23 April 1998: This Week's Roundup

Thursday, 23 April 1998:

This Week's Roundup

Last night I finished Children of God. It's a good book, but not a great one, certainly not as good as its progenitor, The Sparrow. It just doesn't have that WHAM partway through that makes you sit up and think, "Gee, she's not kidding, is she?" It's much more of a plot-oriented book, where the characters serve the plot, whereas The Sparrow is very character-driven, and the whole crux of the book is how the characters deal with what they've done and what's been done to them.

I've started reading Sheri S. Tepper's The Family Tree now. Not very far into it yet.

Wednesday's comics haul was pretty light, but I did pick up the hardcover collection of the first Astro City series, and also the videotape of MTV's cartoon adaptation of The Maxx. (It was seeing part of this cartoon at Congenial last fall which got me interested in the comic. The first 12 issues or so are excellent, and it steadily falls off after that, limping to an unsatisfying conclusion in #35.)

I also went down to the SF3 weekly social gathering last night. An okay experience; I'll probably go sporadically until Babylon 5 starts up again in a month and a half.

I've also started biking in earnest, now that it's up in the 60s and 70s and not raining anymore. I went for a modest (20-minute) bike ride yesterday, and did a 35-minute one (with hills!) today. I want to make it around Lake Monona sometime this weekend (that's between 10 and 12 miles), and the following weekend I want to bike into work for the first time. Biking tonight wore me out - no big surprise since I got basically no exercise over the winter - but once I build up some muscles it will feel really good. (It's especially neat how much easier it is to get up stairs when you have leg muscles. I feel like I can just bounce on up two or three flights with hardly any effort.)

One guy at work just had an offer accepted on a house in a part of town I'd like to live in, and another guy is starting to look for a house. A third woman hopes to look for a condo next fall. So I'm starting to feel a little pressure to start looking myself. My friend Charlie helped me do some calculations using some software on the UW Credit Union's web site which suggest that I can actually afford a significantly more expensive house than I'd been planning for. I'm not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing! Maybe it just shows that I'm underestimating my purchasing power.

I guess not a lot is happening this week. Just reading, life maintenance stuff, and work. I need to get up early tomorrow to do that customer training that I've been dreading all week. I'd probably not be so concerned if I knew this was just a one-time thing, but I really, really don't want it to become a habit, and I'm concerned that that's what some people want.

Well, I just need to get through it and then the weekend's nearly here. But when I'm looking forward to "just getting through it" that's usually a clear sign that I really dislike the whole notion.

Michael Rawdon (Contact)