Wildflowers

Odds-n-ends from the week accompanied by not-very-well-formatted photos of wildflowers we saw on our hike last weekend.

First of all, Monique wanted to know why I didn't write an entry "all about me, me, me!", as she put it. This was because Debbi and I drove up to visit her a few weeks back, and we went for a bike ride along the very pretty east bay shoreline up there, with a stunning view of San Francisco across the bay. We also got a stunning view of Monique bicycling on a flat tire, until I used my frame pump to inflate it. "Wow, that's a lot better," said Monique.

As you can see, the lesson here is that you should be careful what you ask me for!

I had a hard time keeping anywhere near current with my May entries, and eventually ran out of gas on catching up. That's the way it goes, sometimes.

We had a good visit with her, though. Even if the shoreline we biked was where the bodies of Lacy Peterson and her baby were found a couple months ago. Eeg. No news trucks this time out, though. All the drama's now in the courtroom. More appetizingly, Monique took us to a nice little breakfast joint, with excellent coffee shakes. A good trip all around.

I couldn't finish Pat Cadigan's Synners, and Thursday evening decided to bag it. It's been years since I actually wilfully failed to finish a book. I can't remember exactly what the last one was, in fact. (I have stopped reading some books because I wasn't in the mood, and then tackled them later on. I mean books I plan never to come back to.) I'd gotten 1/3 of the way through it - about 150 pages - and realized that nothing much had happened. Moreover, I mostly found the (very large cast of) characters unappealing, and the technological hooks uninteresting (although I did appreciate her sense of humor). I just didn't care, and realized that I have many books on my shelf waiting for my attention which I'm much more enthusiastic about.

In other book-related news, I carried two moving boxes of books to Bookbuyers on Friday and got a big batch of credit for them, some of which I promptly spent. It will probably last me some months before I exhaust it, though.

Now I'm on to Lynn Flewelling's The Bone Doll's Twin, which is another book I'm not too enthusiastic about (it being sword-n-sorcery fantasy and all), but it is for the Kepler's book discussion next weekend.

I've been noodling around a lot on LiveJournal lately, even posting a few entries.

The most notable one is about LJmatch.com, a LiveJournal spin-off site to match journallers with each other. Sadly this is mostly in a "dating" sense of matching rather than a "finding good journals to read" sense, and you're supposed to pay them to find out the true identity of the journals you find, which is a pain (but easily circumvented using, say, Google). I played around with it for a few days, and found one new journal to read - pseudonymously named Warsop - but have largely put it behind me at this point.

Then there's my entry on the so-called "Shower Meme", which is this thing where journallers interview each other and post their entries in their journals, supposedly named because the person who thought of it (apparently under the illusion that this was an original idea) did so in the shower. Shee. Seeing endless interview answers appear in journals on my friends list certainly dulled down LiveJournal for me. It's kind of like regular programming taking a break for a pledge drive.

(Then, this whole interview thing seems to be further promoting the illusion that journallers are part of a community, rather than a bunch of people writing their own personal journals, which is what they've always been. It's very peculiar to me the degree to which journallers seem to embrace this notion.)

Anyway, you're generally not missing a lot by not reading my LiveJournal, in case you were wondering. I mainly have it to keep up with journals via the friends list, and as a reference to my entries here.

This weekend we had a pretty laid-back time. Well, okay, Debbi went dancing Friday night while I went out shopping for CDs and used books (picked up Flowers Kings and IQ CDs, for instance). But yesterday we just browsed the Sunnyvale art fair, then spent the evening reading at Borrone. Today we made our weekly trip to the Mountain View farmer's market, and then spent the afternoon doing some gardening and cooking dinner (Indian food - I had a craving). Tonight I've been cleaning up the piles of crap in my study. Which needs it.

I've also been picking things up on eBay lately. Most notably a set of Bill James Baseball Abstracts from the 80s, so I can see what all the shouting's been about. Okay, I don't really expect them to hold up so well after 15-20 years, but they're of historical interest to me.

I also happily won an auction for a copy of Dougie MacLean's The Search. MacLean is a Scottish singer/songwriter, and this instrumental album is my favorite of his. It's the soundtrack to the official Loch Ness Monster exhibit in Scotland, if you can believe that. But it's sadly out-of-print. I had a copy, but it got lost somewhere along the way (I thought I'd last loaned it to Ceej, but last I asked she said she didn't have it). Anyway, I've now purchased a replacement.

Of course, none of these goodies have actually arrived yet, but hopefully they'll start trickling in (these two and a few others) this week.

And now I just need to set my mind - and time - to putting some of my old comic books up for sale on eBay.

To help pay for all this stuff.

I think that's all for tonight!