I seem to have fixed my sleep cycle problem to some extent by going to bed this morning at 0100 and rising today a little after 1200. The late rising was more out of sheer laziness than anything else, since I woke up roughly once an hour from 0700 onward, but with nothing on the schedule today I didn't see any reason to stir forth and do stuff.

I did finally go out and get the mail, which included drugs from the VA, the new (and horribly screwed up) Sprint bill, the quarterly statement from my brokerage (didn't want that retirement fund anyway) and a helpful letter with flyer from the VA about their suicide assistanceprevention line. I don't think I'll really be needing that, so I chucked it along with the rest of the junk mail. Sprint had done exactly what I asked them earlier in the month and switched the numbers on my phones, so that the Centro -my main phone- is in the 703 area code, and the Katana -my "home" phone- is in the inappropriate 301 area code. Unfortunately, they didn't switch the plans along with the numbers, so I got billed for some texting and data use. :( Fortunately, Sprint being Sprint, they have outstanding customer service which fixed this problem, credited me with the charges for the texts and data, and also credited me another $50 for extending my contract on one of these phones for two years. Ha! It's not like I'd ever voluntarily leave them in any case, so it was free money. :)

The Forgotten Army is a pretty depressing book. Granted, just about any book about the ARVN would be, but this one is particularly poignant since it's not only a once-over-lightly organizational/social history of that doomed army but also a biography of a pair of colonels who came from similar backgrounds, were acknowledged as two of the best young officers in the ARVN, and wound up in very different and tragic places. It's also depressing to see how our Army and the press screwed the ARVN out of the credit for winning the battles of Hue and Hamburger Hill, among many other dumb mistakes the US made in South Vietnam. I'm not done with it yet, but it's hard to keep going when you know how it all ends.
UPDATE: Done with it now. I need a drink, but I gave that stuff up. :(

Time to go out and replenish the groceries, maybe hang out with some friends if they're available.

God, I miss EVE. I'm not really cut out to be a forum whore, and reading the op threads is monumentally frustrating.

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.

( Hyperion )
Related: Definitely going to the PRSFS meeting tonight to talk about SF. What a concept! A SF fan club that actually talks about SF! MADNESS!

Sort of related: Since my sponsor into Goonfleet had the bad grace to not only quit but get himself banned from the forums, I am casting about for a new sponsor and thinking glumly that I just might have to fork over my $10 to Lowtax and start posting at somethingawful.com. thaadd thinks I ought to do an ask/tell thread about Anime Detour. It could happen. UPDATE: It did happen.

Definitely related: Previous post about the League of Wonder provoked a lot of comments (props to burnunit for dropping by and responding) and if it does nothing more than put the LoW on notice that there's a lot of fans suspicious of the concept, then good. I don't know how much time I want to spend on the subject, since as I explained, whatever they do will have minimal impact on me since it's all going to happen in the Ninth Circle of HellMinnesota and not down here. Still, as one of the founders of Detour I feel some responsibility to keep an eye on "my" convention and occasionally stick my oar in, especially when major stuff like this heaves into view.

The only thing on my schedule today is the Guest of Honor Kaffeeklatsch at noon, which I managed to grab the last seat for. This should be good; Charles Stross gave a very good Q & A yesterday and he should be even better in a small-group format. I don't know if I want to stick around for the convention post-mortem at 1600 as I fear this may lead to my getting roped into help run this thing, and I'm still enjoying my staffing sabbatical. The main question in my mind is whether the traffic home will be better at 1 PM or 5 PM. I do know I'm not going to Arlington today, because it's going to be a mob scene. I'll say the Rosary for Mom and Dad and visit them later in the year when the place isn't overrun by tourists.

I do need to get home and file my weekly unemployment report, though; the website is asking for my PIN, which I don't have with me because I didn't think I'd need it.

Sort of related: Apparently Goonfleet had a very good weekend. I sort of wish I could have been there for some of it. Talked to P briefly about the Failbox this morning before she left for work; she said she'd try and do the work on it this week, otherwise I'll take it back and get help from brian_edminster on the BIOS and CMOS twiddling.

Off to the business of the day now.

Newegg was going to reject the motherboard/case from the Winbox since we didn't send the original box back with it, but a few minutes of polite conversation and sincere flattery convinced them otherwise. So the replacement should show up sometime next week, and about time, too. Epic things are happening as the Swarm moves on to crush the allies of the Alliance Formerly Known as Band of DevelopersButtsexBrothers, and I have to sit on the sidelines waiting for the Winbox to be reassembled. Hopefully the replacement will be more reliable than the original.

So tired tonight. I have over 44 hours on the clock between the Day and Night jobs this week, and there's still tomorrow to get through. I may have to stop at Harris Teeter tomorrow and get some of the Snapple Diet Green Tea, as it is only slightly less efficacious than the legendary Dark Black BOSS Coffee and still legal, as opposed to Crank. Which would be bad for me in other ways.

Acquired my own copy of Neil Gaiman's American Gods by cashing in my rewards points from one of the survey outfits I signed up with. Read it yesterday during the Night Job, for it was ungodly slow, and it was every bit as good as I remembered.

And so to bed.

Whoever rorschachsdiary is, he sure has the character nailed. I present today's entry as evidence.

Went to Walmart at lunchtime in search of the ReliOn glucose monitor, only to find they were en route and had not been delivered to the store yet. Wound up buying a new AccuChek monitor (whose price will be rebated to me) and a box of refill test strip drums for far more money than I intended. Still, I needed the meter. Trying to live with diabetes without a meter is much like driving down the road without a functioning speedometer, only worse.

New edition of EVE doesn't work on Cowzilla, whose graphics card is merely adequate and not shiny enough to process the oodles of texture & other graphic awesomeness in the Apocrypha Edition. Fuck you, CCP, for not throwing the rest of us a bone and letting the regular display modes be supported for a while longer. Until I get the Winbox back, I guess I won't be playing EVE, and this sucks.

How Soccer Explains The World is okay so far. Kind of lightweight, but Foer did obviously do some of his homework before getting to know the hooligans of Glasgow, Belgrade and Chelsea, to say nothing of his adventures in Brazil. More later.

Hoped to hear from Foxchase management or the Science Club today about unrelated matters, but it didn't happen in either case. So, a little later I'll head out to the Wal-mart, refill my metformin, pick up a new meter, and get a fresh roll of Kerlix.

At least my legs seem to be improving, though I have no idea why that would be. I didn't get much in the way of sleep last night, or at any time this weekend, have no idea what my blood sugar levels are, and am deathly tired. I'm tempted to just punt the trip to Wal-mart until tomorrow; I have this evening's dose of metformin and enough Kerlix to dress my wound tomorrow morning. We'll see.

The lulz over P's visit to the Goonmeet continue.

Library gets consisted mainly of Sharpe novels: Sharpe's Tiger, Sharpe's Triumph and Sharpe's Escape. I think I have copies of the first two but can't be arsed to dig for them. Other gets include Poul Anderson's Going for Infinity (which doesn't contain "Murphy's Hall", unfortunately) and Franklin Foer's How Soccer Explains The World, which promises to have some interesting things to say about soccer culture.

Great victory or greatest victory? The Mittani reveals all!

Spent most of today on Civicrack and random websurfing after finishing off David Drake's The Sharp End, which won out over Paglia and Fraser for bedtime reading last night. Slept in until noon, read for a couple of hours until hunger drove me into the kitchen for ham and eggs and biscuits, which kept me adequately fueled until early evening when I whipped up some guacamole and nibbled a bag of carrots to death while wasting time on a fleet op in which I almost got a tackling Condor fried by hostile POS lasers.

Going to crash early and rise early, since P didn't indicate whether she wants box parts brought in early or late and I plan to be ready either way.

Got up early this morning and went out to Herndon for breakfast with P. Gave her Christmas presents, had good solid breakfast of eggs & sausage & taters & various other starch components, and conversation that ranged from MUDs to awful bedtime stories (NSFW) and the lack of creativity on the part of the ex. I headed off home as she headed off for bed (she's still working mid shifts) after we agreed to get together and do the box thing...Sunday, I think? Some day when she's not working, anyway.

Christmas passed pretty quietly. Did some baking of thump biscuits and related starch components, carved into the ham (OMG BETTER THAN I REMEMBERED) and nuked some mixed veggies. Lounged around playing Civicrack, browsing /b/, and eventually logged into EVE. Chatted some with thaadd but most of the other folks I know online weren't there, so I didn't stay long. What with one thing and the other I haven't been feeling up to doing much in EVE of late...don't really feel much like losing a moderately expensive ship due to drug-induced stupidity, and I feel dumb flying a Blackbird or tackling frigate after spending this long in Goonfleet.

Well,I have a fasting glucose test in the morning, so might as well crash. 'Night all; hope your Christmas was fun.

Or maybe I'm sicker than I thought. Either way, after picking up a bunch of stuff at the library, chucking out garbage, and consuming the evening gruel, I'm ready to go face-first into the pillows. Which is a shame, since there's all kinds of action happening online in EVE...oh well. Maybe tomorrow night. Maybe not.

So I extracted manga, school textbooks, an assload of Wodehouse, some Andre Dubus collections, various Flashman novels (and, surprisingly, a copy of The Sheikh and the Dustbin) from various boxes and the dresser in the bedroom, but even after all this I still have a shelf and a half to full on the new bookshelf. Booya.

Stuffed envelopes, shot more rats, taunted passing members of Executive Outcomes (an alliance of BoB pets), and eventually logged off EVE to shower and make the run to the post office. I returned by way of CVS, where I bought tape, and am now cultivating patience while I wait for the potatoes (regular & sweet) to finish baking. This once, nuking is not the answer.

Hey, P: would you look around your place and see if I accidentally left my coffee cone there?

Went home "early" at 1330, lugging a bunch of checks with me since I'd run out of stamps - and one needed additional postage since it's going to Canada anyway. Part of the reason for my early departure was that my cold was driving me nuts. Constant sneezing, runny nose and a mild headache made it hard to concentrate and get work done, but I managed to get all the GL entries written up and posted; ditto with this week's checks.

Stopped for lunch at the Springfield Hard Times Cafe, hoping a bowl of chili would help, but it wasn't nearly hot enough. Neither were the half-price wings, although those were good - spicy but not as obnoxious as the average Buffalo wings, which mostly taste like someone rinsed them in Crystal hot sauce. After that, I headed for Kaiser to pick up a fresh box of test strips and some more Novolin N. I dozed off for a few minutes while waiting, which convinced me that I needed to go directly home, do not pass the Post Office, do not collect $200. I have Friday off, so I can deal with the postage issues then.
( cut for extremely non-PC EVE content )

Not sure what to make yet for Thanksgiving? How about a Turbaconducken? Yes, a Turducken wrapped -thoroughly wrapped- in bacon! Must be seen to be believed.

Also, more seriously, the classic Thanksgiving editorials from the WSJ:
The Desolate Wilderness
The Fair Land

As for me, I think I'm going to have some chicken soup and retire early. Going to be a long day tomorrow, even without work.

...makes a man tired and red in the eyes.

Holy shit, a Megatokyo strip appears in a timely manner!

Left work early today to go out to Fairfax, get new parts for old & busted nose hose. Forgot the relative positions of Route 50 and Fairfax County Parkway, so I wound up taking the long way around through Chantilly and being a tad late, but it all worked out. Retrieved hat & gloves from Angeethi afterward, did dinner at BK, and headed home.

Too tired to do much when I got in...logged in to EVE, put some stuff up for sale, dithered between various skills, and eventually logged out, since I'm in no shape to stay up for ops. Especially since I got up around 0520 this morning so I could go into work early. Going to rack out in a few minutes but wanted to post first.

GVDL is right: this is the greatest rant of the year. Take that, you spoiled kids, and get the hell off my lawn!

( Cut for EVE content )
In other news, today was slow; made some entries, cut some checks, dealt with payroll, and left around the normal time despite the boss leaving at 1300.

Finally sent off the books people ordered from Half.com. Go look in the bookstore; you may find something to interest you.

( O Brother, Where Art Thou? )
( Now I know why Dad developed a taste for Dixieland Jazz. )
( EVE cut )
Went over to Fox Way and found 2 of the 3 books I've sold on half.com, but left my gloves over there. :(
Did shopping on the way back and will probably make bread in the robot along with soup in the crockpot tomorrow. All the pork and beef roasts they had at Shoppers were ginormous, so I just got some ham hocks, barley, onions and canned veggies for the soup instead. Ought to be interesting.

And now to kick back and enjoy Kill Bill Volume 2 . :)

Well, I'm doing some of my laundry, anyway...ran out of gumption after getting home and hauling books, drugs, potatoes, and other miscellany in from the Sportage, and since I had enough quarters for one load I decided to forgo the drive to Fox Way in favor of washing my work shirts, pants and shoes here.

Today's gets from the Beatley: Robert Kaplan's Hog Pilots & Blue Water Grunts -the sequel to Imperial Grunts, natch; John Keegan's Fields of Battle, S.M. Stirling's The Sky People, and finally the graphic novel The Road to Perdition, from which the awesome Tom Hanks movie of the same name was made.

I gave WFB's God and Man at Yale the old college try, but it failed to hold my interest. The sad tale of academics betraying the ideals of the universities that pay them is by now fifty-plus years old, and the only thing notable about Buckley's account of the goings-on at Yale in the Truman era is that it was the first of many alarms being sounded by conservatives about the problem. Back to the library it goes, mostly unread.

Probably going to take a break from EVE until next payday. There are higher priorities right now than internet spaceships, I'm afraid.