Wombat Rampant

Happy 36th birthday, kiddo, wherever you are.

Slept late into the afternoon after being up late into the morning...for no good reason, really*. Weight was up, but BG and BP were both down. I think I am pretty well done with this flu, although I still felt tired, so much so that I didn't go out today. Tomorrow I'll have to, but that's tomorrow.

Managed to form the Balkan Pact, but as usual the Allies sold out the Czechs and the Nazis ate them. Austria-Hungary did get South Slovenia & the Carpathian Rus out of it, though, and both Romania and Yugoslavia are still in the Pact. I suppose the Nazis will go after Poland next with the help of the Soviets, but I'm not sure what if anything we can do about that.

Did the FMJRA, which was sort of a composite book post/FMJRA since David Drake is hanging up the keyboard; then I took a break to play HoI and after fixing dinner (rice, veg, creamy wild rice soup and a burger patty) did Rule 5 Sunday.

Used the devil's food cake mix in the bread machine, and I'm not crazy about how it turned out. I'm sure it'll do wonders for my numbers tomorrow.

*Actually I was looking up how to start and run an internet radio station, with the intention of transitioning it to an actual radio station. Going to be expensive, but I think it's worth doing.

Back about thirty years ago when I worked for Xerox (and temp agencies that had me running copiers, which is how I wound up with Xerox) I published a personal zine and mailed it off to my friends. Since I'm trying not to use Facebook any more than I absolutely have to, I am wondering how many (if any) of you would be interested in a revival of that zine. It would be free, show up in your e-mail box about once a month, cover topics of interest to me (and hopefully you) and I would of course welcome letters of comment. Maybe this will wind up being one of those zines that does double duty as an APAzine, most likely for N'APA, the APA of the N3F, maybe it won't.

One thing is for sure, it will not be called the Baja Manitoba Free Press, because I don't live in Baja Manitoba any more and please God, I never will again.

Comment here, not on Facebook, Gab, or MeWe.

I made the mistake of starting S.M. Stirling's The Desert and the Blade last night, which meant I was up until 0600 and that pretty much fucked up my Wednesday. I went out to sign papers and move money, but I was too late getting out the door, so neither of those things happened. I didn't have coffee before heading out, so for a few minutes I sat in the parking lot at Tonopah Station, unsure quite what to do with myself. Eventually I decided to kill all the frog portals there, flipped and buffed the stuffed bear, and headed out to work more mischief. I recharged and farmed some portals on Logan Field Road, made my way out to the Test Range, and made some fields there. Also turned off US-6 and went to the airport, where I captured the water tanks, threw more fields, and took a pic of a decrepit WW2 hangar. Then I went home and whipped up a pitcher of chocolate protein shake, which was Breakfast. Dinner. Whatever, it was the first meal of the day. BG was normal, but weight was up (which I expected after eating all the sushi) but on the gripping hand the BP was down.

I'd thought about getting a phone and a Choice Wireless prepaid card to go with it, but decided to go with the signal booster from Amazon instead. What with the refund and a gift card from T-Mobile it wound up costing me just $150. Signal did seem a little better here on the south side, but I didn't get downtown to see if it was better there too, much less the north side. Tomorrow for sure.

Did the catchup blogging, played some HoI (I am taking another shot with the Japanese) and have been feeling very tired. I think I'll just bash out the normal link post for the day and call it a night.

Slept a full six hours; weight was down a lot, BG was up, and BP was a little lower than yesterday but still high. Maybe I shouldn't have moved all that stuff in the bedroom first.

Had breakfast, waited until after noon for Jase from the rubbish company to show; he took out all the pieces of the old bed frame and the box the new one came in, and said he'd ask around to see if anyone's interested in coming in and helping me with all these damn boxes. After he left, I finished the hummus and tuna salad I fixed for lunch and crashed for several hours. The bedroom is a lot emptier now and I think I'll fill the empty space with a couple of bookcases that have been packed up in boxes unassembled for a couple of years. Real soon now.

Got up, went over to Raley's after a little Ingress and bought avocados, pork rinds, more hummus, and more naan. Misread the $5 Monday flyer and bought a bunch of sushi that wasn't actually on sale. Went home, ate the sushi for dinner while doing the daily bloggage, and browsed Reddit for a while in a semi-catatonic state.

Tomorrow I need to get down to the post office and pick stuff up, maybe do some pre-packing for Wednesday, and gird my loins for the walk up to the water tank. I do believe this time I'll drive up to the chain and save myself some sweat.

Picked up a pound yesterday, but my BG was normal. Fixed a pitcher of protein powder, almond milk, cream, and yogurt, and it didn't taste that great. I blame the yogurt. Got to stop putting that in the protein shakes. I futzed around in the morning with various things and eventually went back to bed for a few hours, because once again I'd gone to bed around 0100 and woke up at the disgusting hour of 0700.

It was supposed to be really really hot today (which was another justification for the nap) but as far as I can tell it didn't break 90. Oh well. It's not like I was feeling energetic enough to do anything anyway.The packages at the Post Office will still be there tomorrow.

Trying another iteration of HoI today after giving up on the previous one, where I managed to peacefully acquire Czechoslovakia & Danzig but stalled out along the Benelux borders after everybody got into the act (as usual). This time I did a little better raising a huge army and pulled off both the Anschluss and Sudetenland annexations ahead of schedule, but I misunderstood how war claims and declarations work, so I'm going to be invading Poland in late 1940 instead of late 1939. Oops.

Got an email from the THS principal telling me none of my references replied to her, so I need some new ones. Guess I'll get on that in the morning, maybe with some new references.

Crossposted to the Book of Feces. Comment there, not here.
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Looking back over this past year, I sometimes think that God was concerned that my humility score wasn't high enough, because the events of the last year certainly humbled me in a number of ways. Still, I managed to avoid being reduced to sleeping in the street and losing all my stuff, but I had a lot of help, much of it from people I don't even really know, which is to say the readers of The Other McCain and Instapundit, who came through for me when I needed it most.* Yes, I got evicted; yes, I half-killed myself again trying to pack up all my crap, but I did pack 90% of it up and abandoned a bunch of stuff I could replace fairly easily.

It's also hard not to see the hand of God (hopefully) in my move up to Tonopah; while it's possible that sheer chance and the nosy algorithms of Silicon Valley may have had something to do with it, it's well known that He works in mysterious ways. How else would I have tripped over an ad from the state Rural Housing Authority while browsing Facebook? Who could have predicted that Corona-chan would do me the favor of getting me moved from the USVETS barracks to a room of my own at the Candlewood, where I could work on putting together all the documentation my landlord required, sock away a few hundred bucks while staying current on my bills, and even running up to Tonopah a couple of times to do the needful?

So everything has worked out for the best, even if this is not the best of all possible worlds. The fridge is full of food, I am going to get a little work in this month with the county elections board, which will help stretch my unemployment, and there is a very good chance that I'll be working for Block again this coming tax season as a virtual tax pro or in the franchise office across the street. It could be a lot worse. It has been a lot worse.

*And if you were one of those people, who I all too often forgot to thank in person, please accept my sincere apologies and my heartfelt gratitude.

So, having been here for about a month, what are the pros & cons?

Well, despite the elevation (6030 feet above sea level) I seem to be sleeping better and feeling better in general. Took me a while to get used to the thinner air up here - for the first few weeks even the slightest bit of exertion had me gasping for air. My blood sugar has been improving, but the weight stubbornly refuses to come down. I'll whup it. No colds, no reopened leg wounds, no health issues at all, which is just as well since there's no VA clinic closer than Pahrump, and if I'm going to go there I might as well just drive to the VA ER in North Las Vegas since that's about as far. The apartment was recently remodeled and has a very efficient a/c unit in the living room, new stove, fridge & dishwasher, so those should be good for the year or so that I'll be here. The DSL from Frontier seems just as speedy as the cable internet I had on 14th Street and Kishner Drive (RIP) as well as the wifi at the Candlewood, so no complaints there.

There's a shortage of entertainment options here, since I don't drink and have fallen out of the habit of playing video poker. I have not yet been to the library, which I've been told is pretty decent for a small town like this, but I have been to the used bookstore, whose prices are comparable to what you might find at a library sale. There are several restaurants and cafes here, but no fast food unless I want to go to the other end of town past the Clown Motel (which I haven't been to) for BK or Subway. I admit to hitting the BK a couple of times to take advantage of offers in the app, but otherwise it's not worth the time. There is an A&W downtown but it's a sit-down restaurant and not a drive-in. None of this is terribly bothersome, since with the Internet and the sizable collection of books & DVDs I've built up over the years I really don't need to go out to be entertained.

The downsides of being here aren't really that big a deal. Food is more expensive here than back in Las Vegas, since the only food stores are a Raley's and Family Dollar, and as anyone who's shopped at Family Dollar knows, the good food isn't a bargain. As for Raley's, I stick to buying stuff that's on sale, which means I'm still paying anywhere from 50 cents to a dollar more than I would have for the same things at Walmart, with occasional exceptions. Gasoline is more expensive up here ($2.75/gallon for regular) but then nothing in town is more than a couple of miles away. Despite the fact that their trucks go through town all the time (US-95 is the highway that runs from Las Vegas to Reno, and in Tonopah it's called Main Street). Amazon's Prime Delivery takes seven days instead of two, and only a fool would trust UPS to deliver to their home/apartment with any degree of reliability. Better to just have everything sent to your PO Box (you have to have one, because USPS doesn't do home delivery here either) and pick it all up at the post office, I have learned. One gets used to these things.

Crossposted to the Book of Feces; comment/ask questions there, not here.

So after an exhausting drive from Tonopah to Reno, I checked into the Sands Regency and did dinner at Mel's Diner, which was lavishly adorned with memorabilia from American Graffiti At this point I have to take a brief detour an explain that I completely missed this connection. The movie came out in 1973, when I was in junior high school, and I had less than no interest in it. Not only that, the whole wave of nostalgia for the late 50s and early 60s left me cold; I didn't care for the whole "greaser" culture fad, and the Beach Boys were almost as annoying as the Beatles. (My mom was really into surf music a la Dick Dale and the Ventures, but I didn't catch on to that until years later.) We will not even speak of the monumentally annoying Happy Days.

At any rate, connections to annoying movies notwithstanding, Mel's is a damn fine diner. Good food, reasonable prices, and fine service. They make an excellent club sandwich with freshly sliced turkey breast, ham and bacon, and as I told the waitress, it was nice to find someplace that didn't substitute roast beef for the bacon in the club sandwich. I plan to hit the place again on the rebound from the EHC. I would have done breakfast there on Wednesday, but they didn't open until 0600, my flight was at 0700, and I didn't realize the hotel was so close to the airport. In fact, nothing in Reno was open at 0500, so I wound up grabbing a bottle of water, some protein bars, and a bag of cashews for breakfast and emergency rations.

Speaking of which, I picked up a couple of fellow attendees at the airport Thursday, made the death march to the Hertz/Dollar desk out in the parking garage, and got a Buick Contour. This is about the size of my old Kia Sportage, although it has slightly less cargo space, and is burdened with all manner of electronic geegaws that it took me most of the drive to Clarksville to figure out. It has a keyless lock and ignition system, which are annoying, but otherwise seems nice. I'm not planning on driving much; I passed on today's range trip because I didn't bring Masha, and I already went to Walmart to get a replacement glucose meter, since I appear to have left mine in Reno.

I may be doing a couple of panels, but we'll see how that goes. The con technically started with a heroic fiction panel at noon, and that was good, more of a discussion than a "We're the experts and we're going to lecture you" panel. Opening ceremonies are at 5, and I'll have to work hard to not blow a bunch of money on books and sharp objects in the dealer's room.