Sense of Adventure

This afternoon I went out the door around 3:30 to go meet Joe at Café Napoli to find snow falling from a sky that was almost exactly half clear. The sun was shining. Basically the whole northern part of the sky was clear.

And down came the flakes.

I’d be tempted to call it typical NM weather, but it really wasn’t. For one thing, I don’t remember ever seeing anything quite like it before. I’m used to sun-showers, and if the wind blows hard enough we can get the somewhat startling phenomenon of a dust storm in the middle of a rainstorm with the sun shining. But not snow coming out of a largely blue sky.

Wasn’t snowing hard, nor in big flakes. But definitely snow.

So, anyway - last night I rewatched Serenity for the first time. Great movie. It surprised me to see it came out in 2005, and yet I hadn’t seen it since catching it in the theater. I fear I let myself kind of get talked out of it by quibblers, both in person and online.

There are certainly some questions that can be raised, at least from an SF-nerd viewpoint. For instance, I had to wonder if Joss Whedon really understands, any better than most of Hollywood does, just how big space is. Did the Serenity really have to fly through a whole cloud of Reaver craft, all seemingly within a long spit of one another, to get from planet to planet?

Then again I might have missed something, and could certainly rationalize it myself. One might also question whether I should have to. On the other hand, I was willing enough to do it. Because the movie earned a certain suspension of disbelief.

Because, it’s really a wonderful movie; and in its own terms almost perfect. I was really impressed. The characters were alive and engaging; the dialogue sparkled. The setting was intriguing. The story was basically all about the characters having to make difficult moral choices. Plus there were lots of guns and SBU. Always a bonus.

Read the rest of this entry »

So here we are in 2009. Everybody okay? Hope so.

Saw the New Year in with some of the SF bunch over on the West Side. I took a pot of my justly-famous Red Chile Pumpkin soup, which proved popular.

When I happened to mention my soup to the pleasant woman who was checking me out at Village Inn, where I went off for late breakfast with Joe, seemed to think she hadn’t heard me correctly. When I repeated it she seemed amazed at the concept of red chile pumpkin soup. Wasn’t a combination that she ever would’ve thought of, apparently. But on second thought she must’ve decided she liked the sound of it, since she asked me to bring some in sometime for her to try. Which I will,

Spent most of the evening kind of hanging loose, eating some nice little sandwiches Roslee brought, and watching people play games on the Wii our kind and generous host Kevin got for Christmas. Which was intellectually stimulating enough for me: having finished polishing my latest Rogue Angel book and gotten it emailed off, I didn’t get to sleep until well after 5 AM. So I was more than a bit fuzzy around the edges.

I’m exhausted tonight but a bit wired; need to compose myself, get good sleep, get a running start on the New Year.

A good day. Hope it was a good start.

I wish the best to my friends and fans, and everyone. Happy New Year!

12/25/08 - Well, the big day is here. Merry Christmas everybody!

Overall things do well here: the pets and I are all okay, my friends seem to be healthy. It’s good.

I am peeved, however, over my woes trying to get cell phone service restored.

Apparently on Sunday while walking Emma on the ditch west of my house I lost my old TracFone. I’d had it since Autumn 2005 and was generally very happy with it. I also found myself quite dependent on it, for things such as keeping track of friends I was meeting up with, and of course times my car broke down. So I was quite distressed to lose it.

Monday, after confirming it was gone (by the reliable method of calling the number and trying to hunt down the ring) the Em and I retraced our steps: no luck, although we enjoyed another pleasant walk.

Trying to buy a new one led to a lot of wasted motion. I finally ascertained what I wanted to replace my little lost pod phone was a Motorola W376g - basically similar to their no-longer-trendy Razr. With double minutes for life (TracFone is a pay-as-you-go service), Bluetooth capability, and a camera it represented a big upgrade over my beloved old phone, and would cost 10 bucks more than I paid for it (unless I was dumb enough to buy it at Kmart, which charges $50 for a phone TracFone’ll sell you online for $30.) I found one at the good price at Radio Shack.

Plus it’s a flip-phone. Laugh if you will, ye who have had a flip phone since Napoleon was still a corporal; long and long have I desired one. Think: “Scotty, beam me up.”

So anyway, the next step was to activate it. Because I’d reported the old phone lost Monday, when I found out about it, I couldn’t take care of that online. Then began the Great Siege.

Read the rest of this entry »

Just a quick check-in on one of my favorite nights of the year. Everybody’s okay, right?

Good.

Everything’s fine here. Lost my cellphone on a walk Sunday; found out about it Monday. Dang! Anyway, the new and much improved one I bought for ten bucks more than I paid for my old one in ‘03 hasn’t activated yet, so you’re all spared awful blurry photos of my traditional walk on Albuquerque’s Old Town and Country Club district with Joe. Which would’ve featured loads of Chihuahuas. Yes, Burque, it’s Purse Dog Hell out there!

It’s been a good day. Hope it was good for all.

I look forward to the morrow, when I’ll get to see many good friends.

Merry Christmas to all!

Does anybody else find this, ah, disturbing? Wired.com informs us that Drillers Accidentally Create First Live Magma Observatory.

That’s right: workers at a geothermal site in Hawai’i accidentally busted into a pool of live magma. Which, as we all know, is lava that has yet to come out.

What could possibly go wrong?

Oh.

In other, totally, completely, utterly unrelated news, scientists claim that evidence suggests the Deccan Traps event was the primary cause of the extinction of the dinosaurs. What caused the Traps was a colossal escape of magma to form what’s called a Large Igneous Province. How large? About half of India. Which constitutes an eruption way beyond a mere supervolcano.

It would probably look, you guessed it, a lot like the picture of Kilauea above. Only bigger. Much, much bigger.

So go right on ahead, boys! Poke that sleeping monster with a stick. It’s for Science, right?

Okay, it was yesterday. Sorry. I was socked-in tight writing on my new Annja book - getting near done, here. Also, in the evening I went to a tree-trimming way the hell and gone up in the foothills with one of my Meetup groups. Which, by the way, was fun.

Anyway, it’s out, huzzah: Busted Flush, second volume in our new-generation Wild Cards trilogy, and first in which yours truly has an entry. Three, in fact: short stories called “Volunteers of America,” “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” and “A Hard Rain Is A’Going to Fall” (where do I get those titles?) which form an arc of their own within the Greater Scheme of Things™.

You can check out a(nother) very nice review here at Bookgasm.

In case you’re interested, and since you’re reading this blog I’ll blithely assume you are, I got paid, both in money and Consortium Points, the same as everybody else who did a single story apiece. And this is entirely fair and satisfies me. My overall contribution is más o menos the same length as everyone else’s; it’s just that the exigencies of the project (by which I mean, what George told me to do) dictated that I chop it up in three.

If you’ve been wondering about the fate of The Radical - and, amazingly, I learn there are people who are - he’s back.

As always, you can help support this site, and me, by clicking the above link to buy your copy through Amazon. (No one has yet done this, by the way. Dudes! and Dudettes!) While you’re at it, you can do the same with the prequel, Inside Straight. The Publishers Weekly review quoted on Busted Flush’s Amazon page is probably right: you’ll find it way easier to track this one if you read the first one, well, first. And you’ll certainly want to be prepared when the third and final volume, Suicide Kings, comes out next year! So why not buy both? They make great gifts!

Okay, this would more accurately be called “Min-Pin Encounter.” But “Min-Pin Adventure” sounds like either a Seventies Disney flick or a deeply, deeply wrong porno. Of such dichotomies are made the cheap amusements on which I thrive. So there.

Anyway, Emma Dog is doing better. Her Uncle Joe suggested she might be bored and depressed, and maybe even suffering Seasonal Affective Disorder. So I determined to start getting out to walk with her every day, rather than, well, sporadically, as we’d been doing. Okay, I’d been doing.

The key turns out to be to walk half the distance I was aiming for: a mile and a quarter, oir a little over, as opposed to 2.5 miles and up. I’d noticed that Emma tended to get footsore when we walked the longer distance. Me too. Which discouraged us from going out often enough to get tightened up for the distance.

So far, so good. The 1.25 mile walk participates in the same principle as my old Five Words model: set goals that make it easier, or at least less embarrassing, to succeed than to fail. Plus less wear and tear on the organism makes it easier to do it daily - thereby building up endurance.

So this morning, since I want to spend it watching football games (which have just commenced), writing, and taking breaks to bring in the Christmas stuff from the shed and decorate my little “tree,” I resolved to get us out first thing. Lo, by 9:15 we were heading out the door.

Not to the car but straightaway to the walk: south a block to Freeman, and then crossing Fourth to go to the ditch between 5^th and 6^th Streets. Which it turns out is called the “Harwood Lateral.” (There’s a sign. Your tax dollars at work, under the Federal “No Ditch Left Unnamed” program.)

Read the rest of this entry »

So tonight (Arrgh! It’s still December 5^th! Why is WordPress slugging it as the 6^th?) came the annual Holiday Stroll and lighting of the Christmas tree in Albuquerque’s Old Town. Since I love the Christmas season, especially the lights and trappings, it’s been my long-standing tradition to attend with my friend Joe.

The tree was to be lit at 6:15. I’d arranged to meet Joe in the Basket Shop at 5:45. I got there late because I got caught writing on my latest Annja book, which nears completion very soon. As I was walking from my parking spot on a side street south and east of OT, I got a call from Joe. He was walking in with his daughter from north and east. So our timing was good.

There seemed more cars than usual. I thought the crowd gathered by Plaza Don Luis on the west side of OT, where the tree had been built of something like 130 smaller trees, was bigger than usual, too. Big enough that Joe and his daughter couldn’t get through the crowd, and had to detour back around through the main Plaza.

But we all got together fine. I mentioned to Joe I thought the crowd was extra-large; he didn’t think it was larger than normal. I suggested that if it was bigger one reason might be that it’s free.

“But it’s always free,” he pointed out.

I observed that in this economy, people might be especially looking for free opportunities to get their festive on. He pointed out that the fact it was not too cold and the wind was calm probably contributed. Which I’m sure is true.

Juana Inez, Joe’s daughter, wanted to watch from the balcony overlooking Plaza Don Luis. So we went up. It gave us a close, if not exactly top-to-bottom look at the tree. plus a good view of the main Plaza with its lit-up gazebo and lightings displays and crowds.

So we counted down to the lighting. Naturally after we got to “one”, it didn’t light. But then it did light, a beat or two late, and everyone cheered.

Read the rest of this entry »

As threatened last time, I made an experimental batch of green chile chicken soup for dinner tonight.

Turned out I had 3 cups of chicken broth left over. Using the proportions from the pumpkin soup, I put in a cup of heavy cream and brought it to a boil. To add a bit of zing I chopped up a celery stalk or two, very fine, and maybe a quarter onion, and crushed a few cloves of garlic. I turned the liquid down to medium heat, added the veggies, and about a third of a container of frozen green chile (defrosted). I then tore up a bunch of the boiled chicken, tossed that in, along with a cup or so of grated Colby Jack. I then simmered and stirred for an indeterminate amount of time, no less than half an hour, I suspect.

I told you this was gonna be pretty ad hoc.

It was a bit thin yet when I stopped cooking it. But it tasted right. Which was enough for me.

And when I really dug in it tasted, frankly, great. Success!

I suspect it’ll taste even better when I reheat the leftovers in a day or two. Things made with chile, in my experience, taste better for a bit of aging.

While I went and spoiled the effect by eating a buttered flour tortilla - better than bread, anyway - this recipe, like the pumpkin soup, is very low-GL. Probably lower, since unlike the pumpkin soup I used no sweetener in it at all.

There was a restaurant here in Albuquerque called the Steaksmith - long closed now - which along with good steaks (go figure) did killer green chile chicken soup. I’ve lusted for it ever since the restaurant died. Over the years I’ve tried other people’s versions. Some were good, none measured up. This - this at least approached the Steaksmith recipe. Damn good.

ASFS is having another cookoff this year for its December meeting. Last year, when the theme ingredient (à la Iron Chef) was pumpkin, my red chile pumpkin soup won a prize. This year’s special ingredient is chile. While it’s been suggested I enter the RCPS again, I may just trot this out on them.

Read the rest of this entry »

“So, there are shoes in the floor,” the pretty, very skinny, very young Latina cashier was explaining as I walked up with my groceries to checkout. I hadn’t seen her before.

“You mean they’re under the floor?” asked the sacker, a Latino kid who looked a couple years older. I got the impression, why I’m unsure now, that they were talking about a mall here in town.

“No. I mean there are shoes in the floor.”

“You mean like they’re built in, like some kind of foundation?” asked the pale-eyed Anglo security guard, who appeared to be in his mid-twenties.

This was maybe forty-five minutes before closing. Outside it was overcast and threatening to snow. We were the only people in the store as far as I knew.

I was hooked.

“No,” she said as she checked my stuff, “I mean, there are shoes in the floor.”

“You mean, like, under glass?” the sacker asked as the cashier gave me my change. I wasn’t by-God going anywhere until at least some of this mystery was resolved.

“No,” she said, “they’re in the floor.”

And turning away she walked along the aisle between the door and the checkout stands with exaggerated, spraddle-legged steps. “They’re set in the floor. Like this.”

“Oh,” the sacker said. He and the guard and I exchanged Looks.

I thanked them and went out. I figured it could only be anticlimactic from there.

Read the rest of this entry »