Guess I haven’t really been in a journalling mood lately, as all I’ve been good for are comic book posts. So to keep you in the loop, here’s all the little stuff that’s been keeping me busy when I haven’t been reading (or writing about) comics:
The biggest little news is that we’ve gone out to look at houses a couple of times in the past month. I’ve been in my house since 2001, and Debbi moved in in 2005, and it’s getting a little tight. Plus Debbi loves to look at houses. So we’ve hit about 10 open houses, even though I’m not ready to buy a new house this year. We saw a couple of houses we liked, one of which Debbi seemed to really like. We also saw a bunch of pretty mediocre houses, usually small houses which were awkwardly remodeled and/or expanded by their owners, and it didn’t work very well. It would be nice to find a house next year that we could buy, although I’m not looking forward to going through the effort of selling the current place!
We’ve been visiting with our friends. One set of friends is remodeling their house, although they’ve had a heck of a time getting the plans approved by their city. Another set of friends have infant twins, and we’ve visited them, and then gone out to lunch with them. I gotta say they seem like just about the most well-organized parents I’ve ever seen; or maybe having twins just left them without any effort to stress out about things. And we had other friends over for dinner one evening and I played with their almost-2-year-old daughter for over an hour.
I’ve been on a minor cleaning kick. I’ve been organizing my Magic cards, and then this weekend I went through all my old science fiction magazines and threw most of them out. Indeed, I went through my considerable backlog of SF magazines I haven’t read yet and declared ‘bankrupcy’ on most of them, tossing them out too, once I admitted to myself that I just wasn’t going to get to them. I marked a few stories in about a half-dozen issues to read in the near future, but that’s it. That’s a heck of a lot of paper out to the recycle bins.
I cleaned and lubed my bike chain which happily fixed the squeaking sound I was getting when pedaling, which made me very happy. I’m still biking to work twice a week, which is getting nicer as we head into cooler weather (although, honestly, it’s been a cool summer). This would sound more impressive if I didn’t have cow-orkers who were biking in 4-5 times a week (although in my defense I think I have a longer ride than most of them).
I finished China Miéville’s The Scar, which was okay, although quite long and the early parts dragged quite a bit. The second half picked up and was pretty rewarding, though. Overall I think I like the idea of (and ideas in) Miéville’s books more than the books themselves.
And of course I’ve been reading all those comic books. And playing Magic. And occasionally poker. And I plan to go to boardgaming at Subrata’s tomorrow night for the first time in a while.
No wonder I’ve felt so busy lately!