I could listen to Neil Gaiman read the telephone directory for an hour. Listening to him talk about writing and history is even better.
http://news.mpr.org/programs/midmorning/rafiles/thu_midmorn2.ram
(BTW, if you haven’t yet read Gaiman’s new novel, American Gods, run, do not walk, to the nearest bookstore and get a copy. Probably the best new book I’ve read in a couple or three years.
The average person would have kept it. Or sold it.
But when Julie Geisler discovered that she had inherited an 80-year overdue book that belonged to the Boston Public Library, she returned it. The book, a first printing edition of Charles Darwin’s On The Origin of Species, was valued at between $15,000 and $75,000.
http://www.boston.com/dailynews/213/region/First_edition_Darwin_book_retu:.shtml
At a time when everyone seems to be out for themselves, it’s nice to see someone do the right thing for no reason other than because it’s the right thing to do. (In an interview on NPR, Geisler said the Boston Public Library agreed to waive the $1.50 maximum overdue fine for the book *grin*)
I rule at avoiding things. It’s a talent.
One of my last entries sort of wandered around and then ultimately admitted that I wasn’t feeling up to talking about what was really consuming my mental energies at that time. I may still not be, but I don’t want to just vanish, so here’s the readers digest version.
Things really haven’t been going well with and me for quite some time. Over the last five months, things have been deteriorating at a rapid pace, and last Monday it finally boiled over. We had The Relationship Talk.
Some background: Kim and I have been together now for twelve and a half years. We are not married. For large parts of that time, we only had half a relationship — all the commitment, but not of the fulfillment, as it were. So in 1997, I broke off our relationship, in large part because I had met someone else who DID seem to care about me. At the time, I thought that this would be a considerable relief to her, to finally be rid of me. This wasn’t necessarily an unreasonable assumption — we had been sleeping in separate rooms for a long time at that point, and were really more roommates than lovers by then. She surprised me by not only reacting very badly to my desire to move out, but insisted that she wanted to save our relationship. After about 2 weeks of discussion, I broke off with the other girl in an effort to salvage the 8 year investment I had with .
For a while, things were much better. But slowly things reverted back to the same rut. The last year has been especially wearing on me, as I had begun to feel like I was really being used — one of the remarks I made on Monday was that it was like having a job without a paycheck — I had all the responsibilities and obligations, but none of the benefits. On the recent trip to Knoxville, I was able to discuss some of this with Kender, but I still had no clear idea what I wanted to do about it. One complication is that I’m the only income earner in our house, and we only have one car (which is hers). If I just walk out, I essentially leave behind a person I do still care about and four cats with no way to pay any bills. If I had it in me not to care about that, it’d be easier, but I don’t. So after the initial fight, she went upstairs to talk to a friend on the phone for a couple of hours, and I sat downstairs and felt miserable. When she came downstairs we talked some more, and I outlined why I was unhappy and what sort of things I’d need to see happening to think it was worth trying again — we’ve “tried to work it out” before, and it always seemed like I put in all of the effort. Never again.
I’m still not convinced it can be worked out. I’m willing to give it some time to see how she wants to play it, but the balls definitely in her court now. Part of me wishes that it was all over and I could just work on being miserable and piecing my life back together. Part of me really wishes I could find in the person I’m with the person I fell in love with over a decade ago. And part of me just wishes I knew how it was going to work out.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/state/la-000056553jul10.story?coll=la%2Dnews%2Ds
Now here’s a fun can of worms. You own a satellite, which is in orbit. It’s out somewhere over the equator somewhere, and nowhere near where you actually have your business offices located. But the country decided that hey, you’re here, and it’s worth X million dollars, so let’s charge property taxes on it as if it were here where your office is.
I’m not sure what to think of this. What happens when a company has multiple headquarters? Who’s liable for the tax then? If I have an office in Gwinnett Co and another in Fulton, I don’t owe Gwinnett Co. property taxes on my office in Fulton. So it seems to me that the taxes on the satellite are owned to whoever has jurisdiction over County Space.
But hey, anything for an extra buck.
I’ve been up since a little after midnight, since I had to be at work at 3am for a maintenance window. We were doing some fairly routine upgrades to the database server — adding a hardware RAID enclosure and also swapping the 1GB of ram it had for 4GB of memory.
Everything went well except for the RAM. I think that one of the DIMMs is bad, or else the slot is bad, because we put 12 DIMMS in and it only saw 11 of them. Worse, this machine (Sun E450) expects its DIMMs in groups of 4, so it only sees 3GB of the 4GB we put in. Yuck. We took it down and tried to reseat everything — I think it’s the slot that’s bad, it seemed loose and now I wonder if it had a hairline crack that was made worse by the removing and inserting of new sticks. Oh well, the window’s closed now and I can’t take the server down again. We’ll have to reschedule another time to take it down and get in and look at it.
My friend vila_resthal from over in Athens was wanting to come and see deidrecorwyn and me tonight. I’d really like him too, even though the house is a wreck. *sigh* He suggested the visit on Monday, and I said to deidrecorwyn, “If he’s coming over, we need to at least pick up the living room”, but nothing’s been done. She’ll say it’s my fault for not helping, but I work all day and she’s at home, and it’s not like I asked for the place to be turned upside down.
Oh well, Editor’s seen our house as a wreck before, so it won’t surprise him any. I’ll probably leave here at noon, so maybe instead of catching a nap before my doctor’s appointment this afternoon I’ll clean the living room. That way at least there’ll be somewhere to sit down.
I admit, I’m easily amused. This was in my friend Rommie’s private journal today:
http://www.jamaicaplace.com/item_JP-00546-g.htm
Just when you thought you’d seen everything…
I’m going to hell.
Those of you who know me well may consider this an unsurprising revelation, but it’s official. Tonight I committed what has to be a serious and unforgivable sin. You see, in order to stretch our money as far as possible, I try to drink iced tea instead of other various beverages which tend to be more expensive. So I went to brew a fresh pot of tea, and discover….
We’re out of Tetley.
I thought for sure we had some. I looked through all the cabinets, even the ones down near the floor where the extra stuff is kept. No luck. But I did find something. So, out of desperation, a pot of tea was born.
I made iced tea with good Darjeeling.
And it’s good.
I’m going to hell.
Ah, vacation is a lovely thing.
Kitty and I went up on Tuesday to visit Shadow and Kender in their brand new house in Knoxville, TN. (Well, new to them.). Kender is the person I refer to as my “sister-by-choice”, because while we aren’t blood-related, she fills that need in my life for a sibling that I never had. She’s been commuting from Nashville to Knoxville (spending most of the week in her parents home in Spring City, an hour away), so that she could work on finishing up her PhD in Medieval Literature. Shadow finally finished his residency and got a job at a hospital in Oak Ridge, so that Kender wouldn’t have so far to go. They were just getting moved in when we came up, but she was still a marvelous hostess.
This was also the first opportunity I’d had since last year to see their daughter, who is now 3, and now capable of holding coherent (if somewhat disjointed) conversations. She really is a darling…there are times I regret my own childlessness. Not often, but sometimes…
I ran an AD&D adventure for Shadow and Kender, since they haven’t really had the opportunity to play since they left Illinois a few years ago. Everyone seemed to have fun.
Friday was another Monkees concert. This is deidrecorwyn‘s current obsession. I enjoy the music, but could really do without the obsessive nature of the fans they tend to attract. More on that another time.
We drove back down on Saturday afternoon, and I got back in time to run down to SFSummer to play some music with Harper. I got called home a lot sooner than I’d have liked, but I had a great time while I was there.
Hrm. I don’t seem to be very talkative today. I think I’m really not ready to air in public the things that are really heavy on my mind right now. Maybe later.
Life for me can get very, very busy.
Monday was a good day. My birthday, hurrah, and all that. I went into work, because I’m taking most of the week of July 4th to go and visit my sister-by-choice (more on that later), her husband, and their daughter, in their new home in Knoxville, TN. They’re wonderful people, and we don’t visit them often enough, so I’m really looking forward to the trip.
Monday evening deidrecorwyn and I went out to dinner with telynor and her husband. deidrecorwyn wanted to go to a sushi place, and telynor knows where all the good sushi places are, so I said sure, as long as they serve actual food there as well. I don’t get along well with the idea of sushi. I don’t mind that other people eat it, but it’s just not really my idea of a good time. Fortunately, this place also had excellent teriyaki. I had teriyaki beef and shrimp fried rice, and deidrecorwyn had this massive sushi platter that could feed three people, from the look of it. Ah, sweet decadence. She took about half of it home with her for lunch the next day.
Tuesday I went and got my hair cut. Nothing drastic, just thinned a bit and trimmed so I look less like a wildman come down from the mountain. I’m trying to get the sides to grow out the same length as the back. We’ll see how that goes. Long ago, someone said “Oh, I know just what to do wit your hair”, and it’s never quite recovered. I suppose I really should just have it all chopped off and let it grow back, but I’ve never quite had the gumption to do so.
Wednesday was a long day. One of our core servers at work had a pair of software RAID-5 disk arrays from back when you actually made 20GB disks out of 12 2GB disks. I’d argued successfully that once these disks started to go bad, it’d be nearly impossible to replace or repair them, and that we really should be using hardware RAID devices anyway. So having acquired the hardware for this task, I’d been slowly moving files from the old devices to the new one. I was down at last to the directories that couldn’t easily be moved while the machine was up and running. I got to work at 3am, brought that machine down into single-user mode, and moved that last bit, which took about an hour, all told. Then, since I had to leave early that day for a doctors appointment, I just stayed at work. I slipped out at 7am for breakfast, and just worked until 4pm, after which I went to my doctor’s appointment and then came home and crashed.
Today was dull. After work I dropped by Borders and Barnes & Nobles in search of Tove Janssen books. I heard yesterday that she had passed away, and i realized that I had LOVED the Moomin books when I was a child, and that I no longer had any copies of them. I did manage to find one (Finn Family Moomintroll), as well as a Rocky and Bullwinkle book in the bargain books section. Borders is apparently having a blowout clearance sale, and I found a Stan Rogers CD I didn’t have (Between the Breaks Live) for 75% off. Sometimes the good guys win, eh? 🙂
And that’s the news. I’ll try and actually keep up from now on.
Sometimes, I get an idea for a song and I sit and think about what I want to say in it and how I want to say it and all sorts of mechanical things that are necessary to transform that idea into music. Other times, it just comes up out of nowhere. It’s what I call “Dictation from the Muse”. “Here,” she says, “take this down. Don’t argue, just take it down.”
The music for this is still a little formless. I’ll keep walking around it until I find it:
Consumed by WonderThe Hundred Acre Wood is dark is dark is closing in Shadows linger shadows leap from behind from within swirling spectres soundless formless timeless ageless seamless screaming shifting sliding swirling swooping down upon me in the closing of the dark of the dark of the dark of the Hundred Acre Wood
Wonderland is dark is dark is closing in Shadows shuffle shadows flee from below from without stalking phantoms mindful prideful vengeful willful skillful streaming swerving skulking stalking swooping up behind me in the closing of the dark of the dark of the dark of Wonderland
The Emerald City is dark is dark is closing in Shadows startle shadows fly from above from withstanding creeping spirits spaceless graceless endless threadless friendless weeping seeping sleeping creeping swooping from within me in the closing of the dark of the dark of the dark of the Emerald City
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