If nothing else, just for the disclaimer.
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It’s been an odd day.

It started out with a dream that I had to teach the class that I am still writing the documentation for. On the dream scale, that ranked quite high on the unpleasant factor.

Then when we were walking at lunch, we walked past an older gentleman carrying a book. He looked rather grandfatherly. (Or, as I’m coming to realize how things change after 30–fatherly.) Out of curiosity I glanced to see if I could read the title.

I almost stopped walking when I figured out what it was–Storm Season, Book 5 of the Thieves’ World series. The original printing is pretty easy to recognize, especially on the spine. It was a strange moment of disconnect. He didn’t seem like the kind of guy I’d expect to be reading Thieves’ World, but they did come out more than 25 years ago.

For those who haven’t had the experience of reading any of the books, it’s an incredibly dark series, co-written by a number of authors who use each other’s characters in their stories (with ground rules of course.) I love the series. Michael can’t stand it.

Of course, I’m not sure what I expect the typical Thieves’ World reader to be like. Other than posessing a very dark sense of humor. But that’s kind of hard to tell from the outside.

Of course the other thing that happened is that I now have a desire to reread the series. I’m trying to hold off, since it’s 12 books, but the thought of reading about Shadowspawn and Illyra is rather tempting to say the least.

We’ll see how well I resist.

And I highly recommend the books, although good luck finding them. I occasionally spot a lone volume at The Bookshelf, but never more than one at a time.

S is right. There had better be a special place in Hell reserved for this man.

The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents (2001) Terry Pratchett

The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents is one of Terry Pratchett’s young adult books, that are set in Discworld.

Talking cats, talking rats, and an appearence by Death (as well as by the Death of Rats). Aside from being slightly shorter normal, this is a typical Discworld book. Although there are two “young adults”, the main characters are Maurice the cat, and the talking rats, especially Dangerous Beans and Peaches. (The rat’s first reading material was old cans.)

Read More about The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents

As much as I like “I Think I’ll Disappear Now” I have got to change the songs in my MP3 player.

Running into you like this without warning
Is like catching a sniff of tequila in the morning
But I’ll try, I’ll try to keep my food down
That’s quite an aftertaste that you’ve left now that you’re not around

moxie
Pronunciation: ‘mäk-sE noun
1 : ENERGY, PEP
2 : COURAGE, DETERMINATION
3 : KNOW-HOW, EXPERTISE
Etymology: from Moxie, a trademark for a soft drink
m-w.com

Two excellent articles in the NY Times on American soldiers.

The first is a photo essay on battlefield medicine and the care that those soldiers who are wounded in Iraq recieve. I strongly suggest that you take the time to view the pictures.

The second article is on how creditors are treating reservists who are being placed on active duty and shipped overseas.

Though statistics are scarce, court records and interviews with military and civilian lawyers suggest that Americans heading off to war are sometimes facing distracting and demoralizing demands from financial companies trying to collect on obligations that, by law, they cannot enforce.

The article discusses the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act:

The law, the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act, protects all active-duty military families from foreclosures, evictions and other financial consequences of military service. The Supreme Court has ruled that its provisions must “be liberally construed to protect those who have been obliged to drop their own affairs to take up the burdens of the nation.”

I have to wonder whether those who would evict the wife of a soldier serving in Iraq, or foreclose on the house of a reservist called to active duty are the same people driving around with the “Support Our Troops” magnets on their cars.

Now Burger King does its part to further the American obesity epidemic, with a 730 calorie breakfast sandwhich.

“The critics will still label it food porn,” Sherri Daye Scott, editor at fast-food magazine QSR, told USA Today, which first reported the story. “But the average male fast-food customer does not have a problem with this.”

Guess they just want to make sure that we bring the US life expectancy back down.

Maybe it’ll be the neo-Cons and “Christian” Conservatives that’ll flock the Burger King and Hardees, and with any luck, they’ll take themselves out of the voting population early.

Congratulations to the basketball team for their win last night.

However those students who set fires and “pelted (firefighters) with bottles and cans as they tried to extinguish them“–I hope they are both arrested and expelled.

For those of you who missed the news, this is the coolest things ever.

NC State Paleontologist Discovers Soft Tissue in Dinosaur Bones

It means that maybe, one day, we really could grow a dinosaur. It means we may well learn whether dinosaurs are cold-blooded are warm blooded. What color their skin was. What their skin was like.

Of course it means that the Calvins of the world would no longer be able to imagine what dinosaurs were like.

But I can live with that.

Elephants Communication

Of course it’s well known that I think that elephants are the coolest animals ever. But the idea that elephants learn their communication opens up the possibility that we could eventually learn to communicate with elephants. Unfortunately, our track record with dolphins probably means this won’t happen any time soon.

Oddly enough I’ve been relatively silent on the Terri Schiavo case. Oddly, because end-of-life care has been a major focus of my studies.

First things first, I am morally and ethically opposed to euthanasia and physician assisted suicide. I am pro-life across the board (and in a way that the president and most conservatives most certainly are not).

I do, however, believe that what has been happening in the Terri Schiavo case is wrong. No one should be forced to live like that, when they are no longer living.

I also believe that what we should be learning from this is the importance of filling out a living will and a health care directive. If you are in WV, you can go to the WV Center for End of Life Care.

It is important, although it is very easy to put off–after all, despite all the time I have spent studying the issue, I still have not filled out the forms. But I will. This is my note to myself. It’s too important to keep putting off.

ADDENDUM the First
For some excellent posts, see:
Respectful of Otters for a medical opinion
Obsidian Wings for the opinion of a bioethicist

Electronics Recycling

Saturday, April 23, 2005
9am - 2pm

Finally! A chance to make Michael get rid of some of the computer parts that have been piling up in the basement!

Anti-government protesters have overrun the presidential palace, the White House, in Kyrgyzstan’s capital Bishkek.

This is where my cousin spent his time in the Peace Corps, until he came home this fall.

I wonder whether he is surprised by the unrest.

I’ve been thinking about desire.

Not the kind that stars in movies and advertising, but the kind that makes people go–the desire that motivates people to achieve and succeed.

I have friends who are working to achieve their desires. One wants to be a poet and author. Another wants to be a mother. A third wants to be a romance writer. They know what their goals are, and they know what they have to do to achieve their desires.

Me, I wasn’t even sure I knew what my desire truly was. What motivates me? What is it that I want more than anything else? Then I realized that I did know what my desire was, but it is both more complicated and more simple than what my friends want.

I desire knowledge.

Not an education–although that can go along with it–just knowledge. I want to know things. To learn things. Many things. All different kinds of things.

I want to know about the founding fathers of the United States. I want to know how to fence. I want to know about the beliefs of the different religions in the world. I want to know how to make plants grow better. I want to know how photosynthesis really works. I want to know how to box. I want to know words–their meanings and how they came into being and how they’re pronounced and used properly. I want to know why people do the things they do. I want to know the perfect lemon cake recipe.

There is so much out there I want to know, and yet there is so little call for such knowledge, so little use for it. No one is going to give me a job because I know some plant physiology and I know some HTML and I know the basics of ethics. There’s just no call for it–yet they are all part of my desire.

And that, more than anything else, is why I sometimes have such a hard time. There is no call for my knowledge, and no one willing to pay me solely to learn stuff.

But there should be.

I’ve been thinking about the continual claims of the religious right, that America was founded on religion, and is a religious nation, and thus Christianity should be forced upon all Americans whether they like it or not. (There’s a disgusting billboard on University Avenue that claims that those who aren’t Christians are traitor to America, which is what got me fired up on the subject.)

I’ve always thought that the founding fathers were far more tolerant than, but I never had anything to back that up. So I decided to look for a list of the US presidents (especially the early presidents) and see what religious faith they were. Needless to say, I didn’t find everything I wanted in one place, and so compiled the information into a table that suited me.

It seems to me that several of the early presidents were either deists or of a more tolerant faith than most of the religious right. I mean, you don’t see a lot of evangelical Unitarians out there.

So I continue to doubt the claims of the religious right when it comes to the First Amendment.

However, compiling the list again reminded me of how little history I know. I’ve read books on Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, but I know so little about the rest of the founding fathers.

Sometimes I feel like there will never be enough time to learn everything I want to know.

Just got back from picking up my car.

I missed my car.

I decided two things. First, that I dislike Nissan Sentras, and I really dislike automatic transitions.

How can people stand to drive those things?

Really not ready to be back at work.
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While were on the subject of books, I signed up for the Amazon Associates club, which means that if you click on any of the book images or links (in the book portion of the site), they’ll take you to Amazon, and if you buy that book, I’ll get a few pennies towards an Amazon gift certificate. I don’t yet have links for everything, but I’m getting there.

The King’s Peace (2000) and The King’s Name (2001) by Jo Walton

In actuality, there are really three books in two. The first book, The King’s Peace is actually two books, “The King’s Peace” and “The Kings Law” which are just a little shorter than the second book, The King’s Name.

The tale is a history of a world that is similar to, but not exactly, the British Isles, so there is a sense of familiarity, without actually being something real.

Read More about The King’s Peace and The King’s Name

A Stitch in Time (2000) Andrew J. Robinson

Okay, before you say anything, I admit it, this is a Star Trek book. And I don’t even have the excuse of it being a movie novelization.

All I can say is that Garak is my absolute favorite DS9 character, and I felt that they never did as much with him as they could–everything you learned just left you with more questions. So when I read that Andrew Robinson, the actor who had played Garak, wrote a book telling the backstory he had created for Garak… well, I’m a sucker.

Read More about A Stitch in Time

Good Omens (1990) Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

Good Omens is one of my all time favorite books, and one that I’d take with me to be stranded on a desert island, because it’s funny.

Really funny.

With lots of passages that make me giggle, and even laugh out loud, not just when I read them, but even when I go back and think about them later.

Read more about Good Omens

We had a fun, although busy time in Baltimore. We made a trip to Va to visit my aunt, uncle, and cousins; we visited Cousin Pat and Aunt Doris; we rewired half the lights in Grandmom’s basement to put them on switches instead of pull chains; we went to the National Aquarium; and we ate seafood. (Of course.)

The visits with family were very nice. My cousins are always a lot of fun, and it made up for the extra short visit we had the week before.

I was surprised by the aquarium though. Despite the fact that we’re in Baltimore several times a year, I haven’t been to the National Aquarium since it opened. I have to admit that I think I like the Newport Aquarium better. I think newport does a better job making the big tanks look like a natural environment instead of a cement tank. But the rainforest section was nice, and we would have stayed there longer if it weren’t for the screaming school kids. Amusingly enough, while we were looking at the poison dart frogs, several groups of kids ran up said “Oh, frogs. Big deal,” and ran on. They’re POISONOUS frogs! Frogs in amazing technicolor!

They didn’t know what they were missing.

We also quite liked the dolphin show. Dolphins are amazing creatures. Seeing them, and knowing how intelligent they are, I wonder how they get caught, and what they think about being held in captivity. They seemed to have plenty of trainers though, and the program talked about all the training they dolphins do, and a good deal about ocean conservation, and, interestingly enough, they had two videos screen that showed bits about training, but also showed two brief video clips of people in boats being bitten by wild dophins, which seemed a very wise thing to do, all things considered.

We also walked around the inner harbor a bit–we spent about 5 hours downtown all told–and I was surpirsed by a couple of things. First was at how clean the area around the harbor was. Of course this is March, and wasn’t nice weather for spending a lot of time outside by the water, but they seemed pretty aggressive about keeping the place clean, which impressed me.

The other thing that surprised me was the number of happy people we saw. We had lunch at Legal Seafood, and got a seat by the window, where I watched people walking by, and for the most part, the people walking by were in groups, chatting with each other. I guess I expected on Monday at lunch time to see people rushing from one place to another, hardly paying attention to one another, but that wasn’t what I saw.

Mind you, I still have no interest in living in a city that large, but it wasn’t nearly as grim as I would have expected.

All in all, it was a very pleasant trip, and we had a very good time. And now I plan to spend the rest of my time off from work reading, as I managed to add more books to my collection.

New books: A Wolf at the Door and Other Retold Fairy Tales edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, A Stitch in Time by Andrew J. Robinson, Byzantium by Stephen R. Lawhead, Myths of the Hindus and Buddhists by Ananda K. Coomaraswamy and Sister Nivedita, Favorite African Folktales edited by Nelson Mandela, Lucious Lemon Desserts, and three mysteries by Michael Jecks that I left in Baltimore for Grandmom to read.

Finally:

I finally got decent pictures of my favorite section of I 68: Lane Ends

Pictures of the aquarium and stuff we did to Grandmom’s house and some random pictures.

Bit and pictures from the trip to Baltimore coming eventually.

You know what? I like having a car that’s under warranty.

Heard a strange, high pitched, whining noise, only a speeds over 60 (which is why it had gone without notice, since we mostly drive in town) that grew louder when accelerating. I didn’t think it was the engine, and hypothesized it might be the transmission. Dropped by the dealer yesterday, they said to come by today at 10, and they’d have a service person ride with me. Came in, had to wait a few mintues in the waiting room, while the service guy took it out on his own, then he came and got me. He heard the noise, said he hadn’t heard that before, and thought it might be the wheel bearings on the front driver’s side, but wanted to look at it, to make certain. Back into the waiting room (I of course brought a book with me), and before I was even 50 pages into the book, they called me in to say that it was the transmission (HA!) they’d replace the transmission with a new one, and could I please follow go with this gentleman to pick up the rental I’d have until my car was fixed.

All I had to do for the rental was walk in, show ID and a credit card, sign some paper work, and leave. The whole thing took less than an hour and a half, which included the drive with the mechanic.

And it’s all covered by Toyota.

And I got a free doughnut in the waiting room.

Not only do I have the coming week off from school, it’s also a slow time at work.

Thusly, I’m taking the whole week off! (happy dance)

I’ll be doing some work on the house (perhaps repainting three of the bedroom walls, maybe staining anf polyurethaning our entertainment center), a good deal of reading, and will be visiting my grandmother for a few days. Not only will we be spending time with her, but we’ll also be rewiring the lights in her basement (like that use of “we” there?), and of course eating well. Definitely G&Ms and a trip to Attman’s. Not sure where else, but when in Baltimore… eat seafood! We’re also going to the Aquarium (after which Michael will definitely want to eat seafood) and I’m going to find a book store. I think there’s a huge Barnes & Nobel at the Inner Harbor near the aquarium. Woo Hoo!

What’s the point of all this? The point is that I’m going to try to relax, so I’ll be attempting to stay away from the computer. Attempting anyway. So if you’re looking to be entertained, try some of the sites on my sidebar.

They’ll playing all my favorites!

eclectic \ih-KLEK-tik\ adjective
1 : selecting what appears to be best in various doctrines, methods, or styles
2 : composed of elements drawn from various sources; also : heterogeneous

Commonly confused words.
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I don’t have any need for this word, but a friend’s older relative used the term, and we wanted to know what it meant.

grass widow

The usual current sense of grass widow is ‘a woman who is separated, divorced, or lives apart from her husband’. The other sense found in current use is ‘a married woman whose husband is frequently apart from her for short periods of time, as on business or to pursue a hobby’.

Historically, there are two senses that are now archaic, obsolete, or dialectal: ‘an abandoned mistress’ and ‘a woman who has borne an illegitimate child’.

More on the etymology at the Mavens’ Word of the Day website.