Refractional Darkness (v4)
Boldly Going Where Angels Fear To Tread

The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde:

This book is pretty hard to describe. Because it has some sci-fi elements and some humor elements, the publisher of course references The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy on the jacket text, but the similarities to either subject or style of that other novel are pretty much nil.
As described by SFSite.com:

The best way to describe Jasper Fforde’s debut novel The Eyre Affair is as a James Bond-style melodrama set in an alternative world which was designed by the lovers of English literature. This book, which appears to be the first in a series, pits Special Operations agent Thursday Next against her former instructor, the third most wanted man in the world, Acheron Hades, a literary Moriarty whose goal seems to be the destruction of literature as it is known and loved.

It's an odd mix of fantasy realism, alternate history, and crime drama.
I'm only about to page 80 so far but it's been an entertaining read so far - looking forward to making my way through the rest of it.

Also reading:



Living Buddha, Living Christ by Thich Nhat Hanh.

This one I actually pretty much picked up on a whim while browsing through the library, as one of the subjects I'm off-and-on interested in is similarities between popular religions and the possibilities of them stemming from similar belief systems or at the very least value systems.
This particular book sort of fits as it's a discussion, written by a Buddhist monk and teacher, about the similarities between Buddhism and Christianity; and how, when you boil them both down they both seem to be different interpretations of very similar ideas and values.
It's actually been a very interesting and sometimes thought-provoking read and is probably one of the main reasons I haven't gotten as far as I could have in the other book

imelda mentioned:

man you got me all scared that people are going to be all flaky and crazy! i signed up for match.com and it makes me think i shouldn't give guys the benefit of the doubt and assume they're nice! i guess i'll find out.

and believe me, i'll be straight up if i'm not interested ... you're teaching me what NOT to do. though i think a lot of it is common sense. but that's hard to come by nowadays.

Ummm yeah - unfortunately I think the women-folk may have it even worse off than the guys as far as the selection is concerned. From talking to these girls there appear to be a *lot* of guys out there just looking to get laid, and a *lot* of incredibly stupid m-f'ers.
I'm sure where imelda is at there are plenty of very nice, well-meaning guys as well, but especially in that large of a populated area (SanFran, as I recall?) she'll probably have an even bigger job of weeding out the losers. That is, of course, assuming she's actually looking for the nice guys rather than deciding to be one of those chicks that likes the “bad boys” who are almost invariably losers (aka my sister's taste in men ).

I think what I've probably learned the most is that my “red flag detector” is usually pretty accurate and that I need to quit ignoring it.
This last girl is either not interested or just plain not ready to date right now (I think a little in the first category and a lot in the second), but either way a hookup is either going to happen not at all or sometime in the somewhat distant future if she ever gets her head together.

...In the meantime, I'm getting very positive vibes from a girl on MySpace that I started chatting up this week - a little younger than I usually go for (late 20's) but has those “cute but nerdy” qualities that I dig so much... college grad, works in med tech, has openly admitted to waiting in line for 2.5 hours to see Return of the King at 12:01a on opening day, digs Irish/Celt music (both folk & rock versions), and has crafty hobbies like crocheting and scrap booking, and likes to travel now and again when the opportunity is there but doesn't go all nuts about it. All things I consider very positive aspects of what is likely a very smart, stable, normal girl who is still has enough willingness to be a dork on occasion to be fun (I love girls who aren't afraid to sometimes be a little nerdy or dorky ). I do need to ask her what the “Other” is about that she listed under the religion portion of her profile, as although I'm pretty darned religion-tolerant there can sometimes be flags hidden there as well.

Oh, and she not only seems interested in communicating, she actually seems enthusiastic about it, which can only be a good thing. Even offered me her phone number after like day 3 because MySpace's email system was acting up (again) - but I told her to hold onto it for now and gave her my non-myspace email instead, telling her that I'll consider the offer for the phone number to still be open if after a few more messages I still hadn't scared her off yet
Appearance-wise based on the photos that are up her look can can range from plain-n-a-little-nerdy (complete with black plastic-framed specs) to practically breathtaking in some photos she has where she was made over a bit for a friend's wedding.

All that said - the subject of dating hasn't actually come up; I simply asked her if she'd like to chat and we started doing so. but I could easily see it quickly leading there and hopefully she's smart enough to realize that if a guy starts chatting her up out of nowhere that's probably what he has in mind

Seven years ago today. one of the most beloved authors of our time left us much too early. RIP, Douglas.

*Sigh* - OK, OK.... I let my greed get the better of me, and instead of sticking to the procedures I learned on and know work, I tried to make some quick cash by jumping on what appeared to by a skyrocket, hoping I'd get some of that late altitude before it sputters out and I ditch just as it hits the apex.

Well... basically, turn out I bought it *at* the apex. F-ing great.

Current real-money portfolio performance for the last 1.5 weeks: about -$80 (already a loss of about 6%).

Next week, time to stick to the plan! Screw Visa!

Picked up the Visa stock again today.
After that dip on Friday that triggered my stop-loss, it started right back up skyward again.
Frankly if I was more comfortable I should have jumped on this one earlier - this stock has gone up 55% so far since it opened on March 19th. My money could have grown more in that time than it would have after 17 years in my savings account.
That's OK though, I'm a newbie that's just learning, and there will be more opportunities.

Ummmm... yeah. Time to move on.

She hasn't talked to me in nearly a week, and it hasn't been for my lack of trying.
And the excuses abound... her new job is keeping her too busy... issues at home are stressing her out... her internet service died... she lost her cell phone.

For Christ's sake. If you're not interested, just fucking tell me you're not interested!. Drives me up a frikkin' wall.

I thought maybe I had found one who would at least be honest enough to do that, because she was fairly open about plenty of other stuff in her life, but I guess not. *grumble*

Woke up with a headache again this morning - odd how headaches and weird dreams seem to be related lately...

Anyway, this time it seemed to be a dream related to my company (which, actually, could only supposed to be my previous company... as there was a group of women at one end of the room preparing to do a skit for the meeting... ) ... having a meeting with several dozen employees... by watching a video... in my living room.

Why they would be having a meeting in my living room, and how several dozen people fit in my living room, both remain a mystery. Also, although it was supposed to be my living room, it wasn't. I don't live in a place that is laid out like that and never have.

Ugh. maybe the caffeine withdrawal is still messing with my head...

Pffft figures - that Visa sell-off that I mentioned came early and seemingly out of nowhere - the stock that had been soaring for the last couple of weeks just started tumbling today.

Thanks to my stop being in place however, only lost about $10 in the deal.

Bah. Looks like something like Apple may have been a better choice, though not as get-rich-quick-ish....

Seriously, if anybody knows how to keep image surfers from hitting my site through Google, I would really, really, really love if you would share that knowledge with me.

I am SO f-ing sick of “exceeded bandwidth” errors that a blog with like an average of 5k of graphics displayed on the front page has no real business getting.

If I don't figure out a way to block it I may just go and delete every stinkin' graphic I have hosted on my host except for the crap like the template background tiles.

Well, yesterday I finally decided to put some cash on the table and bought a little under $1800 worth of Visa stock. It's been rocketing up for a couple of weeks and I figured I might as well hop on for the ride.
There will probably be a sell-off causing a drop within the next couple of weeks so I need to make sure I pay attention so I don't lose whatever gains I make (plus, I was able to set up a “trailing stop,” telling the brokerage system to automatically sell if the price ever drops by more than 5%.. so if it takes a dive I shouldn't lose much of my gains even if I'm not paying attention) - but I think this'll probably be a good start!

I'll probably continue updates now and then to show how it comes along... because if it actually turns out to be a decent money maker, I'm of course going to want to share with my friends (at least the knowledge, if not the cash )

So one of the things I like to do on the weekends is browse the local thrift shops for good deals. I seem to have a little bit of a clothing addiction, and it's much less painful to deal with when you can buy a nice shirt or pair of jeans for like $3.
But I also like to just browse around the stores to see if anything else catches my eye, such as a board game or general knick-knack or whatever.

Well, last weekend there was a framed art print that caught my eye, and at $14 the price was very reasonable (hell, just the frame, glass, and matting were worth well more than that), so I brought it home and it now has prime location in my living room.

Well, this morning I was taking a few minutes to just kinda look over the art.... and I noticed down in the corner... it is hand-signed, and numbered, in pencil.

So, I jot down the artist's name and go look it up - and find that it is a limited edition lithograph by watercolor artist Lou Roman - which sells for $110-130 unframed.



Wow - that's almost as good of a deal as the $200-ish telescope I got for $15... I love thrift shops

Man, I didn't sleep worth crap last night (mostly due to Spring allergies keeping me from being able to breathe - yay), and having weird-ass dreams doesn't help.

Let's see.... not remembering much from this one, but I remember I somehow ended up on a sort of park with a beach, that I was insistent was in California even though it obviously didn't look like the ocean (ocean water is typically not black-ish in my experience).

There was a sort of multi-roomed park shelter, and the shelter and pretty much the beach in general was very crowded.
I was carrying around two items with me, neither of which would I have had *any* reason to be carrying around on a beach (or at all): my big ole' winter coat, and, for some fucked-up reason, a pair of women's red high heeled shoes, and both the coat & shoes seemed very important to me (and no, I don't need any Freudian bastards out there reading into that for me).

For a few minutes the entire area became waist-deep flooded with what appeared to be river water, and was suddenly neighboring a trailer park, I think. Then a minute later, the flood was gone, everything was sunny and dry again, and the area was neighboring a huge water slide and a highway.

I do some wandering around, wondering if I should go in the water or not, and after seeing plenty of people in the water enjoying themselves (with ocean-like waves... even though the water is still dark and murky), I decide I'll go in, but need to somewhere to stash my stuff.

Conveniently near the shelter there's a series of pay lockers, and considering the beach is packed I don't find it all that there are only about 6 lockers total, and one happens to still be unused - possibly because of the $25/day (“or pay hourly,” the electronic screen says) price. I wrap up the shoes in the coat and toss them to my feet, and dig out my wallet, and as I go to put in a few hourly dollars, I notice my stuff is gone; I look all around me and it's vanished.
A cheery passer-by tells me that there are thieves and pick-pockets everywhere at this beach and I need to watch my stuff more closely.

Ticked off and wanting my useless coat and shoes back, I go searching all around the beach and shelter to see if I can spot them, and my search ends up leading me around the side of a stone cathedral or castle type building that I somehow hadn't noticed before. There's a hill that climbs up along one side, and several large window-ish openings that look in onto what seems to be an completely empty stone interior. With the exception of one opening that looked down onto what appeared to be a large platform of some sort that has no way on or off of it (that, now that I think of it, you really only find in stuff like video games), that is maybe 15 feet wide in total, and contains one very active homeless guy who is continually wandering around on it. I think he may have been carrying a black trash bag or something. And there may have been a small campfire on the ledge, not sure. Couldn't get to it anyway.

And I pretty much wake up there... with a headache.

A really good week last week, which was actually unexpected, and thus stocks rocketed. Almost all of the stocks I've been watching did really well last week (in fact Netflix's stock bumped so high so quickly that it caused a bunch of people to sell it off to make a quick profit, thus making it drop back to “normal” ), and I'm actually frustrated at having to sit here and wait for TradeKing to clear all of my financial crap... because it appears that in the week-ish I have to wait, I may literally be losing hundreds of dollars.
Things are still expected to go well next week (in fact it looks like the market may finally, finally be switching directions and starting to head north again), and as long as I don't pick total stinkers of stocks I should still make some cash.. but still, would have been nice to be able to get in on the “spike.”
Ah well... that's what I get for not planning ahead and having the account ready, I guess.

This is damned good beer:

Among the spoils of my latest library raid was the book Fast Food Nation: (The dark side of the All-American meal), a book I had heard about a while back, which was a NYTimes best seller, and is pretty much a nearly 300 page article that allegedly revealed the shuddering horrors that lie behind the cheery facade of the fast food industry.



I eat a fair amount of fast food... I'm not a “heavy user,” but I grab something from a fast food restaurant usually a couple of times a week - so I was curious if the evils bound within these covers would horrify me to the point where I'd do like some others out there and swear off of the stuff completely.

Well, now that I've read it (well, OK, skimmed some of it, I'll explain why in a moment), I have to admit that I feel no less likely to swing through a McDonald's drive-thru than I did before.

There really was very little the author talked about that I didn't already realize or at least strongly suspect. In fact I think about the most surprising thing I read in the whole book was that the reason fast food french fries and chicken products tend to taste better (or at least different) than the stuff you make at home is because they add beef flavor to them. Yes, McD's fries taste so good because they taste a little bit like meat (that, and because they add like a half pound of salt to each fry, in my experience).

But the other stuff, I didn't find all that shocking.
Similar to huge chain retail stores like WalMart, fast food chains cause mom-n-pop hamburger stands to struggle if not go out of business.
Their employees make slave wages and often get screwed over with their schedules and lack of benefits.
The huge corporations that supply their potato and meat products pretty much rule over the country's agriculture market because of their huge market share, and usually find ways to screw over the farmers by not paying them a dime more than they have to while pretty much being the only guys in town to do business with, leaving those farmers with nowhere else to go.
Meat packing plants are one of the most dangerous jobs in the country, who also pay slave wages, almost exclusively to minority workers, usually Mexican migrants.
Meat has a risk of carrying e-coli bacteria.

There you have it - 300 pages narrowed down to a paragraph. Add in a few hundred pages of babbling on and on and on and on and on about the same subject, throw in repeated (and basically unrelated and uncalled for) stabs at religion and generalities about corporate culture, and you have Fast Food Nation. It got to be so tired and drawn-out that I started first trying to speed-read, then got to the point where I'd skim certain sections, and then finally got to the point where I'd literally just skip whole sections after looking at the first sentence or two to see what subject was being addressed.

As you might gather, it seems that unlike the majority of reviewers over at Amazon, I was not impressed, nor was I shocked, alarmed, or horrified. Mostly I was just bored.

So... now it's on to my next library book, No Boundary: (Eastern and Western approaches to personal growth), which I picked up based on the recommendation of a web site I was looking over that caught my interest... but it may turn out to be a little too strongly “new-age-y” for my tastes. We shall see.