shannon_a

Writing in my journal has been constantly lagging lately, as all of my free writing time has been going to D&D histories, and when I can manage it, a little something for Mechanics & Meeples. I think I may have turned a corner for that, but more of that in another (delayed?) journal entry.

For now ...

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Last weekend, Kimberly and I celebrated our 17th anniversary. It's the furniture anniversary, and though we certainly have cat-scarred upholstery, we had no interest in buying anything new, because every new piece of furniture is something that needs to be expensively shipped to Hawaii on a container ship — or wastefully discarded.

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I ran my Burning Wheel game at Endgame on our anniversary. How romantic!

But our celebration occurred afterward. Kimberly and I met at Millennium, which is now conveniently located on College Avenue, between Endgame and home (more or less).

We've eaten there for several celebrations over the years, and this is our third time eating there since they moved to the East Bay (and thus, our third year running). As usual, we had very tasty food ands great service (from our same server as last year, which Kimberly realized and I would not have). Very pleasant!

Since nothing thrilled us on their desert menu, we then went to Smitten Ice Cream a block away, which they slowly make your ice cream while you watch. It was tasty enough, but nothing amazing. But we're already spoiled by Ici, down the street. Mind you, the wait for Smitten to literally create your ice cream was shorter than the typical wait in line at Ici.

Then we had a romantic walk home through the mean streets of north Oakland and south Berkeley, with me pushing my bike and its pannier full of gaming supplies.

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On Sunday, we continued our celebrations by taking BART out to Glen Park. This had been our plan, but Kimberly was somewhat reluctant because of the possibility of a big festival at Golden Gate Park making BART very crowded (especially now that they've stopped running more or extra trains for it, because BART sucks), and I was somewhat reluctant because I was feeling highly congested and wondering if I was coming down with something.

But, we persevered.

BART was crowded. And I was bemused how many dumb/new riders there were. Because if you're experienced rider going to Golden Gate Park you get off at Embarcadero, to catch the N-Judah line to the park as soon as you can, and hopefully get a seat. If you're a new/dumb rider you wait until the Civic Center, which is the last N-Judah crossover. Then you certainly don't get a seat on such a busy day, and maybe pay extra for BART too. So about half the crowd got off at Embarcadero, but about half waited until Civic Center. (And afterward the BART trains we were blissfully quiet, but we'd managed to get two of the last seats at MacArthur, so no biggie.)

We had tasty sandwiches out in the park and we enjoyed a walk out to the end and back along the bottom of the canyon.

And that was our anniversary.

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Unfortunately, I indeed was getting sick. First cold in a couple of years, and in the middle of summer to boot. Very annoying! (But at least I didn't get a cold during any of my many travels last year or during this year's trip to Hawaii.)

It was never bad, but I was a bit under the weather throughout the week. Bleh.

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Other stuff Kimberly and I have done lately.

We finally did another walk from our Berkeley Walks book. We had stopped around this time last year, because the returning students were making the local walks unpleasant for Kimberly, but in July we started with our third, the Berkeley campus walk. We finished it over two Sunday afternoons. Sadly, it was a bit disappointing. The authors seemed to totally punt all the discussion of architectural detail that made the southside walks interesting and also missed many historic details that we were aware of. Ah well. We did still find some interesting stuff on campus. I'd never been to the Women's Faculty Club before, because it's kind of hidden by Strawberry Creek, and I'd never been in the "new" business school, which has a magnificent court yard, where we read during our second walk.

And speaking of reading, we finished Assassin's Fate last night with a 2.5-hour marathon read, which concluded our massive 18-book read-aloud of the Robin Hobbs' 16-book Realm of the Elderling series. (We read two of the three newest books twice, once when they came out, and once as we were concluding the series, two or three years later.) It's our longest series ever to read-aloud (with the 11-book Gene Wolfe Sun series and the 10-book Roger Zelazny Amber series being next up, I think), and it's even more than that by page count, as the books tended to run 500-900 pages(!). Also a magnificent series, full of great characters, and sufficiently distant from the fantasy norm to be truly unique. We'll miss our Fitz and Fool reading, which has been part of our daily life since we started Fool's Assassin almost exactly three years ago. Whew

So, we were supposed to be on a plane to Hawaii today. But drug side effects called it off, alas. (We'll go later this year, no thanks to the horrible bureaucrats and naysayers at Hawaiian Airlines.)

My digestion has actually been better thanks to adjusting and increasing my set of probiotics. But I'm still achey all the time and very careful about what exercise I do. As K. said, I wouldn't be happy spending the whole vacation worried about what I ate and what I did. Meanwhile, K. has also been having some side effects of her own thanks to changing meds. So.

Certainly for the best.

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The sad thing is that I was mostly ready to go. I had lunchmeat, bread, and other such food products planned to run out just before I left. A bunch of library books were all due in the week beforehand, with no new ones ordered. I was even timing the books I was reading to finish up just beforehand.

But now it's back to groceries and books as I like. I've also pulled a few things off the pile of books that was to go to Hawaii. Empire of Imagination, a biography of Gygax, I wanted to read before March, so I'm reading it now. I also decided to read the fifth and final deluxe volume of DMZ rather than save it even longer. (Both because I didn't want to wait and have everything grow more distant in my head and because it's a bigger hardcover that I'd prefer not to heft to Hawaii and back.)

I'm sure I'll have rebuilt my just-in-time schedule by the time we leave for real.

The Cats. Lucy has started being increasingly aggressive toward Callisto lately. It's just hissing and growling, but there's more of it. Mind you, Lucy has never been very fond of Callisto, but this seems to be going in a bad direction at the moment.

I suspect that it's my office that causes most of the contention and annoyance, since both cats like to sit around my desk while I work, and there's also just one food bowl and water bowl in the room. So, I'm in the process of making my office last contentious.

To start with, I tried to deal with the boiling annoyance last week by locking Callisto out of the office during my Thursday and Friday workdays. Poor Callisto, but I figured she got the rest of the house and her mama. But, she yowled at the door for quite a bit. And then she started throwing herself at the door to try and open it (which actually works on our Family Room door, because it has an old lock).

And then she did the wackiest thing ... she ran into the Family Room and started trying to get into the closet that we wedge shut there. She indeed managed to get that door open, because it doesn't latch. Kimberly later said, "What was up with that?" My theory was this: in her little kitty brain, Callisto knew she was blocked by the door from getting into her office. So she ran to open another door, figuring it would lead the same place. Smart cat? Dumb cat? I think the former.

Anywho, this week I got in some cat pheromones to run in my office. I'm also encouraging Callisto to use an alternate lounging place and have moved a second bowl food and water in there.

So far, things have calmed down a bit.

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The Bike. I bought my fourth bike computer last month. Those things keep dying. The first started responding incorrectly to button pushes, the second lost a button, and the third stopped recording the bike's movement. The cheapest one I had, by Schwinn, actually lasted the longest at about four years, while the better ones from Sigma lasted just less than two years and just less than one and a half.

Inexplicably, I got another Sigma. Well, it's not actually inexplicable. They have better feature sets, and their new one that I got has a feature I really wanted: an altimeter. Now, I looked quite a bit for bike computers before I decided on one, and quite a few of them have altimeters now, but they're almost all using GPS. And GPS sucks down energy like no one's business. So I decided I didn't want a bike computer that was unreliable because I had to constantly power it.

So I bought the new SIGMA ALTI instead. I have no idea how it actually measures altitude. Maybe atmospheric pressure or something? It's not entirely accurate. I find that it shifts quite a bit, just sitting in my garage. I might put it away at 180 feet and come back two days later to find it's now at 153. But, it certainly gives the general trends, and over the course of a single bike ride it stays reasonably reliable.

I've been enjoying it quite a bit. I've gotten to see the altitudes of many of the places I ride, and what the actual ups and downs are. (I wish it showed rise over time, so I could understand what slopes are the most difficult for me.) I've found it particularly interesting playing the what's-the-same-height game. For example I've learned that the Berkeley Rose Garden and Jewel Lake (on opposite sides of a ridge) are at about the same height. I've also been able to see which routes are more wasteful due to rise and falls. It's also served as encouragement ("Look at that, I'm almost up to 1000 feet, I can go just a bit further"), which is the same purpose served by the odometer on the computer ("I'm lagging, I should push up to at least 12 mph from this puny 10.")

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Other Entertainment. I wrote this last section head just to be parallel to my last journal entry, where I wrote about "Other Roleplaying". So, what other entertainment have I been doing? As usual that's board games, TV, and books.

Board gaming continues to be my regular Wednesday + Thursday evening activity. My current obsessions are Pathfinder Adventure Card Game (which gets played once a month with my Thursday group) and Roll for the Galaxy (a great dice-rolling game).

TV is in the summer slumps, which means we're watching great things on DVD. Thus far this summer has included Good Wife (season 3), Newsroom (season 2), and Game of Thrones (season 4), with Newsroom (season 3 and final) and Dexter (season 3) on deck. We've also been slowly watching through Arrow (season 3) and Flash (season 1), now that summer reruns finally got us the start of the seasons on our Tivo Of them Good Wife slumped a little from its season 1 greatness and Arrow season 3 just hasn't been as great as what preceded it, while Flash is still developing its cast and mythos. But they're all at least good (with Arrow my least favorite of that bunch) and many are great. We're also watching the embarrassing Big Brother 14 because I can't give up my love of televised strategy games for the summer, even when the summer show is crap.

As for books: I continue with my massive Michael Moorcock re-read. I just finished Phoenix in Obsidian (1970) a couple of nights ago, and am working on my article for it. Other than that, it's what caches my fancy off my to-be-read shelf. I've just started one of the few Sanderson Cosmere books I haven't read, Elantris. Recently finished books include Ship of Magic (a reread of the classic Robin Hobb book, which is still classic), Scream of the Shalka (a Doctor Who book written just before the new series, by Paul Cornell, which was OK, but disappointing for a Cornell book), The Annihilation Score (the newest Scalzi Laundry book which was very disappointing because it took the series in an entirely bizarre and inappropriate direction), and The Girl with all the Gifts (a post-apocalyptic Mike Carey book which left a bad taste in my mouth).

Oh, and I've also been re-reading A Feast for Crows, following our conclusion of season 4 of A Game of Thrones. I pick it up every once in a while and read one or two hundred pages over the course of several days, then I put it back down and read something else. The problem is that nothing happens. It's just a bunch of people standing around and hoping that something happens, but with a few specific exceptions spread out over the book, it doesn't. So, there's no tension and no concern about putting the book down for a week or two. Pfah. The writing is still smart, the characters well drawn. But it makes me that much sadder that Martin lost his way and wrote these two books that just tread water without any purpose.

And that's some of my current entertainment.

This is the place where I was going to write a synopsis of A Dance with Dragon, so I'd know where all the characters were, so that it'd be easier when I pick up the next book, in 2017. But, I find myself just not giving a flying fig, because George R.R. Martin offered up such a disresepectful novel that though I'm sure I will read book 6, it'll only be with a heavy chip on my shoulder.

You know, unless HBO actually manages to keep producing seasons and gets there first, in which case I may decide their version of Westeros is the real one, and screw George R.R. Martin.

Here's what I wrote about A Dance with Dragons over on GoodReads and Xenagia:

A damned waste of a book. Maybe I'll appreciate it more on a second read (if I ever read it a second time), but for now I'm just annoyed. Nothing happens for 600 hundred pages. It took me 5 weeks to plow through this book, mainly due to the fact that nothing compelled me to read on until near the end. 

Even then, half of the events just feel like the status quo being returned after pretending to move away from it, so that *something* could happen in the book. Worse, and this is the point that really irritates me, after wasting all those pages and all that time, Martin drops cliffhangers on us that are sometimes very nearly the same cliffhangers from book 4 or even 3 (written 11 years previous!!). I was the most pissed by Martin revisiting Brienne's cliffhanger from book 4 (which I found the most compelling) with one single page of text that tells us nothing. You wasted 600 pages and you still couldn't finish even this part of the story!?

I think you could have fit everything important in this novel into a hundred pages or so. Making me waste 950 pages of reading time on that causes me to feel very disrespected by the author.

Note to self: Here's a great synopsis-ish. Full of spoilers.

I'm playing around with goodreads, so I may stop using this journal to talk about the non-fiction I read. Here's what I wrote on goodreads about this crappy book:

A horrible book. I actually gave up after 50 or so pages, because it's so bad.

First of all, it feels like a regurgitation of historical facts that the author found, thoughtlessly vomited onto the page with little order and no care for whether they're important or not.

Second, the author often introduces topics without giving them a good basis, leaving the reader trying to figure out what he's talking about. (Frequent references to locations within the Park with no corresponding maps anywhere around often made this problem worse.)

Third, the author is terribly biased. He constantly whines about his hobby horse, that Golden Gate Park shouldn't have any buildings and should be exactly as it was planned in 1870. He also pretty baldly states that the people he doesn't like are bad people, without giving much of the supporting evidence (or, heaven forbid, letting the reader decide for himself).

Well, now I can stop wasting time reading this. Unfortunately, it's put me off a bit from reading the follow-up volume by Herb Caen.

When I finished the third and fourth books of A Song of Ice & Fire (in 2004 and 2006!) I wrote up synopses to help me when I read later books in years to come. Having just finished a (third?) read of the first book, A Game of Thrones, I've decided to do the same. Suffice to say, this entry has extensive spoilers for the first Song book / the first season of A Game of Thrones, so don't read it if you still have those in front of you. ( spoilers ) I'm going to reread A Clash of Kings when we finish watching season 1 of A Game of Thrones on DVD, then I'll write it up here and have all four books in summary.

Finished this mystery novel on the plane yesterday. It's been quite a while since I've read one of the Sharon McCone mysteries, mainly because my local library didn't have this particular book, so I could never pull it off the shelf spontaneously.

This was somewhat of a transition book in the metaplot, as it features McCone setting up her own agency and trying to come to terms with her relationship with her beau, Hy. I was afraid that the latter plot wasn't going to be finalized, but it came to a good end (if a cliffhanger, as Hy offers to talk about his secret background just as the book ends).

The actual mystery concerns a college chum who looks McCone up and asks for her help dealing with harassment he's been experiencing. It starts off really slowly, as McCone just treads water dealing with new harassment as it appears. I wasn't loving it much. Then there's an explosive conclusion to the first part of the book and suddenly McCone is on her own and investigating and all is at it should be.

This book was rather interesting for the fact that it sent McCone across the United States, which I think was a first, though it was still bookended with plenty of good San Francisco background. There was also quite a nice investigatory thread once things got going.

Overall, a good book, as I've found generally is the case for Muller.

After a day of travel, we're back in Hawaii. The travel was relatively mellow, as I've done it enough and I've found ways for it to be more comfortable (not the seats, though, those never get comfortable enough for a ~5 hour trip). 

I had good books, and so I read the first 200 pages of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest and also the comics Age of X and X-Men: Legacy: Aftermath. 

The Girl #3 is thus far terrific. I'd carefully rationed my books, so as not to start anything before we got to the airport, and The Girl was a terrific choice for that approach, because it was immediately engrossing, as it started so close on the track of The Girl #2. As was the case when I read each of the others, I mourn the fact that we lost Larsson after just 3 books (and that he never saw their extreme and deserved success).

Age ot X was the book that I'd saved the longest for this trip. I love reading long X-Men sagas on these long plane rides, and Age of X was the one that jumped out this year. The alternate universe story was great and if anything the X-Men: Legacy: Aftermath volume which interwove with it was even better. It was all told a Mike Carey smorgasbord, as I got to read 11 issues by him over the course of a few hours. I've loved having such talented authors as Brubaker, Fraction, and Carey writing for the X-Men, and I'm very sorry that the last of those--Carey--has now left (though there are still 2 trades to be released, I think). I'm hoping that rumors suggesting that Bendis is coming over in 2013 or so are true. (And I've been happy to hear that Aaron's work on Wolverine & The X-Men has been very good, as his Scalped is great, but nothing else has been particularly notable that I've read.)

Generally, the flight was uneventful. When we got to Honolulu we knew right to go to find the best food court with the nicest garden nearby. We had a few hours layover, but Honolulu is a very pleasant airport (in the right places), so it was no hardship. We had a bit of excitement at Lihue when it looked like our luggage was lost, but it turned out that the airport people had just pulled off our neon green strap (solely there to identify the suitcase) and stuffed it into one of the pockets. Dunno why. Plenty of other straps were in place.

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Meanwhile, we heard briefly from our catsitter (who stopped by our house mere minutes after we left this morning for her first visit of the day) that the kitties were good. We are still concerned for Cobweb, but it's wonderful to get 9 days where we can be concerned without being responsible. We don't have to constantly monitor her food and decide if we want to try an ever-decreasing menu of new options to see if she'll eat better.

And thus I am already feeling more relaxed. I started feeling relaxed the moment I stepped on the plane, to a certain extent, but even moreso when we sat down in that garden at Honolulu and I could feel the cool trade winds blowing through the plants and blowing away stress and worries ... 

I picked up this book from the library because I liked the author-artist's work in another book I recently read, and because the topic of New Orleans before, during, and after Katrina is compelling to me.

A.D. is a graphic novel about New Orleans and about 7 people who lived through Katrina, some of them staying behind and some of them leaving, but all of them being permanently affected by the storm. The people are real and the book is based on interviews with them. It's a brilliant book. 

The clean line drawing which I enjoyed in The Influencing Machine is here, along with a simple two-color palette. Though the color isn't as effective, the art still remains strong. In fact, there are several places where it's breathtaking, and overall it reminds me of why I like the graphic novel form: together its words and pictures combine to create a deeper resonance than either medium could on its own.

The stories are also personal and touching and do a great job of detailing the many different experiences that people had with Katrina.

Highly recommended.