personal

A winter’s day, in a deep and dark December

It got very cold here today, with a few snow flurries in the morning and then just a whole lot of wind chill.

I finished reading submissions for Kaleidotrope, giving me at least a week before the zine opens up to submissions again. (And in which I have to finish putting together the Winter 2013 issue. Anybody got any art they’d like to submit?)

I also watched the not terrible (nor brilliant) The Living Daylights. Honestly, there isn’t a whole lot to say about it. Timothy Dalton made for a decent, if not terribly remarkable James Bond.

Meanwhile, Tucker’s clearly feeling better today. He’s still obviously quite exhausted, but the fever seems to have broken, and his appetite and most of his energy are back. This is not a dog who deals well, on his best of days, with discomfort, but it’s good to see him back to 80-90% his old self.

Thursday…?

I think Tucker is feeling a little better, although it’s difficult to tell. He doesn’t seem to want to do much more than lie around in the same spot, though his fever is down a little, and he does seem to have a bit more an appetite. Even if he does appear to need some convincing at first to eat.

I spent a good bite of the day just watching over him, hanging out watching television while he mostly slept. I watched Tower Heist, which I guess is a movie, although not much of one. I like pretty much everybody in it, but there’s not a whole lot to recommend it beyond that. Rare Exports, which I watched last night, was also slightly disappointing, but at least it had the decency to be weird and bizarre.

I can’t believe it’s already Thursday. This hasn’t exactly been the most vacationy of vacations.

The dog days of winter

I didn’t get to sleep last night until sometime after two in the morning.

Before that, I’d watched A View to a Kill, which proved to be a little longer than I expected, and which really didn’t reward my patience with it. It’s the last of the Roger Moore James Bond films, and while it’s not the worst of that bunch, I think that says more about the series at that time as a whole than it does about the relative merits of this movie. I like Roger Moore a lot, even today, but the simple truth is, he was just too old to be playing James Bond. His last outing isn’t his worst, but it’s a far cry from his (much less the series’) best.

After that, there was a whole bunch of wrapping of presents and stuff like that. And I thought, well okay, this is later than I wanted to go to bed tonight, but I can always sleep a little late in the morning.

Around 4:30, my father woke me up to tell me that he and my father were taking our dog, Tucker, to the emergency vet.

Tucker had been listless and moaning and not at all hungry, not at all himself, and my parents just wanted to rule anything serious out. I didn’t go with them, just stayed home, and awake, for the next two and half to three hours.

The vet gave Tucker something for pain and discomfort — which we later found out, with some surprise, was a shot of methadone — and ran some tests. He was running a fever, then and later still, when we went to his regular doctor this evening. I thought 105 seemed unfathomably high, but it turns out the normal body temperature for dogs is around 101 and 102.5°F. (So you learn something new every day.) The vet gave him another shot, this time of antibiotics, plus some to take orally. He said it’s more likely a virus, and will hopefully pass, but the medicine’s to try and cover all bases. We’ll keep an eye on him overnight. He seems better, still a little slow and hesitant, a little more tired than even his usual, but better than this morning. He has some appetite, and we’re hoping this is just a stomach bug that’s hit him a little harder than usual.

I got a little sleep after my parents and Tucker came back home around 7 am, by which I mean maybe two and a half hours. That’s when Tucker’s barking to go outside woke me up, followed by the phone ringing, and the phone repairman showing up to put us on the fiber-optic system. (Verizon is apparently committed to not repairing the existing copper line, so I guess my parents finally relented.)

Then it was just a trip to the post office, setting up Christmas lights outside, furniture repairmen come to fix a broken living room chair, watching over the sick dog, watching an episode of Quantum Leap, listening to music, thinking about taking a nap, ultimately not doing so, and generally just puttering around. And that was my whatever this day is. Wednesday? Frankly, I was just glad, as I fell back asleep at 7:30, that I didn’t have to be at work in an hour.

Day three of my nineteen-day weekend

Another dreary, rainy day, although less rainy than yesterday. I even managed to take a walk this afternoon. I spent the rest of the day just puttering around the house, doing some reading and setting up the Christmas tree, which is itself a surprisingly time-consuming endeavor. (Even after getting the box out of the attic, each row of the tree is color-coded and has to be fanned out and added a bough at a time, for something like ten or eleven rows.)

This evening, I watched Octopussy, which turned out to be surprisingly not terrible, especially considering the not so great track record I’ve had with the Roger Moore Bond films. This was one of the few, if only, Bond movies I ever saw in theaters when I was younger…and that six-year-old me is probably still the movie’s ideal audience. But it was significantly better than the often tedious For Your Eyes Only, which is maybe all I can hope for this far along in the series. (Just one more Moore, then Timothy Dalton’s pair of movies. I’m not yet sure I want to revisit Pierce Brosnan’s four.)

And that was whatever this day was. Monday? Sure, let’s go with that.

A rainy day

Yesterday was a bit of a wash, really. I watched the disappointing James Bond movie For Your Eyes Only and just hung around the house, still kind of recovering from Friday afternoon. Today, though, my weekly writing group started back up again, at least for a little while, and I cobbled together this:

When the hurricane came through, the dead wizard came back to life and the ghost hunter was finally released from prison.

You probably have already heard this story, or at least a part of it. The governors of Eld were quick to classify what they could, to quarrantine the northern hills where the storm did its worst, but the basic facts escaped their net. There are few across the great expanse of worlds who have not heard about the wizard, Dead Man Jack, or about the woman, Maribel, the would-be hunter who was forced to kill her father twice.

And yet it’s a story that deserves to be re-told, I think, and this time told beyond the basic facts. I can’t pretend to any special knowledge; I wasn’t on the hills that day, and I wouldn’t even make planetfall on Eld for another week, by which point Maribel and Jack both would be long gone. I was not called here to investigate their crimes, nor to root out the cause of the still as yet unexplained storm. I was just another constable, young and naive and fresh from basic on Eld’s sister moon, Brahms — and yet, as a constable, I did have access to reports I might never have seen otherwise. Reports the governors have long kept secret. I know Jack’s real name, for instance, or at least the one that supposedly brought him back to life, and I think, after all these years, I know where he and his daughter disappeared to. The answers have been there all along on the page. It’s just that so few of us have been encouraged to look at those pages.

Dead Man Jack. He was called that long before the first time he died, long before he had even registered himself as a wizard. The official term, of course, is “technomage,” but I’ll be damned if that doesn’t sound even sillier than “wizard,” which is what everyone on Eld knew Jack to be. He wasn’t much of one, from all accounts, either not given to show or incapable of it. If it wasn’t for his daughter, and the strange circumstances of her birth, it’s almost certain no one would have remembered Jack before the year of the hurricane.

Then I came home and watched The Stuff, which was interesting but also pretty disappointing.

And that, plus the crossword puzzle and some dreary rain, was my Sunday.