Part-time prevaricator
I discovered on the track today that this song (“Superbeast”, by Rob Zombie) perfectly matches my running* pace.
It’s extra funny when you consider that, as I was leaving the house this morning, my wife said, “Enjoy running… for your life!”
* Fine, jogging pace.
I shot this photo from my deck, on a chilly night at the end of March 2018. Then I went inside and ordered Michael Swanwick’s chapbook/objet d’art Blue Moon, helping to ensure it would sell out instead of being burned.
Current status: sitting in the Double Decker listening to “Talk Dirty to Me”. I haven’t heard that in years. I’m not convinced I missed it, either.
Dad loved cop shows from the ’70s and ’80s. He wasn’t a big fan of ’80s and ’90s music, though. So imagine my surprise, one day, when, home for a weekend, I heard the dulcet tones of the Beastie Boys coming from the TV that he was watching. It was such an odd occurrence, in fact, that it took me a moment to recognize what I was hearing.
Then it clicked: it was the breakdown in “Sabotage”.
I came out of my room just in time for the lyrics to start up again, and Dad, realizing he’d been tricked, switched the channel.
I get it, though. It sure does look like an ’80s cop show.
Apparently I set my birthday to private on Facebook last year, which meant that this year, I didn’t have a million Happy Birthday! posts from friends and family. I’m OK with that.
I had laser eye surgery performed on the weekend. Today was my second follow-up appointment with the ophthalmologist.
My vision is now sitting at 20/16 with both eyes, which is apparently a step better than 20/20 or “perfect” vision. I gather that the 20/16 means that I can see at 20 feet what a normal person can see at 16 feet.
I had a look at the documents the doctor provided. Before the surgery, my good eye was at 20/400. My bad eye, well, they didn’t even bother with a 20/number, just marked OF 2ft (I assume “out of focus at two feet”).
Now all I need to do is get used to a life without glasses.
(That’s not my eyeball. Photo by Vanessa Bumbeers on Unsplash)
I posted these to Facebook but not everyone’s on Facebook. (Hi, Mom!) So here are a few photos I got of my oldest nephew playing in the Collège Louis Riel band at the 2018 Brandon Jazz Festival.
With some of the money I inherited from my dad, last year, I bought an 11–16mm f/2.8 lens for my camera. In plain English, it’s a nice fast lens with a nice wide field of view, which means that it’s great for astrophotography.
Tonight, the stars aligned for me, as it were. There was almost a 50/50 chance of some aurora sightings, per SpaceWeather. The temperature was a balmy ‑1°C, which was a pleasant change from the ‑25°C and ‑35°C nights we’ve had for the last couple weeks.
Long story short, there was a faint haze to the north. Editing with Gimp brings out quite a bit more than the naked eye could see.
As my camera clicked away, I leaned back against the car. At one point I thought of Kurt Vonnegut’s quote: If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.
On my way back to work after lunch, a City of Brandon truck passed by on the street, carrying a load of freshly-cut evergreen boughs. Just for a second I smelled sawn pine, faintly, and I felt a momentary touch of nostalgia, because pine was the wood of choice for Dad, whether he was in the shed at home or teaching shop class. It was common wood: soft, inexpensive, and ubiquitous.
I grew up smelling cut pine.
Then it passed and all I could smell was winter in the city again.
I just got notice that the book I requested via Inter-Library Loan—The Island of Dr. Death and Other Stories and Other Stories—has arrived at the desk. By coffee time I’ll have it in my hands, and by evening I’ll be reading some Gene Wolfe short stories.
I’m probably more excited about this than I should be, but then I’m a late-in-life Wolfe convert, and I’ve got a lot of catching up to do.
Wolfe is the one that once tore to shreds a pretty common writing trope—calling something indescribable when it isn’t really—and then, I like to think, poked fun at his own advice a few years later in a different novel. I’ve seen him described more than once as the writer’s writer, and I look forward to reading some of his short works.