Friday
- I packed, and then headed out for a partial days work, up in Thousand
Oaks. The commute took about an hour longer than I expected - there was
a terrible accident on the 101 that delayed things. Looks like a
tractor-trailer wrapped itself around a stanchion. I worked until about
3:00, then headed up to Lancaster for dinner with friends, and a good
night's sleep with very happy cats.
Thursday 15 January
2009
Thursday
- Not much to say, just another day at work. Balmy weather mostly, if a bit on the warm side.
I received an email from my old boss, Dr. Kajal Gupta, passing along the info that his old professor, Dr. Olgierd Zienkiewicz,
had passed away. I met OZ a couple of times, he was a cheerful and
intelligent fellow, clearly a man of remarkable parts. I have several
of his textbooks.
You know, I've been waiting to meet Umslopagaas again, he of the axe.
It seems that memory has failed me, and he appears, rather, in
Haggard's Nada The Lily,
and perhaps Allan Quatermain, rather than KSM or She. I read all these
books years ago, at the Martinez public library. Umslopagaas was good
with the axe, as I recall, but had a trick wherein he used the pointed back to deadly effect.
Wednesday
- Warm, 85F and higher. But nice, not too humid. There were some winds
- breezes really - so it was not bad. Actually it reminds me of my teenage days in Martinez, for some reason.
I am working through H. Rider Haggard's She on
tape, my commute book. And...it's bad. Terribly written. Not nearly as
good as King Solomon's Mine. Example: our intrepid hero, having
survived various adventures and battles is about to meet the fabled
Ayesha for the first time. The tension builds...so Haggard goes into a
dissertation on Holly's clothes, those being a business
suit that he's brought to the wilds of Africa (gray flannel, weighing four pounds,
by the way).
I did note that Tolkein borrowed a bit from the description of Ayesha -
Galadriel's viewing fount, for one, is a direct copy of that described
by
Haggard, though Haggard explicitly dis-allows viewing the future in it
while Tolkein's Galadriel merely says that any depicted future is "one
that may be".
Tuesday 13 January 2009
Tuesday
- .I hear that the Electoral College has voted, and Obama is
now
the President Elect, rather than Presumptive President Elect.
Warm today, balmy even. Shirt sleeve weather in mid January.
Monday 12 January 2009
Monday
- a long day at work. Not too much to say there. It is getting warmer,
so that's a plus.
Cleaning up around the house this weekend I ran across a book I read,
sometime over the holidays.
Sunday
- not much to say. Lots of errands and chores done.
I went to Costco to (1) renew my membership and (2) get my prescription
for new glasses filled and (3) get new tires on the Explorer. Sadly (2)
and (3) did not get done - I forgot my prescription and it turns out
that the spare tire does not have the correct rim - and one of the four
is
bent - so that had to be put off until I get a new rim. Tires are
119.99 each, plus $11 for installation, balancing, stem, etc. So a
fairly costly endeavor, but they are getting down to the wear lines,
and the bent rim means I am continually putting air into that tire.
Several visits to various stores - I tried to get a haircut but the
barber wasn't in, and some cleaning up and laundry (six baskets!) about
the house. I also turned on my sprinklers, apparently they had been off
since the Christmas snow, or possibly before.
I did get an external network attached disk, with FTP and Samba, but
haven't really had a chance to configure it yet. It works, pretty much
out of the box, with Windows.
Too bad about the Chargers, I had hopes. As the last west
coast
team they were the only team I really had any interest in. Oh well.
