The Weekend at Last
Boy, it has been frikking hot and humid here the last few days. Highs in the 90s, and very sticky. It was not so bad Friday morning, since a brief shower had cleared things out, but it didn't last. Thank goodness for air conditioning!
Friday I cleared up a few things I'd gotten stuck on earlier in the week. I called my landlord and determined that I can get a clause which will allow me to vacate my apartment under certain conditions if I either buy a house or leave town. Basically, I can give 90 days' notice if I vacate during the months of April through October. But of course subletting is also a possibility (and in fact what my landlord does is simply ends my lease and signs the new person to a lease for the remainder of the term, so it's not even technically "subletting").
So I'm pretty much set (well, as set as I can be) no matter what I decide to do in the coming year.
I also found a framing shop that could handle my large maps. They, too, said it would have been better if they hadn't been laminated, and in fact they said that if they'd been plain paper they could have put a laminate-like substance over them after the mounting and framing, which has less glare than true lamination. But, I hadn't known that ahead of time (I bought the maps last August, after all), so, oh well. Turns out it will cost about $260 to frame the both of them - and that's without glass. But, they are quite large.
A woman in the local SF group had a "kook out" last night which I went to. It was fun, if sticky and buggy. A nice, casual gathering. Most of the gatherings in the group tend to be "big productions", so the variation was appreciated.
I read some more of City on Fire afterwards, which is very slow and is getting boring. It's 550 pages long, so I'll give it a little more time, but it really is a yawner after the first 100 pages. (Of course, so was Cyteen, and that picked up considerably after a while.)
Once I dragged myself out of bed, I went out to get breakfast (I over-ordered a little), and then went to the east side Borders Bookstore, which I hadn't been to before. I've been trying to find a good reference on Jazz artists, something comparable to The Rolling Stone Album Guide or The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Rock (both of which were handy when I was getting into rock music a decade ago), but I haven't found anything that seems appropriate. Any suggestions?
Other than that, I couldn't see that the east side Borders had a better selection of books than the west side one (which is more convenient to me). It's larger, mainly because it has a CD section, but as expected the prices are outrageously high.
I went down to Pegasus Games afterwards to buy the Seafarers supplement to The Settlers of Catan. Contrary to what a friend had told me, it really is a supplement, and does not stand on its own. Apparently an American edition will be out sometime in the future, but I decided I can live with the German one.
Then I came home to the (blessed) air conditioning and did some housekeeping while I edited the commercials out of my tapes of the last three Babylon 5 episodes. Got a bunch done, and petted the cats for a while. They've been kind of restless lately; I ought to play with them more. (Or maybe they're sympathetic with my general misery this week. I think they can sense these things.)
No plans tonight; maybe I'll find somewhere to go read. I think the new Starbucks downtown is sucking customers away from the other coffee houses, since the one I go to has been really barren lately. It's kind of depressing, actually. I hear that Starbucks moves into towns, cuts its prices to drive other shops out of business, and then jacks them up again when it has a monopoly. For that alone, I'm likely to stay away.
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