Tess Gerritsen’s Gravity is a sort of plague drama, wherein people die by the Space Shuttle-load. The cover says “Better than Chrichton!” which may well be true, but doesn’t seem like quite the compliment they intended it as after his recent works. The story is fairly solid, and though it only really paints a few of the characters as fully three dimensional, there’s enough of interest going on to keep you engaged. A fun read for the idle afternoon you’re wondering how to fill, but probably not worth plugging up your reading queue with if it’s already crowded.

Yesterday we signed the papers to sell our Denton house to the new business
editor of the Denton Record Chronicle.
Today, we signed papers to buy the San Marcos house in which we’ve been
living since late March. In a couple of days, all of the transferring of
funds, mailing of legal-sized small print forms, and badgering of notaries
public should be complete. Our biggest plug goes to our Denton Realtor, Darlene Mullenweg, who was a tremendous
help in the process of getting our old house sold. What a relief; what an
answer to prayer.

Tonight the kids and I watched Stop
Making Sense, the Talking Heads concert movie. David Byrne has
a wacky, disturbing, highly energetic charisma that makes him an offbeat,
off-balance pleasure to watch. The rest of the band seems almost startlingly
normal to look at, but is effusively energetic as well, which combined with
the other on-stage goings-on makes the whole show entrancing. One of the
best ways to ensure that the audience of a live performance is having fun is
for the performers themselves to be having fun, and boy do Byrne and company
have fun here.

Return to Mars frustrated me on so many levels that I nearly yanked it from the tape player and hurled it from the window in an attempt to spare other library visitors the agony of listening to it. That would have been a shame, because there is finally a bit of interesting payoff at the end of the work, but it was a challenge to get that far. First, the stuff that was Ben Bova’s fault: the ethnically diverse crew has been a staple of science fiction since Star Trek, but it’s not enough to be ethnically diverse; the characters need personality other than “Russian” or “Navajo”. (Look to Hillerman for how to do this right.) The team had constant issues with authority that got very tiresome. And the story really lacked a central issue to pull it along, which made it difficult to stick with. Now, the things that were the fault of the audiobook producers: Harlan Ellison is a great author, but a lousy reader. His thick ethnic accents compounded Bova’s sins of cardboard characters. His vocal levels varied so wildly that it was impossible to set a level on the tape player that wasn’t either annoyingly soft or gratingly loud at times. A bit of compression would have gone a long way toward making this production easier to listen to. All in all, probably better to watch reruns of The Simpsons than to spend the time on this one (unless you’re driving).

Well, we all made it through the memorial service, and Dad and his brothers are off to Oklahoma City for the service and burial there. Among the best times for me was a couple of hours we spent on Sunday night with the minister, reminiscing and telling stories. I was surprised to learn of my grandfather’s involvement in some early civil rights stands. He angered his whole block when living in Tennessee by paying the black man who did yard work for him twice the going rate. He also landed in jail after playing in a baseball game against a team of black youths when mixed-race games were still illegal. It was fascinating to hear of some of these sides of his personality I’d never been aware of before. Also a pleasure was the time with my Uncle Bill and Aunt Cathy, who were down from Vermont and hadn’t ever had a chance to meet the rest of my family. (Kathy and I were married 5 years ago, and the last time I got to visit with the Vermont contingent was 1992.)

I’ve been working at Coremetrics
since we moved down to Central Texas. The company is well-positioned to do
great over the next couple of years, as it provides a service that is pretty
well unmatched with a giant infrastructure
that will make it difficult for other businesses to copy without a lot of
funding and work. But in spite of all that promise, I’m leaving. The startup
company hours have been very hard on my family and me, and I’m
desperate to establish a better balance between work and home life. Enter Origin, a division of the computer game
company Electronic Arts. They’ve come up with
a great benefits package, a slight raise, and the opportunity to work at
home two days a week, which will both ease the pain of commuting from San
Marcos and allow me more time with my family. I won’t be directly involved
with the game-making process, but will instead be doing the somewhat less
glamorous work of creating applications for use internally, primarily by the
customer support staff. It promises to be interesting and varied work, and
I’m quite looking forward to getting started. My first day will be August
21.

Yesterday at 2:15pm, my grandfather on my father’s
side died. He was my sole remaining grandparent, and had wrestled with
Alzheimer’s disease for several years, degenerating from being able to live on
his own, to on his own with the help of family, to a retirement home, and over
the last several years to a nursing home in Seguin. The death was a bit of a
shock, as it didn’t result from the disease that had wasted his mind, but from a
kidney infection that came on fairly abruptly. My dad got the first call around
1:00 yesterday morning, and was able to be with my grandfather during his last
hours. Though Grandad was never fully conscious, Dad was pretty sure he heard
him as he was talking to him. You know, even though he’d been dying for years,
and with the assurance that he’s far better off now that our faith provides,
it’s still incredibly wrenching to finally lose him. I hadn’t really expected
to, but I found myself choked up and crying with my dad on the phone. We’ll miss
you, Grandad.

I have a new favorite band: Mad River, here in
Austin, formerly based in St. Louis. I’ve never heard them and I’m a bit vague
on what kind of music they play, but whenever you have a chance to go see them,
you should do so, and pay twice cover. Why my enthusiasm? Well, when I ran out
of gas today on the way to lunch, they rescued me. Thanks,
guys.

I recently finished rereading Larry Niven’s
Ringworld, from which I’d been away for about a decade, and which
therefore held some surprises for my forgetful brain. A member of the Giant
Mysterious Space Artifact school of literature, a sub-sub-genre it shares with
the Rama and Riverworld stories, it centers around the journey to and
exploration of a great big ring-shaped construct that encircles a sun. The
civilazations on the ring have fallen into ruin, and the members of the journey
are faced with the challenge of getting off the ring once they crash-land
without the help of much technology other than what they salvage from their
ship. As with the first installment in the other GMSA stories, there’s still
much left unexplained, giving the author an opportunity to milk his idea for a
couple more sequels. A fun read with some interesting
ideas.

I’m starting to really feel like I’m ready for a break! This past weekend
went largely as planned: we picked up Emily at the airport, packed our
remaining furniture, and attended Daniel Davenport’s birthday party. Emily
really enjoyed her time in New York, and though she’s glad to be home, seems
to still miss Martha a fair bit. Our move was made a bit easier by the
purchase of some of our furniture by the prospective buyers of our old home.
I’m not sure we would have had enough U-Haul space if we hadn’t been able to
leave those items behind. (Many thanks to the folks who helped us with
loading and unloading — it would have been dreadful without you.) Daniel’s
party was great fun, and broadened our parenting horizons a bit as we
discovered that Liam loves Skee-Ball. Since then, I’ve been back to work,
Emily’s been sick, Kathy’s been unpacking, and Abby and Liam have been
running amok. In spite of the fact that we haven’t gotten much rest for a
while, we’re very grateful that our house is about ready to sell, and that I’ll likely be able to start spending some more time with the family
soon. (More details on that as they become available.)