It’s alive!
We have internet access, little thanks to AT&T. The start-up software kept gagging and it seemed like we would have to call AT&T tech support — *shiver*. Then Karen had the bright idea to click on Firefox and voila, we have access. It’s a mystery what the AT&T software was trying to do.
So we’re back, hooked into the ‘net, and yes indeed it’s an important thing. I think we first went online back in ’93 or ’94, and I can remember yucking it up over Mirsky’s Worst of the Web, Slutboy’s Home Page, Ninevolt’s HatePage, and a lot of other relics. Back then, the internet was a source of entertainment rather than information. Few businesses had an online presence. The Yellow Pages still mattered, and we needed paper maps to find our way around a new town.
Our GPS crashed two days ago, so without the GPS and the internet we’ve been limping around Bakersfield like somnambulists. The GPS is still down, but of the two, the ‘net is more important.
Work starts Monday, a solid week of orientation. Wish me luck 🙂
D.
We’re he-ee-ere!
. . . And the mercury’s been pegging 107F each day we’ve been here. I’d like to smack the cheery smile off those folks who feel compelled to point out, It’s a DRY heat!
We have limited internet access until Wednesday, when our apartment finally gets hooked up. For now, it’s the $2/hour thing at Starbuck’s AT&T WiFi (or as our GPS’s British voice calls it, Wiffy!) and I don’t know when I’ll make it back.
Meanwhile, I’ve been making daily trips to Target to stock up on supplies, trips to the grocery stores, etc. Not much else to do when you don’t have cable TV or the internet. And it’s really, really creepy to be cut off from the world like this. I only just found out that Sarah Palin will be resigning as Governor some time this month. I feel so cut off. Yes, I know there are these things called newspapers, but they’re so yesterday.
I’ll be very happy when all of the various shopping chores are done and I can hole up all day long in an air conditioned room.
See ya this Wednesday.
D.
Logistics
It was worse moving from Harbor to Santa Rosa.
Then, we had to clean out a 4000-square-foot mostly-but-not-entirely-empty home and a stuffed-to-the-gills 1300-square-foot medical office. We had two cats, two ferrets, two degus, nine poison dart frogs, and about 30 or 40 tarantulas. We were moving to three locations: our rental home, a medical office, and a storage facility.
Now — lucky us! We only have to move from two locations (a home and a storage facility) to two locations (a home and an office). There’s a whole lot less to move to the office, too: no heavy exam chair, no operating microscope (we donated both to Kaiser), no autoclave. I got rid of a lot of junk in the last few weeks. Our degus and dart frogs are gone to the great beyond, and a lot of the male tarantulas have died a natural death, too. We’re down to less than 20 tarantulas.
But this is still a pain in the ass, particularly since we want to move a minimal amount of stuff down to a furnished apartment in B-field (temporary housing until we close escrow). We have a Camry and a Miata. So, as far as storage space for moving is concerned, we have a Camry. Into the Camry goes a carrier for the ferrets, a carrier for the cats, all the tarantulas (each in separate sta-in-pet enclosures), our luggage, our printer/fax machine, assorted files, assorted backpacks with laptops and other goodies we can’t live without, and last but not least, a desktop computer.
Yeah, I don’t see it happening, either . . . not unless the Miata’s trunk turns out to be a lot larger than I’m thinking it is.
Karen and I just did a count: this will be our 12th move together as a couple. Twelve moves in 25 years of marriage just doesn’t seem fair. Whatever happened to settling down?
D.
It’s our 25th!
I’ve done the big anniversary blogs in years past. Not much more to add. We’ve been too busy preparing for the big move to do much celebrating . . . so we’re delaying gratification, something us folks in the medical field know about only too well.
So how about Mark Sanford’s latest interview, eh? Saying that he had never felt the same way about any other woman than he did about his Argentinian squeeze. Saying that she was his soul mate. Wow. And this is a guy who is trying to get back together with his wife?
Karen has a theory that makes a hell of a lot of sense.
This man hates his wife.
Cheers, y’all!
D.
already bought the sequel
Already Dead by Charlie Huston*, 2005.
Joe Pitt’s a Philip Marlowe kind of vampire, a white knight among bloodsuckers. He lives in modern-day Manhattan, where thousands of vampires survive by aligning with one of several factions, ranging from the Mafia-like Coalition to those oh-so politically correct revolutionaries, The Society. Yet Pitt lone-wolfs it, surviving as an independent only because the factions find him more useful that way.
The novel opens with Pitt cleaning up a messy zombie problem. Zombies, in Pitt’s world, are folks who have become infected with flesh-eating bacteria that give the host a hunger for human flesh (yes, especially brains). Pitt takes out the zombies, who because of their mindless carnage tend to draw unwanted attention to the whole undead community. That’s good. But he leaves behind a high-profile crime scene, and worse, a carrier of the zombifying bacterium. That’s bad.
In the classic noir formula of “put your main character in a fucked-up situation, then make it worse,” Pitt’s life keeps getting more and more complicated. No one’s happy with his work, least of all the well connected Coalition, to whom falls the job of political cleanup. To zero the balance sheet, Pitt has to find the carrier and make nice with some old Manhattan wealth — the Horde family, whose 14-year-old daughter, a repeat runaway, has gone to ground somewhere in Pitt’s turf. Pitt’s HIV-infected girlfriend thinks he’s developed a fondness for blue blood, and worse yet, someone — or something — has stolen his ten-pint stash of refrigerated blood.
El Mansour
We had dinner this evening in San Francisco, at a Moroccan place called El Mansour. If you’ve never done it, Moroccan dining is a special experience. Most Moroccan restaurants strive to give their diners the feeling that they’re thousands of miles away, and El Mansour succeeds wonderfully in that regard.
You step in from a bright and unusually warm San Francisco afternoon and the place is a cave, cool and dark. Once your eyes adjust, you see low tables (though not as low as at some Moroccan places — you won’t be reclining on pillows here), billowy sheets draped across the ceiling, warm, rich colors everywhere. The waiter brings over hand towels and a sort of kettle, and he drizzles water over your palms because, yup, you’re gonna be using your fingers to fress here (unless you’re like the wimps next to us, who asked for forks).
Moroccan restaurants are always a bit on the pricey side because it’s a price fixe meal, five courses in this case. It’s worth it, though. I can’t think of anything else quite so unique. I guess dining at a sushi bar might feel special the first time around, but we’ve been there and done that. Moroccan? I can count the number of times I’ve gone out for Moroccan on one hand. They’re hard to find, for one thing. A couple of ’em in San Francisco, one in Palo Alto (I’m not even sure that one is still there), at least one in L.A.
Here were the five courses:
* Lentil soup and bread
* A dish with four separate salads, each themed on a different vegetable: cucumber, carrot, eggplant, and tomato. And more bread.
* B’stila. B’stila is everything that’s good about food, and if you’re not familiar with it, go read Dean’s post on my b’stila.
* An entree. Jake had chicken and couscous with mixed vegetables, I had a fish tagine, and Karen had the best dish of the three, chicken in a honey sauce with prunes. To die for.
* Dessert: fried bananas and a little pastry thingie made from the same filo-like sheets that they used to make the b’stila.
Let’s see . . . there’s the tea-pouring ritual, too, and then the belly dancing. Our belly dancer had a real Barbara Eden thing going. She was great at pulling her audience into the show, although she made no headway whatsoever with my rather dour son. (At that age, I would have found a way to collide with her softer body parts, but it seems my son is not as sex-obsessed as I was.) Smokin’ hot body, by the way.
Over at Yelp, some moran complained about small portions. Admittedly we’re little people, but for us, there was more than enough to eat. We brought home leftovers. And now I’m dying to see if I can copy their chicken in honey and prunes recipe. Oooh, this recipe looks close. I’ll have to perfect it for the next time Chris and Dean have us up to their private island 🙂
What a fun evening.
D.
Shelf-hogs at Borders Santa Rosa
Of course I’m delighted to see that old-friend-of-Balls-and-Walnuts Lilith Saintcrow has half a shelf at Borders, but two shelves for Orson Scott Card? I have nothing against Jim Butcher (I’ve only read one of his books, which left me kind of meh, but at least I didn’t need the eye bleach like with O.S.C.), but four shelves? Mercedes Lackey has nearly two shelves. Used to be that the only shelf-hogs were folks like Stephen King, Terry Pratchett, or Piers Anthony, with fat little clusters for folks like Tolkien or Heinlein or Asimov. The old-timers take up far less shelf space these days (not much Bova or Heinlein; PK Dick is still considered cool, though — 1/4 of a shelf, not bad for a dead guy), so you would think there would be lots and lots of room for newcomers.
And that’s really what I’m getting at. When I go to a bookstore, I want to browse for new authors. If I want known quantities, I can shop online. So what I would prefer to see at Borders or Barnes and Noble is MUCH less shelf space devoted to single authors and more shelf space given to newcomers.
Yes, I realize I’m being hopelessly naive, since market forces must drive these decisions. In which case Jim Butcher must be red hot right now, and Charlaine Harris (whose new book was stacked next to every checkout stand) is molten. And don’t even mention Stephenie Meyer.
The interesting thing about Stephenie Meyer is her appeal across sex and age boundaries. I base this on my N of 2: my son read the whole series, and I read and enjoyed the first two books. She’s doing something right. Still. Sometimes it seems like there’s a whole Stephenie Meyer section of the bookstore (approximately where YA used to be).
How does a guy go about finding new voices? It’s the easiest thing in the world to walk into Borders and buy a Terry Pratchett I’ve never read before (I’m convinced I’ll die before I ever finish all of his books), or a Carl Hiaasen. But I want something new.
Anyway, today I picked up Charlie Huston’s Already Dead, which, from what I can, tell fuses the noir/hard-boiled genres with vampire foo. Three pages into it and the writing is crisp though hardly luminescent. On the luminescent front, I recently finished Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, which rocked — great story, plot, characters, writing, everything. Comparable to Martin Cruz Smith for quality . . . a bit more heavy-handed than Smith, but Chabon’s plotting is better.
Read anything excellent lately?
D.
Love and Thanatos
By now, you’ve heard the news: Governor Mark Sanford, he of the Houdini-like disappearances, is absent no longer. Was he working on a book? No! Hiking the Appalachian Trail? No! Weeping for five days nonstop over his star-crossed love for an Argentinian woman? YES!
Mark Sanford (R), Governor, South Carolina, explaining what Maria saw in him.
I could engage in schadenfreude over the hypocrisy of this “pro-family” conservative Christian Republican politician, but hey, that’s been done. I’d rather focus on Sanford’s own explanation for how it all began.
Follow me below the fold.