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• 07:36 I don't even remember going to bed last night. Considering how tired I am, I'm not sure I went to bed at all. #
• 21:09 A lovely evening with the Greater Worcester Humanists. It's amazing how different my headspace was in the spring - great people all around. #
• 21:22 Last.FM has decided it's female singer night: Rainer Maria followed by @sofiatalvik followed by Anna Waronker. No complaints from me! #
• 21:42 Honestly? When the technology becomes cheap enough where I can get Last.FM in my car, it might be the day I ditch satellite for good. #
• 22:03 Jeff: "Live broke up." Ann: "Is Josh (@Toughgoy) okay?" #

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I feel comfortable saying that I am probably in the best overall headspace I can remember in my adult life:

* It was a tough couple weeks with work, and it didn't get me down.

* We traveled a lot for Thanksgiving and it didn't completely destroy me mentally or physically as it's prone to do.

* I made a choice regarding whether I wanted to go to a Millbury Republican meeting or a Worcester Humanist meeting and I made the choice (humanist meeting, there was a candidate meet and greet that I've more or less already done a month ago) and I was happy with it and have no regrets.

* I had a pretty crummy reunion experience internally, but I was able to snap out of it to the point where I couldn't remember why I had a downer day or so.

This is all just really crazy, major progress for me. A year ago, 6 months ago, I would have dwelled for ages on these issues, been down and out about it for days, whined and bitched and moaned.

That's not me anymore. And that's huge. Honestly, if I could have known that therapy and getting out of my head would be this beneficial to me, I would have done it a long time ago. It's nice to not run from your problems, hate who you are and what you're becoming. Absolutely wonderful.

December is busy, but I think January is the time I really step it up and start doing. The fire is back, and it's real this time and I don't need to talk myself into it.

God, this is a good feeling.

Three reasons, really:

1. New release day! Dragon Rule comes out of the egg, officially.


2. The Sprog is making a new noise. It's a wet breathy susurrance, rather like the sloppy hiss the Gorn Captain made in Arena. Always thought the Gorn were an under-utilized race in the Star Trek universe, BTW. They had the potential to be really cool.


3. We're getting cable. Yes, you read that right. AT&T offers a package in this area of cable, phone, and high speed internet that turned out to be less than what we were paying for the old phone/DSL all by its lonesome, even once our first-year pricing expires. The DSL is already three times faster. The cable install is this afternoon. BBC America, here we come. The Sprog will be watching some Animal Planet in HD.

Books:

The Machine: The Story of the 1975 Cincinatti Reds - Joe Posnanski: Posnanski has fast become one of my favorite national sportswriters, and regardless of the fact that this Reds team beat the Sox in this Series, it was still a good read overall. It's interesting to put this up against the other baseball reads I've done this past year - Posnanski clearly has a joy for this team that felt lacking from the other books I've read on teams, which made this more enjoyable than I expected.

Eyes Like Stars - Lisa Mantchev: I hesitate to call this terrible, because it is well-enough written, but the plot as it is (a magical theater of sorts) was kind of rough, and the execution even moreso. It's a YA book in most places, but it's almost too kiddish for YA and too mature for kids, so I was even more confused by that. Alas...

Eating the Dinosaur - Chuck Klosterman: Chuck Klosterman is becoming aware of his status, and I think it's affecting his writing, and not always in a good way. It's better than Downtown Owl, but it's not nearly as good as his other essay collections.

The Book of Basketball - Bill Simmons: This book is something like 700 pages about basketball. It's almost too much, and it's a definite slog at times, but Simmons is so good and he makes the subject matter so interesting that you keep pushing through to get to the next part. A great book, just don't try to read it over 3 days like I did...

The Unnameables - Ellen Booraem: A children's book about an island where only "useful" things have names, and things without names are not useful and thus discarded. A strange, but fascinating read, not really sure how else to describe it.

The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Prisoner's Dilemma - Trenton Lee Stewart: The first Benedict book is one of my favorite children's books ever. The sequels still have not met the standard set by the original, but this was much better than the second book by a longshot to the point where I'm actively looking forward to the next volume.

The Parents We Mean to Be - Richard Weissbourd: Ann wanted to read this one, she liked it, I...well, it was okay. I don't remember much from it at this point, which I suppose should tell me something.

Superfreakonomics - Steven Levitt & Stephen Dubner: Sequel to Freakonomics. More interesting article-length pieces. Not much else to say.

Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks - Ethan Gilsdorf: A timeline of one guy's nerdy history. Not a lot of interesting things for me overall, since I had already experienced a lot of this, but for Ann, it was a lot of history in a world she's only recently dabbled in.

I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican! - Harry Stein: This was a book of short little anecdotes from a conservative who lives in ultra-liberal Madison, Wisconsin. It really did capture the essence of being a conservative amongst a bunch of liberals in a lot of places and ways, so I appreciated the "you are not alone"-style feeling that it gave me, but it also did irritate me a bit in places, too. I think that's going to be the standard for political books for the next few years, sadly.

Packing the Courts - James MacGregor Burns: A history of the Supreme Court in regards to judicial activity and executive response. Falls into a lot of the historical traps that we take for granted, but it was still a really interesting and fun read. I recommend overall.

Going Rogue - Sarah Palin: It's hard not to read this book and not think of what a) Sarah Palin was and b) what Sarah Palin has become. The book inadvertently collects that transition perfectly - you get the entire idea of what it was that made Sarah Palin so admirable in the past and then see the trajectory that has created the disappointment that I know I feel about her on a whole now. The book is fine - it's a memoir, with all the flaws a memoir has, and I do recommend that anyone who's interested in getting some information on an important political player right now read this. With that said, though...

I think that there is a subset of people in the world who can't recover properly from being completely blindsided by those around them. I found myself thinking about my library experience last year a bit as I read about Palin being thrown curveball after curveball by the McCain campaign, by not getting support from those she felt she could count on, by not getting a fair shake from those who weren't supposed to play favorites. At some stage, things keep beating you down and beating you down, and you lose your entire inner compass.

Sarah Palin was not a radical, and was not a populist. She - and the McCain campaign - allowed the media and the opposition to radicalize her, and she apparently had to turn to populism to reach an audience that she wasn't able to otherwise, and the shoe apparently fit her quite well. Now we see Palin the radical-leaning populist, the one who clearly knows what she's talking about but loses her shit when she's faced with a combative media situation, a Palin who clearly isn't able to trust anyone new anymore. It took me a long time to recover from my lows, to the point where mental health counseling was really the only thing that could get me out of where I was at. What's Sarah Palin going to do, I don't know, but clearly she was quite affected by what she experienced, and it definitely explains how she operates today, and it's up to her to ultimately decide what Sarah Palin she wants to be, regardless of what the environment sends her way. I didn't want to be who I was becoming, so I changed - I'm wondering if we're ever going to see results like that for her.

That got long.

Movies:

Rachel Getting Married: The first 20 minutes or so felt ridiculously artsy and pretentious to a fault. Then things evened out a bit and I ended up really enjoying this movie. Anne Hathaway deserved every accolade she got for this, the performances across the board were great - just a really solid, gripping movie.

Zombieland: The awesome cameo aside, this movie was more a lesson of what it could have been than what it was. As a straight-up homage to the classic zombie movies, it was pitch-perfect. In the sense that you've already seen the best scenes in the preview (cameo excepted)?

Young@Heart: A documentary about a Northampton, MA singing troupe of elderly singers, known for doing rock and punk songs. A really sweet, fun documentary.

Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus: Everything you need to know about the movie can be seen right here:

• 16:34 The most awesome thing in the history of awesome: i392.photobucket.com/albums/pp6/mearii87/sharkplane-1.gif #
• 20:32 Let's go Patriots! #
• 21:26 My copy of "The Singing Saw At Christmastime" has gone missing. This is not good. #
• 23:19 The Saints are the best team in the league right now. I'm not sure anyone can argue otherwise. This is stunning to watch. #

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• 10:06 I just generated my #TweetCloud out of a year of my tweets. Top three words: time, game, night - w33.us/13k5 #
• 14:11 Someone egged my grandmother's house AND Ann's car last night. People still do that? Really?! Glad it's warm enough out to clean it up... #
• 14:36 No Patriots game? You know what that means: MEGA SHARK VS. GIANT OCTOPUS. Aww yeah. #

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I've had a few friends asking about gifts for the Sprog. mjolnir1964 had the right line the other day, suggesting cardboard boxes.

Just wrap an old, worn-out cardboard box in a few layers of colorful, easy-to-tear paper. Shredding paper and taking apart aged cardboard is by far his favorite pastime at the moment. Hours of enjoyment. He is truly the son of a line of Bohemian stone-masons, for he loves to make little 'uns out of the big 'uns.

Saw it on shelf (an unimpressive four copies, spine out) at my local Borders.

Not my greatest work, I'm afraid. The book feels a bit too much like a bridge between Dragon Strike and the final chapter, Dragon Rule. It does what it has to do, I guess (finally getting my three dragons on the same team, breaking up the otherwise successful dragon families, and getting the baddies where they need to be). There's just nothing special about it.

I write genre series fiction for a living, and one of the reasons I'm modestly successful is that I try to make each book in the series stand alone on its own merits, rather than just a rearranged jigsaw puzzle of bits from the previous books. That disappoints me in series fiction.

Am I losing my touch? Letting myself get distracted by fatherhood? I don't think I'm burned out, though I am a little disappointed the Age of Fire books didn't do better. I thought they were something special. I'll be relieved when the series is finished and I can move on to other projects. Fall down seven times, get up eight. . .

This meme is going around the quiet wasteland that is LiveJournal again. If you want to play, leave me 5 and I'll leave you 5. These were from Marian:

--

1. allow me to live vicariously through you - what are your plans for Thanksgiving?

She sent these earlier this week, and she's currently overseas, so I suppose I'll use this to just map out our Thanksgiving as it was - they let us off work at 2, so Ann & I got an early start up to Maine. We hit a little traffic, but we made it in 3 hours to her brother's house. That's been the standard since we've been engaged, I suppose - her family gets Thanksgiving, we get Christmas day, and we try to get up there again between Christmas and New Year's.

But anyway, we got there early enough where we were able to go to a newish wing place up in Portland, with some of the strangest flavors of chicken wing you'll ever see. Quite good, though! We then crashed overnight and spent a pretty low key Thanksgiving with the family. We made it home by about 8pm last night, so we made pretty good time on the way home.

2. I'm dying to know - have you read or are you planning to read Palin's book? I know her quitting her job was a bit of a disappointment to you so I was just curious about your general state of Palin regard. if you have read it, how was it?

I actually just started it this week. I've got some thoughts anyway, but I'm reserving extra thoughts until I finish it. While I'm pretty much done with her politically (unless she somehow ends up being the 2012 nominee against Obama, which I think is highly unlikely at this point), i still find her to be an interesting individual, so...

3. you've mentioned that you would love the adventure of packing up your life and moving to a new country. but of course the downside of taking a big plunge like that is that the rest of the world is way more liberal than the US. do you think you could bear permanent living under a socialist system if it meant good opportunities for career and travel otherwise?

Well, I moved back to Massachusetts, didn't I?

No, seriously, if you asked me that three years ago, it might have been a different answer, but to say that a variety of circumstances have come up where I couldn't really live with myself to be an ocean away anymore. My priorities are in a lot of places right now, and yeah.

4. recommend a good book that I should read. maybe two, in case I've already read one of them.

My stock response for a while has been Anathem by Neal Stephenson, which is sort of a sci-fi but a lot more than that, plus it's a pretty big book so it'll take a while, too.

Also, something I read late last year/early this year is The Invention of Air by Stephen Johnson about scientist Joseph Priestly, a man who has a much larger role in American history and worldwide scientific thought than he probably gets credit for. This question is reminding me that I wanted to find more books on him, because he's a very fascinating individual.

5. a common topic in your posts is that you and Ann are planning on adopting children. it's certainly not unusual, but I'm curious why you feel so passionate about this plan. any background that you can provide would be appreciated.

My stock answer is that I think Ann & I are in the right mindset to be able to do it. It's clearly not for everyone, but I think it's right for us, and the reality is that we're never going to be rich enough or have so much free time that we can make a difference in the ways we would like, but this is something we can do to give back in our own way and be able to provide a life for someone that they wouldn't normally get. I personally wish a lot more people would consider it, but I'm thankful that I have a wife who's on the same page as I am on the matter.