It Was a Weekend

I spent both Friday and Saturday evenings at Borrone, and made a good dent in my reading. I caught up on my entire "comic books to be read" stack (which overlooks the "comic books I'm still collecting and I'll read when I have the whole series" stack). And actually it wasn't a whole lot of good stuff; I determined that the Stan Lee/Jack Kirby Thor comics are perhaps the low point of their triumphant 1960s Marvel Comics collaborations (I read one of the Marvel Masterworks volumes). Classical gods just didn't suit their style, and casting Thor in science fictional situations really didn't work - at least, not back then. (Twenty years later, more sophisticated creators made those premises work better in comics: Walt Simonson did it for Thor and Bob Layton did it for Hercules.)

I also read the most recent All-Star Comics Archives, reprinting #19-23 of that series. This is mid-to-late Second World War stuff, so the artwork is generally sub-par, and Gardner Fox's merry-go-round plots seem particularly uninventive. Recommended only for serious fans of the Justice Society (like me).

Other than that, I read the first collection of Andi Watson's Skeleton Key (not really my thing) and the most recent issue of Strangehaven (#12), which seems to be starting to pick up, as a couple of rather serious events occur in this issue. It's been a rather slow-moving series and I'd been starting to lose interest. But I'll stick it out for a while longer.

I went into work for a little while each day, mainly because I wanted to enhance our test plan application to facilitate some of the testing I'm doing. I got nearly all of it done, but left the rest because I had to fuss over a design issue. (I finally whacked myself upside the head - so to speak - and went with the simplest approach rather than trying to be "clever", and finished it up quite quickly this morning.) While there, I spent a little while playing Quake 3, with Tom on Saturday, and on my own on the net on Sunday. I did pretty well, all-in-all, but there are many people out there who can wipe the floor with me.

Have I mentioned that we've been thinking of also trying Unreal Tournament? We've heard conflicting things about it. Anyone have anything particularly good or bad to say about it? Is it similar enough to Quake that we're not likely to get $50 of extra value out of it?

I went jogging both Saturday and this morning. Jogged a little further than before on Saturday, and did the whole 1.4-mile loop from the fitness center without stopping today. I guess I'm getting better! It took me about 13:30 this morning for the loop, which I think is a little slower than I've jogged on occasion when I did stop to walk in the middle, but I'm not complaining.

(I stopped by Fry's Electronics this evening and bought myself one of those portable radios which you can strap to your arm while you jog. I think jogging will be more fun for me if I have something like that to focus on while I'm chugging along.)

Then Saturday afternoon I decided to go out for a walk. I walked over the bridge over the expressway and around the residential neighborhood on the other wise, where I'd never been. It was eerie! Gray skies, a few people working in their garages, but not a single other pedestrian on the sidewalks! And not a particularly attractive area to walk around, although there were a few nice houses with foliage in their yards that made it seem natural. But mostly it's just razed terrain with many similar houses plopped down on it. Weird.

It didn't particularly improve my mood; I spent most of the weekend feeling mildly depressed and despairing of finding a new apartment (not that I called anywhere).

I had fun Sunday night, though; I drove up to have dinner in Palo Alto and stopped by CJ and David's house. They weren't in, but I amused their dogs by ringing the doorbell. But on my way from there to Palo Alto it occurred to me that I could do a drive-by their old apartment on the off-chance that they were there, even though I dimly recalled that they were supposed to have vacated it by the end of February.

Well wouldn't you know it, but there they were having nearly filled a huge dumpster with crap that had been stored in that apartment for seven years and which they no longer wanted or needed!

My powers of deduction (or something) having been vindicated, they seemed pleased to have an excuse to get away from endless cleaning and to head into town for dinner. We also had ice cream afterwards, and stopped in Borders where I finally picked up the 2000 edition of the Baseball Prospectus, which is recommended to anyone who buys annual baseball books. We had a relaxing time, and it turned out to be a pleasant end to the weekend.

Today it was back to work, and not a moment too soon.