Currently Reading: Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler
Do you watch CSI? Not the spinoffs, which are pretty good too, but the main CSI, the one from Vegas. Do you watch that? Ever since we got cable I've been watching it a few times a week. I'm not sure what time it's on CBS or what day, but it's always been on opposite something else I watched so I missed most of the episodes when they first aired.
CC and I were watching it last night on Fox and we discovered something rather interesting: the head CSI guy, Gil Grissom, has the same problem with his hearing that I do. You find this out in the last episode of season 2 (I had to look that up). Now, I've seen a few episodes after that when they first ran and characters would remark about him having surgery or if he SHOULD have the surgery. I knew it was about his hearing but I never saw the episode where he was diagnosed so I always wondered if he had the same thing.
Ok, so for those who don't know, Grissom has otosclerosis. Basically it means the bones in your ear harden. Since they can't move, they can't convey vibrations from the ear drum properly and thus you slowly lose your hearing. Fixing it, there aren't many options. You can get by with hearing aids for a while but eventually the bones will get too hard for even that to help. There's a surgery where they actually remove the bones and replace them with graphite. How well it works really depends on the person. For most people you get at least SOME hearing back. Of course, there's also a really good chance that you'll lose it again. The same thing that caused the bones to harden in the first place will go to work on the graphite replacement.
There are risks, naturally. Like any surgery things can go wrong. You always have the risk of infection and since you're dealing with the part of your head that deals with balance, you certainly don't want an infection there. There's also the risk that your head is wired funny so maybe your nerves aren't exactly where they're supposed to be. If the surgeon nicks a nerve you can lose your hearing entirely in that ear. There are also interesting cases where people lose feeling in parts of their face. Not sure what causes that. It's either infection or nicking a nerve.
Pretty interesting isn't it? Me and the main character from CSI have the same problem. Of course, since he's ficitonal, I'm sure HIS surgery was SUCH a success that you'd never notice the difference :-)
It was handled quite well in the show though. Grissom is sitting there consulting with his doctor about it. She tells him the problem and you can see it sink in on his face. Oh I know that look very well. I've tried it on myself. It's the look that tells you that you're going to lose your hearing and there's absolutely nothing you can do to stop it. At best, you can only slow its progress.
-- Somebody hand my wife a tissue please. She's probably about to cry :-) --
I'm going deaf.
I can't stop it.
It's quite depressing.
You know, it's actually a bit of a release typing that out. No tears please, no pity either. I've never been fond of that. I'll be just fine.
Funny how things work out.
It's very comforting to know I'm not alone.
Thank you, everyone, for helping me get through it :-)
Tuesday, August 02, 2005
Sunday, July 31, 2005
Slow Weekends
Currently Reading: Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler
One of the things CC and I like most about living here in the apartment is our ability to do absolutely nothing on the weekend and not feel guilty about it. Before, when we were sharing the house with my parents, the weekend came and there was always this sort of fog of guilt around everything. We just HAD to do things around the house no matter how many things we'd done during the week. There wasn't any real DIRECT pressure on us, but you could feel it, gnawing at you. We'd do the floors or dust or clean things, and always food shopping.
These days though that's not the case. The apartment stays a LOT cleaner than the house does so right there you can write off a whole lot of work. We're only cooking for two now which means half the dishes we used to have. And with CC coming home from work mid-afternoon, we can food shop any day of the week.
It's such a luxury, or it seems to be anyway. We've had a couple of days like this already. We turn on the TV and watch it. Just that, just watch the TV, not watch the TV and vacuum or watch the TV and move furniture. Just watch, and talk a bit. Or maybe she'll play the keyboard for a while and I'll read the papers online. Slow, relaxing, fabulous. Best of all, 100% affordable :-)
We weren't able to totally goof off this weekend. My mother had ordered some new furniture and she wanted me to go over there and help arrange two rooms. Lots of clashing styles you see so it's tricky to get the right balance. Even more difficult, the pieces of furniture aren't anywhere near the same size so you can't block things off in neat little sections. Maybe one pieces you can center on a wall but if you go with a different piece there, it has to be off-center otherwise the whole balance of the room is shot. Ok, most guys reading this have glassy eyes right now and have no idea what I'm talking about :-)
We did manage to do two important things to day, at least I hope we did. We got both rooms figured out. The furniture is placed well so it's not crowded. There are nice, big open spaces and it's not as drab. I've also convinced my mother to hold off on hanging certain things on the walls until she gets the rest of her furniture. Trust me on this one, where you place two end tables can REALLY make a difference. Plus, she has to get lamps too and that will also affect what goes on the walls.
All and all, a nice visit and we made some progress in the decorating :-)
One of the things CC and I like most about living here in the apartment is our ability to do absolutely nothing on the weekend and not feel guilty about it. Before, when we were sharing the house with my parents, the weekend came and there was always this sort of fog of guilt around everything. We just HAD to do things around the house no matter how many things we'd done during the week. There wasn't any real DIRECT pressure on us, but you could feel it, gnawing at you. We'd do the floors or dust or clean things, and always food shopping.
These days though that's not the case. The apartment stays a LOT cleaner than the house does so right there you can write off a whole lot of work. We're only cooking for two now which means half the dishes we used to have. And with CC coming home from work mid-afternoon, we can food shop any day of the week.
It's such a luxury, or it seems to be anyway. We've had a couple of days like this already. We turn on the TV and watch it. Just that, just watch the TV, not watch the TV and vacuum or watch the TV and move furniture. Just watch, and talk a bit. Or maybe she'll play the keyboard for a while and I'll read the papers online. Slow, relaxing, fabulous. Best of all, 100% affordable :-)
-----
We weren't able to totally goof off this weekend. My mother had ordered some new furniture and she wanted me to go over there and help arrange two rooms. Lots of clashing styles you see so it's tricky to get the right balance. Even more difficult, the pieces of furniture aren't anywhere near the same size so you can't block things off in neat little sections. Maybe one pieces you can center on a wall but if you go with a different piece there, it has to be off-center otherwise the whole balance of the room is shot. Ok, most guys reading this have glassy eyes right now and have no idea what I'm talking about :-)
We did manage to do two important things to day, at least I hope we did. We got both rooms figured out. The furniture is placed well so it's not crowded. There are nice, big open spaces and it's not as drab. I've also convinced my mother to hold off on hanging certain things on the walls until she gets the rest of her furniture. Trust me on this one, where you place two end tables can REALLY make a difference. Plus, she has to get lamps too and that will also affect what goes on the walls.
All and all, a nice visit and we made some progress in the decorating :-)
Friday, July 29, 2005
Avant Browser, Japanese Fiction & Rear Window
Just Finished Reading: The Inugami Clan by Seishi Yokomizo
I have found the perfect browser! Well, it's perfect for ME anyway. I finally found a browser that has all the really nice features of Netscape and Firefox but actually runs like Explorer so the web pages you view don't get all messy.
One of the really great features about Netscape and Firefox is tabbed browsing. This allows you to load multiple web pages in a single browser window. It's VERY handy if you like to switch back and forth between different pages or if you tend to open a LOT of pages at once. Having them all tabbed in the same browser saves a LOT of desktop space and memory. Explorer never got around to putting in that feature so every time you want to look at a new page you have to either dump your current page or open a whole new copy of the broswer. Well not anymore.
Avant Browser is really more of an overlay for Explorer than a separate program. Everything works just like Explorer. Everything is in the same place as you remember it. You just get more control over EVERYTHING. Want to block those pop-up ads? No problem. Lots of browsers do that now. Want to block those sometimes obnoxious Flash ads that slow your system to a crawl while they show commercials? It's just a click away with Avant. No external add-ons needed. Of course, there's the tabbed browsing as I mentioned before, but also you get GROUP launching. Think of your favorites menu. Now, say you like to view 5 specific newspapers every day. You normally go one by one through favorites or maybe on your "links" bar. With Avant, you can load them into a group then launch that group and watch those tabs fly baby! It'll load them all for you in separate tabs for you to view when you want. Fabulous program. You can customize your menus in ways Windows only dreams of! You can change how it looks and, if you download a little sub-program, you can change the skins making the browser look however you damn well want it to look.
I found it over on CNET. I'd been over there reading a story on something and one of their little "also featured" links caught my eye. Did a little reasearch and as it turns out, I'm not the only one who likes Avant. It gets 4 or 5 out of 5 stars pretty much everywhere it's listed. And here's the best part: It's free! That's right, it's free. You download it, install it, done. No ads, nothing. The programmer asks for a donation of course, and if you can afford it, you should be nice and pay him a little something. But the program will run the same, pay or not.
If you want to check it out, head over to cnet.com and do a search for Avant Browser. You can read up on the review and see screenshots before you download it.
I've said it before and I'll probably say it again, everyone should sample a little bit of world literature from time to time. Wait, that sounds too snotty. Forget the "literature" part. Read some books from other countries. Why? Because it sure is a whole lot more fun when you can't figure out all the plot "twists".
I just finished The Inugami Clan last night. Great mystery novel. I've got a rather large selection of books from Japanese authors and the collection is growing. Since I studied English in college and read a LOT of books from Britain and the US, it's become quite easy to figure out where books are going long before I get to the end of the story. The "twists" that the authors put in to shake things up, I can usually spot those FAR in advance. In short, I find too many books to be predictable.
Now, that's not entirely a BAD thing. I mean, you pick up something by Shakespeare and it's got "TRAGEDY" in the title, you KNOW half the cast is going to be dead by the end of the play. Hell you can even predict how some of them are going to die. That's called foreshadowing. The problem comes when every book you see can be summed up as a variation of another book or pair of books. It's a very bad thing when you can write off novels the way Hollywood people write off movies: "oh, it's The Matrix meets Logan's Run" or "It's The Incredibles meets Harry Potter". That's bad for movies and it's even WORSE for books.
What I used to do was just switch genres. I'd read some sci fi, then some generic fiction, maybe something historical, keep things changing. But after a while even that's not enough. You see influences from one novel reaching into the others and you start to wonder if these people actually bothered to check and see if their "unique idea" had already been done a half dozen times. And I'm talking about series fiction. You expect, for example, all the Mike Hammer novels to be about the same. That's why you buy them. I'm talking about the books that are SUPPOSED to be different but aren't.
About the worst thing you can do is read the classics. That sounds bad but it's true. I've read a good chunk of the classics and that really does mess up modern fiction for you. Knowing that a certain story is just a retelling of a book from 40 or 50 years ago, it makes the author seem a bit lazy and it adds to the predictability.
So, if you read a lot and you want to KEEP reading a lot, try looking for books from other countries, the more foreign the better. I tend to head for Asia myself, usually Japanese and Chinese. Their stories build up in an entirely different way and I find that change quite refreshing.
Listen to me, I sound like a critic today :-)
And our final item for today, Rear Window. Ever see it? If not, go out and get it, it's fabulous. I already loved that movie but now that I'm living in an apartment, I've found a whole new appreciation for it.
Basic story is this: photographer, injured while on assignment, is stuck in his apartment in a wheelchair with a broken leg. Bored out of his mind, he grabs his camera and using the telephoto lense, he starts watching the people in the courtyard and windows of the apartment complex he lives in. Each apartment has it's own little story of course, but the main one has to do with . . . nah, you just get the movie and watch it yourself. :-)
What's interesting is seeing how little things have changed over the years. We live in apartment complex now, having lived in houses up til now. And while the layout is different of course, if you watch the people who live here, you can find all the characters from Rear Window (minus the . . . nope, not going to give away the plot).
SO, to recap, go to cnet.com and download Avant Browser, go to your neighborhood bookstore and get something foreign and pick up a copy of Rear Window. Then enjoy your weekend :-)
I have found the perfect browser! Well, it's perfect for ME anyway. I finally found a browser that has all the really nice features of Netscape and Firefox but actually runs like Explorer so the web pages you view don't get all messy.
One of the really great features about Netscape and Firefox is tabbed browsing. This allows you to load multiple web pages in a single browser window. It's VERY handy if you like to switch back and forth between different pages or if you tend to open a LOT of pages at once. Having them all tabbed in the same browser saves a LOT of desktop space and memory. Explorer never got around to putting in that feature so every time you want to look at a new page you have to either dump your current page or open a whole new copy of the broswer. Well not anymore.
Avant Browser is really more of an overlay for Explorer than a separate program. Everything works just like Explorer. Everything is in the same place as you remember it. You just get more control over EVERYTHING. Want to block those pop-up ads? No problem. Lots of browsers do that now. Want to block those sometimes obnoxious Flash ads that slow your system to a crawl while they show commercials? It's just a click away with Avant. No external add-ons needed. Of course, there's the tabbed browsing as I mentioned before, but also you get GROUP launching. Think of your favorites menu. Now, say you like to view 5 specific newspapers every day. You normally go one by one through favorites or maybe on your "links" bar. With Avant, you can load them into a group then launch that group and watch those tabs fly baby! It'll load them all for you in separate tabs for you to view when you want. Fabulous program. You can customize your menus in ways Windows only dreams of! You can change how it looks and, if you download a little sub-program, you can change the skins making the browser look however you damn well want it to look.
I found it over on CNET. I'd been over there reading a story on something and one of their little "also featured" links caught my eye. Did a little reasearch and as it turns out, I'm not the only one who likes Avant. It gets 4 or 5 out of 5 stars pretty much everywhere it's listed. And here's the best part: It's free! That's right, it's free. You download it, install it, done. No ads, nothing. The programmer asks for a donation of course, and if you can afford it, you should be nice and pay him a little something. But the program will run the same, pay or not.
If you want to check it out, head over to cnet.com and do a search for Avant Browser. You can read up on the review and see screenshots before you download it.
-----
I've said it before and I'll probably say it again, everyone should sample a little bit of world literature from time to time. Wait, that sounds too snotty. Forget the "literature" part. Read some books from other countries. Why? Because it sure is a whole lot more fun when you can't figure out all the plot "twists".
I just finished The Inugami Clan last night. Great mystery novel. I've got a rather large selection of books from Japanese authors and the collection is growing. Since I studied English in college and read a LOT of books from Britain and the US, it's become quite easy to figure out where books are going long before I get to the end of the story. The "twists" that the authors put in to shake things up, I can usually spot those FAR in advance. In short, I find too many books to be predictable.
Now, that's not entirely a BAD thing. I mean, you pick up something by Shakespeare and it's got "TRAGEDY" in the title, you KNOW half the cast is going to be dead by the end of the play. Hell you can even predict how some of them are going to die. That's called foreshadowing. The problem comes when every book you see can be summed up as a variation of another book or pair of books. It's a very bad thing when you can write off novels the way Hollywood people write off movies: "oh, it's The Matrix meets Logan's Run" or "It's The Incredibles meets Harry Potter". That's bad for movies and it's even WORSE for books.
What I used to do was just switch genres. I'd read some sci fi, then some generic fiction, maybe something historical, keep things changing. But after a while even that's not enough. You see influences from one novel reaching into the others and you start to wonder if these people actually bothered to check and see if their "unique idea" had already been done a half dozen times. And I'm talking about series fiction. You expect, for example, all the Mike Hammer novels to be about the same. That's why you buy them. I'm talking about the books that are SUPPOSED to be different but aren't.
About the worst thing you can do is read the classics. That sounds bad but it's true. I've read a good chunk of the classics and that really does mess up modern fiction for you. Knowing that a certain story is just a retelling of a book from 40 or 50 years ago, it makes the author seem a bit lazy and it adds to the predictability.
So, if you read a lot and you want to KEEP reading a lot, try looking for books from other countries, the more foreign the better. I tend to head for Asia myself, usually Japanese and Chinese. Their stories build up in an entirely different way and I find that change quite refreshing.
Listen to me, I sound like a critic today :-)
-----
And our final item for today, Rear Window. Ever see it? If not, go out and get it, it's fabulous. I already loved that movie but now that I'm living in an apartment, I've found a whole new appreciation for it.
Basic story is this: photographer, injured while on assignment, is stuck in his apartment in a wheelchair with a broken leg. Bored out of his mind, he grabs his camera and using the telephoto lense, he starts watching the people in the courtyard and windows of the apartment complex he lives in. Each apartment has it's own little story of course, but the main one has to do with . . . nah, you just get the movie and watch it yourself. :-)
What's interesting is seeing how little things have changed over the years. We live in apartment complex now, having lived in houses up til now. And while the layout is different of course, if you watch the people who live here, you can find all the characters from Rear Window (minus the . . . nope, not going to give away the plot).
-----
SO, to recap, go to cnet.com and download Avant Browser, go to your neighborhood bookstore and get something foreign and pick up a copy of Rear Window. Then enjoy your weekend :-)
Monday, July 25, 2005
Summer Reruns
Just finished Reading: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J. K. Rowling
We have achieved synchronisity. Open the TV Guide and have a look at what's showing on cable. Now, get out your newspaper, flip over to the entertainment section and look at what's playing in the movie theaters. Creepy isn't it?
Now, I'm not going to say that remaking movies is a BAD thing. There have been plenty of GOOD remakes. Ok, there have been a FEW anyway. And just because the idea came from a TV show, that doesn't mean the movie will be bad.
You know it's NOT a good sign for Hollywood when they pin their hopes on yet another War of the Worlds movie, a quasi-matrix clone and The Dukes of Hazzard. That last one really worries me. Who was the freak of nature that thought we needed a Dukes of Hazzard movie? If there was ever proof that the people out there on the west coast are smoking something funny, that's it.
The trouble with all of these remakes is their growing lack of quality. No, that's too nice. They suck :-) In any decent year, these movies would be considered filler. They'd be the movies you went and watched BETWEEN other movies. For example, one week the latest Harry Potter movie would be out. You'd go and watch that. Next week, well there's nothing major being released but the week after that there's another Lord of the Rings. Great, but maybe you don't want to wait two weeks to go see a movie. Maybe you LIKE seeing movies in the theater on the big screen and all. So what do you do? You go to the movies and you see filler. Sometimes the filler is good and becomes a surprise hit, sometimes (usually) it's bad but keeps you moderately entertained. The movies this summer all seem to be filler.
Why are they all so BAD though? I think, in that case, they're a little OUT of synch. Take War of the Worlds for example. Obviously you can't make a movie that's true to the book. We've had so many breakthroughs in science for things to happen the way they do in the book. You have to tinker with it a little bit or do it the way it was done in Independance Day. Honestly, these critters burry their ships underground, they wait for years and years to pop up and conquer us, yet they don't even bother to find out of the air is breathable? They have all that tech but they can't make a proper air-tight seal? They have fabulous weapons but they don't have Lysol?
Then you go the other extreme. They really didn't need to tinker with The Fantastic Four the way they did. Ben Grimm didn't need to be married. He's supposed to get a blind girlfriend a few comics down the line, remember? And what's this about Reed and Susan being EX's? Their wedding was one of the biggest events in Marvel history. All the great Marvel heroes showed up (including a cameo by Stan Lee). They could have just stuck with the basics and make minor changes only due to advances in tech.
What's also annoying is that the folks out there in Hollywood decide to make movies based on older movies and TV instead of getting their stories from good books. You'd think by now they'd have figured that out already. Then again, when they DO make a movie based on a book they tend to either pick a really crappy book or they change it too much and you lose the things that made the book good in the first place.
And here's a creepy thought for some of us. You realize that when we're in our 60's they'll be remaking movies we thought were great when we were younger. Just wait, we'll see a new and improved version of Jaws or maybe someone will reshoot the ENTIRE Star Wars series! Of course, we're more likely to see remakes of bad movies. With my luck, 30 years from now there'll be a rush to remake Jennifer Lopez movies. God help us :-)
We have achieved synchronisity. Open the TV Guide and have a look at what's showing on cable. Now, get out your newspaper, flip over to the entertainment section and look at what's playing in the movie theaters. Creepy isn't it?
Now, I'm not going to say that remaking movies is a BAD thing. There have been plenty of GOOD remakes. Ok, there have been a FEW anyway. And just because the idea came from a TV show, that doesn't mean the movie will be bad.
You know it's NOT a good sign for Hollywood when they pin their hopes on yet another War of the Worlds movie, a quasi-matrix clone and The Dukes of Hazzard. That last one really worries me. Who was the freak of nature that thought we needed a Dukes of Hazzard movie? If there was ever proof that the people out there on the west coast are smoking something funny, that's it.
The trouble with all of these remakes is their growing lack of quality. No, that's too nice. They suck :-) In any decent year, these movies would be considered filler. They'd be the movies you went and watched BETWEEN other movies. For example, one week the latest Harry Potter movie would be out. You'd go and watch that. Next week, well there's nothing major being released but the week after that there's another Lord of the Rings. Great, but maybe you don't want to wait two weeks to go see a movie. Maybe you LIKE seeing movies in the theater on the big screen and all. So what do you do? You go to the movies and you see filler. Sometimes the filler is good and becomes a surprise hit, sometimes (usually) it's bad but keeps you moderately entertained. The movies this summer all seem to be filler.
Why are they all so BAD though? I think, in that case, they're a little OUT of synch. Take War of the Worlds for example. Obviously you can't make a movie that's true to the book. We've had so many breakthroughs in science for things to happen the way they do in the book. You have to tinker with it a little bit or do it the way it was done in Independance Day. Honestly, these critters burry their ships underground, they wait for years and years to pop up and conquer us, yet they don't even bother to find out of the air is breathable? They have all that tech but they can't make a proper air-tight seal? They have fabulous weapons but they don't have Lysol?
Then you go the other extreme. They really didn't need to tinker with The Fantastic Four the way they did. Ben Grimm didn't need to be married. He's supposed to get a blind girlfriend a few comics down the line, remember? And what's this about Reed and Susan being EX's? Their wedding was one of the biggest events in Marvel history. All the great Marvel heroes showed up (including a cameo by Stan Lee). They could have just stuck with the basics and make minor changes only due to advances in tech.
What's also annoying is that the folks out there in Hollywood decide to make movies based on older movies and TV instead of getting their stories from good books. You'd think by now they'd have figured that out already. Then again, when they DO make a movie based on a book they tend to either pick a really crappy book or they change it too much and you lose the things that made the book good in the first place.
And here's a creepy thought for some of us. You realize that when we're in our 60's they'll be remaking movies we thought were great when we were younger. Just wait, we'll see a new and improved version of Jaws or maybe someone will reshoot the ENTIRE Star Wars series! Of course, we're more likely to see remakes of bad movies. With my luck, 30 years from now there'll be a rush to remake Jennifer Lopez movies. God help us :-)
Thursday, July 21, 2005
Cedar Fever
Currently Reading: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J. K. Rowling
Back when I was living in San Antonio, every year we'd have Cedar Fever. that was the time when all of the "mountain cedars" which are actually ash junipers I think, would drop their pollen. Actually it came out more like a cloud -- a big, yellow cloud.
Every year, and they may still do this, a reporter would go up into the hill country -- no more than 5 miles or so outside of town -- and stand in a field with the trees. The reporter, usually one of the weather men, would grab a branch and shake. Try to imagine a tree covered in yellow powder. That's what it looked like. The stuff just flys off like powder.
A LOT of people are allergic to that stuff. Actually even people that weren't really allergic to it had problems just because there was so MUCH of it in the air. Sort of like the mold spores. Most of the time they don't bother you but somewhere along the way they'll reach a high enough concentration that'll get your nose running.
Anyway, fortunately here in Memphis we don't have ash juniper trees. Lots of OTHER trees but not those. We've not nice pine trees and pear trees and some oaks and maples. Dogwood, magnolia. And those pain in the ass flowering trees that are the bane of my existance this time of year!
Ahem. Sorry. Sometimes it's hard to control myself :-)
Most of the time, these trees are very nice. Small, green leaves. Not too tall. Nice branches. They don't make much of a mess in the fall. In the spring and early summer they have nice, pretty flowers on them. Some are white, some pink, some purple, and some inbetween pink and purple. However, mid-summer, right about NOW for example, they pollenate. I can actually see it when I walk the dogs. You look inside the flower and there's lots of little yellow clusters in there just WAITING to fall out. If a wind kicks up, they float on out and drop all over everything. If you have a dark enough colored car, you can actually see it piling up on your hood.
We've been a bit lucky the past few days in that it's rained just about every day. These are mostly daytime heating showers but we've also had a few thunderstorms. One actually knocked out power for a little while. Point is, the rain knocks the pollen out of the air so it's not a problem . . . much. But it won't last forever.
As you may have guessed, this is the Memphis version of cedar fever. It's worse though in many ways. What really makes it a pain is that it comes right in the middle of summer. Now, honestly, it's bad enough getting sick in the winter and fall but who wants to be sick in the middle of summer? Bad enough you're all sweaty from the hot, humid air, but then you have to add in a stuffy, runny nose and all that mess.
Makes me grouchy.
Makes me tired.
Makes my head hurt.
On the plus side, it doesn't last nearly as long as cedar fever season in Texas. I suppose that's SOME consolation, just not much.
Almost time for football season! Not that fake, wimpy metric football either! That's right, time for REAL football. It's still early, I know. But pre-season starts in about 3 weeks. Well, 2 and a half now. That's sure to brighten my mood up a bit :-)
Got the new Harry Potter, as you can see from the sub-heading. Really funny story about that one. Ok not REALLY funny but somewhat funny. I'm cheap. I don't like having to pay extra for the super fast shipping because they always charge more than they should. So when I order things online, I usually do so with the assumption that it's going to take at LEAST a week to get to me. Well, that wasn't quite the case with this book.
I was over at Amazon.com Saturday night. I'd been browsing the net checking to see if I was right in my predictions about what happens in this book (and I was). Given what I'd read in the reviews, I decided to go ahead and order a copy now instead of waiting. Saturday night, maybe 10 pm or later, I put in my order.
Tuesday afternoon there's a knock at the door. I get up, check through the peep hole, no one's there. I open the door and there's a package on my doorstep . . . from Amazon.com. I was thinking, surely this can't be the books I ordered Saturday night. I didn't ask for any quick shipping. Hell I just took the freebie shipping which is as slow as you can get. But there it was, my Harry Potter book. I guess they had things wound pretty tight over at Amazon and if you ordered one of these you got processed faster than usual. But even still, I ordered it Saturday night. That means it got processed and the box packed Sunday morning. Had to because the post office here tends to be slow. That box had to arrive Monday in time for sorting and delivery on Tuesday. I wish ALL my Amazon shipments came in that fast :-)
As for a review of the book, I just started it last night so I've only read the first few chapters. It's more like the last three than the first two. I've noticed that the further she moves the plot, the more complicated it all gets. The first two books were fairly straight-forward. The plots weren't all that complex nor the characters too deep. But starting with the third book, and continuing on through the rest, it's been growing more and more complex.
Don't listen to this rubbish that the books are getting "darker" and all that. Books aren't dark. Movies are dark. Pictures are dark. Rooms are dark. What reviewers mean is that the book has a lot more gloom in it. More scenes where things are stating to look bad for the characters and that's really how it SHOULD be at this point in the story arc. We're really reaching the end of the second act in the play so things SHOULD look bad. We've got to be in a position, at the end of this book, where we have doubts about how the story will be revolved. We need to feel a little bit of peril here so that when we finally reach the third act, the next book, our protagonists will be more heroic and our antagonists will fall all the further.
I don't know how she intends to wind up this series. Up until now I've been able to predict most of the major plot "twists" before they happened. In story like this, certain things ALWAYS need to happen before the action is resolved. But when you get to the third act, all bets are off. She can resolve it any way she wants to. Happy ending? Maybe. Tragic ending? Doubtful. Most likely it'll land somewhere in between. Does that mean Harry will make it through? Who knows? But I can certainly see the possibility of Harry dieing a heroic death and as a coda, having Ron and Hermione married, years in the future, naming their first-born after him. But then again, I can picture it ending in a LOT of different ways. Guess we'll all just have to wait and see how she does it.
So there you go, long blog entry for today. Hope that makes up a bit for the lack of posting. Enjoy your summer reading!
Back when I was living in San Antonio, every year we'd have Cedar Fever. that was the time when all of the "mountain cedars" which are actually ash junipers I think, would drop their pollen. Actually it came out more like a cloud -- a big, yellow cloud.
Every year, and they may still do this, a reporter would go up into the hill country -- no more than 5 miles or so outside of town -- and stand in a field with the trees. The reporter, usually one of the weather men, would grab a branch and shake. Try to imagine a tree covered in yellow powder. That's what it looked like. The stuff just flys off like powder.
A LOT of people are allergic to that stuff. Actually even people that weren't really allergic to it had problems just because there was so MUCH of it in the air. Sort of like the mold spores. Most of the time they don't bother you but somewhere along the way they'll reach a high enough concentration that'll get your nose running.
Anyway, fortunately here in Memphis we don't have ash juniper trees. Lots of OTHER trees but not those. We've not nice pine trees and pear trees and some oaks and maples. Dogwood, magnolia. And those pain in the ass flowering trees that are the bane of my existance this time of year!
Ahem. Sorry. Sometimes it's hard to control myself :-)
Most of the time, these trees are very nice. Small, green leaves. Not too tall. Nice branches. They don't make much of a mess in the fall. In the spring and early summer they have nice, pretty flowers on them. Some are white, some pink, some purple, and some inbetween pink and purple. However, mid-summer, right about NOW for example, they pollenate. I can actually see it when I walk the dogs. You look inside the flower and there's lots of little yellow clusters in there just WAITING to fall out. If a wind kicks up, they float on out and drop all over everything. If you have a dark enough colored car, you can actually see it piling up on your hood.
We've been a bit lucky the past few days in that it's rained just about every day. These are mostly daytime heating showers but we've also had a few thunderstorms. One actually knocked out power for a little while. Point is, the rain knocks the pollen out of the air so it's not a problem . . . much. But it won't last forever.
As you may have guessed, this is the Memphis version of cedar fever. It's worse though in many ways. What really makes it a pain is that it comes right in the middle of summer. Now, honestly, it's bad enough getting sick in the winter and fall but who wants to be sick in the middle of summer? Bad enough you're all sweaty from the hot, humid air, but then you have to add in a stuffy, runny nose and all that mess.
Makes me grouchy.
Makes me tired.
Makes my head hurt.
On the plus side, it doesn't last nearly as long as cedar fever season in Texas. I suppose that's SOME consolation, just not much.
----*----
Almost time for football season! Not that fake, wimpy metric football either! That's right, time for REAL football. It's still early, I know. But pre-season starts in about 3 weeks. Well, 2 and a half now. That's sure to brighten my mood up a bit :-)
----*----
Got the new Harry Potter, as you can see from the sub-heading. Really funny story about that one. Ok not REALLY funny but somewhat funny. I'm cheap. I don't like having to pay extra for the super fast shipping because they always charge more than they should. So when I order things online, I usually do so with the assumption that it's going to take at LEAST a week to get to me. Well, that wasn't quite the case with this book.
I was over at Amazon.com Saturday night. I'd been browsing the net checking to see if I was right in my predictions about what happens in this book (and I was). Given what I'd read in the reviews, I decided to go ahead and order a copy now instead of waiting. Saturday night, maybe 10 pm or later, I put in my order.
Tuesday afternoon there's a knock at the door. I get up, check through the peep hole, no one's there. I open the door and there's a package on my doorstep . . . from Amazon.com. I was thinking, surely this can't be the books I ordered Saturday night. I didn't ask for any quick shipping. Hell I just took the freebie shipping which is as slow as you can get. But there it was, my Harry Potter book. I guess they had things wound pretty tight over at Amazon and if you ordered one of these you got processed faster than usual. But even still, I ordered it Saturday night. That means it got processed and the box packed Sunday morning. Had to because the post office here tends to be slow. That box had to arrive Monday in time for sorting and delivery on Tuesday. I wish ALL my Amazon shipments came in that fast :-)
As for a review of the book, I just started it last night so I've only read the first few chapters. It's more like the last three than the first two. I've noticed that the further she moves the plot, the more complicated it all gets. The first two books were fairly straight-forward. The plots weren't all that complex nor the characters too deep. But starting with the third book, and continuing on through the rest, it's been growing more and more complex.
Don't listen to this rubbish that the books are getting "darker" and all that. Books aren't dark. Movies are dark. Pictures are dark. Rooms are dark. What reviewers mean is that the book has a lot more gloom in it. More scenes where things are stating to look bad for the characters and that's really how it SHOULD be at this point in the story arc. We're really reaching the end of the second act in the play so things SHOULD look bad. We've got to be in a position, at the end of this book, where we have doubts about how the story will be revolved. We need to feel a little bit of peril here so that when we finally reach the third act, the next book, our protagonists will be more heroic and our antagonists will fall all the further.
I don't know how she intends to wind up this series. Up until now I've been able to predict most of the major plot "twists" before they happened. In story like this, certain things ALWAYS need to happen before the action is resolved. But when you get to the third act, all bets are off. She can resolve it any way she wants to. Happy ending? Maybe. Tragic ending? Doubtful. Most likely it'll land somewhere in between. Does that mean Harry will make it through? Who knows? But I can certainly see the possibility of Harry dieing a heroic death and as a coda, having Ron and Hermione married, years in the future, naming their first-born after him. But then again, I can picture it ending in a LOT of different ways. Guess we'll all just have to wait and see how she does it.
So there you go, long blog entry for today. Hope that makes up a bit for the lack of posting. Enjoy your summer reading!
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