Showing posts with label Relentless. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Relentless. Show all posts

Monday, June 29, 2009

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.

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

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.