Whatta Fiasco

It was a long and crazy weekend, but we made it through intact. I even managed to fit in a local fencing tournament on Sunday and some time with Ms.K. All my tax returns are in. Work has turned into nonstop nuttiness as we prepare two different web sites to move to new hardware running a new OS and a newer version of Lotus Notes. I’m juggling five different versions of six databases and at least three different versions of another twelve databases. And I just got word that we’ll begin testing on the next version of Lotus Notes right about the time we get these two projects done. Vacation in May? I don’t think so, although I might manage to get a day or two somewhere in there. Not taking any vacation in April was probably not such a good idea.

When I look back on it, it really hasn’t been the case that I’ve been super busy this past week. It’s just that schedules were so out of whack it was hard to get things done. And stress level s were high enough that I wasn’t in the mood to do much reading, let alone writing. Very weird. Life is just very strange right now.
I’ve gotten into the habit of surfing on Firefox with images and page colors turned off by default. When all I’m looking for is some text to read, it works great. But every now and then I have the pretty stuff turned on again and load a site I’ve been reading regularly but had never seen the full design of. It can be a rather unsettling experience. Like walking out to the garage and finding that someone had repainted your car overnight. And the prettier the paint job, the more jarring the experience is. But frankly, given the widespread use of a few decent blog templates, the visuals tend to be repetitive and uninteresting.

You’ve heard the important part already: compared tot he previous two installments, it’s almost not a bad movie. But there’s more. If you’re pregnant and you’re going to die before the end of the movie, we’re not going to waste much money on your costumes, although we will put you in a nightgown that was never designed to be slept in (string of pearls shoulder straps?) and then make you sleep in it. All of our serious thought about camera work ill be spent in minimizing the height difference between Obi-Wan and Anakin when they’re walking side by side. But my very favorite part of the movie was a reenactment of Frankenstein with Darth Vader in the lead role. It’s hysterical.

succumb to more brain candy. Space Opera! With a girl! So, it has decent pacing, plenty of twists and turns, blood and gore, and a few interesting characters who go through some minor struggles and changes. He works a wee bit too hard to convince us that his science is coherent. (Just wave enough numbers around and people will let it pass, right?) And the politics is only slightly more substantial than the science. Still, the book is better than Robert Jordan. I’ll be reading the next one in the series some time.

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Rule number one: don’t try to read this book by nibbling at ten to twenty pages at a time interleaved with other books. It just doesn’t work, or at least it didn’t work for me. I strongly suggest that you make it through the first hundred to hundred and fifty pages first so that you have some sense of what’s going on. Rule number two: follow rule number one and you should find yourself in a bizarre and twisted adventure or two.

[amazon]

It’s the second in a series of fluffy, mind candy, supernatural mysteries. The first involved warlocks. This one was werewolves. Any guesses as to what Grave Peril will involve? (No bets.) It’s fun story telling but the characters are too flat, and a protagonist who could be incredibly interesting has too many visible puppet strings and never seems to change or learn.

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There’s just nothing like coming into work on a Monday morning to an inescapable smell of gasoline. I first noticed the smell and the odd haze cast over the entire downtown area as I drove in this morning. I’m used to haze in the summer, but it’s still a bit early in the season and this wasn’t the usual yellow-brown smog. The radio explained that there’d been a gas line rupture at the power plant and there’d been leakage into the Missouri river. I figured by the time I got to work up on the hill, things would be fine. Oh no. I arrive at my desk to find an email explaining that air quality is being monitored and that the air flow in the building had been adjusted to minimize the smell. Joy joy. It’s not a lot of fun. If I didn’t need to be around to handle some database issues I’d have already followed some colleagues and split for the day.

It’s been a long busy week. Two birthdays, a memorial service, a fencers party, a graduation, and a bridal shower. There were all good events and I enjoyed them all, but I am peopled out. Persons in specific (and small numbers) are just fine. People in the abstract are also fine. But people in general are requested to go elsewhere for a few days. At least, that’s my initial reaction to such a week. Instead it will be a case of going back to a more normal week where I get some fencing done and try to find more time to continue cleaning the house.

A David Lynch film with Isabella Rossellini? Oh yes. But this is a case of a film I waited too long to see for the first time. It’s still a very good film but the impact felt greatly diminished, but Dennis Hopper transcends all that. And Dean Stockwell is charmingly evil.

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Hey, this Ian McDonald fellow is pretty good. I was particularly taken by his deeply flawed protagonist and his sense of the alien. My only real complaint would be that he tries to do so much that he never quite delves into the full implications of the scenarios he sets up. But it’s good entertainment.

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I think my library’s computer system has an odd glitch in it. I checked my account online this weekend when I realized that I had several overdue books that had slipped under the radar. While I was in there, I went ahead and renewed all of the overdue ones to avoid having additional fines pile up. This afternoon at lunch I walked down to the library with the overdue volumes to return them and pay the accumulated fines. I was expecting it would be in the five dollar range because one of them was almost two weeks over due. (Whoops!) Instead, the librarian told me I had less than two dollars in fines, and those were not for books that I was returning today.

What the heck? Weirdness. But it does look as though if you have overdue books at the Kansas City library, you can just renew them online (after the due date has past!) and wipe out at least some of the fines. I still love my library and I’m glad not to owe them much cash (after splurging and buying and actual physical book of my very own this weekend), but that just doesn’t seem right. Now I’m tempted to run an experiment where I let two books get over due and then renew just one of them online before taking them both back to the library. Hmm.
It was a good weekend with stunningly pleasant weather; cool crisp shade laid in strips with warm yellow sun. I had a low-key celebration of turning forty with some friends who cooked dinner and baked some yummy bread. On Sunday we had our fencing club party at a local pub. Supposedly they were going to call us earlier in the week to confirm that we had the upstairs party room reserved, but we never heard from them and hubby got busy and didn’t call them either. So it was a little nerve wracking driving up to the place on a Sunday evening not sure if they knew a crowd was about to descend on. Luckily all was well. We didn’t even have to pull out the fencing gear and take over the parking lot. The poor waitress even dealt with over five hundred dollars of food and drink without wigging out. It was a good evening.

Hold the presses! I just checked the receipt that librarian helpfully printed out and gave me after I paid my fine, and she knows not whereof she speaks, or doesn’t read much, because the receipt contradicts her in oh so many respects. But most particularly in that there were indeed fines for books that I returned today. There were also some small fines for a few books I had previously returned, but none for the books that I currently have checked out and am reading. But it looks as though she had no way of telling from the billing system which books I had already returned. Clearly, if I’m going to return a book late, I ought to make sure I return it to the desk and pay the fine then and there. Or better yet, just renew all my books every week (unlimited renewals) and thus avoid ever having any late charges. Or something like that. So cancel the scheduled overdue book experiment.

Guess what? I’m over forty and I’m still here. Amazing. I think I’ll go declutter my house some more.

A sweet bit of romance from Jean Vigo. A village girl marries a river man and moves onto his barge with him. The course of true love never runs smoothly or the movies would all be boring. And so it is here. Dita Parlo as Juliette is sweet and lovely, but it’s the cats who steal the show. Special mention goes to the kitten who manages to balance on the shoulder of a crazy old boatman as he dances around playing the accordion. And Michel Simon, as the strange old boatman, puts in a strong enough performance to avoid being overshadowed by his cats. There’s also the bonus of a scene near the end of the film showing a high tech audio parlor in Paris.

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