I don’t care what the weather reports say; I don’t believe it’s going to be 93° on Saturday.
I’m currently wearing a sweatshirt, long pants, and I’m still cold.
As if working until 2AM each night this week wasn’t bad enough, I had to start The Deathly Hallows on the plane ride home from Orlando last weekend. Which means I was up until 4AM last night, unable to put the book down.
Overall impressions, from page 350 or so: It’s good. Not having read any of the other books in the series besides the first (but having seen almost all the movies in the theater), I can follow most of the story arcs sucessfully. I’m enjoying the character development and the plot is beginning to pick up steam, although it dragged on a bit through the first third of the book.
Usually I’ll power through a book I like in one sitting (even books this big), but I made a conscious decision to slow down and savor this one as much as possible—it’s been a while since I had some good escapist fiction to read, and it’s a welcome alternative to sitting in front of an LCD for 3/4 of the day.
I don’t know what’s funnier about this story, really. From everything I’ve read, Petraeus is a straight shooter who will tell the truth about Iraq, so I’m not surprised our lousy government is trying to keep any bad news covered up. But it still makes me mad that they’re trying to spin this thing like their half-baked war is a success.
Oh, yeah, nothing brings me back to the great Wild West days of hand-coding HTML for the internets like connecting through a VPN and using Remote Desktop (accurately replicating the joy of working with Windows NT on a slow workstation) to edit ASP files with WordPad.
I keep getting these stupid letters in the mail. I guess they think I’m too dumb to watch the news or something. The idea that “rates are still low” is also pretty laughable considering the interest rate I’m currently at.
Update:
Aug. 16, 2007, 10:09PM
Countrywide taps credit line for cash
By ALEX VEIGA AP Business Writer
© 2007 The Associated Press
LOS ANGELES — The credit mess forced Countrywide Financial Corp., the nation’s largest mortgage lender, to borrow $11.5 billion on Thursday, shocking financial markets already reeling from the growing credit crunch and threatening to make home loans harder to get.
Countrywide said it borrowed the cash from a group of 40 banks so it could keep making home loans….
How to use a wristwatch as a compass. I keep forgetting this one, but I love it.
Baltimore is a lot more comfortable than when I left last week. I had the bizarre experience of leaving 100° weather with humidity at rain-forest levels to travel south to a tropical state with less humidity and cooler temperatures.
Everything on that trip worked out better than I could have hoped, really. Despite working my ass off while I was down there, missing out on using the hotel pool entirely, we were staying only three miles away from the House of Blond Smiling Children, which made it easy for Jen to visit while I was at work. On Friday night I was able to back away from the computer for the evening, and we drove across Orlando to try Seasons 52, the first non-chain (well, it’s an upscale chain, because this is Orlando, after all, and there is no escaping chains there) food we’d had in a week.
As it happened, I was working with a fellow who was an avid skydiver, and he gave me an idea for the perfect birthday gift: falling out of a plane strapped to a total stranger! After some discussion, he helped me pick the right local venue for Jen, who was genuinely suprised and thrilled to take me up on the offer. A short drive out 50 to the coast on Saturday morning led us to the Skydive Space Center, where a nice man named Terry hooked Jen up to a very simple-looking rig, gave her a pair of goggles and a five-minute briefing, and then led her into the plane. As she disappeared down the runway, waving from the open door, I hoped I would see her again in one piece, and also thanked God she understood why I wanted to keep my chicken ass on the ground.
After waiting under a deep blue Florida sky for a few minutes, we spied the plane at drop altitude, and soon saw the first parachutes blossoming, specks against the fluffy cloud layer overhead. They circled lazily for a few minutes, riding the thermals, and then began to come in for landings one after the other. I picked out Jen from a distance and started shooting pictures as she came in over my shoulder and landed facing away from me. The verdict: swinging under the risers made her queasy, but freefall was amazing and she’d do the whole thing again in a minute.
After some recovery, we sought out a restaurant in town which was recommended by two separate parties: The Dixie Crossroads, where we were told to sample the rock shrimp. It’s a restaurant with a lot of local character, but the food is killer and the service is excellent. More importantly, the shrimp did not disappoint, and the comparison in taste to fresh lobster is true.
Making our way back home to the hotel, we passed several roadside attractions and sights unique to the area: Airboat rides, a petting zoo in the shape of an alligator, a dragstrip, and boiled peanut stands. Florida was good to us, something I wasn’t expecting, quite honestly. The friends are great, the A/C is cold, we got to see the Space Shuttle take off, and everything is beautiful from 15,000 feet.
We have been told the rock shrimp at Dixie Crossroads is the thing to have when in Titusville.