Kicking Back
Sometimes, one puts in a full day of work - on whatever projects need to get done - and it seems like at the end of the day you just haven't gotten very far. Other days you wrap everything up early and have time to kick back and relax.
Recent entries in this journal have probably shown you that I've had more days like the former than the latter of late. Happily, today was different.
So I spent the afternoon watching four episodes of Babylon 5. The most recent episode, "The Ragged Edge", involves Garibaldi continuing his slide into the bottle. Something tells me he won't be coming to a good end. It was an unremarkable episode otherwise, but I understand that when the series returns after the NBA playoffs that things will pick up considerably.
The other three episodes were re-runs: "Z'ha'dum", "The Hour of the Wolf" and "Whatever Happened to Mister Garibaldi?". Although "Z'ha'dum" is a well-constructed episode and is rather unconventional in that way for television, it's undercut by the rather ridiculous, Darwinian motivations for the Shadows (which also undercut a lot of the drama of the whole series). "Wolf" kicked off season four, and introduced some interesting notions and contained some good character bits (as did "Garibaldi"), but also showed signs of the muddled plotting approach that gloved much of the fourth season. And the character of Lorien (whose name is another silly Tolkein rip-off) was never entirely convincing. It's pretty clear by this point that the series' high point has come and gone, unfortunately.
I also did my taxes while watching these episodes. I'm always very afraid I'm going to miss something important, but I always do them in pencil first and then double-check when I do them in ink, and I think they're fine.
And after I'd finished that, I was done with what I wanted to do today. So I picked up my copy of Dark Water's Embrace and kept reading. I'm about 1/3 done and it's still a very good book. Some of the eerie atmosphere bleeds away as the plot gets going, but the way things are going now I'm sure it will change again: There's at least one more major plot turn to come, I think.
I also called my friend Jim Rittenhouse and chatted with him and his wife for a while.
And now I ought to go to bed so I can go to work tomorrow. I'm going to try to put a little extra time in this week to catch up on everything I've got to do. I'm not all that far behind, which is remarkable since I've lost a lot of time this development cycle for unavoidable reasons (like, people I needed to talk to to proceed being out-of-town for a week).
We'll see.
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