Bookshelf:

Recently Read:

• Bill Willingham, Beowulf: Hyde and Seek

Currently Reading:

• Joan D. Vinge, The Snow Queen

Next Up:

1. Margery Allingham, The Fear Sign
2. Tim Powers, Expiration Date
3. Frederick P. Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month
4. Michael Lewis, Moneyball
5. Margery Allingham, Death of a Ghost

Fixing-Upping

Other than my little outpouring in Sunday's entry, it's been a pretty lively time.

Mostly I've been doing things around the house which have needed doing for a while. Like, oh, vacuuming. And my upstairs porch has had ground-in dirt from the winter for months. The apartment complex next door has some eucalyptus trees which drop their reddish leaves everywhere, so there were lots of leaf-shaped dirt marks on the porch. I scrubbed it all with a brush - which took a couple of hours - and now it's nice and clean. So I can sit out there and read, and even have the cats join me (which they love, of course).

Better yet, the neighboring complex cut down the eucalyptus trees last week, so hopefully that'll be the last of those leaves that I need to clean up!

I also finally mounted my AirPort base station on the wall in the hall, and bought a white ethernet cable and attached it to the wall so that it's fairly hard to spot. It looks nice and works great! Wireless is cool. Having a home where I can freely nail things into the wall is also cool.

Now I just need to finish cleaning up my front room in preparation for my cat-allergic friend Karen's visit next month...

Still haven't put the games up on eBay. I've been dragging my feet (on that among other things). I need to get a small scale so I can estimate shipping costs for stuff ahead of time. I've been eyeballing the weights of stuff I put up for sale for far too long.

Over the weekend I finished Jon Courtenay Grimwood's novel Pashazade, which I found to be... okay. It's the first of a trilogy set in an alternate near-future where the Ottoman Empire is still a major power, and Germany dominates Europe. It's mainly of interest because of the social structure in which the hero, Raf, works, himself being an import from America who recently learned that he's the son of a Pasha. But it's a pretty pedestrian murder mystery, and I was disappointed in the vague nature of Raf's past, since he clearly has some secrets which are being left for later books in the trilogy. But this one didn't grab me enough to continue on to the next two, I think. Not with all the other stuff I've got to read.

I also read the first two books in Bill Willingham's Beowulf series - which may be the last two, since the publisher, Clockwork Storybook, has gone under. The Monster Maker and Hyde and Seek follow the adventures of the legendary figure - who's now a sort of modern-day pulp adventurer in the employ of a company which seeks and destroys evil supernatural monsters - as he grapples with a couple of tough foes. Both books are short - only about 100 pages - but have some clever twists, and a wry sense of humor. Worth checking out, if you can find 'em. Hopefully Willingham will be able to write more in the series sometime.