"Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough," I Say

Again, E and I headed to the first weekend of the twice-yearly Friends of the Library Book Sale. It was one of the worst lines I've ever had to stand in at all. We stood around longer than an old Soviet Union toilet-paper line, for pete's sake.

Supposedly, the local fire marshall didn't like the way people were crammed into the old warehouse, so he laid down the law and decreed that only so many people were allowed into that giant tinderbox at a time, which meant an unprecedented hour-long line.

Still, I had an agenda, and the fact that I got that second book in the pile there made it all worth while!



I thinks it's indicitive of the refinement of my reading tastes that the piles are getting smaller. I'm just not picking up every damn book I come across. That's good, because I'm spending less, overall. Well, not really--there'll always be stuff I want, but at least I'll eventually spend less on the classics.

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Utopia

Series 3, Episode 11: Best. Episode. Yet.

...and it's only part 1 of 3.

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Diiiiiiiive!

Last night, the wife and I went to the first film of a summer outdoor film series at the Big Red School on the Hill. Sing it with me...

Flash! Ah-ahhhhh! King of the impossible!



I just had to get a shot of the almighty Brian Blessed...

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Book Splurge '07

One of the pitfalls of steady income is the ability to go to the first and most expensive weekend of the twice-yearly Friends of the Library Book Sale. While E and I spent more on this booksale than the two previous ones we went to combined, we still made out like bandits.

My haul alone was easily worth every penny of the $40 I spent for it...



So don't be surprised if I'm not blogging again for awhile.

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More Backlog

This week, I find myself rearranging and reorganizing for the New Year. Usually, I have someone nagging at me to do this, but I find that the habit finally took. Over the past few days, I've been slowly going through and clearing out all the things cluttering up my psychic RAM. Here's one of them.

During last Turkey Day's trip to Clevesburg, we stopped at a brand new, redesigned Dunkin Donuts. I'd love to show you just how it's different, but alas...



This is one of those things you kind of understand, but still question at a deep level. Trade secrets are one thing, but exactly what do they have to hide? See, now the paranoia about potential hidden weapons of mass destruction starts to become just a touch more relatable.

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Christmas on the Hill

The Elmira Correctional Facility in upstate New York wants to wish you all a happy holiday season!

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Backlog

I've been meaning to get to this for months.

This is part three of this saga, and a fitting end, too.

Part One was something utterly strange and beyond comprehension. Part Two was a little more understandable.



But with Part Three, the world once again makes sense...

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But Wait, There's More

The Wife and I couldn't resist going back to the third (not second, like I thought before) week of the Book Sale. Each day of the weekend, the prices go down a bit more. The last haul was $4...I think we spent about $7 or $8 that day.

The stack you see up there was but half our Sunday haul, which cost us a grand total of $3.35!!

I love this town!

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My To Do List Just Got Longer

And, I'm not complaining one bit!

This weekend was the second third weekend of the Friends of the Library Spring Book Sale.

These books here cost $0.50 each!

I've been planning to get some Isaac Babel for some time now. If Raymond Carver thought highly of him, that's good enough for me. It looks like I snagged a reprint of a 1955 edition of Babel's collected stories.

The only publication date I see inside that copy of The Norton Anthology of Fiction is 1978, which theoretically makes that a first edition.

The funny thing is that I've got Fitzgerald's "Babylon Revisited," Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants," Kafka's "Metamorphosis," and Updike's "A&P" three times over with just the books I have in the picture!

Not a bad haul for $4. I got a couple of other miscellaneous books, too. True, I could've gone to Free Comic Book Day, but we had errands to run, too.

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Slope Day = Day for Slopes??

No, not at all. No racial dig, there. It's just the annual year-end tradition at the Big Red school on the hill which takes place in an area called "The Slope." I got to observe last Friday after my first full week of work.



Rapper Talib Kweli was there. His show wasn't too bad.

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Gobble, Gobble, Part Deux

My Wife pwned teh birrrd! All I had to do was guzzle down the cream sherry and do the dishes.

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Ain't NaNoOne's Business If I Do

This is pages 71 to 120 of my NaNoWriMo piece. I've cranked out another five pages tonight (I had another gig), but I gotta tell you. Week Three started out being the picnic that was promised in the book No Plot? No Problem!. But, it's killing me, now.

To be honest, I know why. That "Inner Editor" of mine, which believe it or not was more than content to sit quietly for two weeks, is now going, "Okay, you've had your fun. But, now you're just adding words for the sake of the word count and meandering nowhere--at least nowhere near the plotline."

In truth, there are only about two or three more scenes I need to wrap up the story and I'm pretty damn sure it's not 24,000 words worth of stuff. Anyway, I've decided on an uneasy compromise. I'm not going to write filler, but I've been trying to elaborate on all the background and exposition that I just haven't had the time to more skillfully work into the story. Then, I've done the same with some of the scenes I haven't written yet. It's frustrating to throw craft completely out the window, but that's what has to happen if I continue with the project within the spirit of the rules.

I guess I just have to accept that decision. If I want a submittable story by the end of the month, there's no reason I can't stop now and pare it down. But, I want to complete the project I signed up for.

Oh, and for the curious: 27,035/50,000 words, or 54%. I'm behind. I know. Stop yelling at me.

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Outage

Teh Intarwub has been down at our place for the past two days, so I've had to leave to get online. Jaysus, it feels like I'm in Athens, again. So, that means I'm on the run, especially on Mondays and Tuesdays, when The Wife needs rides to and from work because of her irregular hours. I've sort of buried myself with deadlines and such for various projects, and I go ahead and take on another one, thanks to Datu_B.

I don't have high hopes of accomplishing 50,000 words between November 1st-30th, but it's a good excuse for me to work on this short story idea I had from a decade back that got too large and unwieldy for something under 5,000. But, will it stretch out to 50k? We'll see.

We went to a Halloween party in Rochester. (Yes--more weekend travelling. Jaysus.) I'm glad I went, though, because we had some nice costumes that weren't too expensive. All we needed were hats and accessories. Everything else came out of our closets, and like homemade presents, aren't those the best kind?

All right, now I gotta drive to the Library and return some books. Hopefully, I can find some more episodes of BBC's Coupling. Actually, there's one more task I need to get to first.

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Once Upon a Time in Ithaca: Old School

I finally decided that I've had enough of half-heartedly working through dead patterns on chairs and doing footwork drills in the living room, so I decided to take it back and do it Old School. (If you're wondering, I fell out of contact with the local FMA guy, but I'll pick it up again as soon as the paychecks start rolling in.)

I forget which of the Old Masters--I want to say Punong Guro Edgar Sulite (Datu_B, check me on my facts if I'm wrong)--was trained like this: His father would hang a single stick, held in the middle by a piece of string, off of a tree. The object was to hit the stick, and just have to deal with all the different ways it would bounce and spin around. Not necessarily the safest thing to do.

Needless to say, I said "Screw it."



I worked that for about twenty minutes before I realized that I was just hanging out on the outside. I played around with it, and came up with this configuration:



Now, I worked this facing the tree (my "opponent") as my frame of reference, the idea being to have to stay inside those boundaries, which I could modify as I saw fit. Then, things started getting fun for the next fifty minutes.

Now, I realize that all I've done is reinvented the wheel (one of my biggest pet peeves), but since this is the first time I've actually tried this, I learned quite a few things right away. (And, no rolling your eyes and going "Duh!")

• Somehow I managed to figure out that how much more effective it is to keep hitting, as opposed to hitting and waiting for a "counterstrike" to deflect and attacking again. I suppose this means I've finally made the connection that deflection isn't necessarily a "passive" act, so to speak.
  
• When in doubt, "candlestick."
  
• If you keep the angle of the stick to your wrist at 90° it's easier to do that.
  
• When I could pull them off, gunting movements with the double stick are nice.
  
• The strangest thing, I managed to work in every deflection (depending on how high or low I hung the stick) except my favorite, the reverse umbrella. And, I tried, believe me. Oh well, guess I'll always suck at that move ;).

Any thoughts or suggestions would be much appreciated. I gotta go do some chores... can't train and blog all day ;).

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First "Sunday" Dinner

It was actually yesterday's dinner, but Mamazoo has all sort of stuff to do Sundays, so we had her over yesterday. E picked her up out in Elmira and brought her back here to give her the grand tour. We did the usual stuff we used to do when we'd visit from Ohio: hang out, play Scrabble and/or Yahtzee, and eat! No lumpia that night, though. We had some spaghetti with some Italian sausage and our favorite Bully Hill Love My Goat vino!



After dinner, we spent a bit of time at a park that's right on one end of Cayuga Lake. It's not like living near Lake Erie, but it's close enough, what with the water, the lake breeze, and the gulls that would walk right up to you. It was the replacement for the usual visit to Harris Hill in Elmira. There were even swing benches.

The wierdest thing was knowing that it wouldn't be six months before we'd get a chance to do this again with Mamazoo. This is going to be regular, maybe once or twice a month. I can tell you, the ladies were ecstatic, too. Mamazoo was beside herself with giddyness when she sat down at our table to hang out and play games.

The other side of it is that spending time with E's family or mine doesn't have to be such a choice anymore, or the time-crunched misadventure that it usually is. Yes, the drive to my folks is a little longer, but neither of our families are out of the way.

Of course, this begs the question: What's for tonight's "Sunday Dinner?" Maybe some lumpia.

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My New Second Home

At this moment, I'm spending my second day at the Commons. I was here two days ago, looking around and remembering all the good things I loved about this place the last time I visited.

I found the coffee shop in the picture that The Wife took, namely Juna's Cafe. Now, I probably won't be spending as much time here as I did at Donkey. But, why didn't anyone tell me that this place is the love child of Donkey and the recently renovated Village Bakery?

As I walked around the Commons two days ago, I couldn't help but represent...

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Settling In

Well, Ivy League, being the busy-bee that she is regardless of her energy level, has managed to get most of the house in order. Not that I haven't done my fair share, mind you (I think even she'll admit that much ;)). My favorite of her work: the swanky shower curtain in the bathroom.



Sometime after the kitchen and dining areas got done, I got around to fixing up my new "command and control center" aka my Office Space.

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Recap: Moving Day 3

We had a problem the night before getting into the apartment itself, since we arrived after the Rental Office Hours. But, thanks to a nice, new neighbor and a responsive maintenance man, we got in after a brief wait.

The next day, after much hanging out with our help, we started the unpacking process, which really amounted to unpacking a few things and blowing an ungodly amount of money on miscellaneous things we needed. But all in all, it was still good.

Needless to say that we did follow the truck's advice as we were emptying it the night before.



By the way, Budget kicks ass.

The first two rooms we cobbled together were the living room and the dining room. A dining room with tables and chairs so that, as DATU_B said about his similar experience after his recent move, we can actually sit and eat like adults.

I love having furniture from each of the periods of my life. Ivy League likes the "retro swank," but it's something else for me. For instance, that bulbless lamp and coffee table are just slightly older than I am. As a toddler, I smashed my head into every corner of that table at one time or another. The futon is straight from Athens and used to belong to Mr. and Mrs. DATU_B. Ah, all the beer drinking and movie watching...



And, at the risk of sounding maudlin again, the other picture is that of our first Sunday dinner in our new home. Ivy League, partially due to her half-Italianness, was determined to reinstitute "the Sunday dinner" into her life, which is more than fine with me. Next week, we'll probably have Mamazoo over, now that she's a mere 45 minutes away.

Well, that's our move. Thank God "Ithaca or Bust" was not a bust. I need to find something productive to do, now, not the least of which is find a jobby-job.

Anyone hiring a former mental health worker with retail skills, fair-to-middlin' martial arts skills, an overactive imagination, and an overstocked vocabulary in the Ithaca, NY area?

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Recap: Moving Day 2

We got the rest of our stuff, sans one bookshelf, onto the truck, hence the look of disbelief on my face.



While we were packing, my dad "supervised" as dads are often wont to do while Mom packed enough food to last us a week.



So, we hit the road about 11:30 in the AM, and soldiered on. And, at exactly 2 PM on July 30th, 2005, we became New Yorkers!



Although, we still had another five hours of driving ahead of us...

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Recap

T-minus 12 hours until move time:



The looks on our faces still haven't completely faded.

T-minus 9.5 hours until move time: No, more than 2.5 hours had passed. It's just that we grossly underestimated the moving and cleaning time.



These were our last purchases from Donkey Coffee. Note the "symbol of the day"--very appropos in Ivy League's eyes.

T-minus 2 hours until moving time: 75% of the truck filled with 95% of our stuff. The other five percent we would pick up at my parents' house in Cleveland.



T-minus 30 minutes until moving time: After cleaning up, dinner, and a quick shower, we spent time pondering the close of the first chapter of our lives--not that we got all maudlin or anything ;).



More when I get more energy back...

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