Bookshelf:

Recently Read & Reviewed:

• Lian Hearn, Across the Nightingale Floor

• Ernest Hemingway, To Have and Have Not

Currently Reading:

• Karl Schroeder, Ventus

Next Up:

1. Hope Miirlees, Lud-in-the-Mist
2. James McManus, Positively Fifth Street
3. Karl Schroeder, Permanence

The Usual Stuff

Boy, a busy couple of weeks, even with yesterday's Ultimate tournament being cancelled due to the fields being washed out from all the rain we've been getting. (We have had a lovely, sunny, warm weekend, though.)

I've played poker twice since last I wrote - including a trip last Saturday while Debbi was at a scrapbooking event - but with no better results. Last weekend's outing was especially painful as I lost a large pot due to mis-remembering my hole cards. How embarrassing! I need to work on my focus, clearly. Tuesday's session was better, although I lost another big pot, this time due to a genuine bad beat (a good hand being improbably beaten by an even better hand). I've got a long way to go to be a decent player, it seems. I'm trying to keep in mind that poker is supposed to be fun, though, and also that the amounts I'm losing are not very significant to me. (I'm playing the low-limit tables.)

Debbi thinks I'm thinking about it too much, and while I'm not sure I entirely agree, I am cutting back on my learning about poker to focus on practice and assimilating what I've learned and read so far. So we'll see how it goes.

Here's one of those little annoying things: I've been using Ciba Vision's AOSept product to disinfect my contact lenses for about a decade. Suddenly it's impossible to find on the shelves. Turns out they're replacing it their their ClearCare product, but that's also impossible to find.

The reason? Apparently it's due to problems at their manufacturing facility (confirmed in the sidebar here), and the products won't be on the shelves again until - apparently - April 2006 (next month), although some seem to think it might be as late as August before they're available. Sigh. My eye doctor recommended that I use a multipurpose solution to disinfect my lenses in the meantime, but also be sure to use an enzymatic cleaner once a week as well, since the multipurpose solutions apparently aren't nearly as effective as Ciba's products.

As you can see from the sidebar, I've been busily reading, too.

And with fantasy baseball season right around the corner I've been manically working on preparing for the draft, including reading this year's Baseball Prospectus (which has a really neat article which I hope to use as a springboard for an entry this week).

I've also been planning some vacations for the coming months, a bit tricky due to my overall schedule. But I think it'll all work out more-or-less as I'd hoped. Which is good, because it's been a long time since I've gone away on vacation, and I'm looking forward to it.

I guess this isn't too exciting an entry, but since I've mostly been grinding through the usual sorts of thing I don't have a lot interesting to relate. Maybe later this week...