In which tygereclipse brightens our doorstep...

Well, it's been a quiet couple of days at the Villa. Sunday Omaha and I had a lovely evening date, very important to both of us as a chance to get caught up on things we'd rather not talk about in front of Kouryou-chan, and allowed us to grab some ColdStone ice cream without children screaming for some.

Then came news that Tygereclipse needed some place to hole up for a while, and asked if she could borrow the room her father had used for a couple of months. Omaha and she negotiated an arrangement, and she moved in Tuesday afternoon. We're still trying to figure out how to fit everything together, but that's okay. Yamaarashi-chan, who was over Tuesday evening for our weekly get-togethers, was absolutely thrilled to see her again. We gave her a tour of the house, found space for her stuff in the fridge and kitchen cabinets, showed her how to work the absurd-number-of-remotes TV, and pointed out the various idiosyncracies of the house.

I burned episodes 13-18 of Uninhabited Planet Survive for the girls, downloaded episode 42 and also got episode 5 of The Virgin Mary Watches Over Us, season 2. I see that episodes 5 and 6 of Girls Bravo are out, time to watch those soon. And I cannot believe that Anime Keep had trouble finding a translator for the cutesy-sexy DearS, but the obscenely ultra-violent Elfen Lied has four different fansubbing groups all vying for it!

I am advised that I must download at least one episode of Sweet Valerian, which someone described to me as "Powerpuff Girls as bunnies done by Clamp." To quote Largo, I feel a great evil coming on.

I've been disassembling mkdvd in the hopes of figuring out how it makes its menus. Once I can automate that, I can write a script to generate the rest of the DVD on the fly.

I haven't done much writing recently. Well, okay, that's not entirely true-- I wrote a thousand words yesterday, and Monday wrote about eight hundred words or so in a love scene covering a kind I've never covered before. It was one of those "277 episodes and you've never written about little, common 'ol that?" You'll just have to figure out what it is for yourself when I post it.

Think Like a General

The U.S. Army's Chief of Staff has released the 2004 "Recommended Reading" list for senior officers. Check it out. By the way, not mentioned on the list is that order is important; General Schoomaker recommends that you do not read Clash of Civilizations until you have read Thinking in Time, for example.

Das Bus, and the music shuffle

This morning, after taking my morning stroll through Pike Place Market, I sat at the transfer station and waited for my bus to come and take me to work. A man sat next to me and at first I thought he was just another commuter. He wore a medium rain jacket, nice shirt, khakis... and then my eyes caught that he was without socks. No, that wasn't right, he had socks on, but they were hospital socks, the paper-thin blue booties with the round-the-ankle elastic, that he had then thrust into his sneakers.

I looked up at his face. Clear skin, well-kept hair, perhaps a little tired. Classic Gallic profile, Aqualine nose. His hands moved, and I heard a >crack< sound and the smell of cheap beer wafted over me. He pulled the can out of his jacket, took a quick sip, and shoved it back underneath.

I wondered where he was. On his way down, I imagined, and did he know what lay at the bottom of that spiral? Couldn't he see it? It seemed so deliberate, all of it, as if he knew where he was going and didn't care. I was earnestly creeped.

---

I shuffled my music around a bit:

Added:

• Android Lust - Stripped and Stitched
• Karan Casey - Seal Maiden
• Laurie Anderson - Live At Town Hall
• Aqua - Aquarium
• Puffy AmiYumi - Nice

Deleted:

• Misia - Best of
• Frank Zappa - Fits Your 34B No Matter Which 43B You Are
• Soundtrack - Watership Down
• Vangelis - Invisible Connections