A meme from bcjennyo

Five Things I've Never Done But Want To.

Everyone is tagged. To make this a little harder, your five things must be plausibly attainable. So no skateboarding on the moons of Jupiter.

1. Visit Scotland.

2. Finish writing a novel.

3. Play one of my saxophones well enough to play a notable solo (not just a few bars exposed in a regular band piece).

4. Take a motorcycle-racing training course.

5. Eat a meal that costs in the three figures per person.

We went to the beach.

Let's see. Cindy has a job; she starts next Monday. She's found an apartment but doesn't move in till October 13, so she's in our basement for three more weeks. So far we have all managed to avoid killing each other, although there have been a few tense moments over who put what on which refrigerator shelf, who used the "wrong" kind of garbage bags, and other similar details of daily living. Anyway, the job is a good one - she'll be assistant branch manager of one of the branches of the Baltimore County Public Library, which is pretty ideal in terms of where she'll be and what she wanted and what kind of salary it pays. Yay for Cindy!

So, Cindy wanted to go to the beach, now that she's living on the east coast. Everyone recommended Ocean City, but that's 3 hours away and a chore to get to and all. So she did a bit of Googling and found Sandy Point State Park, about 45 minutes from here, just underneath the Annapolis end of the Bay Bridge, and we went down there this afternoon and sat around in the breeze and watched seagulls and read books and dozed. Not completely empty of other people, but almost. A few crows stealing things from the seagulls; very funny to watch these huge black land birds swooping in. (Possibly ravens, given the size; I honestly can't tell a crow from a raven just by looking.)

Tomorrow: party with some of the Biker Skum. Next weekend: Fall festival at PIGS sanctuary in West Virginia. Weekend after that: Jewish wedding. Weekend after that: knitting convention and a concert to play. Whee!

Recent reading:
Bad Monkeys by Matt Ruff. A disappointment, really. The ending was too many twists that despite being surprise twists were predictable. Nowhere near Set This House In Order in subtlety, nowhere near Sewer, Gas & Electric in humor.
The New Space Opera - an anthology. The update of Scheherezade by Robert Silverberg was nice, if predictable - well done, cute. Kage Baker's offering was set on Mars, same setting as the limited-edition novella "The Empress of Mars" was, an offshoot of her Company world. Generally, I liked the stuff by authors I already liked, and didn't like the stuff by authors I didn't already like.
A couple other SF anthologies - SFWA's new collection of recently translated stuff from Europe, some of the stories almost 20 years old. A few I liked, most I didn't - too literary, or too stylized, or something.
Paloma, latest in Kristin Kathryn Rusch's Retrieval Artist series. Not the best, but still a very good SF murder mystery. Lots of references to events of the previous books, so you wouldn't want to start the series with this one. As usual, a big chunk of the theme is the conflict between law and justice, and the conflict of different ethical systems.

memity!

( another memey thingy - two in one day! )

The only thing they got wrong was the pet :D It's an attack rabbit, not a doberman.