But, On the Other Hand-

…I figured if I was actually going to take the time and trouble to do the whole costume thing, then I might as well do it right.

I Hate Halloween

Gloria feels the same way about Mischief Night.

The Crushing Retort

Made the following observation during a discussion with Neuro, with unusual succinctness:

…as smart people, we have this perpetual stupid fantasy I call The Crushing Retort:  the idea that if we just manage to say that perfect thing, our enemies will be so overwhelmed by our masterful and superior intellects that they’ll immolate, or run away crying, or give up, instead of getting even madder or just beating the crap out of us…

“Perpetual” and “stupid” at least on my behalf, because even though I know it’s a fantasy, I still catch myself engaging in it with some frequency.

This is a parallel concept to that expressed by my all-time favorite French term, l’esprit d’escalier (literally, “the spirit of the staircase”), which is when you think of the perfect comeback three minutes after the argument is over and you’re on your way out of the building.

Yep.

“He had always known it would end horribly.  Only the when, where, how, why, and by whom of it all had eluded him.”

–  from Juggler of Worlds (Larry Niven & Edward M. Lerner)

The Constant Variety of Sport (coda)

one week later

“Did it!” yells Jack.  He glances over his shoulder, throws me a silent thumbs up where I am sitting watching, and I send it back to him with a grin.   He turns back to the other players, runs in dizzy circles around his teammates in celebration, tossing his glove in the air. Read the rest of this entry »

The Constant Variety of Sport (part 3)

[This is the third part of a three part story.  To read the first part, click HERE.  To read the second part, click HERE.]

“Is it over yet?” he asks.

I look around at the milling people. A man smoking a cigarette drags a huge bag past second base to a rain puddle and opens it up, then takes handfuls of brown stuff out of it the same color as the dirt and throws them into the water. It has no obvious effect.

“No,” I tell him, with a wry smile. “They’re gonna make more speeches.”

“Rats,” he says.

—

After everything is done, after all the “thank yous”, after losing Jack completely in the departing crowd and fighting off panic, only to discover him standing by the Snack Window, waiting for me to buy him an ice cream cone, the station wagon seems like a small oasis.  I help him off with his cleats and back into his sneakers, toss the muddy things into the footwell and close the rear door on him, shutting him inside.  Then I flop in the driver’s seat. I roll down the windows, let the stuffy, hot air blow out and the afternoon breeze blow in.  I can feel the heat rising from all the metal.

The lanes between the parking spaces are filled with slow-moving cars.  “No point in even startin’ her yet,” I say to Jack, hooking my elbow over the doorframe.  “Can’t go anywhere until the lot clears out.”  I look at him in the rearview mirror.  “C’mon up,” I tell him, patting the seat next to me. “I wanna talk to you.” Read the rest of this entry »

All Systems Go

Seems like everything is back to normal (and, look, Tales is even 2.8.5 now!  Oooooooooooooo!)  Spilt Wine and Sticky Rice has also been restored, so if you’ve never bothered to check that out, now’s the perfect time…

Excelsior!

On the Blink

Tales has been a bit skittish lately–  all of Interregnum was migrated involuntarily by my host to a new server, and my subsequent attempts to upgrade to WP 2.8.4 in order to deal with the issues the migration created resulted in new issues,  including a total inability to log into my own Dashboard, until just now.  I’m suspicious as to whether everything is actually back to normal;  I seem to have less than complete functionality at the moment.  So if you’re trying to visit the site and getting 500 Internal Server Errors, or any other sort of bug, I’m workin’ on it.  Post a comment here (if you can!) and let me know.

Spilt Wine & Sticky Rice was also part of that migration, and has been having the same problems, only worse, so I’ve taken that down for a while.  Will cross post here when it goes back up.

The Constant Variety of Sport (part 2)

[This is part 2 of a three part story;  you can read the first part by clicking HERE.]

“TEAMS!” the coaches yell. “GROUP UP!”

The speeches are going to begin.

Community-based events of this size (or any size) always begin with speeches.  There is the Welcoming of the Involved, the Invocation of the Event History, the Identification of the Group Leadership, and eventually, the Exhortation to Fun.  Occasionally the speechmaker will also slip an Explanation for the Newly Involved in there, somewhere after the Welcoming and before the Exhortation.  This turns out to be one of those occasions, and it’s a good thing, because when it occurs, I find out that we are not at a batting practice as Jack has been maintaining.  We are at a full-out baseball clinic: one where volunteers from the Shadetree varsity team will be working directly with the junior league kids to help them improve every aspect of their game.  The Chief Speechmaker, a sharp-voiced man in a maroon windbreaker, is only a few feet from me, and so therefore are the varsity players, standing in a line-up behind him.   They are grim-faced boys, muscular and lanky.  They slouch slightly, shifting between cross-armed stances in an ominous silence that makes them look sullen and powerful all at once, and they regard us through narrowed eyes beneath the brims of their caps.  They do not smile.

Jesus, I think, as they stare back into my eyes. They’re TALL. Like oak trees in pin stripes.  They bear no resemblance to anything I remember from my own high school days.   I realize with some amazement that Read the rest of this entry »

Mmmmm.

“…And suddenly, for no reason, she told this strange woman about her endless journeys from her mother’s tiny flat with its smell of face powder and curry from the take-away downstairs, and the tights dripping in the bathroom, to her father’s cold, tidy, solemn house with its ticking grandfather clock.  And about the silly dreams she’d had of bringing them together and the hopelessness of it all.

‘Do you think there might be a third place?  Not my father’s house or my mother’s apartment but somewhere else-  by the sea perhaps?  And that one day I might find it?’

She drew back, suddenly frightened, because the fierce aunt was looking at her far too intently.

But Aunt Etta was nodding.  ‘Of course,’ she said.  ‘Of course there is a third place.  There is one for everybody.  But it’s no good filling it up with people from your old life.  If you want to find the third place, you must find it alone.'”

—Island of the Aunts, by Eva Ibbotson

Therefore, By Implication-

To that great list of Mildly Annoying Truisms, add this:  if anyone stops to compliment me on any aspect of my dress, it is invariably in reference to an item of clothing that was given to me unbidden by someone else.  If they say “nice shoes”, for instance, they are referring to the pair my ex-girlfriend gave me, the ones she got from her friend’s husband, for whom they were one size too big.  If they say “nice tie”, it’s one of the hundreds of ties that used to belong to my father, one that found its way into my closet only because my father is dead and my brother has more ties than he can possibly ever use.  If they say “cool t-shirt”-  and I have a freakin’ lot of T-shirts, including a Hicks County Poultry Fanciers t-shirt, and the Amber Horizons 47 t-shirt I designed myself-  they are commenting on the daruma mask t-shirt that my friend Uriel and his wife brought me as a surprise present from Japan.  Even the network swag my friends drool over finds its way into my possession more or less at random.

I am hoping to mitigate this trend for the space of a day with the new suit I purchased last Saturday.  (I have little patience for listening to members of either sex bitch about how the other has it easier, but I will ungrudgingly concede that when it comes to fashion, men get a walk-   we can wear pretty much the same damn suit to just about any formal occasion, and so long as we keep it clean and replace it once every few years, no one notices or cares.)  Few people who might have the inclination to compliment me on it will actually see it, of course:  the Empress, with whom I am going out to dinner, and my co-workers, who are more likely to notice the sudden, miraculous transformation to formal dress than anything about the suit in particular.

But I’ll know.

Clarity

The moment at which you most need your glasses is…  when you’re looking for them.

Minutiae

reprieve

The sale of the house I live in has been completed.  It was purchased by a local:  the son of the travel agent whose office is in the center of town.  He seems very agreeable (although so did Flora, at first) and does not have any apparent plans to throw me out or raise my rent.  He is planning to move into the first floor with his family in the spring, after completing the extensive renovations necessary to restore the place to livable condition and bring it up to code.  Some of this renovation will involve my floor.  The house inspector, for instance, cited the need for there to be a railing along the opening in the floor that leads to the stairwell (only six years after that would have been helpful to keep my toddler son from killing himself!  And just in time for it to be a pain in the ass that prevents me from getting to any of my bookshelves, or closing the jury-rigged structure I created to prevent all the air-conditioning from draining down the hole.)   Reputedly there will also be some level of treatment of the bathroom-  hopefully before the remaining intact floor tiles crumble through the rotting floor underneath.

At my behest, he has also expressed a willingness to fix the hot-neutral reverse-wired outlets just as soon as the electrician first shows up.  That’s exciting, although it may be too late to save the carpet:  the duct tape I used to immobilize Eve’s power line when I ran it across the living room floor to the good outlets has been there for months and months, and the glue seems to have fused to the fibers…

Terminex has also been by, as he discovered evidence of termite damage while ripping the first floor apart.  He wryly observed that he suspected the previous owners probably knew that and just didn’t bother to mention it.  Gee, ya think?

malfunction

Discovered last night that the eraser side of the pen that goes with my Cintiq is no longer functioning properly in PS4;  it duplicates whatever the pen side is set to rather than erasing.  That’s relatively inexplicable, given that everything is working correctly otherwise, and all of the pen and tablet calibrations tools that I can find, both for the program and for Vista itself, are set correctly.  Have to start by updating the drivers first, I suppose, then check the forums more thoroughly.  There were some posts about similar issues, but not my specific issue with this specific program.

damage

Also swung my laundry basket at a funny angle today and managed to snap off one the two plastic nubs that hold Gloria’s cargo nets in place.  Ouch!  Sorry sweetie.  That’ll be a trip to the dealer this Saturday…

Spore: 42

Ordinarily I would put this on the Spore page, but:  after many different approaches, endless speculation and over a year of on-and-off playing, Jack and I finally managed to reach the center of the galaxy this weekend.  (The triumphant creatures who took the honors were those self-same Purple Shifters I mentioned earlier.)  And boy, was it worth it!  Because when we got there Read the rest of this entry »

The Constant Variety of Sport (part 1)

[originally written in late July 2009]

Every Saturday afternoon it’s a slow train-wreck.

“I don’t see anybody from my team,” says Jack, as I help him on with his cleats.  He twists in the front seat of the station wagon to look out the windows, pulling his foot farther away from me, and halfway out of the shoe.  I grab his foot by the ankle and shove the shoe firmly onto it, double-tie the laces.

“It’s a huge field, son,”  I tell him, glancing out across the green and brown.  “They’ll be there.”  I fold the leather tongue down over the laces.  “Somewhere.”

On Saturday mornings, Jack goes to classes at the Gifted Society in Sewcrest. We drive up Route 33 to Bluelaw County, to the Sewcrest Elementary School, and for an hour or so he gets some instruction in whatever topic interested him enough to enroll in.  One semester it was “Simple Science”.  Another it was Egyptology.  This semestre it’s Lego Engineering, which thrills him no end;  he builds the Mindstorm kits, the ones with the sensors and the cpu, while I sit down the hall in the cavern-like All-Purpose Room drinking coffee and reading.  He’d rather I be in the class with him (so would I, actually), but it’s against the rules.

Saturday afternoons, by contrast, he has baseball practice.  We leave the Sewcrest Elementary School, Read the rest of this entry »