Monthly Archives: August 2004

More entertainment recommendations…

British author Jasper Fforde has come up with quite the clever universe in his Thursday Next series of novels. I have only read the first two (found them in paperback at Costco) since the third just came out in paperback last month. I’ve been keeping an eye out for it before I break down & order it off Amazon, but I think that will be soon. The fourth just came out in hardback, but I’m not sure yet if this is a series I’m committing to purchasing in hardback, but it is darn fun to read…hmmm…

To give you a taste, here’s the back cover summary of The Eyre Affair

“Great Britain circa 1985: time travel is routine, cloning is a reality (dodos are the resurrected pet of choice), and literature is taken very, very seriously. Baconians are trying to convince the world that Francis Bacon really wrote Shakespeare, there are riots between the Surrealists and Impressionists, and thousands of men are named John Milton, an homage to the real Milton and a very confusing situation for the police. Amidst all this, Acheron Hades, Third Most Wanted Man In the World, steals the original manuscript of Martin Chuzzlewit and kills a minor character, who then disappears from every volume of the novel ever printed! But that’s just a prelude…”

Of course I had finished the first two books before ever going to the official site, which looks maintained by the author himself…I think he’s been having fun with Photoshop with the mammoth migration through sleepy British villages, etc (don’t worry – you’ll understand after reading)…but I haven’t poked around too much since I’m wary of spoilers for the 2 books I haven’t read yet…

My mom’s comment after reading the first one was “I don’t think I’m smart enough for these books. I feel like I’m missing a lot, and I never read Jane Eyre.” However, I just gave Kael The Eyre Affair for his birthday this week, and he is loving it already…I highly recommend the series to anyone fond of quirky sci-fi, Harry Potter fans, and anyone fond of puns, wordplay and literature.

P.S. Personally I couldn’t get past the first 150 pages of Jane Eyre in highschool AP English Lit class, and Kael admits never having read it either, but I don’t think that really matters…just in case that was scaring anyone off…

On Wednesday evening, a few friends & I saw The Big Lebowski outside at the summer Cinema San Pedro run by Cinequest in downtown San Jose (quite fun!)…the short film they showed before the feature was a cute & clever piece called “DysEnchanted” about various storybook heroines in group therapy…Laura Kightlinger, Amy Pietz & Jim Belushi were the only cast I could recognize by name, but it was memorable enough I think the word should get out…

Here’s the IMDB link…it showed at Sundance and at the Cinequest San Jose earlier this year, so it’s making the festival rounds I guess…

…and here’s the “official” website:

http://www.dysenchanted.com/

If you get the chance to see it, you should…

Happy Friday!

Due to scheduled work meetings and the fact I have another functioning vehicle, today was the first day I could work from home to be able to have AAA come tow my car to investigate why it wouldn’t start. Jeff tried looking at it & we messed around with it a few times to no avail…but due to all the electrical working fine, even the headlights didn’t really dim while trying to start, we didn’t think it was the battery…I knew it had almost a full tank of gas, so it had to be something else. Jeff couldn’t see any obvious cables falling out, fuses blown, etc, so it seemed time for a professional opinion…

So, yesterday I called AAA & found out that one of the two California AAA Car Care Plus service centers is in Santa Clara (ironically would be walking distance if I hadn’t moved 2 years ago!) so I scheduled an appointment and was told to call back in the morning for the emergency tow. Like a good girl, I obeyed, with the tow truck arriving about 9:45am…

The guy gets out of the truck, sits down in the car, and for the first about 10 times gets exactly the same results as Jeff & I did:
*lights all come on*
uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh
*no VROOM*

Then this guy decides he’s going to pump the hell out of the gas pedal like 10 times in a row, then tries again, this time holding the key turned and flooring it for several minutes…finally…
*lights all come on*
uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh
*VROOOOOOOM*
– but as soon as he lifts up on the pedal, it immediately dies…

This happened 3 times in a row, then he held everything cranked for EVEN LONGER (any previous car would have flooded the engine long ago) then
*lights all come on*
uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh
*VROOM*
Hooray! 😀

At that exact moment, my work cell rang since the meeting was starting that I needed to be in…heh…so the guy left, nicely saying he’d write this down as “no service” so I still have my 4 free tows for the year, then I shut the garage with the car still running, since I was deathly afraid it wouldn’t start again. I went inside, had my meeting, then came back & drove the car to AAA for the starter diagnostic they recommended even if it finally started. I thought this sounded like a good idea, since without knowing what was wrong, how do I know it won’t happen again tomorrow?

Even though my house was out of range, they took me home in the courtesy shuttle, then I waited for the call. A few hours later, they called saying the basic check (starter, alternator, battery) was okay except the battery was dangerously low, so they wanted to put in a new battery then test again. I explained (again) the entire set of events that happened and how I really didn’t think it was the battery since we didn’t add any juice to the battery when it finally started, but since it was the original battery on the car, so over 6 years old, yeah, I’m sure it should be replaced…to the tune of $180 since of course it’s a special Miata battery, tiny enough to fit in the tiny toy car that it is…AAA had to go to the Madza dealership down the street since only dealers stock it! *sigh* Really, I love my car, but sheesh…

About an hour later, I get another call just for symptoms so they know what to check next. I told the full story again, complete with sound effects (how else do you communicate car noises well?) and explained how the tow guy guessed it might be a clog in the fuel line, or perhaps the fuel filter or fuel pump, so they agreed they would try to check those. Of course every time they’d started the car it has worked just fine.

4:30pm they call & say my car is ready, and I just ask what time they close, since I figure I’ll get the whole story when I get there. Basically, after a whole bunch of mumbo jumbo, they couldn’t find anything verifiably wrong anywhere, but at least all the things they checked are good to go. I’ll need new spark plugs soon but not immediately, and the air filter should also be changed soon (THAT at least is a special order at Kragen that I can install myself – been there done that!)…The oil is also fresh since I requested they do an oil change since it was due…

I drove away after $300+ on my credit card (at least I get the points!), with the top down on the car before I left the parking lot, happy to have the breeze in my hair again…but I can’t help but be reminded of my Netcom network admin days calling a telco on a circuit outage…

“Could you please give us a reason for the outage?”
“Unknown – all we did was test it and it came back up.”

I’m crossing my fingers that it starts tomorrow morning!

Since I’m pretty bummed today, I need to publicly count some blessings to put things into perspective…

1) Kylie the Kitty let me sleep in both Saturday & Sunday and she is usually very sweet…

Unfortunately she was a real bitch this morning waking me up before daylight and I couldn’t get back to sleep, hence some of the grumpiness today…

2) Thank goodness I own two cars!

Why? The Briata spontaneously decided not to start this morning! All I know so far is it’s not a dead battery and that it worked fine on Saturday when I washed it by hand…

3) Thank goodness I randomly decided to drive the Honda yesterday & fill it with gas!

Why? See #2 above.

4) Usually the drive up 280 and across 92 takes me 35 minutes to get to work.

Today however, as I was already late from transferring everything to a functioning vehicle, the 92 offramp was backed up farther than I’ve ever seen it before…

5) I have wonderful & supportive friends.

Said friends are trying to refer me to new home mortgage possibilities after I got the news today that I only got approved for a counter-offer based on “insufficient income”…said counter-offer is nowhere near enough to buy anything non-condo in the Santa Clara-Sunnyvale-Redwood City areas. The worst was first thinking something might actually be possible thanks to some recent stock sales, then hopes getting dashed by online research, only to have the hopes lifted again by the loan rep, only to have them dashed again by the underwriter reply this morning…getting jerked around emotionally is no fun, and at least for me, trying to buy my first home is quite an emotional thing…tied in with all sorts of grown-up accomplishment-type issues that I already have problems with not being married or with kids either…

That’s all I’ll go into here…some complaints just aren’t meant for public airing so I won’t inflict them on anyone here…

At least I have the “Swellegant Picnic” kickoff event for The Choral Project‘s new season tonight, so that should be fun and definitely yummy…and I got my purple satin opera length gloves today from an online purchase I only made late Thursday evening, and they will be perfect for the Jessica Rabbit costume I’m planning for Halloween, at less than half the cost of the only local costume shop that stocked any! So, there ya go…

Wow…SEVENTEEN baby ears of corn now! I’m impressed that the cornstalks that are still small are also bravely putting forth silk tassels…Still a bunch of tomatoes, so I’m eating about one a day to let them vine-ripen as long as possible… The blackberries are near the end, though, since it’s been a week since I last picked and I only have about 10 berries ripe today, and not many left to ripen later…ah, well, it was yummy while it lasted, especially seeing a 6 oz clamshell of organic blackberries for $3 at Trader Joe’s!

One new pumpkin is coming along, growing larger, but I have not licked the powdery mildew yet, so I doused with more milk & water solution this evening…I’m not sure how long the already-very-orange large pumpkins will last…perhaps I’ll need to do more research on harvesting pumpkins now! I’m hoping 2 more months on the vine will be okay… *crossing fingers*

I did try to blitz-edit the rough cut of the tour video to be ready for the party, but that plus making the Pimm’s Garden Party Punch and the Union-Jack-decorated baked brie to bring to the party made Saturday a bit hectic…in the end, only a very few of us who stayed later watched any video, and I just showed them clips, so it all worked out…I let myself have Sunday off from video work to finally clean my disaster of a room, clean & rearrange the kitchen, some gardening, some laundry, the dreaded litter box, etc, etc…

This weekend was rife with Harry Potter news as well…on Sunday there was a reading with a question & answer session with JKR, but the only real tidbits we got were that yes, we all guessed correctly that the Hogs Head barkeep is indeed Aberforth Dumbledore, Petunia is not a Squib, Dumbledore’s Patronus is a phoenix, portraits are not as fully realized as ghosts (shooting down many fans’ hopes for a portrait of Sirius that survived the culling in the Black household when he left the fold), and that Harry will live _to_ book seven, not necessary to the _end_ of book seven or _through_ book seven…which is being misreported in just about every news article I’ve seen…*sigh*…this morning the “Do Not Disturb” sign was gone from the door on jkrowling.com, meaning a new tidbit exclusive about book 6 was available, but all that was behind it was a description of some new character, but no name…argh! Ah well, just more to look forward to…at least JKR said at the Q&A that book 6 was about half-written so that’s good news…

Here’s one last bit for you to ponder…

Has Voldemort or Tom Riddle ever cared for or loved anyone?

JKR: Now, that’s a cracking question to end with—very good. No, never. [Laughter.] If he had, he couldn’t possibly be what he is. You will find out a lot more about that. It is a good question, because it leads us rather neatly to Half Blood Prince, although I repeat for the millionth time that Voldemort is not the half blood prince, which is what a lot of people thought. He is definitely, definitely not.