Brief updates
- 14:27 Realized I’m glad that home ‘Net is working, ’cause I sure as Hades can’t research my MarsCon panels at work. My life is weird (good). #
- 20:36 Trying to find a sewing pattern which would be a starting point for Kyle MacLachlan’s House Atreides uniform. #
Sent subspace radio by LoudTwitter
Brief updates
- 21:04 Starr’s parents, sisters, and I just broke into “Paradise By the Dashboard Light” and sang the whole thing together. Kinda awesome. 🙂 #
Sent subspace radio by LoudTwitter
Late celebration
Freaky: We have, on the downstairs TV: the satellite box, the DVD player, a PS2, and now a Wii. I have been thinking all week about getting a switch box so as not to keep yanking cables from the TV’s two RCA left-right-video connections. Yesterday morning, I mentioned this casually to Starr. Yesterday night, Starr’s sister gave me for Xmas an RCA input switching box that she’d purchased days ago, thinking maybe I might find a use for it.
Whoa. Telepathy.
Awesome: Starr is in the dining room playing “Hey Jude” from a Beatles piano book I’d given her for Christmas. This is one of the best “sit down, take a deep breath, and stop fretting about stuff because fretting’s the best way to blow it completely” songs ever written. There’s a lot going on in my life right now, much more than I’m used to trying to keep track of, but I just can’t get too messed up about it all when “Hey Jude” is drifting in from the other room.
Gonna make my award-winning mashed potatoes this afternoon to go with the pot roast Starr started last night at 1am. Should be an excellent Fauxmas dinner.
Come Sail Away
While driving to work this morning, watching the sunrise and listening to the Trance Euphoria podcast, I flashed on a fantasy that’s been with me since I could drive, if not before.
In that fantasy, I’m cruising down the Interstate at standard driving speeds, waiting for a nice gap in the cars before and behind me. At the right moment, I reach down to the center console and hit the switch that activates the repulsor pads in the undercarriage.
As the aft thrusters warm up, I feel the small jerk that tells me that the wheels have lost contact with the ground. I hit the button that folds them away into the fenders, bring the thrusters up to 200 MPH, and climb into the sky, arriving at work in 15 minutes instead of 50.
That little vignette hits me on almost any drive longer than 20 minutes. I love visiting all sorts of places… it’s the actual getting there that I often find so tedious. Needless to say, mine would be the only car that could do this, otherwise there’d be flaming wrecks scattered across the landscape. (And not always other people’s fault, either: last night I almost broadsided someone because I was thinking about my grocery list rather than the road. Bad Borg.)
From the corners of the ‘Net
Just had the odd experience of finding my fiction published on a web site of which I’d never before heard. It’s the Decipher WARS fiction I wrote, and it has their copyright tag on it, so perhaps it’s not ‘my’ fiction; but there’s no dispute that I wrote it.
Looks like they’ve posted all the released WARS fiction, including both of my stories. I have my own copies, of course, but it’s good to see them on the web. Hope they don’t have to pull them down anytime 🙂
Inside the Borg Studio
Yes, it’s Interview Meme time again. kittenchan asked the questions, and I provide the answers. For those who wish to play along at home, the rules are (c’mon, you know this by now):
1. Reply to my post asking me to interview you.
2. I reply to your post with five questions.
3. You post your answers and this meme on your LJ.
1. What’s the craziest (PG) thing you’ve ever done?
PG, huh? Probably in my teens, when I used to attend USS Heimdal meetings in Lynchburg, the other car in our convoy would race us there and back. 110-120 MPH speeds were known to occur. I wasn’t driving, but I didn’t exactly try too hard to talk the drivers out of it, either. I’m glad that we all grew out of that before something terrible happened.
2. Why did you first join VTSFFC?
It wasn’t really on purpose! When Tom Monaghan started attending Tech, he invited me along on a VTSFFC trip to Stellarcon. I rode with Scott Gosik, whom I had not met before that day, and weathered a barrage of cryptic anime references; witnessed a car accident in our convoy and spent an evening in an Emergency Room with a delirious Rosethorn (also a total stranger); and entered the con costume contest on five-minutes’ notice, using random items I’d happened to pack. The general consensus was that I had passed the initiation whether I’d intended to or not.
3. Do you still draw?
I have not drawn anything in 2008, I fear, besides some crude notebook sketches of my Legion of Liberty superhero. I have several drawings in my head, though, and 2009 will not be artless.
4. Do you ever miss working at the TN?
I miss a lot of the people I got to work with at the TN, but I don’t miss the late Tuesdays (even the abbreviated ones) or the desperate deadlines! Honestly, I wish there was a NASA facility in Blacksburg; the work I’m doing now is great, and I still enjoy causally saying “oh I work for NASA” when asked, but I miss my friends and family up there a lot.
5. What’s your favorite restaurant of all time and why?
After lengthy thought – there are two close runners-up – I’d have to say Sakura, over in Salem. The prices are moderate, the service is very good, the decor is attractive and simple, and the food is addictively good. I can name restaurants that have been better in one or more categories, but this is the all-round winner. I think a certain someone’s impromptu reception dinner was held there, as well 🙂 Stinks that I’m 5 hours away, now.
Watching the what now?
My exciting New Year’s: no party, no fancy dinner. I didn’t feel well, so we stayed home to watch the ball drop on one of the excruciating network New Year’s shows. We waited for the countdown to start… and waited… and waited… and looked at the clock to notice that it had somehow become 12:22. Yes, we fell asleep waiting for New Year’s. Such a hardcore life we lead, eh?
I repeat what I said last year: if I’m planning to party or otherwise celebrate late into the evening, I’m at a point in life where an afternoon nap would be a wise preparation – especially if I’d gotten up at 5:30am that day to go to work.
Slept until almost noon on the 1st, because I’m still exhausted from last weekend. (Possibly from all of December.) Starr had to work, so after lunch I headed to Bert and Meche’s, where they got a game of Munchkin Quest going. I’m glad they have it, because I want to play it again, but this time I don’t have to buy a copy. It looks like an average game might well be 4-5 hours, though we had some non-gamer types at the board, which slowed things down a touch.
I’m tempted to say that my New Year’s Resolution is “1280 x 1024, 32-bit color at 60hz”. But in fact, the personal-improvement things I hope to accomplish this year are to keep trying to lose some spare tire, improve my education and my earning power, and do more non-journally writing. I’m especially unhappy with my writing output in 2008; I’ve stared at a lot of empty text files this year. That will be changing.
Happy New Year to all!
