley novels, saving out a couple of the RTP books that I thought P might like or that I wanted to take a gander at myself. About half a dozen of the books were too chewed to save, unfortunately, including one of the Flashman books (Flashman at the Charge) and those were relegated to the recycling pile, along with a self-serving book by Robert MacNamara, may he roast in hell.

A couple of the books stirred old emotions - the copy of Robert Ruark's Grenadine's Spawn, which was one of the first books I went hunting for on the Internet. I remember Dad asking me about it like it was yesterday, and his shocked pleasure when he got the copy in the mail. I think he hadn't seen a copy in forty years...not nearly as popular as Ruark's Great White Hunter novels, the Grenadine Etching satires of historical novels very nearly sank without a trace. But just about everything's for sale on the Internets.

The other books that I took upstairs were Dad's collections of Andre Dubus works. I don't care much for mainstream fiction if it's not historical, but there was something different about Dubus' stories, and in fact when I left for Monterey in 1979 after graduating from Basic, I came home and packed a bunch of books; one of them was Dad's copy of Adultery and Other Choices, and I read it as obsessively as any science fiction book over the next four years. Dad knew Dubus through my Aunt Pat, since the latter two both taught at Bradford College, and in fact many of the books are autographed to my father. I never met the man myself. Like many of my favorite authors, he died before I had the chance, but that's the way it goes.

Well, that was an interesting day, even though I spent all of it sorting & filing invoices or pulling copies of said invoices from the suspense files so the copies could be trashed. I'm at a construction company until further notice, helping salvage my fellow Bobs' (not to be confused with BoB from EVE) reputation after Predecessor #1 contracted an endless case of stomach flu and Predecessor #2 couldn't stay away from the receptionist. *rolls eyes* It's not a terribly demanding job, but the company is going to be moving to newer and more roomy offices in the unspecified future and it rings the alarm bell with great force when the head bookkeeper sits down with you and earnestly solicits advice on how to fix the workflow of invoices, which they know is fux0red and can't think of any way to improve themselves. Apparently the problem is that nobody really understands the hermaphrodite project management/accounting software the company uses, at least not enough to get it to spit out aging reports. Now, I'm no A/P guru, but Jesus X. Christ, that's a pretty fundamental part of managing your payables, and if the CFO can't provide better guidance than "Hey guys, see what you can figure out here" I'm not so sure I want to be one of the guys carrying the shovels in this particular parade. So I'll keep banging the papers together until Accountemps, Monster.com, or the Feds find me something better.

Noticed on the way home that the old Foxchase shopping center (on Duke Street, a couple blocks east of 395) has had a major makeover. The two-screen theater where I first saw Shall We Dance? is gone, and in its place there's a Harris Teeter, Absolutely Amish, and (coming soon) a Chipotle. I stopped at Foxchase for some Chinese since two nights of Mexican in a row are enough for me and I wanted to wait out the rush hour.

On that note, I think I'm going to take my evening drugs and crash early, because I am tired as hell and have zero interest in shotting POS or anything else tonight.

I think I've found my doppelganger, a kid who grew up in Los Angeles and fled to the Northeast to escape the heat. It's not an exact copy, of course; my parents weren't insane about the heat like this poor bastard's, and I certainly didn't have his orgasmic experience of discovering the four seasons. Maryland's got a rather nice spring and fall, thank you very much, even if the winter is kind of blah most of the time. Still, there's a lot of similarities there, and it's a well-written little piece of autobiography. (Rachel)

I'm putting together a checklist of things I need to do before moving day next month, some of which need to be done sooner rather than later and relate to the job-hunting thing. For example, I didn't manage to get out last Thursday and get a copy of my St. Mary's transcript, which shows (in between all the Fs) that I actually got a fair amount of grounding in how to teach. I need to send off for that this week, once the bill from the Sheraton clears my account and I know for sure how much money I have in the bank.

I've also settled on a date to give notice - going to do it on the 20th, with my last day projected for August 3. This will give me enough time to schedule movers and cleaners before my projected departure date of August 13, and also allow me to manage the partial rollover of the Cardboard Box Fund from the Evil Banking Neighbor to Ameritrade. I don't think hanging around another week so that my last day will be on the 8th (making it an even eight years with the EBN) is really worth doing.

Somewhat related: a couple of my vile and treacherous friends here have expressed interest in throwing me a good-bye party. I honestly don't know what to think about that. It's a truism that the wombat clan takes criticism badly and praise even worse (because we wonder what else those who come bearing praise have in mind) and so things like farewell parties leave me confused and embarrassed*. I guess I'm okay with the concept, because I actually do like parties and it would be kind of nice to say goodbye to people in person as opposed to leaving a "GONE TO VIRGINIA, NOT MOVING BACK EVER - AND I MEAN IT THIS TIME" sign on my LJ - but having the occasion for the party be my imminent departure seems a bit weird and unsettling.

*I've actually had a couple of these before. The one before I shipped off to Basic was a surprise party and rather fun (if ultimately disappointing), the one celebrating my departure for Minnesota was riotous and nearly ended in divorce when I finally got home in the wee hours of the morning. Hopefully this one, if it comes off, will be somewhere in between those two extremes.