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Yes, I'm alive. To some definition of "alive". (A week of 6 or less hours of sleep per night is starting to catch up with me.) I spent last weekend in Milwaukee with my parents, since that's probably the last chance I'm going to get to be in that city until next year (I'm not currently planning on flying into Milwaukee for Christmas and/or New Years). Plus, you know, seeing my folks.
Problem is that I did this without taking any vacation days, so it went "get into work early, work, go to airport for 5pm flight" and then "get up early, go to airport for 7:45am flight (and make it with 3 minutes to spare because of hour-long TSA line), get into work by 11:30, work full day". Yes, sometimes, I do wonder if I was dropped on the head as a child.
One thing the flights were good for is chewing through A Song of Ice and Fire, because I'm impatient and can't wait until next year for s2 of Game of Thrones. If the little tick marks on the progress bar in the Kindle omnibus of the first 4 books mean anything, I'm about 75% through A Storm of Swords. I've just been chewing through it, after I finished the nonfiction book I'd been reading.
(Said nonfiction book is For Us Surrender is Out of the Question: A Story from Burma's Never-Ending War by Mac McClelland, who's also the human-rights reporter over at Mother Jones. It's about McClelland's time as a young twentysomething when she went to a Burmese refugee camp in Thailand for six weeks and got a hell of an education. In between her own story, which is written in the wry kind of "god, I was an idiot" voice at some points, are the stories of the people she met, which are heartbreaking and rage-inducing for their sakes. It's not an easy book, but I do recommend it.)
In non-media consumption news, I did get myself a Google+ account (it helps having friends at Google). Yes, this still means I do not have a Facebook, and I'm perfectly alright with that. I kinda like it so far. The interface design does not make me want to claw my eyes out, the asynchronous circles are nice and remind me of DW, and the multi-way video chat is not only neat, but nicely integrated into the entire thing.
Problem is that I did this without taking any vacation days, so it went "get into work early, work, go to airport for 5pm flight" and then "get up early, go to airport for 7:45am flight (and make it with 3 minutes to spare because of hour-long TSA line), get into work by 11:30, work full day". Yes, sometimes, I do wonder if I was dropped on the head as a child.
One thing the flights were good for is chewing through A Song of Ice and Fire, because I'm impatient and can't wait until next year for s2 of Game of Thrones. If the little tick marks on the progress bar in the Kindle omnibus of the first 4 books mean anything, I'm about 75% through A Storm of Swords. I've just been chewing through it, after I finished the nonfiction book I'd been reading.
(Said nonfiction book is For Us Surrender is Out of the Question: A Story from Burma's Never-Ending War by Mac McClelland, who's also the human-rights reporter over at Mother Jones. It's about McClelland's time as a young twentysomething when she went to a Burmese refugee camp in Thailand for six weeks and got a hell of an education. In between her own story, which is written in the wry kind of "god, I was an idiot" voice at some points, are the stories of the people she met, which are heartbreaking and rage-inducing for their sakes. It's not an easy book, but I do recommend it.)
In non-media consumption news, I did get myself a Google+ account (it helps having friends at Google). Yes, this still means I do not have a Facebook, and I'm perfectly alright with that. I kinda like it so far. The interface design does not make me want to claw my eyes out, the asynchronous circles are nice and remind me of DW, and the multi-way video chat is not only neat, but nicely integrated into the entire thing.
