Since I was up until 0300 this morning as a result of sleeping in way too much on Sunday, it was pretty surprising that I woke up at 0800 and managed to stay up, remembering that I had to go in to the VA this morning for pre-surgery tests. I forgot that I was also going to have an A1c blood test done and so ate breakfast, but by the time they drew the blood there were other issues anyway so vOv.

Spent a lot of time waiting around and so got pretty far into The Cardinal of the Kremlin. I've been on a bit of a Tom Clancy streak of late; knocked off Clear and Present Danger last week and Without Remorse before that. I'm not reading them in any particular order, obviously. I'll have to get Debt of Honor and Rainbow Six out of the library, since I don't think I ever bought copies of those; as for Executive Orders , the weakest of the Jack Ryan novels IMAO, I'm just going to skip it.

All that having been said, I think this would be a good night to just crash early, forgoing the dubious pleasure of playing EVE while fuzzy with fatigue poisons.

I was supposed to go into the VA today for pre-operation stuff, which I assume means blood tests & such, but the vascular clinic dropped the ball, and so the surgery & prep will be put off until next week. At least it's not going to be on the 8th; aside from it being a Holy Day of Obligation, I'm planning on spending some time with my parents at the Family Plot. Since it's that time of the year again.

On a more cheerful note, I went out and deposited a few checks with the bank. Hopefully the coming month will see more of that. I also cashed in my free rental coupon from Blockbuster and wound up with three movies since they had a ROGO deal going on. This means that I need to find time between now an noon next Tuesday to watch Hancock, Iron Man, and Jarhead. I would rather have seen Starship Troopers 3, which is supposed to be so bad it's actually kind of good, but they didn't have a copy at the Blockbuster I went to. In the same strip mall, there's a Giant which is oddly retro and cute; it's so much smaller than the other stores I usually shop at and yet seems stuffed to the rafters with all manner of foodz. I walked in originally intending to just cash in my free Coke 12-pack coupon and get the Giant club card, but left with some half & half and tea as well. (You can't have enough tea around the place.)

I forgot to mention that over the weekend I stopped in at the library and picked up Juggler of Worlds by Niven and Lerner along with Here Comes Civilization, which is the second volume in the complete William Tenn collection. Neither one of them particularly impressed me.
( Spoilers )

Don't go out there! It's not safe!
Stay here at the computer and take advantage of these deals instead!

Unusually energetic this morning - fired off the paperwork to the Commonwealth and spent most of the morning firing off resumes in several directions. Hopefully one of them will land on someone's desk and find them in a good mood!

The chili improved after sitting in the fridge for a couple of days, but isn't quite there yet. I suspect the arbol peppers just aren't as hot as the serrano peppers I'm used to using. The turkey has been moved to the fridge and will probably wind up getting roasted a day early, but we'll see how things go. Also baked the acorn squash and nuked a couple of potatoes, because they go well with chili. :)

Papers arrived for the substitute job at Quantico; I think I'll call down and see if Wednesday morning is good for them. If not, I guess it'll be next week.

Not a good day playing internet spaceships. Got a mining barge (and its expensive strip mining modules) blown up under me, and a salvaging osprey likewise. So I was actually down a few million isk by the time I quit the game. :(

Still plodding through Baseball Between the Numbers: Why Everything You Know About the Game Is Wrong, but am also rereading Ronald Glasser's 365 Days and S. M. Stirling's The Peshawar Lancers.

P took me out for late-night Korean at Ye Chon yesterday after exhibiting her poor navigation skills and wandering down Columbia Pike, but the bulgogi and sushi were excellent as usual even if the service was a little sub-par. Eh.

No work today either, but I gave the printer a good workout cranking out forms and coupons in between doing a bunch of online surveys, some of which will actually earn me a few bucks. This afternoon I'm going to hit the bank and get quarters for laundry, drop my reporter agreement with STATS in the mailbox, and finally fax off my DD214 to another Federal agency. That, and actually doing laundry, should eat most of the afternoon.

Supposed to be going out to P's for chili tonight using the last of Mom's chilies; was originally going to make it myself at home with the arbol peppers I bought at Walmart, but after a hilariously misplayed round of rock/paper/scissors last night in which P and I chose the exact same items three times running I agreed to let her go ahead and do it. Since the Kia's driver seat is wobbly and my fuel budget is nonexistent, I'll be taking the Metro and the bus most of the way out there and the same on the return trip. Should be interesting.

So far I'm not really all that impressed with Baseball Between the Numbers: Why Everything You Know About the Game Is Wrong. It doesn't really cover any new ground, and I suspect that in their dismissal of Catcher ERA they're missing something, but it's not costing me anything, and someone not familiar with sabermetrics may well find it useful.

Well, time to quit writing and get going.

Went out and did grocery shopping today at Wal-mart and Harris Teeter, with a stop in between at the library, about which more in a bit. I'm pretty happy that I managed to keep the grocery bill around $40, but then I did go a little overboard on frozen vegetables last week. The menu is going to have a lot of chili and beans in it for the next week, to say nothing of tuna salad, but that's okay. Having grown up as an Air Force brat in the pre-Nixon era, I'm used to eating a lot of the same things repeatedly. *shrug*

I also picked up a printer at Wal-Mart, an HP Deskjet to replace the dead Lexmark. It would have been less expensive to rely on the Foxchase Media Center, but their printer has been out of ink for a couple of days and the staff in the rental office don't seem to be in any hurry to deal with the problem. So considering that I have applications I need to print out and send in, it was either this or throw money I don't have at Kinko's/Landmark Printing/Staples so I can get stuff printed off the thumb drive - and that also requires time & gas and wear& tear on the Sportage.

Okay, on to the library gets...
Every goon in the Sports Argument Stadium has been recommending Baseball Between The Numbers by the Baseball Prospectus crew (along with The Dugout, which is painfully hilarious) to people who aren't up on wOBA, UZR, and all these other newfangled stats these rotten little kids have been making up while I wasn't paying attention. I think the book's subtitle* is annoying on account of being more than a little patronizing, but we'll see if it's anther math-packed snore fest or whether these people actually have something constructive to say.

I've been wanting to read Escape from Hell, the sequel to Inferno by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle, ever since I heard they were working on it. Plot is similar to the first novel -an American SF writer wakes up in Hell- but from all accounts is even closer to the original Divine Comedy than Inferno was. I'm looking forward to seeing all the people who Niven & Pournelle think deserve a helping of eternal (sic) torment. :D

Speaking of Larry Niven, he appears to have opened a new part of the Known Space universe in a trilogy co-written with Edward Lerner. I'm going to take it one book at a time, and the first book is Fleet of Worlds. I'm hoping it's good so I can go on to the other two books.







*Why Everything You Know About The Game Is Wrong

As a follow-on to the previous post, here's a list of books I've culled from the library, either because they're duplicates or I don't need/want them around any more:
( cut to spare the f-list )

Went over to Alexandria City Public Schools' main office this morning to turn in all my paperwork and get fingerprinted, which means that if everything goes smoothly (no reason why it shouldn't) I'll be an active member of the substitute pool starting Monday. Hopefully I'll have better luck with that than I've had with the various temp agencies.

Been on quite the reading jag lately, which considering how much time I'm spending with my feet up isn't too surprising. Today I finished S.M. Stirling's The Peshawar Lancers; yesterday I wrapped up his Helot War trilogy with Go Tell the Spartans and Prince of Sparta, both of which are co-written with Jerry Pournelle. I've also been browsing through Total Baseball, mostly looking at horrible teams like the A's, Browns and Phillies from the 1940s and 50s. Actually, since the Browns became the Orioles in 1953, there's not much to look at, but what's there is morbidly fascinating.

Speaking of baseball, I finished sixth in the fantasy league fsf_rapier started, which puts me two places behind him and one behind luned, though it really wasn't that close. luned's Rivendell Rangers led my Dukes by 10.5 points at the end of the season, mainly because my pitching blew chunks. I had the league's worst ERA and WHIP, to say nothing of Batting Avergae Against. The only pitching category I did well in was saves, where I was fourth. The offense was similarly bad: league worst AVG and OBP, mediocre HR and RBI - at least we led the league in steals, which is just ridiculous since that's not the kind of team I like. :(

Maybe next year I'll do better, after I pick up the Sporting News guide and figure out who all these damn players are. Also, I need to just leave my pitchers alone until June; I got rid of Scott Baker, Justin Verlander, and Cole Hamels, all of whom started badly and finished great. :(

My eyes are telling me I spent too much time staring at this screen today, so I think I'll post this and go to bed.

Interesting article in Esquire about drone crews. (Instapundit)

Didn't accomplish much around the burrow today. I did sort out and shelve some cassettes and other leftovers from the ongoing reorganization, make some calls, and fire off some resumes to various folks on Craigslist, but that was about it. Really tired today despite backing off the Clindamycin from 9 to 6 pills/day, which I think is what I should have been doing all along. I'll find out for sure Monday. Sort of related: blood sugar has been in the green for a couple of days now.

Carlos is the proud new owner of a cardiac stent, so he should be good for another five years/50,000 miles or whatever those things are warrantied for.

Finished rereading William Manchester's Goodbye Darkness, which is a very strange mix of memoir, military history, and travelogue that mostly revolves around Manchester's pilgrimage to the Pacific battlefields where he and his fellow Marines spent so much time and blood, sometimes for little return. I feel differently about this book now than I did when I first read it some twenty years ago; Manchester's rage and frustration at the younger generation seems petulant and somehow unconscious of the fact that the Woodstock generation and the Gen X'ers are what the men and women who fought World War II made them, for they were our parents and grandparents, after all. His scorn and disbelief that today's generation of soldiers and Marines are up to the standards of Guadalcanal, Peleliu, Saipan and Okinawa is belied by the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, I think; is anyone isn't up to the standards of those days, it is today's politicians. Well, perhaps someone who survived the hell of Okinawa is entitled to some bitchiness in his old age, and there is no denying that whatever shortcomings Goodbye, Darkness has, that his other biographical and historical epics more than compensate for it.

Managed to mislay the PIN number I need for filing the weekly unemployment claim this morning, which made for some unnecessary excitement (and some much-needed sorting & pitching things out) until I eventually found the missing document hiding under my keyboard. This time I copied the number into a file on Winbox, which file will doubtless become corrupt or something between now and next Monday. In other stupidity, I managed to run out of my N-type insulin, so I'll be getting by on the fast-acting R stuff until the refill arrives from the VA. Fortunately USCF has a very informative page on figuring out what your daily insulin intake should be, and after studying this I think I have a good idea what I need to be shooting up a couple times a day. We'll find out.

So far I have four (small) boxes of books at various stages of being packed up, and hope to get a couple more done this week. My niece has apparently run through the anime I loaned her and is noodging me about coming over and exchanging cleaning for anime, which would be a Good Thing. One way or the other, I'm hoping to get most of the boxes out of the living room before huladavid arrives in ten days or so.

Watched The Dirty Dozen last night, which as I remarked here is very different from the book but an excellent movie of its type. It's kind of sad that we don't see too many movies like this any more, with large all-star ensemble casts, I think. Also kind of weird to see Ernest Borgnine as a relatively young man, in the role of the general in charge of the project...for that matter, there's a lot of guys in that cast who are dead now. Lee Marvin, for example.

I'm still not sure what to think about Sewer, Gas, and Electric, which is one baroque, weird-ass novel from one end to the other. All manner of improbable characters (including Ayn Rand, a 160-year old female Civil War vet, various Electric Negroes, etc, etc.), cockamamie plots, insane AIs, crazy people, suicide missions into the New York sewers, and Walter Cronkite as a renegade blimp driver all rolled together into something that easily cracks the top ten of Weird SF Novels. Reading it was kind of a struggle, and at the end of it all I'm still not sure I get what was supposed to be going on. Probably the closest analog to this book are the Illuminatus! novels by Robert Anton Wilson, which I haven't read, but from all reports are pretty wacky.

Aaron Static has a new Power Hour out. You should go download it, if you like this sort of thing, and I know some of you do.

Got some stuff done online today, but otherwise wasn't too productive. Legs have been hurting pretty much all day, and I hope this is an indication that they're doing some healing. I did notice less weeping from some areas on the right leg that had been doing so yesterday, so we'll see. Got an eye appointment tomorrow morning and then Thursday it's back to the vascular clinic. Speaking of which, the Profore bandages they didn't have at the pharmacy last week still haven't showed up, but they did send me 4000 gauze sponges and a couple rolls of 2" tape.

Nats got massacred by the Dodgers tonight 16-2, and my Dukes are doing only slightly better since Wakefield's return from the DL was less than epic.

Been reading a lot of old stuff out of the boxes recovered from the house, most recently A Spaceship for the King and Poul Anderson's Agent of the Terran Empire. There's another series of tales that would make an awesome anime series, but I don't expect to see it in my lifetime. Currently reading Sister Time by John Ringo.

Have to get up at 0600 to wring out my legs before heading off to the VA hospital downtown; since it's "payday" tomorrow and driving there in the Sportage through the AM rush would be MADNESS, I'm taking the Metro. So I probably won't get anything else done all day. :(

So...before P and I could go retrieve the Sportage from Don Beyer, we needed to offload some of the stuff we'd gotten from the old house last week. So we got a 5x10 in a storage place off South Pickett Street, stuck the boxes in there, and that was that. As soon as I can drive without the clown shoes (Sunday, most likely) I'm going to move some of the other book boxes out of the apartment and into storage since there isn't really enough room in the living room to swing a hamster, much less a cat, and it would be good to have some extra maneuvering room if/when we get around to throwing some of my decrepit bedroom furniture out and replacing it with stuff from the house.
( Ender in Exile )
( The Dirty Dozen )

Picked up the latest sequel to Ender's Game, Ender in Exile. It's starting strong. Also, an updated version of E.M. Nathanson's classic The Dirty Dozen, which I haven't read since I was stationed in Germany; the new version has some art that wasn't in the original Random House version, and Nathanson did the typesetting on this one himself. Looks nice. Finally, Sewer, Gas, & Electric by Matt Ruff, which seems to be popular with the TV Tropers. This may not necessarily be a good thing, but I guess I'll find out.

Finally touched base with Don Beyer, got the bad news about the bill, and promised to get the Sportage out of hock tomorrow (unlikely) or Friday (more likely) if for no other reason than I'm tired of dealing with the Subaru's foibles and want to listen to my own music again.

Tomorrow I have an appointment downtown at the VA vascular clinic; we'll see what they say about my legs. They've been hurting lately, so it could get interesting. I also need to pick up copies of my chest X-ray results from the Alexandria clinic, and doubtless other tasks will present themselves as the day wears on.

There really is going to be a fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie, and apparently it's going to be based on Tim Powers' On Stranger Tides. Which is doubleplusgood in my opinion; as you may or may not remember from my review, I was getting some strong deja vu when I read the book, since I'd seen the first couple of Pirates movies before reading the book.

...to the extent that I am still awake at 0500 and now have a burning desire to get (or at least read) Dan Abnett's series about Gaunt's Ghosts, and get Cain's Last Stand. FML.

Well, after dithering about how I was going to do this, I wound up taking the Sportage in to the Kia dealer where I'd had the starter replaced and the turn signals (briefly) repaired for its annual inspection. They'd been tinkering with it since 1300 when one of the service managers came out and offered me a loaner, with the implication that the mechanics had no idea WTF and wouldn't be finishing today. Which is no big deal since the windshield also needs to be replaced because it's broken like this, which is not okay, and not like that, which would be acceptable. No, I don't get it either, but it's the LAW. So anyway, they sent me home with a Subaru Legacy loaner, which is kind of like the Optima I had last time except with more bells & whistles and a really odd transmission that lets you decide whether you want to shift your own gears or let the slushbox automagically handle that. As God is my witness, I spent fifteen minutes studying the owner's manual and still managed to miss that until I pulled into a parking lot to find out why the damn thing wouldn't shift out of first gear at 5000 RPM. Curse you, overly clever designers of the Master Race, CURSE YOU!!! *SHAKES FIST*

In other news, the employment commission sent me a fresh copy of my monetary determination letter, which I will now wave at the VA so they'll get off my bozack about the copays I can't afford. Also, syringes arrived just in time for the weekend, which is one less thing I have to worry about.

It's Old But It's Good Department: Samuel E. Morison (Rear Admiral, USNR, Retired, RIP) was a great historian, of a sort not often seen these days*, and towards the end of his life he started a massive opus, The European Discovery of America, of which he only finished two volumes before relocating to Hy-Brasil in 1976. The first volume covered the Northern Voyages from 500-1600, and includes a couple of truly amusing chapters on mythical islands of the Atlantic (some of which persisted on maps well into the 19th century) and silly claims by various people whose national heroes allegedly preceded Columbus to the New world, including Welsh (who became Mandans, allegedly), Norsemen - this part includes a hearty slap at the Kensington Runestone- and other ethnic nuttiness. I can't recommend this book strongly enough.

Old Wine, New Bottles Department: Study shows rooftop solar more lethal on a per-terawatt basis than Chernobyl. Petr Beckmann did this for you in 1976, guys. About time you caught up.

*Which is to say, readable - something Morison complains about in the foreword.

This Conelrad music is pretty cool ambient stuff for the most part, so I don't think I'll be flushing it.

Going to listen to baseball for a while and try not to fall asleep quite yet.

Jack Vance's Brave Free Men is still awesome after all these years. I'll have to go find the other two-thirds of the Durdane trilogy someday, but that day is not today.

...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... )