The All-New Bunrab

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.

So, the Army Band's big 85th anniversary concert ended with the chorale exhorting the audience to sing along with them in "God Bless America." We stood, because we respect other people, but did not sing along, because we don't believe in a god, let alone one that has a particular favoritism for America. But it sat in the back of my mind, and what came percolating up a few days later, when I woke up this morning, was:
( first draft, a version of Irving Berlin's song for atheists )
Not perfect, but available to work on. I've sent it to Dan Barker at FFRF 'cause that seems like someone who could polish it up. (We're longtime FFRF members.)

Other news from that concert: the Army Chorale is changing its name and mission; they soon will be called DownRange, and they'll be doing mostly soul/R&B/do-wop with a small jazz-band type instrumental back-up. They gave us a demo, and it was pretty funny, with four lead singers all African-American, and 4 pasty white people doing the do-wop background. Anyway, it's clearly a move to address today's enlisted force, which is a different mix of ethnicity and background than WW II's enlisted force was. Look for them to come to a USO concert near you!

Other weird news: last Friday, someone released a bunch of emus in downtown Baltimore. When the police and animal control came to round them up, homeless people in the area told them that a van had pulled up, opened the back, and shoved out the emus. So there they were, abandoned, dazed and confused. Some were not in good condition. The article didn't say how many, but I gathered there were at least half a dozen, and maybe as many as a dozen. They were taken to shelters and farms in the surrounding rural counties. I know winos is probably an incorrect term these days, but still, can't you see it, the winos wondering, is this a hallucination, or are there really five-foot-tall birds suddenly standing on my street corner?