Wombat Rampant

Found enough change in my pants and the quarter cup to do a full laundry run, so I did both baskets and got it over with.
Aside from that, internet spaceships and experimenting with the bread robot (cinnamon-honey oat bread, which for some reason finished with a hole in the middle, wtf?) it was a pretty slow day.
( EVE stuff )
The Frank Miller graphic novels are pretty much what I expected after seeing the movie. I'll have to check the catalog and see if they have more of Sin City in their collection.

(h/t to onsenmark for the title)
Missed the bank, which is okay because I think I have enough quarters to do the required laundry anyway, and there's always tomorrow.
Hit Borders to take advantage of a 30% coupon, which was used on Never Mind The Bollocks, Here's The Sex Pistols, which I've been faunching after since seeing Greg Gutfeld's interview with Johnny Rotten in Vegas. Features a country version of "Pretty Vacant", which justifies the bandwidth all by itself. (Look for "Viva Las Vegas" in the Video section.) Also picked up a Case Logic CD case that will allow me to carry more mix CDs in the truck, which is good because I've pretty much memorized the ones I have.

Returned books to library, checked out two graphic novels by Frank Miller (The Hard Goodbye and The Big Fat Kill) along with the last Turtledove American Civil Wars novel, In At The Death. I don't expect it to be very good, but I want some closure, dammit. Also picked up Hot Rocks by the Stones, which ought to fill my remaining Stones needs; TMBG's Flood, which became increasingly annoying as it went on; the soundtrack from O Brother Where Art Thou?, which was too scratched to play; and Elton John's Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. The opening cut on that one still makes me feel the way I did when I first heard it back in junior high school. Brrr.

Got meds from Kaiser, chikuns from Popeye, and then went home.

Well, in between experimenting with the bread robot, playing Civ and EVE, and other wastes of time, I finished all the library books* and assembled another bookcase. This allowed me to empty another couple boxes of books, which gives me a little more floor space to work in. Go me!

I was thinking about taking part in this...well, I guess it's a meme...over at beatonna's LJ. Being the odd combination of shy and cynical that I am, though, I decided it wasn't for me. I can't see my younger self actually paying attention to the nearly endless string of "good news/bad news" anecdotes older me would inflict on him, and there isn't that much of it that would be funny to other people. Not in the "laughing with" as opposed to the "laughing at" category, anyway.

( books books books )
*I'm re-reading Yellow Eyes, as it's been too long since I read the first chapters online.

Never got the signal from P regarding breakfast this morning, and when I called her at 0900 she was already asleep. Oh well. Fared forth to DD for breakfast, Jiffy Lube for overdue maintenance on the Sportage (during which I finished Colonel Dave Grossman's On Killing), and to the library, where I paid my debt to society and picked up the second and third Takeshi Kovacs novels by Richard K. Morgan, along with Neal Stephenson's The System of the World. I then headed over to the Duncan branch, located in the Del Ray section of Alexandria, where I got John Ringo's Sister Time and Yellow Eyes. The former is excellent brain candy, carrying on the tale of the secret war between the O'Neal clan and the Darhel in a most amusing manner, especially in the scenes involving the reunion and subsequent meetings of Michelle and Cally O'Neal. What makes these especially fun is that Michelle has spent all her time off-planet among the Indowy, learning to become one of the fearsomely skilled mentats, who can, among other things, build hideously complex GalTech artifacts by manipulating nanites through a form of meditation and telepathy. Very much a study in opposites, these two, and the argument ensuing from the climax of events is FABULOUS.
( So what was with the Grossman book? )
Spent the rest of the day reading, playing Civ, and keeping cool.

Ganked from deathquaker, with an assist from qob.
( Another snooty literary meme )

I was going to go over to the house tonight, but I completely ran out of energy after getting the laundry done.
I was also going to go pick up some more groceries at Harris Teeter, but my get up and go kinda got up and went.

So I spent the evening sitting around reading Stephen Coonts' Saucer. Fun little book, reminded me a lot of Heinlein's Starman Jones, oddly enough, and would probably pass muster in most young adult sections these days. Well, assuming the librarians didn't freak at all the violence, that is. Basic plot: Rip Cantrell and his fellow mining surveyors find what appears to be a real flying saucer buried in sandstone in the middle of the Sahara. They hammer it out, poke around, and not too much later the Air Force shows up. Among their number is hot (test) pilot Charley Pine, co-star and romantic interest; she winds up being the saucer's main pilot, and taking off with Rip after goons from Australian mega-millionaire Roger Hedrick and Libyan Army troops show up, in that order. Hi-jinks and adventures follow, mainly revolving around Hedrick's intention to sell off the saucer to the highest bidder and what that means for Rip and Charley. Lots of suspense, politicians being portrayed as morons, Air Force types being secretive, and a lot of fun. Nice brain candy, in short.

The Player of Games....well, it's another Iain Banks Culture novel, which doesn't help too much since it really doesn't have that much in common with either Consider Phlebas or Look to Windward, except insofar as it relates how the Culture deals with other civilizations. In this case, Jemau Murat Gurgeh is a games master who has become utterly bored with the lack of novelty. He is the master of pretty much every strategic game, whether played on boards, computers or anything else, but even so has to be blackmailed into voyaging to the brutal Empire of Azad to play the game of Azad. Azad can't really be described briefly, since it involves 12,000 Azadians all striving on the Board of Origin, the Board of Form, and the Board of Becoming to determine their status within the Empire. Gurgeh, being a human of the Culture, isn't familiar with some of the concepts of the game and only when he is actually involved in the game does he realize that the game of Azad is in fact a simulation (after a fashion) of the Empire itself, and that losing may have more severe consequences than just failing to advance. I found it very absorbing and distracting, but reading it in the wake of my mother's death was a very bad idea. I give The Player of Games a 5.5 on the Oldboy scale; it is not for the squeamish.

Took today off work to help Carlos with stuff and wound up doing not much of anything this morning. Going to load the dishwasher, hit the shower and get going, but first, a few notes.

Last night's dinner with P and RS wound up being one serving of tamago at Aoba Sushi, since I was too hungry to wait for P to get out of class and wound up chowing down at Applebee's about a block away. It probably did my waistline no good, but we'll see; I wasn't excessive in my eating.

Ian Banks' The Player of Games was probably not the right book for me right now. Nothing wrong with the book (quite the contrary!) but I probably would've enjoyed it more if I'd been in a better mood. More details when I'm in a less scattered state of mind.

Since P is working today we got together yesterday afternoon/evening and had an early Father's Day burger dinner at Foster's Grille, which despite the pretentious spelling dishes out a quality burger with fresh-cut fries and is a Coke joint besides; think Five Guys with a bigger bun, a tad less grease, and beer on tap if you want it. Good eats. Too bad it was full of Little Leaguers, which made it a little tough to carry on a conversation.

I then motored down the road and hung out with Mark, who is understandably stressed about his mother, but not so much so that he couldn't show me the mid-season finale of BSG (which was every bit as awesome as advertised) ,Casting Call of Cthulhu, and the trailer for the actual Call of Cthulhu movie (silent, of course) produced by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, those fine folks who brought us Shoggoth on the Roof and other Things That Should Not Be. We also discussed Civilization strategy in general terms. I'm getting to the point where I can whip Civ III at the Regent level so long as I don't have to deal with more than four AI, though I usually wind up playing the same map multiple times so that I know where the resources are. Cheating? Good question; in a conventional wargame you'd know where all this stuff was already, and in any case I don't care. It works. Mark' struggles with Civ IV sounded painfully familiar, and hopefully some of the advice I gave him based on my C3 experience will help. Needless to say, we both miss Call to Power.

This ended far later than either of us planned, and I aggravated matters by staying up until past 0400 reading Farmer in the Sky. It was good reading forty years ago, and it hasn't lost anything in the meantime. Come to think of it, none of the Heinlein juveniles have aged that badly, allowing for the changes in what we know about Mars and Venus.

Today was largely spent lolling around playing C3 with expeditions to the Walmart (for waterproof bandages and meat) and the swimming pool. Was going to do laundry, but I'm pretty tired out from thrashing around in the pool for half an hour and I'm going to call it a night.

Virginia Postrel gives Obama's Dreams from my Father a once-over, and doesn't like what it says about the policies he's likely to favor if he gets into office and has a chance to indulge his own dreams.

Left work today after getting the bulk of the important payroll stuff done; the rest can wait until Monday after I see the lymphedema consultant who will hopefully take one look at my legs and go "OMFG you need new stockings three months ago!" and dispense with unnecessary dietary/exercise lectures. There's lab work on the schedule for tomorrow morning before I head out to Chantilly for a long-overdue clearing of the mailbox.

Finished Neal Stephenson's The Confusion last night but am withholding judgment until I finish The System of the World, because there are too many dangling plot threads. Am currently enmeshed in Max Hastings' Warriors, which is a nice collection of biographical essays on soldiers, sailors and airmen who were heroes in their time, including Joshua Chamberlain, Eddie Rickenbacker, Frederick Burnaby, John Masters and Jim Gavin. Not all of them pleasant, not all of them boon companions, even, but hard fighters one and all.

deathquaker may have convinced me to go to Otakon after all. We'll see how the budget looks in August when it comes to deciding whether I want to go up for a day or get a hotel room for a couple of nights.

Didn't go for the walk, but did get one of the Target bookshelves up and stuffed. That's another box and a half of books unpacked, in addition to all the loose paperbacks that were stacked on the floor around the TV I got from cajones and chebutykin before I left the icy wastes of Leng Minnesota. The Target shelves are only 4' high as opposed to the 6' Ikea shelves, but they have semi-real particleboard backing panels instead of the stupidly cheap and sleazy corrugated paper/paper nonsense of the Ikea shelves. Also, the Swedes must like their books really big because the Ikea shelves don't have any more shelves than the Target models; they are wider, but not significantly so.

I also killed some time shuffling the SF paperbacks and non-SF paperbacks into semi-coherent shelves and pushing the less-favored books (e.g. Phule's Company) to the back of the double-ranked pb shelves while making room for the Good Stuff (Barnes, Hemry, Drake, Laumer, etc.) up front where it could be easily spotted & grabbed. While doing this a lot of memories got stirred up and the Winamp unhelpfully supplied U2's "Walk On".
Fuck you, Winamp. Fuck you.

I think I finally get what the critics are saying when they say a book or movie didn't live up to its potential. Sadly, this realization was triggered by John Ringo's The Last Centurion, which I finished Monday evening before crashing.
( I guess it wasn't all Tom Kratman's fault after all. )

Okay, bored with being horizontal now, and hungry besides, so while I'm irradiating tubes of meat, some quickie reviews of books I picked up at Balticon.
( It would take a miracle. )
( Admiring God's creation, I am. )
( Skating a fine line  )

This is an excellent book on the hikikomori, the Japanese who have withdrawn from society to such an extent that many of them no longer even leave their rooms except to excrete, and maybe bathe once a month.
( details )

Spent today cleaning up after all the payroll stuff I did last week, and of course there were things I hadn't got quite right. None of them were serious, though, and I've taken notes so I won't make the same mistakes next week when I do this. I'll make differentmistakes next week. Left the office 30 minutes later than usual (i.e. 1500), picked up drugs and the new Sinatra compilation CD at the Walmart, and made one more stop at the post office to make sure things got into the mail today that were done after the postman called today. Why not, it's on the way home anyway.

I then climbed onto Cowzilla and updated my checkbook spreadsheet, went online to order underwear and bookshelves, ate cheddarwurst and broccoli for dinner, and finally got laundry into the washer. This is a Good Thing, since I am out of clean, functional shirts.

Next on the agenda is finally getting stuck into that bookshelf that's been sitting in its box next to my bed for the last few weeks. But first, a quick review of Richard K. Morgan's Altered Carbon. Short version: this novel is the shit.
( Long version? )
Currently reading: The Confusion and Shutting Out the Sun.

UPDATE: I need to find my hammer and one of the umpteen zillion real screwdrivers hiding in the living room boxes. Pounding home the compression dowels with the butt end of a midget screwdriver worked, but it was ugly and painful; I suspect administering love taps to the loose parts of the shelf with the eight-pound sledgehammer would be just ugly, since this is a cheap particleboard POS shelf. But I repeat myself.

Spent most of the late morning/early afternoon picking up books and a self-study Korean course at the library, tooling around Alexandria, eating lunch at Marino's, and deciding that Potomac Yards was way too crowded for me to be shopping there today. Maybe I'll go out later, but I don't really need anything...on the other hand, it's supposed to rain tomorrow, and carrying stuff back to the Sportage through the rain is seldom fun.

Among the books I picked up was Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan, which was recommended to me last fall by both edwarddain and nickiq. It's actually been getting most of my attention since I've been home, and is pretty awesome. Thanks, guys. Wish I'd picked it up sooner - it's that good!

That was an evening well spent. Got over to Mark's place in Reston, hung out, did steakage, and talked for hours about books and movies and family and Balticon and Battlestar Galactica, which is evidently all kinds of awesome. Got home horribly late and for some reason did not go to bed immediately; stayed up until 0200 reading through various Wikipedia entries triggered by the entry on Qwghlm. I am moderately tempted to attend Balticon, since Mark and Paul will both be there, and possibly some other acquaintances of mine that I haven't seen in a decade or two; on the one hand, Connie Willis is the GoH, but on the other, the main hotel is sold out and the nearest Days Inn is about three miles down the road. On the other tentacle, I do have a free day coming to me from TripRewards. I have a month to think about it, so there's no hurry.

I expect to spend most of the day in a horizontal position; my legs are not looking good and I find myself having to change bandages twice a day to keep up with the drainage. Also, the left leg is showing troubling signs of erupting into a drainage zone as well. Good thing I'll be back with Kaiser this week or next. Meanwhile, I do need to get laundry done for tomorrow.

( Book reviews )

So I headed over to Walmart for some infrastructure investment, and blew about $80 on various household supplies including a multimedia shelf and a three-shelf bookshelf (I am weak and can't lift the five-shelf one) which accounted for about 2/3 of the bill. Spent the rest of the afternoon playing EVE and tidying up the kitchen a bit, and am going to go out to haul in the shelves from the Sportage before heading out to Ashburn to do dinner with P and get the copy of Quicksilver that she forgot to bring to breakfast yesterday.

( and now a few words about EVE )

Haven't seen Iron Man yet; I hear mixed reviews about it. Been spending most of my down time rereading John Ringo's first four Posleen War novels and the new David Drake novel, since I'm kind of burned out on A Savage War of Peace and am seriously reconsidering whether I really want to get stuck into The Black Book of Communism.

Surprisingly, I haven't been worrying about the work situation. If he hires me, that'll be good; if he decides to keep me on as a temp, that'll be good too. We'll see what happens tomorrow, I'm sure.

Kind of an anticlimax, really. Payroll arrived today, which meant everything stopped so taxes could be calculated and paid (no, this is not done by the payroll processors, don't ask me why) and the checks mailed out. Then we got back to doing end-of-month stuff for the Portsmouth and Hagerstown offices, which was not that big a deal, really. Stopped at the library on the way home to pick up a copy of John Ringo's When The Devil Dances, because I can't find my copy(ies) in the living room. I swear, when the pension check arrives, the first things I'm buying after I write the rent check are going to be 3-4 bookcases from Target so I can pull all the books out of the damn boxes and have some idea just what I have and don't have. Also got the copy of David Drake's When The Tide Rises I had on hold, but the copy of Ringo's Sister Time is still in the queue.

On to Friday, huzzah.

Ganked from danae; obnoxious comments in italics.

( What we have here... )