A Fan of the Hidden World

I stacked up a pair of busy days, working virtually.  The race to go live is running full steam, so it has been a succession of ten to twelve hours day.  Moving forward, surely and steadily, though I have a couple of things that are falling slowly behind.  The next couple of weeks are going to be a repeat.

On the personal front - I just finished reading Dean Koontz's new novel "Innocence", which was an excellent read - I did not expect the twist at the end (though the ending itself was typical Koontz.  A very enjoyable book, with great characters and an interesting storyline. I'd definitely recommend it.

That is about it for the night, I think I am going to watch a bit of television and then start again tomorrow morning and see how much I can accomplish.  There are still some tall hurdles between here and the finish line and I am hoping to cross some of them in advance. Quite often though each piece of work unwraps another piece of work that was hidden underneath it.

I have to say though I am a fan of the hidden world in all it's forms.

A Lazy September Day

The last couple of months have been pretty lean on entries from me.  Nothing major going on, just a normally busy life.  I thought I would refocus a bit here in the month of September and see if I can't write a little more.  I enjoy writing, I just don't always make it a priority. August was filled with work related stuff and with the beauties of late summer in California.

I went up to the Highland Games with Tony on Saturday and had a good time, eating food, wandering the fairgrounds and listening to music.  The music was a mixed bag this year - there were some good acts and there were some acts that mistook "loud with bagpipes and drums" for quality. One of my favorite acts is "The Browne Sisters and George Cavanaugh" and though they were good, their sound mixer was not particularly on the ball and oft times during their show the music was being drowned out by the crowd noise.  I think that is always a risk at any festival.

Yesterday was almost entirely a restful day.  I had breakfast with Tyrone at the Hickory Pit and then wandered home.  Something I ate didn't sit right and my stomach was churning (I suspect the fruit), so after getting home and watching a movie, I settled in for a two hour afternoon nap. For there, I spent a lazy afternoon watching assorted movies on the DVR and on cable, and then went to bed early.

I laid down at about 7:00 PM to read for a while (Dean Koontz's "The City") and fell asleep by 8:00 PM, which led to my waking up, wide awake, at about 3:00 AM.  I managed to fall back asleep after about an hour and then woke up at about 6:00 AM.  I haven't done anything today either, mostly just reading, surfing the web, and watching incidental television.  I am going to make a couple of family calls this afternoon and then meet Tony & Bob for dinner at El Burro at 4:00 PM.

I am going to take a run at house cleaning and incidental crap sorting today. I took tomorrow off from work because I could and because I needed it - and as a side benefit it will also give me a two day work week next week, which is going to be nice as well.

August was a pleasant month.  In August I focused on just making sure that I spent some of my time off as true time off - doing nothing. (Hence the need to devote some hours today to house cleaning.) I think I am going to carry that trend on through September.  A few restful weekends makes me hungry for a few more restful weekends.  It the fast paced sweep of modern life is it easy to lose track of the need to take time to yourself.

T.R. is on her extended vacation right now, which is something I have always envied. She should be wrapping it up shortly soon and I am looking forward to spending some quality time with her and catching up.  I have undertaken a small personal project that during that time frame that I will share when it is complete, for now I am enjoying it and curious as to where it will go.

Well, with that, I am going to slide back into the rest of the day.

So Much Reading, So Little Time

Most of the day was spent with my nose buried in an excel spreadsheet.  One of my co-workers is out on maternity leave for the next couple of months and I've picked up the daily administration of one of her programs. Unfortunately, stuck right in the middle of this program is a manual review process that is done by reading and manipulating a sizeable spreadsheet.  The process is ridiculously long - a total of 17 steps with minimal payback from each step.  If I had the ability to redesign the process I would have designed it entirely different - of course, we can lay this little bit of insanity at the hands of our idiot director as well.  Another example of micromanaging run amok.

So, other than that, I had two good conversation with TR today, on a wandering array of subjects. Then, I watched an episode of Ray Donovan. I followed that up by trying to call the ranch, but no answer.  They are running up to Rapid City for a doctors appointment this week and they may already be on the road.  I will give them a try again tomorrow.  I did send an email off to my nephew asking him to check the phone if he was still at home at the ranch. With that done, I tried to call my sister and landed in her voice-mail.  I swear to God my family is the most antisocial bunch in the world. I joke that I always picture them on the porch with a shotgun and a bottle of moonshine, waiting for strangers to wander by so they can pepper them with rock salt!

Then, I finally finished my Scott Lynch book, Red Seas under Red Skies, in the Gentleman Bastards Sequence.  It was an enjoyable ride.  He has a third book in the sequence coming out in October, so I will look forward to reading that.  Meanwhile, I am getting ready to start the next book. My plan is to hit Amazon real quick tonight for the latest Orson Scott Card and the latest Dean Koontz, both of which are high on my list of favored authors.  Though, now that I think about it, I actually have a pair of Neil Gaiman books in the queue as well.  Not to mention all the other non-fiction that I love reading.  So much reading, so little time.

Ending With Odd Apocalypse

It was a pretty good day. I spent most of it just wandering in the summer sun, walking and enjoying nature.  Though, I might have an internal debate on the wisdom of walking a lot on a day when it was sunny and 85, it was still a very enjoyable day.  I am going to wrap it up shortly and spend the evening reading Koontz's "Odd Apocalypse".  Ahhhh, what a way to end the day.

Beautiful Summer Evening Unfolding

We're deep in the re-planning and re-scheduling phase at work. Today was basically seven meetings, all marginally interrelated. Progress was made, both toward the goal and toward the clarity that the project needs. I have my fingers crossed that we are going to pull something a bit more civilized out of it.

It has been one beautiful summer day after another here. I am especially fond of the mornings.  I woke this morning to the calls of wild geese in the hour before dawn.  I slipped out of bed and stood at the open window and watched them winging through the sky.  From there trajectory I think they were circling to land at Starbird Park about a half mile away.  The scent of dawn, a soft breeze, the call of geese - beauty unfolded within beauty.

Dinner tonight was chicken and coleslaw, a good choice on a warm summer eve.  I spend most of the evening watching a part of guilty pleasures off the DVR - "Haunted Highway" and "Destination Truth", both from the SyFy channel.  I love it when the casts manage to scare themselves silly.

I am not sure what I am going to do tonight - I am deep in reading Orson Scott Card's new novel - "Earth Unaware (Formic Wars)".  I am about halfway through and it is quite enjoyable. I have Dean Koontz' "Odd Apocalypse" stacked up after it.  Good reading all in all. I love this time of year.

The Simplest of Things

I was wrapping up the evening here and I thought I would take a few minutes tonight and write about the simplest of things. Human contact is an amazing thing, whatever form that contact takes. T.R. has been working the last two weeks and traveling, so our contact has been limited to intermittent texts, a few email, and the occasional stolen phone call. (We're used to it, since both of us have jobs that, though different, sometimes require high focus and a high commitment of time.) When we are in these circumstances I am constantly amazed at how much I come to cherish just a simple incidental phone call, her words, her voice, her laugh, her thoughts. The simplest of things and the most astounding of things. So, if you have a moment, where ever you are, whatever you are doing - take it and call someone you love. You'll never regret it. That is my thought for the night, as I wind the evening down and get ready to slip into bed.

I finished reading Dean Koontz's "Breathless" and I have to say - though I loved Merlin, Riddle, and Puzzle - it tapered out at the end and ultimately didn't deliver for me. I followed it up however with an absolute page turner that has me laughing out loud in the middle of the night - Christopher Moore's "Bite Me: A Love Story", which is the sequel to "You Suck". I love Christopher Moore and he has never failed to pull round after round of laughter out of me - and in Bite Me - I love Chet the Vampire Cat. Chet rocks!

So, with Love, Voices and Vampire Cats, let me call it a night. Good night!

Daily Life: The Vacation Switch

I woke up this morning and I was bright and fierce. The summer sun is in my skin and the summer itself is deep in my bones today. I am sure a lot of that has to do with "The Vacation Switch". I officially start my vacation one week from today - all 17 straight days of it. Today, the "Vacation Switch" flipped and I find myself in countdown mode.

I've started to think a little deeper about what I need to pack and that led me to an amusing moment. I was counting the chargers I need to take with me…

-Personal Laptop Charger
-iPhone Charger
-Bluetooth Headset Charger
-Canon H50 Charger
-Canon DSC9 Charger
-Amazon Kindle 2 Charger
-Electric Razor Charger

Now, technically, just looking at that list, I could leave the Kindle and the electric razor behind. But, why? That is one of the good thing about what is essentially a "Stay-cation" (I am not leaving California). I also tend to not really worry about the clothes I pack - San Diego is a major metropolitan area, if I need anything, I can get it there.

I also started to think a little deeper about what I am going to do on vacation, other than eat, sleep, drink and stare at things. The organizing principle behind the vacation is the San Diego Comic Con, the ultimate pop-culture destination, where a 100,000+ people are going to gather celebrate "all things geek". Comic books. Graphic novels. Television. Movies. Among many, many other things.

I was reading on Twitter the other day that it is estimated that if you walk the entire floor of the San Diego Convention Center, past every booth on the Exhibitors floor - you will walk a total of ten miles. That sounds about right to me. I tried that one afternoon two years ago and given the crowds and the distance, it literally took me all afternoon (about five hours, including a stop midway for lunch).

I will blog through it of course I did last year as well (pop back to July 2008 on the archive over to the lower right and you can read some of those entries). Me and about ten thousand other people will be blogging and twittering our way through it. It is almost impossible to describe, but you will see it on the evening news and read about it in your local newspaper and I will be in the thick of it. Or, sitting exhausted on the sidewalk somewhere drinking a Starbucks iced mocha I stood in line for thirty minutes for.

The official program schedule of events is supposed to go up on the web sometime later today, so I will begin the process of mapping my path through the time-space quantum reality that is better than any circus! Because of my love of the written word, I will be analyzing it to calculate which writers I will be able to listen to. Last year, it was F. Paul Wilson and Dean Koontz. I am definitely looking forward to a similar prize this year.

Daily Life: A Tad Hot

It is chasing 10:00 PM here in San Jose. We are having a spell of warm weather that is supposed to last through the end of the week - days are in the low nineties and high eighties, which is hot for here. I had been running the AC more that I usually do, so tonight, when I made it home, I kicked open all the windows and fired up the fans to get some clean air circulating. They are whirring away fight now and I am sure if my apartment had wings it would take off.

It was a quiet day at work today with a triple set of time consuming challenges that rose up, a customer request, a mistake during a deployment of code, and a server problem - the full gamut. Fortunately, because it was a quiet day, they were all resolved rather smoothly. After work I swung by the grocery store and met my friend Tony at Johnny Rockets (Tony had dinner, I had ice cream and a brownie), then picked up some odds and ends and swung home.

I spent most of the evening reading - I am nearing the end of Assassin's Quest and am letting it stretch out - I should finish it by this week and then I plan to be on to Dean Koontz's "Relentless" - I am looking forward to it very much as I have heard from two other Koontz fans that it is very good. I have about three weeks until I start my vacation - a full two weeks plus off. About half of it will be spend in San Diego at the ultimate pop-culture event, Comic Con San Diego, and the rest of it will be spend at home - I am definitely looking forward to both parts of the vacation! It has been a long stretch since my last vacation that was longer than an extended weekend, though in all fairness I have made it a point to take several shorter, more local, vacations, it's just not quite the same.

I still feel semi-blocked when it comes to writing - I have a couple of stories I would like to tell, but they are just not coming out - they are in there, sort of hovering. I get a feeling they are going to hover a little more and then come pouring out all at once, which will be kind of cool.

Daily Life: Num Lock, Egg Drop Soup, and Noil Silk

Well, it took me a while to figure out how to turn the NUM LOCK off on this laptop. In the course of learning that I managed to find out how to put it into battery conserving sleep mode! I guess we learn something every day.

I woke this morning for a dream of noil silk (a type of raw silk), of great bolts of it draping and cascading. It was a visually powerful and charged dream. The dream pretty much set the mood of the day for me and I moved through the day with an strong sensual awareness. Work went smoothly, productively and quickly. Lunch was a simple egg drop soup (not the best I have ever had, that honor usually goes to Tao Tao in Sunnyvale, where they make an excellent egg drop soup. I wrapped up the day reviewing a couple of training modules (all in all a vast improvement over what we have in place now), so that was good focus time. I like those moments in work where you lose yourself.

Dinner was a chicken Caesar salad and a bottle of sparkling water at a local restaurant, then a quiet evening at home. I spent most of the evening reading the last of the Robin Hobb trilogy I have been working my way through, called “Assassins Quest”. It is also an excellent read. I about twenty five percent through it and I will probably dedicate another hour or so to it tonight. I’ve also downloaded the Kindle application for my iPhone, which has me doing something I used to do years ago but fell out of the habit, which is read on breaks and at lunch during work. That is speeding me through the novels a little faster.

Then, I have Dean Koontz’s new novel, “Relentless” waiting in the hopper. (That is actually a tribute to Robin Hobb – I am a huge Koontz fan and when he comes out with a new novel he is automatically bumped to the top of the list – and in this case, he wasn’t – because I want to see how Hobb wraps up the Assassins Quest.)

It is a beautiful evening here right now. The day was hot, in the high eighties, and now it is dropping off into the seventies, heading straight into the sixties. There is still a band of soft gray at the western horizon and a few stars are peeking out. I’ve got all the windows open, there is a cooling breeze drifting through the living room, and having had a good conversation with my dear T.R., I am wrapping the night up with a little bit of writing and “So You Think You Can Dance”. It is a guilty pleasure for me, and I tend to be fond of guilty pleasures.

A Day of Simple Things

Today was a good day. I lingered in bed reading Ted Hughes "Selected
Poems" on waking. Then I took a hot shower. I spent most of the
morning drinking coffee and orange juice and chatting online. It was a
pleasant morning in chat, with subjects ranging from insects to
explosives to elephants! Sometimes the seques are amazing.

Then, I had tamales for lunch at Maria's, followed by one of the very
best movies I have seen in a long time - Danny Boyle's "Slumdog
Millionaire". I highly recommend it. After the movie I went to Borders
on Santana Row and bought the new Koontz novel and the movie "Romance
& Cigarettes". I wandered a bit more, took some photo's, and circled
home.

Dinner was pork chops and rice pudding. Then I watched "Sanctuary" and
"Stargate Atlantis". I chatted a bit more and made a phone call with a
great little conversation and am now going to curl up and read myself
to sleep. The great things in life are simple things and today was a
day of simple things.

Sent from my iPhone