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High-Tech Christmas

One of my Christmas traditions is that every year, I read James Joyce’s “The Dead” from Dubliners on Christmas Eve. This year, for the first time in about a decade, I ended up spending the evening at my parents’ house instead of going home to my own bed. So it was then that I realized I had left my copy of the book at home.

But! Since I now have a Kindle (thanks to a deal I could not refuse!), all was not lost. I went onto the Kindle Store, found a free copy of Dubliners, and before I knew it I was spending Christmas Eve curled up in bed with Gabriel and Gretta Conroy. Christmas was saved, and the future is now. Sometimes, technology is awfully handy.

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Ho Ho Argh

Apparently if there are Christmas disasters to be had, for me it’s shifted off of Christmas Day (what with the infamous “Greg comes home and finds water pouring in through his ceiling and his possessions floating in an inch of the stuff” moment) and moved to December 23rd. I say “disasters” because I’m hoping that was the worst of it.

The big thing for me was discovering that the Christmas tree had not just toppled over, but actually broken in the night. Completely unusable. Thankfully only one ornament broke, probably because most of the tree hit the couch instead of the floor (or the coffee table). It’s a little frustrating because I’d bought it last year since right now I don’t really have room for a full size live tree. I ended up taking all the ornaments off of the tree and packing them back up. I could have bought another tree but at this point it just seemed easier to call it a day. I’m hoping next year that I can just go back to having a real Christmas tree once more.

Meanwhile, Charlie ended up having all sorts of trouble at the airport due to the backlog of passengers from snowpocalypse earlier in the week. Ugh. One of the big problems of all of the airlines teetering on the edge of bankruptcy is that everyone’s killed half of their schedule. So now when a day’s worth of flights are cancelled, there aren’t tons and tons of other flights to shift all the passengers onto. What a royal mess.

(Speaking of a royal mess, half of my work parking lot is still unplowed. What are they hoping for, 80 degree weather to just melt it all? Good luck on that.)

Oh well. If that’s the worst of it I suppose I should consider myself lucky, right? Minor stuff in the grand scheme of things. Here’s to a quiet and sedate holiday from here on out…

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Another Great Gift Idea

Ok! Better late than never, right? Here’s another great gift idea, and it’s one that you can just as easily give to yourself as to someone else. Even better, it’s a gift that helps others and is on sale. What might that be you ask?

My favorite small press publisher of prose, Small Beer Press, is having a sale. And, for every book you buy from them, they’ll donate $1 to the Franciscan Children’s Hospital. SBP co-owners Gavin Grant and Kelly Link have had a family member in their hospital for a while now, and in general I think the idea of a hospital specifically for long-term care of children is such an incredibly necessary thing. (You can read the full story of their time with the hospital at this link.)

Anyway, they have a lot of great books for sale. Some of my favorites include:

The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories by John Kessel. Kessel’s “Lunar Quartet” is alone worth the price of admission, but “Pride and Prometheus” and its merging of Pride and Prejudice with Frankenstein has to be read to truly be believed.

Perfect Circle by Sean Stewart. Stories about people who can see ghosts are a dime a dozen, but Stewart’s book is about family and dead relatives and promises and the things that bind us. Breathtakingly beautiful prose. (His book Mockingbird is also available and I love it to death too.)

Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link. In the future, everyone will know about Kelly Link’s genre-defying short stories. They’re hard to describe and all peculiar but in a twisted, wonderful sort of way. Seriously, if there’s one book you’re going to buy, make it this one.

Second Line by Poppy Z. Brite. I haven’t actually read this one, but I have read Liquor, her novel which also stars the same characters (two chefs in New Orleans who eventually open a restaurant where all the food is cooked using alcohol in some way, shape, or form). Brite made her start as a horror author but it’s her novels about cooking and living in New Orleans that have made her into a must-read author for me. Seeing someone shift genres so effortlessly was a real revelation, and a reminder not to automatically push someone into a narrow box.

Or, buy something entirely different! Those prices are ludicrously cheap. I rarely buy prose books these days because of space; instead I keep visiting the library. I make an exception for books from Small Beer Press.

Baum Plan Perfect Circle
Magic for Beginners Second Line

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Ghosts of Christmas Past Gifts

I’d told myself that December would be the month that I really started updating online a lot more, but then everything hit at once. To top it off, my own site got hacked and it took the better part of a day to scrub it clean of all the nastiness. (Moral of the story? Some people suck.)

Anyway, I kept telling myself, “You need to update,” and not doing so. But then I read Kate Beaton’s latest online strip, and it’s one where she talks to her younger self, and it kicked up all sorts of flashbacks of my own.


(Go on, read it. I’ll be here when you get back.)

It’s strangely comforting to know I’m not the only one who can still carry around guilt related to past gifts. I remember getting a microscope one year and within about 12 hours having spilled some dark blue dye all over the kitchen table and the tablecloth. Stained for life. I remember years later still feeling horrible about that. And despite one of my favorite childhood books being one titled Greg’s Microscope (I have multiple copies, so please don’t think tracking one down for me is a good idea), I too had no idea what to actually do with a microscope once I had one. You know how that goes. I look back now and I just wince. Such a thoughtful present that never got used to its full potential.

Anyone else  haunted by the ghost of a past gift?

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Christmas Gift Idea

I have some amazingly talented friends. This is, really, not so much news. But I was thinking to myself this morning, “Greg, some of your friends don’t have big publishers pushing their books, or prints, or (insert awesome creation) here. And they would make good Christmas gifts if only people knew about them. I wonder if you could do something about that?”

So! As I have free time (a rare commodity these days, to be fair) I thought I’d point people in the direction of some talented friends’s websites and products.

First up! My good friend Britt, whom I’ve known for over a decade now, recently started her new website The Photo Garden Bee, where she visits gardens all over the country and takes some amazing photographs of them as well as writing up a travelogue. I’m not a huge garden-visitor but even I find this pretty enthralling.

She’s now selling black and white matted prints of some of her flower pictures, and they look fantastic. I mean, c’mon, just look!

Very reasonably priced, and just gorgeous. Hello, easy Christmas shopping idea! Go buy some!

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How to Travel Ten Hours and Go Absolutely Nowhere

So! Thanksgiving. The plan was pretty simple: get up early Thursday morning, fly from National Airport to Charlotte, then from Charlotte to Birmingham. Then, late on Saturday, we’d fly back home. Of course, since I said, “the plan was pretty simple” you know that means that the end result was anything but.

It started out on target; got up at 4:15am, Charlie picked me up at 5:30am, and by 5:50am we’d parked the car, checked in, and checked our luggage. (There were plans to go running several days, plus nice clothes and casual clothes packed, so the bag was otherwise bigger than I’d have planned. It could have still fit in the overhead compartments, but since it was a full flight I figured I would just find it easier to not have to struggle.) At 7am, our flight was completely boarded and we soon took off for Charlotte, despite heavy fog in DC.

It was around 8am that the pilot came on the intercom. I thought he was going to say we were descending to Charlotte, but instead he started explaining that they had mechanical difficulties and the flaps on the wings wouldn’t come back up after take-off, which would make landing tricky. And, because of heavy fog in both Charlotte and DC, they couldn’t land safely at either airport. So as a result, we were being diverted to Pittsburgh. Yes, instead of going 330 miles southwest, we were going 191 miles northwest.

After we landed, they started working on the plane. And working. And working. And working. After an hour or two, we realized that we were in trouble, because there was no way that we would make our flight to Birmingham. Worse, the only other flight from Charlotte to Birmingham was already overbooked. So that wasn’t an option either. Charlie got on the phone with USAirways, and after a lot of talking they booked us on a Delta flight from Charlotte to Atlanta. It’s only two hours from Birmingham so it wasn’t impossible, right?

Except the airplane still wasn’t ready. After several hours they finally let us off the plane to stretch our legs (and get food if necessary), then they moved us onto a new plane. Finally we took off, back to Charlotte. We landed there at 1:30pm, a mere five hours and fifteen minutes late. And too late for the Delta flight to Atlanta.

At this point, we wanted to just go home. Getting to Birmingham for Thanksgiving was impossible, and staying in Charlotte was not our idea of a good time. That’s when we discovered a new snag. The woman at the ticket counter wouldn’t change our flight because we were only flying one way on USAirways (the way back was via Delta), so she said we’d have to buy another ticket. Aaarrrgghhhh.

I stood in line for the assistance counter, with about 25 people in front of me, while Charlie got on the phone again with USAirways. After an hour, I still wasn’t at the front of the line, but Charlie had someone on the phone that said yes, they’d fly us back and no, we did not have to buy new tickets. Charlie went to a new ticket counter where the woman proceeded to say that we’d have to buy new ones. Fortunately, Charlie had kept the guy on the line and handed her the phone. (Also, around the same time, another passenger from our flight who had also given up on getting to his intended destination told her to stop giving Charlie a hard time because we were from the same mechanical error disaster.) Finally we got our boarding passes, got on a new flight now seating back to DC, and at 4pm were back where we started.

Well, except for our bags, which we didn’t get until the next evening. But I rather expected that.

Exhausted (we’d been awake for 12 hours and in airports/airplanes for 10 of them), we drove up to Rosslyn, had pizza at Piola, and then went home and crashed. For better or for worse, the most memorable Thanksgiving I suspect I will ever have. Hopefully next year things will be a bit calmer. (And hopefully next year I will get to do what I’ve wanted to try: brining a turkey.)

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Thankful Time of Year

Holy cow, it’s Thanksgiving tomorrow, isn’t it? (Well, at least in the United States it is.) I’m actually heading out of town for Thanksgiving this year; pretty sure the last time I wasn’t around for the day itself, I was in the back seat of a station wagon and my age was in the single digit zone.

(I am vaguely disappointed that Birmingham, Alabama, is not a balmy 90 degrees this time of year. What’s the point of living there?)

So, as I’ll be out of town, here’s an advance photo essay on things that I am thankful for.

I am thankful for…


Child stars smoking dope!

 
The Spidey-Signal!


Cross-dressing Sailor Moons wearing sneakers!


Uncomfortably snug pants!


Chanukah ham!


Awesome parking jobs in my office lot!

And last but not least…


Betty White reminding me to end the joke here.

Happy Thanksgiving, regardless of whatever you’re thankful for.

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Late Adopter

It’s funny, with some technology I’ve been an early adopter; I had a Wii before anyone else I knew locally, for instance, and I was using a second generation iPod before there was such a thing as Windows support. (Ah, back in the day where you had to use something like XPlay to transfer your music to and from your Windows machine.) I had my Palm Centro before the advertising campaign even really kicked in.

But in the past week I finally embraced the Bluetooth earpiece for cell phones, and bought an iPhone. Which makes me perhaps one of the last people on the planet to do so.

Dark Side of the Tooth [365portraits: 313]I’d actually given a Bluetooth earpiece a try a few years ago. The experience was horrible; constant crackles of static, echoing voices, and sound regularly cutting in and out. I try and use a hands-free device for if I have to use my phone while driving and after a week I gave up on the Bluetooth and went back to a wired earpiece. Said earpiece just died a few weeks ago, and after a trip to Target revealed no wired earpieces being sold, I did some research and gave Bluetooth another try.

The nice thing about not being an early adopter? They fix the bugs. It’s amazing how much better things sounded. So while I still feel like an extra in “Rise of the Cybermen,” I’m sold. Mind you I only use it while driving. I still draw the line at just wandering around with it on. It always makes me think that there are crazy people talking to themselves walking down the street until they get close. Why give people another reason to think I’m nuts?

As for the iPhone, while I liked my Palm Centro, there was a lot less functionality between it and what was coming out now. I thought about a Palm Pre, but a combination of there being far less apps available (and let’s face it, that’s half the attraction) and Sprint not offering a reasonable deal to re-up my contract and give me a discount on the phone, and the choice was easy. So, my contract expired on Saturday, and on Sunday afternoon after brunch I walked out of the Apple Store with my new phone. So far, so good. (Although I am a tiny bit surprised that plugging the iPhone into the computer won’t charge it, like any other iPod-like device up until now. Slightly annoying.)

And of course, one nice thing about being the last of my friends to get an iPhone is that I already have their huge recommendation list of apps to get. I’m already on the third screen worth of apps…