Friday nite...

Galina arrived around 4 pm yesterday. It turns out she left Thursday morning and had an overnight stopover in Austin, where she delivered a sculpture to a client. After I got off work, we went looking for a place to eat, eventually arriving at Joe's Crab Shack over by I-45 and Fuqua.

The place was jammed, so we settled for a quick Polish hot dog at the neighboring Sam's Club, and bought some munchies (smoked salmon, wine, etc.) to take home with us. (Believe me, it's a lot more fun this way...)

Among other activities, we managed a screening of What Women Want, with Mel Gibson and Helen Hunt. I liked the movie, and the chemistry between Gibson and Hunt was really great, but couldn't help but notice that the film accepts and perpetuates a negative male stereotype that Hollyweird apparently feels no qualms about perpetuating (if not actually promoting). It is one I am also beginning to grow increasingly weary of, but I cannot say I was not warned in this particular case. If memory serves, there is a tag line on the slip case, to the effect of, "Finally, a man who listens!"

Maybe, someday, there will be an entertainment industry that does the same.

But I'm starting to preach...sorry.

Cheers...

Catching up on my reading...

I finished Robert B. Parker's Potshot a couple of weeks ago, or so. While it was a pleasant read, and despite the fact I said some nice things about it in a previous post, I got to thinking that the pleasant thing about it was, simply, that it scratched my itch to read more about Spenser. The story line seemed exactly that: a line; linear; one-dimensional. More suited for an episode of television than a book.

A while ago, it appeared to me as though Parker had gone into a slump with Spenser. I think Spenser novels such as Stardust showed a marked decline in complexity, depth, and character development from his earlier works. To date, I think his best Spenser novel has been Searching for Rachel Wallace, and Promised Land (the novel that introduces Hawk) runs a close second, in my book.

Then Parker came back, and with the publication of Hugger Mugger, I thought the slump was well and truly over. I figured Parker's expanded focus, with other novels featuring Jesse Stone and Sunny Randall (who each seem to have been launched on a multi-volume career), was helping dissolve the same-old-same-old rust. I really liked Hugger Mugger.

But if I think about Potshot much, I get to thinking that the author offers no new tidbit into Spenser's past, as used to routinely be the case in the early novels, and which resumed when Parker's slump ended. And all of the repartee - with Hawk, with Susan Silverman, with the tough guys from previous novels whom he approaches with a wild idea reminiscent of The Magnificent Seven - seems to have "RECYCLED" stamped all over it. Too, though the ending to the book works, it left me empty. (Of course, that could be a problem on my end.)

In between everything else, I've started on James Ellroy's latest, The Cold Six Thousand, which appears to be a follow-on volume to his 1995 American Tabloid. I'm about 100 or so pages in and, like all of Ellroy's recent stuff, the text resembles Dr. Seuss on speed. I shall have to finish it in Pagosa.

In other news, on my way in to work this morning (at oh-dark-thirty), I saw the waning crescent moon in the eastern sky, and there - about two finger widths above and to the left of the moon - was a (crescent?) Venus. I noticed this as I was driving past an as-yet undeveloped stretch of FM 518, where the ground fog was holding fast to the trees and scrub, and for a moment, despite being in a car, I felt I was in the middle of nowhere, looking at an alien landscape.

Talking about aliens, Galina and I realized yesterday, coming back from Sam's, that we cannot leave for Pagosa directly after the end of my MCC shift tomorrow. Why? Well, as much as it pains me to think I am scheduling my life around the teevee, tomorrow is, after all, only the season finale for The X Files. Colorado can wait a day.

Cheers...

Recovering...

The so-called "weekly planning conference" pretty much exhausted me and Elena E.-S., who is working with me on air-to-ground this morning. Both the U.S. and Russian MCCs did a very thorough job of discussing the upcoming week's events with the ISS crew. We'll survive, though (we have to...there are still 6 hours left in the shift).

After the conference, I went for a walk "around" the second floor in the old part of the building. This consists of a rectangular hall that surrounds a central core of rooms, and which in turn is surrounded by a row of rooms on the "east" and "west" sides, and by cable chases and other utility spaces on the "north" and "south" sides.

I feel a mild "geek attack" coming on for the duration of this post.

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