{"id":11470,"date":"2014-09-01T15:01:16","date_gmt":"2014-09-01T19:01:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/?p=11470"},"modified":"2014-09-01T15:01:16","modified_gmt":"2014-09-01T19:01:16","slug":"labor-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/?p=11470","title":{"rendered":"Labor Day"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"photo<\/a><\/p>\n

Happy Labor Day! I’m not spending working, unless you count working on a short story.<\/p>\n

I also wrote a little something else yesterday, as part of my weekly free-writing group:<\/p>\n

There was nothing to be done about it, Harold thought. If the snow didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t let up, and judging by the sky it wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t going to, then he was going to be trapped here longer than just overnight. And there was barely enough firewood to see him through until morning. Over in the corner of the cabin there was a radio, shiny and almost brand new from the look of it, and a flare gun on a shelf in the pantry. But neither of those things were going to do him much of any good, he realized. He\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d been halfway across the room to the radio when he remembered where he was.<\/p>\n

But there was nothing he could do about that now. At least not until he got the recall.<\/p>\n

There wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t a lot of food in the pantry, Harold noticed. He wondered, briefly, about whoever had lived here before him. There were no bodies, at least none that he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d found, and no sign of a struggle. Maybe they hadn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t been here when it happened, the worst of it. Maybe they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d headed to town for provisions, or been headed here from further south. The place looked lived in, but not recent. It couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t be recent. Whoever it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d been, they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d left behind of few tins of canned peaches, some beans, and that flare gun, but not a whole lot else. Whoever it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d been was long dead now.<\/p>\n

Harold supposed it could be worse. This was supposed<\/i> to be survivalist training, wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t it? This was supposed<\/i> to get him ready for work in the field. He\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d heard about agents-in-training thrown off into worse assignments than this, cadets who had barely survived before recall — and plenty who hadn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t. Holing up against a winter storm after the end of the world didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t seem so bad by comparison.<\/p>\n

He checked his readings. If the radio was going to give him nothing but static, he could at least be sure about the equipment he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d brought with him. It wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t much — couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t be, according to protocol — but at least the scanner\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s blip-blip-blip was comforting, the steady green light that confirmed there was no more contagion. The plague that had killed everybody on Earth, at least, was gone.<\/p>\n

So it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a little cold, he thought. There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s probably some blankets, and you like peaches. Got to check their sell-by dates, check for dents, but it could be worse. You\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll be fine. Harold almost laughed. It wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t like he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d been time-jumped back into the Pleistocene or anything like that. He wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t going to end up on the roll of cadets who had been crushed or eaten by dinosaurs. There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d been this one guy, tried as a witch back in sixteen-something in Salem. They\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d had a noose tight around his neck before the recall came. You could still see the marks. Harold was just here, up north in the Canadian backwoods, trapped by bad weather, the last man left alive on the planet. It wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t going to be fun, but it was going to be easy.<\/p>\n

And that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s when there was a knock at the door.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Meanwhile, Saturday night I watched The Abyss<\/i>, which was pretty much everything I expected it to be. I can’t say that I loved the movie, but I thought Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio and Ed Harris were great together. (This scene<\/a> in particular — spoiler warnings — was pretty damn terrific.) I do think the movie would have been a little better without<\/i> the science-fictional elements, though, which seems like a weird thing to be saying. The aliens — again, um, spoilers — almost seem like an afterthought. The director’s cut apparently expands on that, though possibly not to the betterment of the film. I dunno, I enjoyed it.<\/p>\n

Last night, I also re-watched Jacob’s Ladder<\/i>, which I think was a little better the first time I saw it, if only because I didn’t know how it ended. <\/p>\n

And that’s kind of been my long weekend, such as it is. Hard to believe it’s already September.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Happy Labor Day! I’m not spending working, unless you count working on a short story. I also wrote a little something else yesterday, as part of my weekly free-writing group: There was nothing to be done about it, Harold thought. If the snow didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t let up, and judging by the sky it wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t going to, … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[14,28,12],"class_list":["post-11470","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-movies","tag-personal","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11470"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11470"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11470\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11473,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11470\/revisions\/11473"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11470"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11470"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11470"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}