Category Archives: Uncategorized

Time Off

My day job involves helping complete enrollments for Medicare Advantage member for a large non-profit HMO and that means our busy period is just about to being as the Annual open enrollment period starts today. In anticipation of the hours to come I took Friday and Monday off from last week and this week giving myself a 4-day weekend. I didn’t go out and do anything special. No trips out of town, no shows, just a longer than usual weekend with one role-playing game sandwiched in the middle on Saturday.

That game is a Space Opera  game with the original rules published by FGU back in the distant past of 1980. One of the players and a dear friend for decades hosting the group of us at his office allowing the players and myself as game master, to be as loud as we wish since at that time of the day and week there is no one to disturb. It’s been a real blast revisiting this game system I haven’t run in ages and everyone appears to be having a great time. Even if every mission the players are dispatched on doesn’t quite turn out the way that they hoped.

I had also planned this weekend to finally see It: Chapter Two  at nearly three hours its running time makes it a very difficult film to schedule during my usual week. Sadly Sunday afternoon I started with a minor migraine and canceled my seat reservation. By the evening I was not disabled from the pain but distracted enough that I would have not enjoyed the film.

At least I was feeling fine Sunday morning so my sweetie-wife and I could enjoy our customary Sunday trip to the Zoo and lunch out together. Pictures to follow soon.

All in all it was a pleasant long weekend and now I am reading and refreshed to get back to work at my day job and complete reviewing the galley’s for Vulcan’s Forge  coming out in March of 2020.

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And Now My Birthday Has Ended

Yesterday was the anniversary of my birth. I started the day by driving to court and reporting for jury duty. I have often been summoned to jury duty but I have never served. As a writer I think it would be good and as a citizen I think it is my duty to do such service but alas it seems for the most part lawyers do not like the look of me. Yesterday it was not the lawyers but rather the lack of courtrooms. There was but one available for trail and so after they called a single jury pool away the rest of us were dismissed. Because so much of the day remained the rule for my day-job compelled me to report to work. So my birthday was split between a jury lounge and my cubical, surprisingly this was not the dullest birthday I have experienced.

In 1981 I was enlisted in the United States Navy and served my one and only Western Pacific Deployment, or WestPac. On my birthday we were no floating about the middle of the ocean, no for that special day we had found a spot even more boring than endless sea, Diego Garcia.

Diego Garcia is a tiny atoll in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Its strategic location makes it perfect as a base for long rang aircraft and there is a tiny tiny US Naval station there. Personnel who volunteer for duty at Diego Garcia, at least when I was in the service, have that duty count as sea duty, and one year is credited as two. You see, unlike other Naval Stations around the world, there is nothing at Diego Garcia. No native population, no city or town, just the military men and women on a sliver of land with a lagoon that often hosts sharks. Going ashore there, and even with nothing you still go ashore when you can, I watched a shark come out of the water to get a flying fish. The big entertainment on my birthday there was sitting on a beach watching my friend Dean Amick, and it was his birthday as well, struggle trying to work out how to split a coconut open. Ahh, good times.

So you see yesterday, in comparison, wasn’t bad at all. Not to mention I now have a nifty blu-ray stuffed with bonus material for the British horror film, Night of the Demon, one of the many films referenced in the opening song to The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

 

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Three Weeks

For three weeks now I have been following the weight watchers diet. The change was prompted because I had reached a new record weight and that was not a good thing. With the years passing under me plus the pressure on my joints already suffering from arthritis returning to a more modest weight seemed imperative and yet previous diets had proved to be too difficult to maintain. A writer friend of mine after facing a life threatening health crisis had used Weight Watcher to great effect and it seemed reasonable to give it a go.

It is by far the easiest weight management diet I have attempted. All of my empty calorie junk food snacks have been replaced with fruit and my regular meals are for the most part untouched. (Can you tell my problem was really junk food?) I can still have a burrito once a week and a nice lunch out with my sweetie-wife on our Sundays out.

At the two-week mark I had lost, at least according to our home scale, 13 pounds and I am not suffering from hunger and dreadful late night temptations.

I am not selling this. You do what is right for you, for me but this looks like it may actually work.

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My New Camera

Things have been hectic around here and hopefully soon I will be able to talk about it. Until then here is a photo from the used camera I got this week. I am looking forward to taking lots of pics with this Nikon D80

 

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Recent Podcast Discoveries

I listen to podcasts while I do my work at the day-job and I have discovered a couple of new shows, new to me that is that I think are well worth sharing.

First up is the Revival Theater Playhouse. The Revival Theater started up a fan run podcast to fill the void when we were left without any version of Mystery Science 3000 that later expanded to start producing radio plays comedies, under the Playhouse podcast. Their brand is to take something well knows to fandom and give it a strange twist. Productions include Plan 9 From Outer Space as written by William Shakespeare a strange and hilarious mash-up of Soylent Green with A Christmas Carol, and a lovely homage to War of the Worlds. With lively voice actors and a willingness to go nearly anywhere for a gag, including comedic commercial interludes, the productions are a fun way to kill a few hours.

The second discovery is You Must Remember This, a podcast dedicated to the Hollywood history. The host Karina Longworth creates themes for her seasons, such as exploring the cycle of horror films by following the lives of Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, or an entire season dedicated to ‘Dead Blondes.’ Karina presents the history in a comfortable conversational manner while exploring interesting nooks and crannies of tinsel town.

If you are into the Podcast you should give both a spin.

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I’m So White

A few months ago I took one of those DNA tests that helps determine your ancestry and genetic traits. While the results are not particularly surprising it is interesting to see jus how shockingly white I am. Of course anyone who has seen me burn in the sun would intuitively understand my ancestry is European. By the numbers my genes would indicate that I am 98.3 percent European, with a full 64.5 percent from Britain and its islands. Another nearly 14 percent is designated to French and German ancestry which means I am perpetually at war with myself, followed 4 percent Scandinavian, 2 percent Iberian, 1.5 percent comes from Sub-Saharan Africa almost a third of a percent of me is Finnish.

This was all very cool and fun seeing where my material came from before it reached this particular evolutionary dead end. (I have no kids.)

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A Different Recollection

Seventeen years on this date old the World changed forever. Others will be more eloquent and more analytical about the importance and reverberations echoing from that terrible evil act and I will leave such remembrances to their skillful prose. So, not to ignore but to reflect on a happier occasion I’m going to post about the only party I ever went to during my high school years.

In high school I was very much a loner, I had a small tight circle of friends, but the larger social environment simply was alien. Because of that I don’t have the usual American experience of attending games, proms, or parties held while a student’s parents had departed for an evening or weekend. However there was one exception to this, my acting class.

In my senior year, 1979, as an elective I took a class in acting taught by the engaging Mrs. Linda Crumbo. It was a fun and lively class and one where I even slipped in a bit of my own original writing as a prose piece that I performed. The class was small, we became friends, and towards the end of 1978 it was planned that there would be party held at Mrs Crumbo’s house. Her husband had been wrangled by members of the class to arrange things so that the party would surprise to Linda. The event’s evening arrived and I rode out to the party with four classmates, among our little troupe was Roberta and Pam who during the entire drive out discussed a horror film, Halloween,  that they had recently gone out and watched.

The drive I must tell you was not an urban one. We drove through darkened wood on a small two-lane road with only the car’s headlights for illumination. Pam and Roberta recounted to film with great detail and the tension in the car grew as we transverse the dark and somewhat threatening forest. Eventually we arrived at Linda’s two-story wood-frame house.

Every window was dark.

We sat for a few moments debating how to proceed. Naturally someone had to go to the door and find out what was going on but after the tales of violence and murder no one wanted to venture alone from the car. The wood seemed to close in around the house and around us. Several more moments passed and together we got out of the car and crowded around the door, knocking loudly. A second story window illuminated and footsteps proceeded down the stairs and to the door. Linda Crumbo, a robe closed around her, her eyes bleary from sleep, her blond hair disheveled, opened the door.

“We’re having a party!”

I’m not sure who or how many shouted that as greeting and the scrum of students invaded her house. Nearly at once we encountered her husband, half way down the interior staircase and her said. “I forgot!’

The Crumbos got dressed and a pleasant party filled the remainder of the evening hours. This was not a drunken bacchanal and it is one of my more pleasant memories from that time.

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