23 February 1998: A Medium Time

Monday, 23 February 1998:

A Medium Time

As promised, yesterday I basically kicked back my feet and relaxed (and after all that walking on Saturday my feet needed some relaxing!).

I watched the three Babylon 5 episodes I had saved up, including last week's "Learning Curve" (which I talked about earlier), and the rather duff¹ second-season episodes "All Alone In The Night" and "Acts of Sacrifice".

"All Alone" is a rather weak quasi-horror episode which takes a rip at alien abductionists and contributes an eerie and seemingly precognitive dream to the ongoing storyline. Unfortunately, the meaning of the dream was pretty much a let-down (being, as it was, tied up in the tiresome reason for the whole Shadow War). "Acts of Sacrifice" contributes some nice Londo scenes, but it otherwise a complete waste of time, especially the utterly embarrassing bit with Ivanova trying to win an alliance through the ambassador of a priggish new race. Gack.

I also did a bunch of life maintenance stuff, and kicked around on the Internet for a while, particularly working on my Boston Red Sox Web page.

Today was another very busy day at work, but I'm feeling strangely more self-confident than I have in many months. Many, many months. I don't know that there's any particular reason for this change, but it's certainly a welcome one. Maybe it's partly that I feel I'm finally doing a number of things which I find interesting, challenging and new (and, better yet, doing them the way I want to do them!).

Tonight I read James Thurber's My Life and Hard Times, which is a delightful little book, even though I'm not really a Thurberist. But reading it at one blow rendered me incapable of reading anything else this evening, as anything I tried ended up with Thurber's light wit being laid over it. Well, there are worse things that could happen!

Oh, yes, and this morning I took some time out to play with the cats for a while with a toy we hadn't used in some time - a length of brightly-colored polar fleece. Jefferson had a wonderful time. Newton seemed to get jealous, as every so often he would meow and run forward to bite Jeff in the scruff of the neck (a cat-dominance thing). The cats rarely play with me at the same time - one will play and the other sits on the side and watches. I think they're pretty competitive a lot of the time, and get easily jealous.

I'm having a pretty medium time in my life lately; I hope no one's falling asleep out there!

¹ Between being friends with James S----- and reading The Slings and Arrows Comic Guide this bit of British slang seems to be entering my vocabulary. Soon "naff" will no doubt join it, assuming I can remember what it means!

Michael Rawdon (Contact)