Parking On The Driveway (Not Driving On The Parkway)

Since I was asked to post a picture of the new driveway, here is a picture of the new driveway!

Unfortunately, it has been rainy and muddy here, and it thus did not stay pretty and pristine for long. But, look! No cracks! No grass growing in the middle! Now if they'd just repave the road in front of it...



(Hopefully this time the picture will work.)

A Pretty Big Pile Of Concrete

Well, the work on my driveway has finally started. Of course, in true Murphy's Law fashion, it got delayed long enough to happen just as I'm about to go back onto night shifts. Sigh. But I'm very, very glad it's finally getting done. And I'll be even gladder when it's finished and I can mark it down as one less thing to worry about.

Here's what has become of my old driveway:



[ETA: Apparently the photo wasn't showing up for anyone but me, because Google Photos does really annoying, non-obvious things with permissions. Sigh. I miss Picasa. Anyway, it should be visible to the world now. Right? Right?]

Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep

I still don't have a new driveway -- apparently there were some delays, and the most recent word I heard was that maybe they'll be here Monday or Tuesday -- but I do have a new mattress.

And, man, mattress shopping got weird since the last time I had to think about it. (Not that I thought about it very much, then. It was basically: I need a bed, this affordable bed frame/mattress/box spring/headboard combination at the local furniture store seems fine, end of shopping.) It used to be a mattress was a big rectangle full of springs, and all you had to do was pick one that seemed to have the right firmness, but while I wasn't paying much attention there was, like, this bewildering explosion in mattress technology.

Anyway. I got a traditional spring one with a cushiony pillow top on it. Which, after sleeping on it for a couple of nights, I am thinking may not have been the ideal choice. The top is foam, and while I'd heard foam beds retain a lot of heat, I figured one layer of it, which supposedly also features some kind of gel to help keep it cool, would be okay. I can definitely feel the difference in how warm it is, though. It'll be great for winter, but is less than ideal in July, when we haven't had a day that hasn't hit triple digits in over a week. Still, if I replace my comforter with a lighter blanket, I think I'll be fine. (I can't sleep without some kind of a blanket. I feel too exposed, or something.) It's also waaaaaay thicker than my old mattress, which is going to take some getting used to, if only because it means I have to adjust my aim when groping for my glasses on the headboard shelf in the morning.

Unfortunately, I'm also not sure it's helping with the fact that my back often tends to feel a bit stiff or achy when I wake up, which was kind of the point of the exercise. (Although, honestly, the old one did need to be replaced, regardless. It was 15 years old, and becoming noticeably concave.) Likely said stiffness has more to do with my poor posture during the day than it does with my sleeping position. (The ergonomics at work aren't bad, but I have noticed I tend to slump a lot when sitting in front of the computer at home. And I do a lot of sitting in front of the computer at home.) I'm also a little worried, though, that in my paranoia about ending up with a mattress that's too firm -- hard mattresses being the source of some unbelievably miserable nights I've spend on hotel beds -- I might have ended up with one that's just a little too soft. Sigh. How on Earth can the human body possibly be so sensitive to such things? Didn't we evolve to sleep on beds of leaves or something?

Tired But Happy

The Night Vale show, predictably, was super awesome. Although it's a weirdly strange experience when what you're used to experiencing as a disembodied voice on a podcast is coming out of an actual human being standing in front of you.

Now I think I'm going to take a bath with some of the expensive bubble bath my mother sent me for my birthday. All in all, not a bad day. Not a bad day, at all.

Another Spin 'Round The Sun

Happy birthday to me! I am 45 today, which... Well, I shall not dwell upon that too much, I guess, except to be glad to have made it this far.

Mostly, I am busy feeling excited about going to the Welcome to Night Vale live show tonight! Although it's also maybe a little bit awkward, because people -- mostly my relatives -- keep asking me what I'm doing for my birthday, and I keep saying, "Oh, I'm going to Albuquerque and seeing a show," and then they ask me what it is, and then I have to try and explain what Night Vale is, and... Yeah, good luck with that.

But! It is going to be very awesome, and I am super-psyched about it.

Now, if I can just finally get my driveway done, it will be a terrific week all the way around. (I was told it would be in the morning, one day this week. Given that the week is slowly running out of mornings, I am beginning to get nervous. But, eh. It'll happen! And that will be one less giant thing hanging around for me to worry about. Which will be an excellent present, so, yay!)

Space Stuff

Also an eensy bit belated, but hearty congratulations to the Juno team, who are all set now to do some really awesome science at Jupiter. Let us know if you find any monoliths, guys!

July Currentlies

Happy belated Independence Day to my fellow Americans! And congratulations to us, I guess, for managing that e pluribus unum thing more successfully than our parent country. Ahem.

Right. Time for the currentlies!

Current clothes: Blue shorts. A Doctor Who t-shirt with the 10th Doctor's (in)famous "big ball of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff" quote on it. White socks.

Current mood: Pretty good. Got lots of sleep today.

Current music: Nothing much.

Current annoyance: They told me "some time in early July," and it's early July now, but I'm still not sure exactly when the contractors are going to be here to do my driveway. Which is understandable, and probably not a big deal. My boss even very kindly re-arranged the schedule so I'm not on night shifts next week, so I'm not faced with the possibility of trying to sleep while people are using jackhammers outside my house. (Unless they end up doing it later in the month, I guess, on the Monday after my night-shift weekend, but that'd probably be more deal-withable, anyway.) But I get really, really antsy when I can't get things pinned down so I can make plans.

Current thing: So, I did finish playing Undertale again, and got my happy ending reward for not killing people. You can also get a very different kind of play-through if, instead, you kill everybody, but there was no way I was going to do that, partly because I didn't want to go through it again, but mostly because of the overwhelming guilt. So I found a YouTube video that'd show me what happens if you do that... and the game still managed to make me feel like a terrible person, just for watching it. Well played, game. Well, played. Anyway. That was definitely worth the ten bucks I paid for it on Steam, because even being done with it, thoughts and feelings about it seem to be lingering in my head and bouncing off each other in interesting ways. Arguably, when you play it as a pacifist, its response is a little too preachy and saccharine, but overall it's a well-aimed commentary on the largely unexamined way that games expect you to progress through violence. And when you put the various possible paths together, there's some fascinatingly meta stuff going on. Also, it has funny skeletons.

Current desktop picture: Still the same 12th Doctor wallpaper.

Current book: The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee. A good (if perhaps slightly over-hyped) book about a super-depressing subject.

Current song in head: Some of the stupidly catching music from Undertale.

Current refreshment: Nothing, but it's gonna have to be lunchtime soon.

Current DVD in player: I just finished disk 3 of season 2 of Community. Which is slightly weirder than season 1. I am not complaining about this. Truth is, despite the occasional musing about whether perhaps our popular culture is spending a little too much time gazing into its own navel, I actually do love the meta. (With or without funny skeletons.)

Current happy thing: I've been taking a little extra time to relax lately. It is good for the soul.

Current thought: Speaking of funny skeletons, I think I'm going back to the Discworld Death novels next. Hmm. Come to think of it, Discworld is also pretty meta. There seem to be some strange, strange patterns in my media consumption at the moment...

Some Reactions To Some Entertainments

In the interest of actually updating once in a while, here's some media stuff I'm currently/recently into, and the slightly odd thought's I've been having about them:

I've been playing Undertale, the adorable game designed to make you feel like human garbage. (Why is it so hard not to kill things? WHY??!) I actually finished it once, but have started over again trying to do things differently, which apparently is what the game expects you to do if you actually want to not feel like human garbage. I cannot remotely decide whether this is brilliant and thematically deep, or just emotionally sadistic. Probably both.

I just finished watching The Wire, which does, indeed, live up to its reputation as a landmark piece of TV drama. And leaves one at the end with the impression that perhaps everyone is human garbage, made so by a crushing and inescapable human-garbage-producing system. (Well, all of us except maybe that one newspaper guy, anyway. And Bubbles, who is so darned likeable one can forgive him anything.) Honestly, I was eager to finally get through this show for sheer cultural literacy purposes, but now that I'm finished with it, I miss it already.

I've also been watching Community, which, mercifully, does not make me feel like human garbage, but which does make me wonder: How is it that tired, annoying sitcom plot points and cheesy, annoying sitcom morals-of-the-story suddenly become entertaining again if the show in question acknowledges, tacitly or explicitly, that that's what it's doing? I swear, part of me, watching this thing, is appreciating the show's ironic approach in a way that is itself ironic (because ironic meta is soooo last decade, amirite?), and it is at about this point that I start to wonder if our culture is about to disappear up its own navel, and whether that's a good thing or a bad thing or what. Eh, whatever. It make for an enjoyable half-hour of television, anyway.

New Mexico In June: It Makes You Not Want To Be In New Mexico In June

I still aten't dead. I've just 1) not had anything particularly interesting to say, and 2) not had lots of motivation or energy for blogging, or for much of anything else, for that matter. We've reached that inevitable stretch of triple-digit days here, the ones that leave you with the disturbing feeling that the sun is actively trying to kill you, and that rob you of your will to live, or at least of your will to do anything other than crank up the struggling A/C -- the swamp cooler can make it livable in my house, under conditions like these, but can't actually get it all the way to cool -- and lie on the sofa with a cold drink and a book. I have a to-do list as long as my arm, and I'm really hoping to get at least some of it done on my days off this week, but I don't think most of it is happening. The yard work, which would have to involve getting up very early to get it finished while the yard is still capable of sustaining human life, is almost certainly not going to get done. No matter how tall the weeds are getting.

Of course, summer is also fire season here. I've already had one person who saw a story about fires in the southwest on the national news ask me about it, so, for the record, no, I'm not on fire, or in any obvious immediate danger of catching on fire. The Dog Head fire, which is the big fire you may have heard about, is considerably north of me. We have had one only a few miles away, though, which I did find a little too close for comfort. The giant, dark plume of smoke visible from here the first day that one was burning was certainly unpleasant to look at, not least because it covered a surprising amount of the northern horizon. It did destroy a couple of houses and some other buildings, which is awful. But I don't think it was in any real danger of coming this way, so the most I personally suffered was some lung irritation from the smoke.

Honestly, fires are pretty much a fact of life in this part of the country at this time of the year. There's at least one right now that's being allowed to burn for the sake of the ecosystem, which evolved to expect a fire from time to time. It's when they encroach on human habitation that they make the news. And the Dog Head has done some terrible encroaching -- well, a couple dozen houses, but that's beyond terrible, if one of them happens to be yours. I think they have the worst of it under control now, though.

Anyway. That's the status of things at the moment: I myself am fine, albeit lethargic, but the state I live in basically feels like some cruel child-god is holding a giant magnifying between us and the sun. But monsoon season should be here in earnest any minute. Admittedly, probably just in time to prevent my driveway work from being done, if my luck holds true. But given the state of things, I'm not sure I could even bring myself to complain.

I Aten't Dead! Have Some June Currentlies.

Current clothes: A bathrobe. I just got out of the shower. Once I'm finished posting this, I'm going to go and put on... I dunno. Jeans and a t-shirt, like usual.

Current mood: Not bad. A little slow-moving, in that heavy, slept-too-much kind of way. Which I've been doing a lot, lately. Maybe it's the summer weather. Sometimes my body just seems to decide it wants to estivate. Not that I'm complaining (or at least not much). Too much sleep is better than too little, especially when I'm on night shifts.

Current music: Nothing, really.

Current annoyance: The company that's going to redo my driveway has been taking a while to figure out exactly when they're going to be able to schedule the work. They just got back to me with "sometime in early July, exact date TBA." I hope they don't end up wanting to do it the week I'm on nights. Or that they'll at least let me know soon enough that I can arrange for someone to cover for me. I really don't want to work all night and come home to the sound of jackhammers outside my window.

Current thing: I guess I have a couple of current things, other than sleep. I've started re-reading some of Pratchett's Discworld books, in between all the other books I have to read. Starting with the Death novels, because Death is awesome. The character, that is, of course, not the phenomenon. I'm also back on a little bit of a making-household-improvements kick. I've finally replaced a bunch of window screens that were shredded nearly to uselessness by time and cats, for example. Which is good, even if I am a bit annoyed with myself for accidentally ordering the wrong color frames.

Current desktop picture: It's still the same Doctor Who picture I've had for ages now. I should probably stop pretending to myself I have any desire to change it.

Current book: Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen by Lois McMaster Bujold. Which is pleasant enough, I guess, but kind of dull. Never thought I'd say that about this particular series.

Current song in head: Billy Joel's "For the Longest Time," ever since a few days ago, when I stumbled across this parody on the subject of entropy.

Current refreshment: Nothing. But I'm thirsty. And maybe a little hungry.

Current DVD in player: I just finished season 4 of The Wire. Which was amazing.

Current happy thing: Looking at my work schedule for tonight, it looks like, unless something goes horribly wrong (which is always possible), it should be a nice, quiet night. I am very much in favor of nice, quiet nights.

Current thought: Between the window screens and the driveway, my next household improvement project is going to have to be shopping for mattresses. Since it finally occurred to me that part of the reason why I wake up with an achy back far too often probably has to do with the fact that my mattress is 16 years old and saggy. This, I am not looking forward to.

This Is A Test. This Is Only A Test.

Nothing to see here, just me testing the Blogger app I installed on my phone, because trying to use the Blogger website on a phone is ridiculously awkward and difficult, and it finally occurred to me that, duh, of course there's an app that's actually designed to be used on a phone. (Not that I update from the phone often, anyway, but, hey, when you went to, you want to.)

Anyway, This seems way easier. Yay.

I May Have Some Currentlies

Current clothes: Olive green sweat pants. My Doctor Who wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey t-shirt. White socks. Black leather boots.

Current mood: Not bad. Today has been that combination of relaxing and productive I most like to achieve on the weekends, marred slightly by the fact that my days off just seem to slip by faster and faster, and today has not been an exception.

Current music: I was just listening to random-shuffle stuff on the iPod while doing some housecleaning. Last song was something by the Goo-Goo Dolls.

Current annoyance: That thing about my time to myself going by too fast. Slow down for a sec, time! I have things I want to do with you! (Stupid wibbly-wobbly stuff. Sigh.)

Current thing: Some of that time (OK, probably too much of that time) slipped past while I was playing Slither. That game is stupidly addictive, I think mostly because it's one of those games where every time you lose -- and you will always, always lose - it feels as if you almost didn't, and all you have to do next time is not make that one stupid mistake, or be just a little bit faster... It's so hard not to just click "play again" to attempt to prove it.

Current desktop picture: Still the same Doctor Who one I've had for ages. I really, really should change that. Will it happen before I do this again next month? Probably not.

Current book: Pretender by C. J. Cherryh, book 8 in her Foreigner series. Someday, in the distant future, I will actually make it through all of this series.

Current song in head: "Temporary One" by Fleetwood Mac, which came up on random shuffle yesterday, and has been playing in my head ever since.

Current refreshment: Diet cream soda.

Current DVD in player: Crimson Peak. Which, like all of Guillermo del Toro's movies, is extremely visually impressive (albeit a bit gory in places), but, like most of his movies, I'm not sure how impressive it is or isn't in other respects. It's got its good points, but... Well, if it's a bit slow, a bit stilted, and more than a bit ridiculous, is that a flaw, or is it just really, really good at capturing the sensibility of the Victorian Gothic stories it's paying homage to? I honestly can't tell.

Current happy thing: No work today! And later I will have pot roast. Mmm, pot roast.

Current thought: Happy Mother's Day to all you motherly types out there (at least in places where it's celebrated today). Me, I'm going to continue spending today reveling in the inestimable joy of not having kids.

Game Of Spoilers: Or, I Would Rather Know Nothing About Jon Snow

I just finished watching season 5 of Game of Thrones on DVD. (And was surprised by how caught up in it I got, too. The last couple of episodes, there was a lot of very loud yelling at certain characters.)

Of course, being just about exactly a season behind, that means I got to the end of season 5 just in time to be hit by an avalanche of season 6 spoilers, everywhere I turn online. Honestly, what is it with this show? I thought Doctor Who spoilers could be tricky to avoid if you waited too long, but GoT fans and critics seem to go out of their way to make sure nobody can miss them. Years later, I'm still shaking my head in bemusement about the article I saw on the prevalence of GoT spoilers that had a spoiler in the title.

I'm seriously beginning to suspect that HBO is planting this stuff somehow, in an attempt to get people like me to subscribe.

Oh, Look, It's May!

And thus endeth the exercise known as Blogs-A-Lot April. I'm never entirely sure if said exercise feels like it has all that much of a point, but one thing I did notice, this time, is that it sort of forced me to pay attention to every day as it passed, which means that, unlike a lot of months lately, April did not pass by in a blur, but seemed to take its time and to go by in something that felt at least a little more like a steady, regular way. And, honestly, if I was going to pick any month to do that, April seems like a good choice. Despite a few oddly chilly days this year, it is, for the most part, a brief, beautiful respite between the major New Mexican seasons of Too Cold and Too Hot, and it's good to enjoy that while it lasts.

Anyway. It being May, you will probably hear much less from me now. You may breathe a sigh of relief if you wish.

I Guess It's Just Crappy Old Invisibility for Me

By the way, I forgot to mention it in the last post, but you know what's really annoying about having very poor visualization skills? My absolute number-one most desired superpower, with no question, is teleportation. I frequently long for the ability to just be places without having to deal with all the incredibly tedious, frequently expensive, and, in the case of cars, genuinely dangerous traveling in between.

And, of course, every time I've heard a description of how teleportation works in fiction, it inevitably starts out with, "OK, first you picture the place you want to go..." Sigh.

Maybe It's Because I Can't Put Glasses On My Mind's Eye

I recently stumbled across this article, "Aphantasia: How It Feels To Be Blind In Your Mind", and got kind of a kick out of it, partly because this guy's realization, astonishingly late in life, that other people's brains are doing a weird thing his doesn't is strangely hilarious, and partly because it's incredibly gratifying to be able to say, "Finally! Someone who's even worse at visualizing things than I am!"

Because I don't get pictures in my head, either. Or not much. When I try, I might get something really vague. Maybe something a bit like seeing a scene through thick, not-quite transparent glass, where you can get a sense of colors and where things are, but not actually see any details? Except even that seems like too visual a description. Once in a very, very, very great while, I might actually get something like a photograph flashing across my mind, but it's always gone in a split second before I can really look at it, and it always leaves me kind of weirded out. I can imagine colors well enough, though. It's not exactly like seeing them, but I can remember what they look like, if that makes any sense. And other senses are no problem. I can imagine smells and tastes and touches, not perfectly, but well enough. And my auditory imagination is great. I can recall or imagine voices in great detail and at will: pitch, pauses, and everything.

But visuals? I took the quiz linked to in the article, and found it immensely frustrating. OK, I might be able to come up with something vaguely resembling a mental image for some of what they're asking me for, individually -- the color and texture of storm clouds and flashes of lightning are surprisingly doable, by themselves, although the sunset they start out asking me to imagine is almost just an abstract idea of a circle on a flat horizon -- but to ask me to imagine a picture, see it in detail, focus on those details and then change them? Yeah, I'm kind of with this guy: How do the rest of you weirdos do that? (The quiz, by the way, told me I was part of only 5% of the population who sucked this bad at visualization tasks and asked me if I wanted to be part of a study when I was done. I'm not sure if I do or not.)

I do think this is at least part of why I'm not great at faces and why I'm really, really bad with directions and navigation: I don't have a good visual referent in my head to match a person or a street up with.

He also mentions people asking him about whether he's a good speller, which seemed like a weird, out-of-left-field question to me a first, but apparently, when a lot of people are trying to remember how to spell a word, they see the letters in their mind? When I need to think how to spell a word, I imagine myself either typing it or writing it, often with my fingers twitching slightly. So, like the guy says, it's muscle memory.

And now, suddenly, all I can think of is how I read that book called What We See When We Read a little while back and spent the entire time indignantly going, "Whoa there, buddy, what do you mean we?!" Speak for yourselves, you mind-picture-makers, you!

Real Life Is Annoying. I'd Rather Just Sequester Myself Somewhere And Read.

I seem to have reached one of those not-infrequent points in my life when I've got a bunch of things that need to be done all at once, all of which have to be scheduled around each other and my weird work hours. I'm working on getting the ball rolling on my driveway replacement, and I need to get my swamp cooler up and running, and I have to make a dentist's appointment (because I still have a filling that needs to be replaced, and although I really wanted to just blow that off for a while after the root canal, the dentist is bugging me about it), and I have to go in for my semi-annual blood test before I run out of my thyroid medicine, and I've got the exterminator coming soon (because it's spring and attempted roach incursions have begun).

I'm trying to let my attitude be, "Yay, look how much I am getting done!", rather than "Aargh, too many things! Too much stress! Want to hide from the world!" I'd say I'm having maybe a 65% success rate.

Windows And Driveways

Oh, right, I forgot that thing Windows 10 did the last time it upgraded, where it kept constantly telling me I had to re-enter my "most recent credential" for my Microsoft account. I'm trying to remember how I dealt with that last time. I think, after trying everything the internet told me to try, I just finally told Windows to ignore the message. Oh, Windows.

In other news, I now have an estimate for my concrete work, and I'm possibly more surprised than I should be by just how close it is to my own rough guesstimate for how much this was gonna cost me.

WTF, Computer?

After all the wailing and gnashing of teeth that Windows 10 caused me last time, until I finally gave up and went back to 8.1, my PC has suddenly decided, with no permission and no warning, to "upgrade" itself again. What the hell, Microsoft. What. The. Hell.

Sigh. Dare I hope it'll behave itself better this time? Dare I?

Sunday Is TV Night

I've been watching the Walking Dead spinoff, and it's... Well, it's not awful, but, I have to say, some part of my brain is tempted to just skip it and watch the aftershow, because the episode they're talking about always sounds slightly better than the one I just watched.

Also, they keep showing ads for Preacher, which intrigues and bemuses me, because I'm pretty sure one of my main thoughts after reading the comics was that, of everything I have read in my life, that was the least likely to ever be filmed.

Maybe I Need A Beryllium Atomic Clock.

Speaking of Doctor Who... It was just brought to my attention that next month marks the 20th anniversary of the Paul McGann TV movie. Which I am having no small amount of trouble wrapping my head around. How is it that I am so constantly blindsided by the steady, predictable passage of time?

Welcome Aboard The TARDIS!

Although there's not going to be any new Doctor Who until Christmas -- *sniffle* -- the BBC has just announced that they've cast the new companion. (Apparently they made a big announcement during halftime at a soccer match, which seems a little odd, but, I guess, very, very British.)

They've also provided a little snippet of video for us, in which we don't learn a whole lot about the character, but do at least get to see that she is amusingly irreverent towards the Daleks:



I'll be looking forward to getting to meet her for real! Even if it won't remotely be soon enough.

RIP, Grunk. Or Not.

My half-orc barbarian only lasted a few weeks, after all. She went down last night, fighting an annoyingly well-armed vampire. And then, just to add oddly hilarious insult to injury, the creepy sorcerer in the party re-animated her as a zombie, so her corpse is still following us around.

I really need to finally bother learning how the magic system works in this game, so I can be the one standing in the back throwing fireballs.

I Ant That Impressed

Yesterday's viewing: Ant-Man. I have to say, I didn't find this nearly as engaging as most of the other Marvel movies. A lot of the humor felt like it was trying too hard, and the "dramatic" dialog was terrible. Plus, the whole concept is so silly that even acknowledging up­front how silly it was didn't make it feel less silly. Well, at least it did have one or two fun little action-y moments. Unfortunately, though, mostly it just made me think about how much I hate ants.

I really, really hate ants.

Random Things I've Been Up To

Some random things I've been up to:

Our team won the pub quiz last night! Apparently our perfect knowledge of fictional orphans made up for our pitiful inability to name more than three Denzel Washington movies from the last decade.

I watched the season finale of Better Call Saul yesterday, and it was fantastic. You know, on one hand it's not remotely surprising that a Breaking Bad spinoff, brought to us by the same people, would be really, really good. On the other hand, though, elevating your comic relief to the status of tragic anti-hero in his own prequel drama (even one that also features a lot of humor) seems, on the face of it, insane. So I'm still impressed that it works as well as it does.

I had to go into work today, on my day off, for a lecture on cyber security, which they require us to do periodically. So now I can warn you all: don't pick strange USB drives up off the ground and stick them into your computer. You're welcome.

This Just In: Customer Service Is Not Entirely Dead, After All.

So, I called the concrete company back, and they said they'd tried to call me but hadn't gotten through. I'd given them my cell number, and didn't have any missed calls, so I think what happened is they had my phone number wrong. This time, I was able to talk to the relevant person right away, and he actually apologized for not being able to come down today, because he had to go to Santa Fe. But he's going to come on Monday. Whew! Maybe I'll finally get this done, after all. (And then I can move on to all the other things that need to be done around this house.)

My Concrete Is Abstract

I've been needing to get the deteriorating concrete of my driveway and some areas around the side of my house replaced for ages now, and, needless to say, it's just getting worse with time. Last year, I tried calling a concrete contractor here in town. The guy told me he'd be around the next day to give me an estimate, then never showed up, and every time I tried to call, I'd either get no answer, or I'd basically get blown off with "We've been busy, I don't know who you are, the boss will call you back later." Which, of course, he never did.

So, on the basis that the rainy season was coming and that seemed like a bad time to pour concrete, I put it off until, well, about now. Last week, though, I finally got off my butt and tried contacting a different contractor. This one is in Albuquerque, but the person I talked to said she thought they'd work down here, and that someone would call me back about an estimate. That was Wednesday. It's now late Monday afternoon, and, guess what? Yup, nobody's called. Sigh.

I'm starting to entertain paranoid ideas about having been blackballed by the state's entire community of concrete contractors for some reason unknown to me. But when I mentioned this to a friend, he suggested an explanation that's, sadly, much simpler and more believable. Namely: "Eh, it's New Mexico."

And again I say, sigh. Well, I'll try calling them back tomorrow. But, really, you'd think it would not be this difficult to get someone to take a few thousand dollars from me.

Admittedly, I Read This Book 20+ Years Ago, So Mostly All I Remember Now Is That It Was Great.

Not much to talk about today, this being one of those weekends where I don't really have much time to do anything but sleep and work. But I figured, for anybody who might be interested and hadn't heard this yet, I'd pass along this recent bit of news that made me happy: Neil Gaiman has said he'll be wring a TV adaptation of his and Terry Pratchett's novel Good Omens. That article also talks about some other Pratchett-based adaptations currently in the works, which I am feeling pleasantly optimistic about.

Now, I just need to do start that Discworld re-read I keep saying I'm going to do sometime...

Our National Ordeal Is Over For Another Year.

I hope all my fellow USians got your taxes done in good time and in good order, and didn't encounter any nasty surprises. Me, I hate filing my taxes beyond the telling of it. Something about those forms just makes me feel colossally stupid, as if I will never understand money at all. Even though my taxes are really, really not that complicated.

I was afraid it was going to be even worse than usual this year, too, as I have an HSA now, plus the e-file site I used last year closed down. But it turns out that H&R Block has free federal and state filing for people who make as little as I do, and their interface turned out to be mercifully easy to use and generally really well put together. So it was at least much less painful than it might have been. Whew!

And now I am not going to think about this again until 2017.

No Images For You!

Fortunately someone pointed out to me that they weren't seeing the picture I included in my last post, or I might never have realized that, in the process of all my uploaded pictures being transferred automatically from the now-defunct Picassa, everything that was once shareable became inaccessible to anybody but me, as does anything new that I upload, unless I specifically put it into a shared album. Which makes sense from a privacy point of view, I guess, but, man, that was not a graceful transition. And figuring out what had happened and what I needed to do about it was just confusing, since the description made "shared albums" sound specifically like albums other people could upload to, not just ones whose pictures you share with others. Turns out, when you make one, it asks you if you want to allow that uploading by others as an option. Would have been nice if that were clearer upfront.

Anyway. I think everything is working now. If you have any problems seeing images here, though, including in older posts, let me know.

(P.S.: Anybody know how to correct Google's mistaken identification of lots of non-car things as cars?)

Goodbye, Gareth Thomas. No One Else Could Have Pulled Off Those Puffy-Sleeved Shirts Nearly As Well.

Has this really been a much, much worse year than usual for hearing about the deaths of people I've never met, but whose work I care about? Or is it just that I've been paying attention more, after a couple of especially hard-to-ignore examples early in the year? Or maybe just that I'm reaching an age where it's beginning to be inevitable? Probably some combination of the three, I suppose.

Anyway, today it's a sad farewell to Gareth Thomas, aka Blake of Blake's 7, a show that reached the coveted status of my #1 fannish obsession for a surprising number of years, long after it went off the air. (And now I've got the last scene of the series playing over and over in my head. I can't decide whether that's appropriate or awful, but I suppose it's pretty much inevitable.)

Thanks for fueling my imagination, Mr. Thomas, and for helping to bring me so much fascinatingly grim-yet-campy entertainment, ever since that first day I saw you on PBS.

Gareth Thomas as Blake, in the first episode I ever watched.

I May Feel Less Self-Conscious About People Looking At What I'm Reading Now.

And today's random thing, just because it made me laugh way more than it probably should have: fake book covers on the subway. (Warning: some of these are pretty crude.)

I Suspect It May Be Very Different If You Play It In A Reasonably Sized City.

Today's time-waster: Corpseburg, which lets you enter an address and then uses a map of the surrounding area as the basis for a simple zombie survival game. I tried playing in my town, and discovered that apparently my strategy for the zombie apocalypse will involve ransacking a bunch of churches and then wandering around in the desert at the edge of town looting abandoned cars until I get bored. Good to know.

Yay, I'm Only Twelve Years Behind On My TV Viewing!

My current Netflix watching: The Wire, season 3. And this show continues to be a constant cavalcade of, "Hey, it's that guy from that thing!" Look, it's Littlefinger from Game of Thrones as a smarmy, scheming politician! Well, nice to see that he's not being typecast at all...

Welcome To My Library

This is pretty cool! LibraryThing, where I catalog all my books -- because how else am I going to keep track of them? -- just came out with a spiffy new interface that makes searching through a collection of books really simple and easy. It's mainly aimed at lending libraries of various kinds, and they have to pay a fee to use it, but they've made it available for free to people who use the site to catalog their personal book collections. Which means that if you want to search through my books, say to check if I have a particular volume you'd like to borrow or to make sure I don't already own a book before you get it for me for Christmas, you can go here and pretend I'm an actual library!

Sorry, But The More Often I Blog, The More Likely You Are To Hear Me Complaining About My Sleep Schedule.

Ugh, I've been having some stupid sleeping patterns this week. No matter what time I go to bed, I have some trouble falling asleep, and no matter how long I sleep, I have trouble getting up. Days when I'm able to, I keep falling back to sleep once or, more likely, twice before I make it out of bed and end up oversleeping, which often makes me groggier than if I'd just gotten up. This was annoying on those days off when I was trying to get things done around the house, as it meant fewer hours up and about to accomplish things. It's even more annoying days like today when I have no choice but to haul my butt out of bed stupidly early for a day shift.

I think this is yet another manifestation of the fact that the older I get,the harder it is to switch myself off night shifts. And, once again, I find myself missing the days when we had enough personnel that it was possible to make a schedule that would let us stay on the same shift for two weeks in a row.

Not That Axe-Murdering And Characterization Are Necessarily Mutually Exclusive.

Followup to yesterday's post: I went to the D&D game feeling like I'd made my peace with the kind of game we were playing and ready to just enjoy pretending to hit things with an axe for a while. Two minutes after I arrived, everybody was deep in a conversation about how maybe we wanted to do something with more role-playing instead. I'm honestly not sure if it's me that has terrible timing, or everybody else.

Oh, well. I did do a lot of hitting things with an axe after that, anyway.

I Might Finally Have Enough Hit Points

Tonight's social activity: Dungeons & Dragons. I haven't really done much tabletop gaming in years, and D&D was never my favorite game to begin with, but a co-worker wheedled me into joining his game a few months ago, and, hey, at least it gets me out of the house, right? It's also not the sort of campaign I usually like: very hack 'n' slash dungeon-crawl-y, with characters that are essentially disposable. Very video game. I was always much more into unfolding stories and actual role-playing, but, alas, my crazy work schedule makes trying to participate in that sort of game an exercise in frustration. I've tried.

I feel like I'm finally getting into the spirit of the thing, though. After playing a series of doomed half-assed rogues -- half-assed in part because I found the Pathfinder character creation a little confusing and tended to err on the side of screwing myself over -- and a couple of fighters who could dish it out but not take it, I got some help from some handy character generating software and rolled myself up a half-orc barbarian who is easily the most munchkin thing I've ever played. We'll see how long this one lasts!

Almost But Not Quite As Good As Finding A Big Stack Of Money

Story of the day: Mysterious Stacks Of Books In NYC! Well, they're not all that mysterious. I mean the article includes the name of the guy leaving the stacks of books around and some quotes from him about why he did it. So... Kind of the opposite of mysterious, really.

Anyway. My bookish heart finds this utterly delightful and is thrilled to know that there are such things in the world. My practical brain, however, can't help kind of agreeing with the people in the comments suggesting that leaving books sitting around outside is probably not the best thing in the world for them.

April Currentlies

I got nothin' else today, so let's go with this.

Current clothes: Gray sweats, Rush concert t-shirt, black socks.

Current mood: Not bad. Halfway between being happy at how much I've gotten done lately and mildly stressed about how much I haven't gotten done. But I'm leaning slightly more towards the positive, moodwise, I think.

Current music: Norm Sherman by Norm Sherman. Which is... an interesting album. Let me put it this way, I listened to it for the first time immediately after an episode of Welcome to Night Vale, and I'm pretty sure it was the weirder of the two.

Current annoyance: No matter how much time I have, the amount of time necessary to do all the things I need or want to do is always greater.

Current thing: I'm taking a little time off this week, since my schedule easily allows it for once, to try to get caught up on various things I've fallen behind on... Housework, yardwork, etc., etc. And I am making progress, but... Yeah, see "current annoyance."

Current desktop picture: Still the same Doctor Who image. I suppose it may actually be time to change it up soon. Even if it is pretty awesome.

Current book: I just read The Adventures of Tintin: Explorers on the Moon, which a friend lent me, earlier today. I'm not entirely sure what I'm going to read next. Something non-fictional.

Current song in head: The "Whalers on the Moon" ditty from the second episode of Futurama. I blame Tintin. Mostly.

Current refreshment: Orange spice tea.

Current DVD in player: Most recently, Spy. Which was cute. Not amazing or anything, but cute, and worth a watch. Also, man, is it nice to see someone who looks like Melissa McCarthy starring in a movie like this. Hollywood generally not only doesn't let us ladies of the rounder persuasion do any ass-kicking (even of the comedic kind), it generally prefers to pretend we don't exist at all.

Current happy thing: Not being at work.

Current thought: We're whalers on the moon! We carry a harpoon!

I Don't Think The Spinoff Is Going To Help.

Dear The Walking Dead,

Congratulations! You are now a serious contender for the title of "most frustrating season-ending cliffhanger ever."

I just cannot remotely decide whether that's a good thing or a bad thing.

Yes, The Eggplant Thing Is A Real Book I Actually Bought.

Yesterday was the local library's big (well, big-ish; it's a small library) Friends of the Library book sale. As always, I told myself I was going to be restrained, and mostly just look for stuff that was already on my wishlist, and, as usual, I left with a big pile of books I had no intention of buying, anyway. There's just nothing like a $2-a-bag price tag to make you suddenly convinced that if you don't go home with a copy of something called Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant, you will somehow regret it for the rest of your life.

Well, at least I can say that my books acquired total for the year is still smaller than my books read total. So far. I did intend to help that along by spending the rest of the day reading, but I was so tired from getting up at noon to buy books after working all night that I had trouble keeping my eyes open. Ah, well. I have the rest of the year to spend working on it, right?

Sometimes I Think We'd Be Better Off If We Just Dropped The Mic On April Fool's.

So, did everyone survive April Fool's Day? I have to say, it is not my favorite day of the year. I quite like jokes that are funny, clever, and creative, and most importantly obviously jokes, and which have no consequences of any kind. Think Geek's fake products, for example, are always good for a chuckle. (And when those have consequences, they're actually the good kind. I mean, enough people loved the idea of the tauntaun sleeping bag that they ended up making it for real, and how cool is that?) Pranks and deceptions, on the other hand, I do not like. Even the most harmless ones are mildly uncomfortable, and the less harmless ones can be incredibly bad ideas.

On that note... Any of you guys get caught by the Gmail Mic Drop? In case you didn't and don't feel like clicking the link, they introduced this new "feature" supposedly for use when you were fed up with a conversation. It'd e-mail a gif of a Minion dropping a microphone and stalking off to all other recipients, then ignore the rest of the conversation forever. They yanked it pretty quickly, after a bunch of people accidentally hit the button on important work-related e-mail. Which isn't too surprising, as it was right next to the usual "send" button, and apparently actually replaced a "send and archive" button a lot of people habitually use. (I don't see that on my mail, myself, though. Maybe you have to deliberately set it up?)

I damned near got caught by this thing, myself, actually. I saw the button show up (on, it's probably worth pointing out, the evening of the 31st in my time zone), immediately figured it was an April Fool's thing -- Google's actually done some really great ones in the past, of the harmless and obvious kind -- and went to their blog to see what it supposedly did. Mildly cute, I thought, if not exactly up to their usual standards. And I went back to click on the thing, because I was curious to see whatever funny "Ha, ha, April Fool's, obviously we wouldn't actually do that!" box would pop up. I damned near did it on a conversation I was in the middle of with a friend, but common sense prevailed, and I tried it out instead as a reply to some link I e-mailed myself ages ago and did not care about. Boy, was I taken aback when I realized that it actually did what it said it did. "Huh," I thought to myself. "That seems... dangerous." And very, very carefully avoided it after that.

Making it all worse, even though they removed it quickly, once it was there for you it didn't go away unless you reloaded Gmail. I certainly saw it on mine all night, until I finally thought to try that.

Just say "no" to stupid April Fool's pranks, boys and girls. Especially if they involve screwing with services used by people all over the world for doing lots of serious and important things. I wouldn't think this would need saying, but there you go.

April Showers You With Blog Posts

So, the last couple of years, in honor (kinda-sorta) of this blog's anniversary month, I've run the experiment of posting at least something, no matter how short, for every day in April. It's a good antidote, I suppose, for my tendency to just wander away for weeks at a time and forget about this place. So, I'll be trying that again this month. Get ready for lots of posts about... things. Of some kind.

Right. That's one day down! That was easy.

Not A "10"

So, my verdict on Windows 10, for the record, is that it'll be pretty nice if they ever get it to actually work. In the meantime, my desktop is now back to Windows 8.1, and Microsoft owes me back the day of my life I spent dealing with that crap. Gaah.

Welcome... to NM.

Guess who's got tickets for the Welcome to Night Vale live show they've finally -- finally -- decided to bring to New Mexico, and which will be playing in Albuquerque ON MY BIRTHDAY?

Yep! Me! Whoo-hoo! Gonna be the best birthday ever! (OK, admittedly, it's not until July. I could get hit by a bus before then, or swallowed up into the depths of the existential void or eaten by eldritch horrors or something. But I will confidently predict it to be the Best Birthday Ever, anyway, because we must always live in optimism.)

I'm extra amused that the show is called "Ghost Stories" and they've managed to book the purportedly haunted theater. See, guys? You come to New Mexico, we receive you in all appropriate style!

March Currentlies

This is at least a couple of days earlier in the month than I usually do this, but I'm working ridiculous hours for the next few days, plus I hardly blogged at all in February. So what the heck. Here we go.

Current clothes: Gray sweatpants. Blue t-shirt from Carlsbad Caverns National Park. White socks. Black leather boots.

Current mood: Okay, I guess. But tired and a little out of it. I've been tired and a little out of it all week. It's not that I haven't been getting enough sleep, more that the shiftwork is increasingly kicking my ass. Last week I did seven days in a row of night shifts, and I'm still not quite recovered from it, somehow.

Current music: Nothing much, really. Well, except for this happy, upbeat version of the Walking Dead theme music. I just listened to that a few minutes ago, and it was weirdly creepy in how not-creepy it was.

Current annoyance: The usual having-a-human-body stuff. Most notably it's unambiguously spring here now, and my allergies are starting to notice. Mercifully, there's not too much of the sneezing-and-snotting right now -- I like to think that's because I got proactive and started the Flonase early, but probably it's because pollen season hasn't really started in earnest yet -- but my sinuses are already giving me problems. Although, come to think of it, they did that sometimes during the winter, too. Basically, sinuses are evil.

Current thing: This is shaping up to be an amazing year of reading so far, both in terms of quality and quantity. Between that encouraging fact, and the tiredness and evil sinuses sapping my energy, all I want to do is cocoon myself on the sofa and read forever.

Current desktop picture: Still the same Doctor Who image it's been for months.

Current book: Visions of Sugar Plums by Janet Evanovich. Because who doesn't want to read a Christmas story in March? I don't know that I'm enjoying it as much as the Stephanie Plum series proper, though.

Current song in head: The last couple of days, it's just been random stuff that's dissipated quickly. Which is an immense relief, since before that I had Jonathan Coulton's "Nemeses" stuff in my head for, like, a week and a half. That's a fun song, but not when it's playing on continuous loop night and day.

Current refreshment: Raspberry ginger ale. Which is an interesting combination of flavors. I'm not 100% sure how I feel about it. I mean, it's good, but I think maybe I like regular ginger ale better.

Current DVD in player: Nothing right now, but yesterday it was the classic Doctor Who episode "The Brain of Morbius." It's a lot of fun to go back and revisit some of the old Fourth Doctor eps occasionally. And Tom Baker was my first Doctor, as he was for a lot of Americans, so he holds a special place in my heart.

Current happy thing: Allergies aside, the weather really is lovely. Also, I finally got the permanent crown put on my tooth, and after a year of sensitivity and root canals and all kinds of indignities, it's quite a relief to be able to chew on both sides of my mouth now without pain or worry.

Current thought: Seriously, all I want to do is sleep and read and read and sleep. But, noooo. I have housework to do, and I've got to go get a haircut, and then I've got some 12-hour shifts to work, and... Bah!

Felicitous Calendrical Adjustment!

Happy Leap Day! I hope everybody has enjoyed their extra bonus bit of February. Me, I spent mine working, then sleeping (more than I really should have), then finishing a good book, then watching last night's episode of The Walking Dead. So, a very full life, really.

February Currentlies

Yes, it's time for this again! And I have taken my own and others' advice and finally replaced the "current worry" with "current happy thing." Because it's much better for my brain to think about happy things than all the stupid stuff it likes to worry about. Anyway:

Current clothes: Gray sweats. This Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy t-shirt, which I bought recently because there was a "buy a t-shirt, get a free pair of socks" sale, and how could I resist? Gray and green wool socks (not the ones I got free with the shirt).

Current mood: Meh. Kind of tired and out of it, since I got less than three hours of sleep today. Basically, I got off my night shift, took a nap, and then got up again. Which at least will make switching over to days happen easily. Well, OK, not easily, but it will make it happen. I'm also trying not to be stressed, which is harder to do the less sleep you have.

Current music: Nothing much. Oh, wait, I guess this cut from the Mad Max: Fury Road soundtrack that a friend linked me to because we were discussing the movie. (I just started playing it again. Man, that is waking me up!)

Current annoyance: Having a house and a human body, both of which are aging and need all kinds of maintenance and repairs.

Current thing: Being a responsible adult and getting important stuff done, even though what I really want to do is to go back into book-hibernation. Yay, me.

Current desktop picture: Still this (spoilery) Doctor Who picture. Because I am not tired of it yet.

Current book: I just finished 21st Century Dead: A Zombie Anthology, edited by Christopher Golden. Which was okay, but nowhere near as good as his first zombie anthology. I'm now about to start Hard Eight by Janet Evanovich, because Janet Evanovich is perfect reading for when you've had three hours of sleep and need some fun, mindless distraction.

Current song in head: There's been a lot of stuff lately, but right now it seems to be "Every You Every Me" by Placebo.

Current refreshment: Nothing. But I should drink some water or something, 'cause I'm kind of thirsty.

Current DVD in player: Most recently, disk 2 of season 2 of The Wire. Which is still very good, although I sometimes feel like I'm only pretending I'm actually following all of it. And I forgot half the characters' names again between seasons.

Current happy thing: In an amazing and inexplicable triumph of willpower, I have bought no books yet this year. Zero! None! I'm starting to see tiny little gaps open up on the TBR shelves where books have come off and not been replaced, and it's terribly gratifying. I won't swear it'll last very long, though. Especially as I have a doctor's appointment in Albuquerque tomorrow, and I may very well talk myself into a stop at Page One while I'm there.

Current thought: I really should get some things done around the house now, and have some food, and take a walk... But I cannot decide what order I should do these things, in, and the indecision is making me want to just give up and flop on the couch instead.

Song Of The Day

Because you want to keep a sense of humor about these things.

The Word Of The Day Is "Root."

Well, my sewer has now been de-clogged and my tooth de-pulped. And I am weirdly amused by how fundamentally similar those two procedures actually are.

Anyway, the root canal was long, tedious, uncomfortable and tiring, but not painful (except for the needles at the beginning), and definitely nowhere near the top of the Worst Things I've Experienced in My Life list. And, holy crap, the pain is gone! I'd gotten so used to it that now every time I pull air past that tooth or take a drink of cold water, I feel genuinely shocked that it doesn't hurt. Mind you, my poor jaw definitely feels like it's been held open with clamps for three hours. But I'm sure that will pass.

The sewer problem, by the way, turned out to be due to roots. It seems that at some point I really ought to have the old iron pipes replaced with PVC, otherwise they're likely to cause more problems down the road, but for now I can flush my toilet with impunity again, and all is well. Whew!

Two Not At All Great Tastes

You know what's even more fun than contemplating having a root canal tomorrow? Hoping that the plumbers I just called will be able to get my sewer line unclogged before my root canal appointment tomorrow. Yay! There is nothing more fun than having your tub back up when you flush the toilet! (Fortunately, I think it's only a partial clog, as this sort of thing is not happening every time. But it did happen last night, and today when I tried to take a shower my toilet started gurgling, so, yeah. Something clearly needs to be dealt with here.)

Seriously, life, do you just think it's funny to pile the most cliched imaginable awfulnesses up on me all at once, or what? SIGH.

Good News, Bad News

So, today I found out I have to have a root canal. But, on the plus side, I also found a way to keep my shoes from coming untied all the time.

I Aten't Dead

Oh, dear, I've been neglecting this blog long enough that people have started to e-mail me and ask if I'm all right. I'm fine! I'm sorry for disappearing! I think two things have been happening this month that explain what I've been doing instead of blogging. First, I kind of went into this state where all I really wanted to do all day was lie on the sofa and shove words into my face. Sort of the book-lover's equivalent of hibernation, I think. So I mostly did that for a while, and then I had to scramble around doing all the responsible-adult things that piled up on me because I neglected them while I was book-hibernating. Which I'm still in the middle of. (Next up: dentist's appointment! Whee!)

I feel like I should have something else to say here, though, so I will offer up a random thought.

Random thought: I have heard that in some places there is a tradition/superstition that if you don't take down your Christmas decorations by January 6, the Devil will come and get you. I am strongly in favor of adopting this here in the US. Hell, I may almost be ready to start believing in the Devil myself if it will get people to take down their Christmas lights. Come on, guys! It's nearly February!

New Year's Currentlies

Current clothes: Green sweatpants. Gray sweatshirt with an Edward Gorey picture of a cat lounging on a pile of books and the words "books. cats. life is sweet." (Because, really, what more do you need? Not even capital letters!) White socks.

Current mood: Very good, happy and relaxed. I spent the entire morning in my pajamas, doing nothing but reading a good book until I finished it. Man, I need to do that more often. It's very good for my psychological health. (The shirt does not lie!)

Current music: Nothing much. Once again, most of my listening-to-things time is going to trying to keep up with a bunch of podcasts. Or at least not fall further behind. My podcast backlog hasn't remotely reached the out-of-control state that my book and DVD backlogs have, but it is constantly threatening to expand in that direction.

Current annoyance: I was totally prepared to say winter, and that I'm entirely ready for it to go away now. Except, uh... it kind of did? The temperature suddenly shot upwards today, with the result that there was a veritable waterfall of melting snow pouring off every roof in town.

Current thing: It's a new year! So I'm going to be more creative and more productive and healthier and just generally all-around better at living! Right?

Current desktop picture: Still this spoilery promo picture released before the Doctor Who season finale. I might leave it up for a while, I dunno. It is a pretty awesome picture.

Current book: I've just started in on a bit of local history with Elfego Baca in Life and Legend by Larry D. Ball.

Current song in head: Nothing at the moment. Although Brain Radio has been unusually suggestible lately, and I fully expect something new to set it off and get it playing something annoying at any moment.

Current refreshment: Mellow Moments tea, which is a really nice delicate blend of peppermint, spearmint, chamomile and, I dunno, some kind of spices and stuff.

Current DVD in player: Disc 5 of season 10 of Supernatural. About which I appear to have no opinions whatsoever. Well, OK, I definitely have opinions about it, both positive and negative, while I'm watching it. But the moment I turn the TV off, I entirely cease to care.

Current thought: Maybe next time I do this, I'll add in "current happy thing" or something to take the place of the "current worry" entry that I eliminated last time. (Which, I must say, was a very good idea.) Seems like it'd be a little redundant this time, though, as it'd just be feeling good and having the day off of work and getting some quality reading-in-the-PJs time in.

2015: The Year In Books And Other Stuff

Happy New Year to all! I hope 2016 is bright and happy for all of you, and brings you many good things.

2015 was, I suppose, a messy, turbulent year for the world at large (although I'm not sure if there are actually any years that aren't), but, looking back, it seems fairly sedate for me, personally. The big event of the year for me was having family visiting and doing the Balloon Fiesta and various trips around New Mexico, in October. Well, that and rain flooding in through my floor again during the summer. Looking back over the blog, I'm not sure I even talked about that here... It was extremely annoying, although fortunately not too difficult to fix: I just had to caulk up a crack in the concrete slab floor. Also on the subject of water being where it's not supposed to be, I think my roof might finally be fixed for good this time, so that's definitely a plus for the year. I also got a new oven, a new dryer, and a new couch and loveseat, so my house is overall a nicer place to be now than it was at the beginning of the year, even if it is continuing to age. Oh, and, yes, I am going to brag about winning that Doctor Who trivia contest forever.

I also read a lot of books, as always. My total for the year was 137 books. Interestingly, 2014's total was 138, and I have no idea how the heck I manage to be that consistent about it. I'm not consciously trying to be! You can see my whole year's worth of reading here.

As is traditional, I include here a list of my favorite books of the year, or at least the ones I gave the highest star ratings to on LibraryThing. It's a pretty good list this year, I think:

Fiction

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
Avatar: The Last Airbender: The Promise by Gene Luen Yang
Sweetland by Michael Crummey
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin
Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie
Tenth of December by George Saunders
We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
Putting on the Ritz by Joe Keenan

Non-fiction

What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions by Randall Munroe
Confessions of a Sociopath: A Life Spent Hiding in Plain Sight by M. E. Thomas
I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban by Malala Yousafzai
Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande
Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better by Clive Thomspon
The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession by David Grann
Size Matters Not: The Extraordinary Life and Career of Warwick Davis by Warwick Davis

A little of both

The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2012 edited by Dave Eggers


We're not going to talk about how many books I acquired in 2015, though. Not at all.

Was I Visited By Some Kind Of Evil Snow Genie?

Ye gods, just because I said the snow was pretty, that didn't mean I wanted all the snow forever. Seriously, it can stop now.

So, That Was Christmas

I hope everyone who celebrates it had a very, very merry Christmas, and that all of you are keeping well through the dark of the winter.

My Christmas was nothing terribly exciting, but there were lovely presents, much turkey was eaten, and much Doctor Who watched, all of which made it entirely my kind of holiday. We even came very close to having a white Christmas: when I got up this morning there was just a little snow on the ground, and the mountain had that pretty dusted-in-powdered-sugar look.

I only wish I didn't have to haul my butt into work so early this morning. It'd have been awfully nice to have had a four-day weekend like a normal person. Ah, well. Guess I gotta pay for all that turkey somehow.

Better Not Pout

I've gotten really bad about updating this blog again, haven't I? Well, let's see what's going on at the moment...

First, Christmas is coming! Although not fast enough for me. I always find this week before Christmas weirdly frustrating. All my presents are bought, all the presents from other people have arrived, everything is ready, and there's nothing to do but wait. And, meanwhile, so much of life is just on hold. I find myself thinking things like, "I want to buy Thing X, but I guess I'd better not, in case someone got it for me for Christmas." And, "I'll have to wait and make that appointment after the holidays." And, "I really need some new jeans and a new pair of shoes, but there's no way I'm braving the mall at this time of year. Better wait. And wait on everything else I need to do in the city, too, since I might as well get it all done in one trip." I'm looking forward to Christmas as much because it means I finally get to unpress the pause button on my life as because of all the nice Christmassy things that go with it. Ah, well. Maybe that's the difference between Christmas as an adult and Christmas as a kid?

Meanwhile, the big news where I live is that they're closing down the Smith's supermarket. This is a huge blow to the town. 66 people out of work -- a significant number in a town this size. And god only knows where most of them are going to go. We've already had enough businesses closing that the place is starting to look frighteningly ghost town-ish. The store isn't actually closing until January, but they're already not replacing their stock. I was in there a couple of weeks ago, and the depleted, denuded shelves made me feel like I'd suddenly stepped into some kind of zombie apocalypse scenario. Just in time for Christmas! Classy, Smith's. Classy. They've got a big banner out front now advertising stuff as much as 75% off. I've been a bit torn between going to to see what I can pick up cheap, and never wanting to set foot in there again because, god, is it depressing, and, also, fuck Smith's, I don't want to give them any more of my money. So far, that second impulse is winning.

December Currentlies

This time out, I'm finally following advice I gave myself ages ago and removing "current worry" from this monthly meme, because, really, the last thing I need is encouragement to dwell even more on the stupid crap I'm inclined to worry about. I am open to suggestions for what to replace it with.

Current clothes: Red sweatpants. Venture Bros. Guild of Calamitous Intent t-shirt. White socks.

Current mood: Kind of restless, in that way that never lets you quite settle down and be productive at anything.

Current music: Nothing at the moment. I'm working on catching up on podcasts again. So many podcasts.

Current annoyance: I may have spoken too soon when I said I was happy with the upgrade to Windows 10. In the week or so since I switched it over, my PC has completely hung up on me twice, which is not something it was inclined to do while running Windows 8.

Current thing: I'm not 100% sure how I felt about everything in the season finale, but in generally, I've been all flappy-hands excited about Doctor Who lately.

Current desktop picture: Speaking of, it's this promo picture for aforementioned season finale. Warning: spoilery. So very spoilery.

Current book: Explorer, book six in C. J. Cherryh's Foreigner series, which I am still making my way through, very slowly.

Current song in head: Nothing at the moment, which is a relief, considering some of the stuff that's gotten stuck in my skull recently.

Current refreshment: Mint tea.

Current DVD in player: Nothing in the player. I have season 10 of Supernatural from Netflix, but I can't seem to work up the enthusiasm to watch it, so I've started streaming season 4 of Bob's Burgers instead.

Current thought: I think my washer just stopped. Guess I better go put my laundry in the dryer. At least then I will have accomplished something useful today.

Like The Cybermen, I Have Been Upgraded.

I just upgraded my desktop PC to Windows 10. I hadn't actually intended to do that just yet, but I found out the hard way that when you click on "Upgrade Later," that doesn't mean, as I had assumed, "download the files and be ready to upgrade later, whenever I feel like telling you to," but rather, "you must now schedule your upgrade for sometime in the next few days, and then you will be irrevocably committed to it, bwahahaha!" Oh, well. Except for the fact that I was sure I'd scheduled it for 2 AM and it instead happened at 8 AM when I was actually trying to use the computer, it seems to have gone remarkably smoothly. And I no longer need those third-party apps I had installed on Windows 8 to bring the Start menu back and enable me to use the "modern GUI" apps in resizable windows.

All of which mostly just means that I'm still waiting nervously to find out which part of it I'm going to hate. But, hey, so far, so good!

I Hope It's A Good Book.

I just took this Do You Have A Book Hoarding Problem? quiz. It told me "SEEK HELP NOW. You are becoming a book."

Is that bad?

I Do Have To Wonder What The Questions Were.

Somebody just sent me a link to this Tweet showing Steven Moffat, Peter Capaldi, and Mark Gatiss losing a Doctor Who trivia contest at an Australian convention. Do you know what this means? (Other than that they are hilariously adorable losers?) It means that I am a better Who fan than the people who actually make the show! Yes! On account of how my team won a Doctor Who trivia contest, and theirs lost! That is clearly the only logical conclusion to draw. (Why, no, I'm not ever going to stop crowing about that accomplishment. You gotta take your victories where you can get them, I say.)

Three Things Make A Post

Because I haven't been updating much lately, and I should post something:

1. I spent this morning resealing the gutters on my house. Well, the ones in the front. The ones in the back of the house still need to be done, but I think I about reached the limit of how much of that job I'm willing to do in one day. Scraping off the old stuff is tedious, and the silicone sealant I bought turns out to be way worse to work with than the caulk I used in the bathroom, especially when you're holding the caulk gun upside-down and at odd angles. As a result, my gutters are now kind of a goopy, silicone-y mess. Sigh. Well, at least it's clear, so maybe it won't be too obvious? Honestly, I'm not sure I care much, as long as it's watertight. Man, I really hope it's watertight. Of course, I won't be able to test it until it dries.

This has been yet another installment of Ways It Sucks to Be an Adult. Hey, when you're a kid, if you have to do a big, annoying chore like that, at least you'll probably get a word of praise and maybe a little extra allowance. As an adult, all you get is the dull, practical outcome of not having leaking gutters, if you're lucky, and the responsibility of being the one to do it over, if you're not.

2. A not-good-news update on Nova-kitty: He's continuing to lose weight. The vet now thinks it is very likely due to heart problems. (I hadn't realized heart disease could cause weight loss, but it turns out it totally can. You learn something new every day.) He can't say for sure, though, because he doesn't have the equipment to do a proper echocardiogram, and I'd have to see a specialist for that. Which... At Nova's age, honestly, the stress of diagnosing and treating the problem might not be worth the small amount of extra time they might be able to buy him. For one thing, seeing a specialist would almost certainly mean a long, long car trip into the city -- probably more than one -- and he freaks out terribly just on the ten-minute ride to the local vet. Not long ago, he got so agitated about it, he peed all over himself in the carrier on the way. It's not a happy thing to do to the poor animal.

For right now, at least, we've switched him from the slightly-higher-calorie-than-his-previous-food cat food to special extra-high-calorie canned cat food, in hopes of curbing the weight loss some. The good news is, he loves the stuff, and can't seem to get enough of it. The bad news is, it's given him diarrhea. I'm really, really hoping that'll go away as he adjusts to the new stuff. Well, hey, at least it meant I didn't have to give him his laxative last night.

3. On a happier (and more science-y) note, I thought I'd link to this blog post celebrating NASA's Swift satellite observing its 1,000th gamma ray burst. This is relevant to my life because the VLBA is one of the "telescopes around the planet, which then (if they can) also observe the burst," as mentioned in the article. Most of the time, we're busy observing something else, but sometimes these things happen at just the right time for us to participate, and I'm always slightly tickled by the fact that I'm essentially being e-mailed by a satellite.

Time For This Again!

Current clothes: Dark gray sweatpants. T-shirt from White Sands National Monument. Not the new one I just got the last time I was there, but the older, more faded, somewhat more battered one, which has now been demoted in status to the kind of shirt I wear on weekends when I'm cleaning the house.

Current mood: Mostly okay, with a slight edge of frazzled annoyance. I don't want to be cleaning the house this weekend, you know.

Current music: The Best of Elvis Costello: The First Ten Years. Except there's something wrong with the CD, and the last two songs didn't rip properly.

Current annoyance: So many things. So many. And it seems like every time I responsible-adult one of them into submission, another, often even more annoying one pops up. Recent examples include some of the stucco suddenly falling off my house (or, more accurately, off the overhang that projects over my front door), and discovering as I went to put today's dinner into the crockpot that the onion I'd bought for the soup was rotten inside.

Current thing: Doing productive crap that needs to get done, when, really, I'd much rather just lie on the sofa and read all day.

Current desktop picture: You know what? I think last month, out of sheer habit and haste, I linked to the same wallpaper I've had for ages, when I'd actually just changed it! It's now this wallpaper featuring certain Doctor Who characters.

Current book: C. J. Cherryh's Defender, book 5 in her Foreigner series, which I am making my way through, slowly but surely.

Current song in head: "Paradise by the Dashboard Light" by Meat Loaf, because somebody requested it on the radio while I was in the car running errands the other day. The DJ didn't seem thrilled about it, but I have to admit, I have a weird fondness for Meat Loaf. His songs are so overwrought and emotionally overblown as to feel almost self-parodic in a way I can't help being amused by, and yet there does seem to be a core of something realistic and sincere to them. And sincere, awkwardly real emotion wrapped up in a ridiculously over-dramatic package seems to me like as good a representation of adolescence as there has ever been.

Current refreshment: I didn't have anything, but reading this, I realized I was thirsty, so I got up and got a diet Pepsi.

Current DVD in player: I just finished season one of The Wire, because that seemed like a giant gap in my quality-television viewing experience that needed to be addressed. And it is, indeed, an excellent show, but it suffers a bit from what I think of as "Game of Thrones Syndrome," which is to say it's got a million characters whose names I kept forgetting or, often, not even catching, and was reduced to making up nicknames for them in my head. (E.g.: Asshole #1 and Asshole #2, Surprisingly Competent Guy, Chubby Cheeks, The Chin, Lt. Where-Do-I-Know-That-Actor-From?, etc.) I did figure out most of them eventually, though. And I sort of have to admire this show's absolute commitment to its lack of a moral center. Every time I'd try to latch on to a character as someone I liked, or thought had integrity, they'd engage in some terrible act of police brutality or corruption, while characters I'd initially dismissed as criminal scum increasingly won my sympathy.

Current worry: I dunno, all the usual crap, really. Most immediately, I'm worried about a tooth that's bothering me. I need to find the time to make a dentist appointment.

Current thought: Well, I rambled a here a lot, and got distracted somewhere in the middle watching Meat Loaf, so this took me longer than I expected it to, but I think now I have to go back and finish up the damned housework. Sigh.

Wibbly-Wobbly Timey-Wimey Talk

Ten years ago today, I stumbled across some service on the internet that'd let you write letters to your future self and would then send them to you years later. So, I sent some, partly because I was bored and partly because it was the closest I could get to time travel. I've gotten, I think, three of them since then, with the most recent one showing up in my inbox today. While I remember doing this, the e-mails always startle me when they come, because somehow I do not understand the passage of time and can never manage to believe it has actually been that long.

I went back and looked at the blog entry I made the day I sent them. It says, "I just sent some e-mails to the me of the future. I bet she doesn't answer them, though. The jerk." Which... Hey! Screw you, past self! I am damned well going to answer this one, right here, right now!

Thus:

Hello, 2015!

Hello, 2005!

This is the Betty of 2005, after a somewhat longer lapse this time. It's getting iffier whether the e-mail address on this thing will still be valid, though it won't surprise me terribly if it is. Heck, I wouldn't put it past you to remember this letter and keep the address just so you'd get it. Did you?

You know, I don't think it has honestly ever even occurred to me to change the Gmail address this was sent to. I think what I was thinking here is that maybe Gmail wouldn't even be around in ten years' time. Ha! Google is our eternal overlord, Past Me, and Gmail ain't going nowhere.

Anyway... how's the future?

A lot like the past, to be honest. Your life certainly hasn't changed very much. You're boring and predictable, Past Self. You're going to have to fully accept that one day. I'll try to let you know when it happens.

Do we have flying cars and robot housekeepers yet? (We've only managed electric-hyrbid cars and robot vacuum cleaners now, in case you don't remember.)

Well, I guess we've got some fully electric cars, and maybe slightly better robot vacuums? Neither of which I own. I do have a pretty bitchin' smartphone, though.

It's a beautiful fall day here in 2005, though I'm stuck at work without even anything much to do.

Whereas I have today off, but I've got a lot of crap to do. And yet, I am taking the time to answer your e-mail, Past Self, even though I have lots of other unanswered e-mails in my inbox. So who you callin' a jerk, jerk?

I am in pretty good health, though I occasionally suffer from bouts of mild hypochondria. Apparently once you hit your 30s, you start worrying about the ol' body falling apart. I hope yours hasn't.

It honestly startled me to realize that particular "Oh, noes, my body may fall apart at any moment!" thing goes back quite that far, although now that I think about it, I guess I do remember feeling that once I passed 30. Well, Past Self, despite some medical adventures, the ol' corporeal form is still quite functional, but the effects of entropy are becoming increasingly noticeable, and that annoying "mild hypochondria" is going to find more things to feed on. I'm trying to let this be a reminder to myself to enjoy that functionality while I've still got it.

And I have a cute 'lil seven-week-old kitten, who, if he's still around, will qualify for senior citizenship by the time you read this. If he is, give him a cuddle for me.

He's ten! That's not really quite feline senior citizen status yet. But, geez, you should see him now, Past Me. He's huuuuuuuuuuuuuge! And not at all grateful for all that work you put into him, but I will cuddle him for you, anyway.

I hope there's some good TV in the future.

Yes. Yes, there is. Oh, Past Self. Your priorities are... well, not going to change any, really.

With any luck, maybe Doctor Who is currently in the middle of another 25-year run.

It does very much look that way! Even if the ratings, from what I've heard, have dropped a bit this year. But, oh, man, the things that little Whovian you has ahead of her! If I told you what some of them were, you'd look at me like I was nuts. But it's going to be a fun ride! Mostly.

See ya in another ten!

I am honestly nervous about that letter. I think I wrote it with some sense of it being completely impossible to predict what my life would be like that far out, and I more than half suspect that nothing much will have actually changed. Although I'm not at all sure why that feels like a bad thing.

Love,
you

Back atcha, Past Self. Take care of yourself for me.

Stuff And Things

I feel like I should really talk about things other than Doctor Who here once in a while. Like an update on what's going on in my own life. It's just that the answer is "not much." Well, let's see what I've got:

Had kind of a bad night last night, due to some... let's say "gastric distress." I woke up about 3 AM, threw up, and immediately felt a lot better, so it was almost certainly something I ate. But, man, it's a bad thing not to feel well when you've been reading about nasty diseases. (I'm most of the way through David Quammen's Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic.) One headache or abdominal twinge, and some completely irrational part of your brain wants to diagnose yourself with Marburg. (Marburg is, of course, a much cooler thing to diagnose yourself with than Ebola, because fewer people have heard of it.)

It looks like the city finally fixed the leaking fire hydrant in my front yard, after at least five phone calls, and it worsening to the point that it was threatening to turn the rest of the street into muddy swampland and not just my yard. Yay.

After years of taking a small amount of hormone for my mildly underactive thyroid, the latest doctor in the local clinic's revolving stable of doctors is insisting I should have an ultrasound done of it. "What do you think that's likely to tell us?" I asked. "Probably nothing," she said. OK, then, doc. At least we'll have another pretty picture of my insides!

I've given up trying to weigh Nova at home. To say that he is uncooperative is putting it mildly. I think I'm going to take him back to the vet in a couple of weeks and let them re-weigh him. He tends to go very still and quiet when he's there, possibly under the belief that veterinarians hunt by seeing movement.

I just checked the weather report to see if we can finally declare the rainy season over, thus removing my excuse for not going out and re-sealing my gutters. (Hey, I don't want to take the chance that it might rain before the caulk dries!) It looks like the answer to that might be "no," but in the course of checking I also discovered that it's supposed to get down below freezing on Thursday. Nooooo! I am not ready for winter! I mean, I don't want to be caulking the gutters out in the cold, do I?

Yeah, that's probably about it for now. Whee, what an exciting life I lead!

The Rest Is...

Happy Halloween! I'm about to head off to a Halloween party soon. Having zero time or energy to devote to coming up with a costume, I decided to go with the lazy Doctor Who fan's solution:




All the points to you if you get the reference!

(But, man, I had not realized quite how difficult it is to take a picture of one's own arm.)

Clearly This Is Just What I Needed For My Stress

(Seriously, what does it say about me that I actually did sort of feel more relaxed after watching that?)

Skinny Kitty Update

Just got Nova back from the vet after having him checked out for his weight loss (as mentioned last time in the currently meme), and... they basically couldn't find anything wrong with him. His thyroid levels were good (which reminds me, I'm overdue to have mine checked). His creatinine levels and white cell counts were outside normal range, but only the eensy-weensiest smidge, so the vet thinks that's probably noise rather than signal, meaning his kidneys are probably fine and he probably doesn't have an infection. They also x-rayed him and didn't see any tumors. Which doesn't necessarily mean there aren't any cleverly hidden ones, but, OK, he probably doesn't have cancer, either. The vet thinks mostly likely it's a gastrointestinal problem, and he's not getting full value out of his food. So they just gave him a vitamin B shot and switched him over to a higher-calorie food. I'm going to keep an eye on his weight -- I actually own a pet scale I originally bought to monitor the fat cat -- and take him back in in a few weeks if he keeps losing weight.

So, for the moment... No news is good news, I guess?

No, I Didn't Forget.

It's much later in the month than usual, thanks to all that vacationy stuff, but, no, I didn't forget the usual state-of-me "currently" meme.

Current clothes: Red sweatpants. Doctor Who t-shirt. White socks.

Current mood: Still kind of tired. Still a bit overwhelmed by the to-do list.

Current music: Nothing at the moment. I'm working on catching up on all the podcasts I didn't listen to while I was traipsing around New Mexico.

Current annoyance: The way taking a break makes you feel so behind on everything once it's over.

Current thing: Books, Doctor Who, the usual. (Man, this is making for a very boring iteration of this meme, isn't it? Sorry about that. Maybe I should have waited until I was more capable of coherent thought.)

Current desktop picture: Still this one.

Current book: I'm almost finished with Firestarter by Stephen King. Apparently I've decided that Stephen King is my default vacation reading now.

Current song in head: Given my current book, what else could it possibly be?

Current refreshment: Nothing, but I'm hungry. I should maybe go and eat one of those zillion snacks my mother brought with her and then left here.

Current DVD in player: Once again: nothing. I'm busy catching up on all the stuff that's accumulated on my DVR in the past couple of weeks. (Note to self: never take vacation at the start of the TV season again.)

Current worry: Nova kitty. He's lost quite a bit of weight over the last several months, so I took him into the vet today to have him checked out. They're going to do some blood tests to check his thyroid and his kidneys, but they wanted him to be fasting overnight to do it, so I'm going to have to take him back in in the morning. He seems mostly OK, otherwise, so here's hoping there's nothing too awful wrong with him, but I am a bit worried.

Current thought: Man, I am hungry. Which is not helped by the fact that I have a pot roast cooking in the crock pot, and it's starting to smell really, really good.

What I Did On My Vacation

Well, the houseguests I mentioned in my last post here, what seems like forever ago, have now departed back to their homes. It was fun showing them around New Mexico, but, man, I now feel kind of exhausted. I blame the lingering effects of getting up at 3 AM, not once but twice, to make it up to the Balloon Fiesta before dawn. It was very cool to finally go, though. Despite having lived in NM for 25 years, this is the first time I've attended. Well, unless you count that one time in college when we drove up, stood outside the fence, and watched the balloons overhead, but didn't actually go into the park because we were too broke even to want to pay the minimal entrance fee. I will say, though, that while I might just possibly be persuaded to get up in the middle of the night and do it again sometime, I am never, ever going on opening day again. The balloons were great. The crowds were nightmarish. Fortunately, Thursday was much better, and well worth it, even if the Thursday night Glowdeo was cancelled due to winds.

We also, among other places, drove down to Carlsbad Caverns and White Sands. White Sands was a little disappointing this time, I fear, as it was very cloudy, and I hadn't realized just how much a lack of sunlight changes the landscape from blinding otherworldly whiteness to, well, big piles of light-colored sand. Carlsbad, on the other hand, astonishes me every time I go there. This time I was thinking, y'know, maybe I've seen it often enough, maybe it's going to start losing some of its appeal with familiarity. But, nope. It's still just as awe-inspiring the fourth or fifth time, or whatever it is for me now. I suspect I could visit it every day and never get tired of it.