23 March 1998: A Rare Weekend of Human Interaction

Monday, 23 March 1998:

A Rare Weekend of Human Interaction

I'm not feeling too motivated about this journal thing lately. In fact, I'm waffling between giving it up and trying to ride out this lassitude. At any rate, that's why I haven't been writing many entries lately.

I had a pretty good weekend, actually. Saturday we had a book exchange organized by Tracy, my cow-orker and the current president of SF3. It was pretty successful; I got rid of a bunch of books I either didn't want or had duplicates of (about half of the books I brought were taken by other people), and picked up a number of books I'm happy to have for free, such as some Octavia Butler and some Catherine Asaro. One couple brought 7 boxes worth of stuff, including issues of Analog and F&SF dating back to 1963, with a few issues from the 1950s. I snagged one of those which had a George R. R. Martin story in it (which I think might not be collected otherwise), but not surprisingly there generally wasn't a lot of interest in the magazines.

(Incidentally, I once came across a neat book which listed for each SF author in it all their books, and all of their stories which had not been collected in book form, and where you could find them. However, I do not remember the title of the book and have never seen another copy. Fortunately for us on-line folks, The Internet Speculative Fiction Database serves a similar role.)

Saturday evening I started reading Sewer, Gas and Electric by Matt Ruff, for our SF discussion group. I'm not too impressed so far, as the satire and humor is very much in an Illuminatus! Trilogy vein, and I've read more than enough of that style to last me the rest of my life. (This may be part of why I wasn't bowled over by Snow Crash, either.) But we'll see; I have many pages left to read.

Sunday I met some folks down at Memorial Union to play Diplomacy. A guy at work put up a post in the classified ads there asking for people who play, and apparently got a number of responses. There are a whole bunch of gamers at work about whom I didn't know!

We had four people at this game, one playing England, one playing France & Austria, one playing Italy & Russia, and me playing Germany & Turkey. We only had time to play two years worth of moves, which was okay since two of the four were learning the game, but it was a fun time. I ended up in a very good position - especially with Turkey - and was only one wrong guess away from a great German position, too. I was also the only person who succeeded in linking up both of my nations, and was working on crushing Russia. But Britain was shaping up to be a big problem, and I was tempted to give up on the German position, had the game continued.

So we'll probably play again sometime. After one person had to leave, the other three of us hung around for an hour or so and chatted and got to know each other over ice cream (the Union sells Babcock Hall ice cream, which is quite yummy!). I'm definitely one of the old people at work, not just because I've been there four years, but because I'm 29; both of these folks are 22! Not that I would have been able to guess if they hadn't told me.

So in the wake of that I put out a call today for people to play Robo Rally after work sometime this week, and got a good response, so it looks like we'll play a game tomorrow evening. After work I went to a comic book store to pick up some more bags and backing boards, and I ran into one of the guys who will be there tomorrow, who says he's getting back into comics, and who says that one of the Diplomacy guys from yesterday is also a comics fan! Sheesh, maybe I'm on the wrong team!

I've been bringing in soup from the local co-op for lunch at work lately. It happens to be salt-free and fat-free, which is good, although all I'm really interested in is that it has less fat than McDonald's. I'm also trying to get myself to cook for myself more rather than eating microwave foods, and I took my bike in today to get a tune-up since it's going to get warm later this week and I want to start riding it. My goal this summer is to ride to work for most of the summer, lose some weight, and to learn how to care for my bike by myself, particularly to replace flat tires.

I'm not ready to make the commitment to a pricey, flashy bike (mine cost me $250 or so back in 1991), but I can at least use the one I have more often. Besides, just the short ride to the bike shop tonight reminded me of how much fun riding is!

Only a week 'til opening day of baseball season, and less than two until our fantasy baseball draft. I will be spending much of next weekend writing the software I'll be using to produce our statistical results next week. Naturally, I'll be writing it in perl, because perl is a natural language for such a thing, and because it runs on my Mac!

Michael Rawdon (Contact)