An Evening With The Serpent of Venice

I've reached the end of a fairly decent Saturday. I slept in, lingering into the dawn listening to the birds singing outside in the cool green morning. It was a very pleasant way to start the day.

When I finally decided to get out of bed, I ran through the shower, and then started that first morning cup of coffee. I might have watched something off the DVR early in the morning, but I forget what it was. At the usual time I headed out to meet Tony and his friend Matt for breakfast at the Hickory Pit. It was an enjoyable breakfast, a little heavy on the woes of the city of San Jose conversation, but enjoyable nonetheless.

After breakfast I stopped at Fry's Electronics and picked up a headset. I bought a Steele Series V2 gaming headset. I've been wanting to get an around the ear gaming headset for quite a while. It is light and it seems to have good quality sound and good-quality pick up on the microphone.

I also bought a pair of noise canceling headphones that were on sale. Unfortunately I'm going to have to take them back tomorrow – the right side is dead. We will see if they're willing to do a simple exchange. If they are all crackerbox staring the store and make sure I get one that works. It is possible but they've got a bad batch.

At home, in the afternoon, I caught up on the latest episode of Elementary, then settled in for a two-hour nap. As typically happens when you want to take a nap as soon as I had settled in and dozed off everybody in the world decided to text me, so it was a fitful afternoon of napping.

But, the rest of the afternoon was exceptionally lazy and enjoyable. It is from there but I slid into the evening, and then having slid into the evening, slid into bed. My plan is to round out the day reading some more of Christopher Moore's novel The Serpent of Venice.

The Uncertain Places

I was nearing burn out, so I kept today short and to the point (short being relative, I worked about ten hours). I left work a little early tonight to go see H&R Block, then came home for a simple dinner of mushroom soup and a peanut butter and jelly on Paleo Bread sandwich. After supper, I was just settling in for the night, had just kicked off my shoes and I suddenly realized I had forgotten to run to the pharmacy and pick up my prescriptions.  So, the shoes went back on and out the door I went.

A fast errand later I found myself home, where I watched the latest episode of Castle, then turned the TV off to settle into a period of blissful silence before I head off to bed early, My work schedule tomorrow is fairly meeting light, so I plan on starting earlier and running as hard as I can through the day. I have a whole slew of stuff that I have to test and I am going to get settled in test my way through it.  The UAT covered a bit of ground today, which is not too bad.  I wish we had a dedicated test group, but if wishes were horses...

I've been reading a novel called "The Uncertain Places".  It was a good concept,but the execution was just not there.  The main character is inconsistent and there are often lesser characters that appear for no other reason then to show the author did her research.  I wondered if it was the authors first novel because the flow kind of goes "story...story...dump of research data...story...random but cool character...story...dump of research data".  Way more exposition then necessary to move the story along.  I wish I could recommend the book - but it is just to choppy and inconsistent for me to recommend. Go ahead and read it if you like, the overall concept is interesting - but be forewarned it is not particularly good.

Looking Back Memoirs - Lou Andreas-Salome

T.R. recommended a book, which arrived on Friday, and I just started reading it. On waking this morning, I spent the first half hour re-reading the first chapter, which I had read the day before, in large part because I wanted to try and understand what the author was saying.

The book is "Looking Back: Memoirs" by Lou Andreas-Salome. Rather than go into great detail about the subject matter and author of the book, here's a link to Wikipedia, where may brains better than mine speak about her. If the remainder of the book is like the first chapter however, this is simply a very cool book.

I'm certain that, as I go forward, I am going to write in detail about some of the ideas in the book. I'm already mulling around what is contained in the first chapter.

Lou Andreas-Salome on Wikipedia

Here is a link to the book, if you're interested.

Looking Back: Memoirs by Lou Andreas-Salome

Book Review: Shadows At Dawn

My brother recommended this to me a while ago and it seemed interesting enough that I downloaded it to my Kindle. I spent the last week or so reading it. It is a history book (non-fiction) and, from the standpoint of story-telling, I personally found it jumbled for no apparent reason other than to make it longer.

The author tells the story of the Camp Grant Massacre in Arizona from four different points of view – the American’s, the Mexican’s, and two tribal groups – the Tohono O’odham Indians on the side of the attackers and the Apache victims of the massacre. It would have been interesting except for what I considered to be technical problems – the author first establishes that he is going to write it from the four POV’s and then promptly proceeds to routinely disregard the framework he established.

The result, though interesting, in thematically jumbled.

That said, it is an interesting book and it does reveal the “intimate violence” of the frontier and has a moment or two of brilliance. I think it would have been a better book if the author had kept to his self-imposed narrative framework more rigorously because he kept representing things he had already presented (which it was lead me to the conclusion that he was padding the book). If you are unfamiliar with the Camp Grant Massacre however, it is worth a read.

On the tail of this book I have started another one that have been looking forward to – “Cleopatra, A Life” by Stacy Shiff.