Stuff In My Drawers Day: Mail Edition

thrilling emails received on this day in history

I abused multiple listservs to get the broadest dissemination for my undergraduate recital.

I totally accepted this late submission even though Elizabeth should have known how to submit her own file in the LAST WEEK OF THE SEMESTER. This is probably why I got such great evaluations on my ear-training / sight-singing class.

There was a time when our work project had amazing onsite system administrators who would proactively identify problems and work with us to correct them before they affected the end users. Within five years, they had all been replaced by entry level staff who thought that racks only occurred on women and in dishwashers. Also, 4 GB of RAM seems like a rather small allotment for a webserver serving the entire Department of Defense.

Stuff in My Drawers Day: Scouting in Alexandria

Back in 1993 when local cable access channels were still a thing and Jones Intercable had not yet been bought out by Comcast, the show, Scouting in Alexandria was featured in an article in the Alexandria Gazette Packet.

I did very little with this show other than to get interviewed once about my Eagle Scout badge although I did attend a few editing sessions when it was an "Explorer Post", turning knobs and splicing VHS tapes like a pro. This participation gradually petered out after I couldn't find anyone willing to give me a ride to the studio on a regular basis.

Maia Week #41 Battle Report

Maia is 9.43561 months old and oscillating around the 16 - 17 pound range depending on the distance between the Earth and the Moon. She is an adept crawler now, capable of closing the distance between rooms fast enough that I no longer bother picking her up when I move to another room myself -- she'll be by at her leisure. Everything tippable has been bolted to the wall now, so each room has about a 2:30 minute buffer where I'm comfortable turning away momentarily without the fear that the house will explode in my neglect.

Maia can also get back into a sitting position after crawling now, which is super cute but also makes naps take longer to begin. The crib has transformed from a place where there isn't much to do besides lie down or roll around and eventually fall asleep, turning into a place where sitting up now gives fresh new vistas of the room at large.

It has been warming up gently over the past couple weeks and we made it to the park once this week. The pond was a bust because of a hostile set of geese defending nests but Maia seems to remember the park and enjoys being outside. Rebecca is gearing up for the annual farmer's market circuit as well, which will allow Maia to get unrealistic perspectives on local commerce while Rebecca gets weekly nitro ice cream.

Maia also learned to drink through a straw after just one demonstration.

Memory Day: Snapshots

This picture was taken 36 years ago in June of 1982.

I am 2 years old and sitting on the beach in Ocean City, Maryland, according to my Dad, the historian. I don't remember being in Ocean City at all as a kid, and spent a good portion of my 20s and 30s dismissing it as a poor man's Outer Banks. Based on my 2017 visit for our Babymoon, it kind of is, but there's nothing wrong with that if that's what you need for a long weekend!

Review Day

There are no major spoilers in these reviews.

Assassin's Quest by Robin Hobb:
The final book in the Farseer Trilogy outstays its welcome by being longer than the previous books but with less going on. What's sad is that there is a very fulfilling conclusion in the final pages of the book, but it feels almost like an afterthought. If that section had been expanded upon and the previous, repetitive sections of people walking somewhere and being sad had been trimmed by a good 25%, the book would have been much more satisfying.

Final Grade: C

The Joel McHale Show with Joel McHale:
This is a fairly silly show (with one new episode released every Sunday) in which Joel McHale makes fun of clips from various reality TV shows and random famous guest stars stop by to do amateur skits and plug their new shows (essentially a reboot of The Soup from the E! network). The humor is hit-or-miss and the skits generally fall flat, but there are just enough hilarious clips to make it worth a watch. Free on Netflix.

Final Grade: B-

Black Mirror, Season Four:
The problem with this season is that there aren't enough new, thought-provoking ideas to build episodes around. Instead, this season felt more like the writers were exploring "What if we told other stories in the same worlds we had already created?" Over half the episodes dealt with the concept of the "cookie" that contained a person's consciousness, which is fine, but something we already explored in earlier episodes. The episode, USS Callister, is probably the best mix of fun and horror, and Metalhead is easily one of the worst episodes ever created. Free on Netflix.

Final Grade: B-

Colony, Season Two:
Perhaps I'm spoiled by quality shows with shorter, complete seasons (like Fargo), but I find Colony to suffer from a plodding, network pace in which new plot information is methodically spoonfed to allow for the show to possibly carry on for years. If the plots of the first two seasons (26 episodes) had been compressed into a single 20-episode season, it would be much more compelling. As it is, I worry that the show is going to pull a LOST on me (a real danger since the creator of LOST is also the creator of this). Free on Netflix.

Final Grade: B-