Dear Gosh, there are things I would much rather do than ever ever ever go to Wegman’s again. These things include chopping off my penis with a spoon. Every bad experience I’ve had in the worst parking-lots of the most congested retail centers, magnified by ten. Crowds of people pushing oversized shopping carts around trying to run folks down, in the store. So many people, easier to leave the store and walk to another entrance than through the aisles — oh, and by the way? It’s like 10% Groceries, 40% Not Groceries, and 50% Consumers Crush Fellow Consumers Between Shopping Carts.

Wegman’s has its nice points. Um. There was a suspended toy-train track at the back of the store?

Plus, I got to meet the infamous & beautiful Notable-M, our paths usually just about crossing most days. After we escaped the People Crusher that is Wegman’s, she took me for a tour of Greetings & Readings and we talked for too short of a time at Panera’s before we had to part ways. Hopefully she’ll make it to Dougherty’s.

Two photos, because I haven’t posted anything on this since … July? —

And an interior photo, bird’s eye view (taken at least a month ago), of The Great Hall (still, at that time, under construction):

Saturday marked new laws governing learner’s permits and provisional licenses. This was a topic of discussion during the Ed Norris show today.

Personally, I think it makes sense — the new law extends supervised driving to sixty hours, as well as restricts what teens may do in their cars (i.e., no wireless devices, no teen passengers). Some callers made the point that many teens rely on carpooling to get to school or work, and this will be very inconvenient, but in a society where good driving becomes increasingly rare, I think a little inconvenience can be a good thing, particularly if new drivers have an increased sense of the importance of good driving skills.

Many many many months ago I bought The Incredibles on DVD. I watched it, enjoyed it, and lent it to Zap, who showed it to his kids, and also enjoyed it.

Flash forward to my birthday. My mom mentioned she wanted to see the film, so I took it down to my parents’ house. I got a call a few days later, they’d sat down to watch it and the movie disc wasn’t there.

I called Zap, and he checked his house and couldn’t find it. I thought of a few people I might have loaned it to and checked with them, zilch. I came to the conclusion that I’d probably returned the disc to Netflix by accident, and made my peace with that. The plan was to eventually retrieve the disc from Netflix, and I’ll just say no more on that.

Anyway, a month goes by, and Zap grabbed my arm at work last week. Seems his landlord was going to be painting, or putting down new carpet, or something, and in the course of moving everything out of the room, he found the disc tucked away with some loose CDs.

Awesome!

Not G-Mail’s fault, probably, but lately whenever I try to compose an e-mail, I get this god awful stupid spell-check thingy that pops up and completely ruins my typing rthym. I click the “x”, it goes away for about five words, then pops back up. Dammit. I clicked the X! Go AWAY!

I was planning on heading down to Kohl’s today for a new pair of jeans, and then to DSW for shoes, when I decided to check Weather.com and noticed that the weather is supposed to stay at least in the sixties for the next two weeks or so.

And it suddenly snapped in my mind that this is a really good thing. Over the summer, during my “war with the fleas”, I bagged up most of my clothes in giant trash bags, intending to contain the potential fleas within until I had time to launder clothing that wouldn’t be worn during the summer - long pants, sweaters, etcetra.

In other words, almost my entire fall/winter wardrobe is still needing time to be laundered, and I’d completely forgotten I didn’t have a full drawer of sweaters in case today was chilly. Well, looks like I’m going to be on elevated laundry duty this week.

Alan Furst writes “historical spy novels.” I recently finished Dark Voyage, about a Dutch tramp-freighter captain named Eric DeHaan who uses his command to work for the British Admirality on various “covert” operations for the Allies during the early years of the Second World War.

Furst’s novels are quite excellent, painting a believably scary picture of war-torn Europe and the political tides of war that threatened everyone. It’s hard not to get drawn into the story, and rarely do his books get bogged down in an over analyzation of the political situation, making the assumption that the reader is probably at least moderatly educated
about the time. (And if not, hey, surprise!)

What I don’t care for in his novels is the end section, a pretentious, over-flattering interview titled “The Research of Alan Furst”, but most especially the question section that makes me feel like I’m back in an English course at Towson. For example: “Furst’s novels have been described as ‘historical novels,’ and as ’spy novels.’ He calls them ‘historical spy novels’. Some critics have insisted that they are, simply, novels. How does his work compare with other spy novels you’ve read? What does he do that is the same? Different? If you owned a bookstore, in what section would you display his books?”

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