Playing catchup...

And we're not talking about the condiment, either.

Sorry. Echoing Clemens, the only people entitled to refer to themselves in the plural are members of royalty and people with tapeworm. I belong to neither group, so...

Lee was home when I arrived, which was a pleasant surprise. She has a lead on a job here in Houston, except it requires her to pick up a working knowledge of C, HTML, and ColdFusion over the next month. That sounds like a pretty hefty portion of work, if you ask me. I wish her luck.

Work went well, today. I tried to stop by the ATM and the post office in the morning, but I started the day by leaving my wallet (with ATM card) at home, and then when I finally gained an audience with the ATM machine, it was out of order. Feeling that this was Divine Providence's way of telling me to get my butt to work, I reported for duty at my assigned place in the MCC.

I managed to get another chunk of the article done in my "free" time, and an extension from the editor to Thursday. That ought to work out fine; in fact, it may allow me to rewrite the thing.

Had an interesting conversation between comm sessions with Kataenko, who is doing the Execute Package. It had to do with the slippery concept of tolerance. I seem to uniformly run across people (K included) who seem to think that tolerance means never expressing disagreement with the other fellow (or gal). We jawed a bit about that until the folks on the ISS were finished with one of their many procedures and proceeded to report the results to the ground. I feel a post coming on about the topic, but not just yet.

The last two videos I rented were The Legend of Drunken Master and Goya in Bordeaux. The former is a Jackie Chan movie about a martial artist whose "style" is improved by intoxication. The plot is about typical for the genre, but the choreography is really marvelous. I enjoy Jackie Chan movies, but I can't for the life of me figure out why.

Goya in Bordeaux is a foreign film (Spanish language with English subtitles). I can't figure out why I liked this movie, either, but I did, despite the fact that it tended to be "arty." Not much of a plot, more a purported look inside the mind of a great artist. I really first noticed Goya when I had an opportunity to see his works close up and personal at the Prado museum in Madrid a couple of years ago. I've seen a lot of classical art, and a lot of it makes no impression on me, but the exhibit of Goya's work moved me, almost to tears. I was kind of hoping the movie would shed some light on his life, and maybe an attempt was made to do so, but if so, it went right by me. His relationship with the Duchess of Alba ran like a recurrent theme through the movie; no, make that more of a disturbing dream than a theme.

The movies went back tonight, in exchange for Onegin and a tape of episodes from the Patrick McGoohan series The Prisoner. I started with the McGoohan tape and was not disappointed; the first episode is as crazy today as it was back when it first aired. Lee seemed impressed (she sat through the whole thing, despite telephone distractions). I'm not sure it's something I'd want to add to my permanent "collection," but it surely is an eye-grabber.

I have an 8-page fax I need to look at from home. It's a list of all the things that need doing here and there. I am not looking forward to reading it...I think I shall put it off until tomorrow. In the meantime, I shall fritter away an hour or so surfing the 'net, and then retire. I've got another action-packed day at air-to-ground again tomorrow.

Cheers...