What a week!

It’s been quite a week. That earthquake hit the other day, and now Hurricane Irene is expected to run wild on us this coming weekend. My local news station has been harping on this double-whammy big time – I spent some quality time in the lunch room at work printing up company t-shirts, and I didn’t even bother counting how many times I heard and saw the same segment (“First an earthquake, now a hurricane!”) repeated. It’d definitely affected the clients who depend on my employers for their HVAC and plumbing. Another thing I didn’t bother counting was the number of calls we got today regarding backups for sump pumps (handy for draining flooded basements) and backup/emergency generators for if this hurricane knocks out power.

Call me sad, but I’ve started paying more attention to the countdown for Lunacon 2012 - 203 days, some-odd hours at this point, and ticking down. Other than a party weekend in Baltimore that I’m trying to plan with friends as soon as my first 2.5 days or so of vacation time kick in from work (November, I’m hoping!), Lunacon’s the next big thing I’ve got to look forward to. John Ringo’s set to be the Author Guest of Honor, and we’ve also got Howard Tayler of Schlock Mercenary for the Artist GoH, Tamara Pierce as the YA Author GoH, and gaming gurus the Looneys. It should be a good time.

Life goes on.

This is the end of my fourth week at my office job, and it’s gone by pretty fast. I hadn’t though I’d like office work, but I’ve got good co-workers. They tell me I’ve picked up the answering-of-phones procedures pretty quick, and am doing well, though I still need to rely on cheat sheets and co-workers for certain information. The real test will come next week when one of my fellow customer service-type phone-answerers is on vacation. Also, I did manage to have a librarian moment this week. Two files were being searched for almost frantically. The searchers asked me to check the boxes where the files are being stored. They had been searching since the day before, but I managed to locate both files in under half an hour. Ta-dah!

My reading continues. I finished Doomsday Book yesterday, and I regret it took me as long as it did to get to it. It thoroughly deserved the Hugo and Nebula Awards it won when it was published. I’m continuing the time travel theme with 1633, co-authored by Eric Flint and David Weber for Mr. Flint’s 1632 universe. The premise for this series is, “What would happen if a modern American town was picked up and dropped in the middle of Germany and the 30 Years War, and the corresponding chunk of land dropped back in the town’s place?” I say I’m “finally” getting to it because I read the first book of the series last year. I’m enjoying it so far, and I’ve got a few more of the books down the universe’s timeline, as well as three of the sidebar books of related short stories. I also have a copy of Time Spike which starts in the same manner as 1632, only it involves a high-security prison getting dumped among the dinosaurs.

Displaced bibliophile

I’ve been working in an office for three weeks now. After training for phone-based customer service and doing lots of necessary busy work to help prepare for the upcoming Moving of the Offices, I started answering phones this Tuesday. It’s been an interesting experience so far. I’ve never really done phone work before, but I’m getting used to it and I’m told I’m doing well. It isn’t what I imagined I’d be doing ten years out of high school, but it’s helping me pay the bills and I like my co-workers. We’ve got some fun people in the office. One of the guys who’s usually out on service calls has started introducing himself as Mr. Ben Dover when I answer his calls to the office, so I naturally started inquiring about his sister Eileen. It’s all in good fun, but I didn’t let myself laugh until the person he’d called for told me who it was and wondered how he was going to introduce himself next.

I do miss working with books, but I’m keeping up with my reading. I recently finished Book of the Dead from Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child’s Agent Pendergast series (truly amazing, it’s like intellectual candy for me) and Eisner Award Winner David Petersen’s graphic novel Mouse Guard: Fall 1152. The paperback I’m currently working on during my daily commute and on lunch breaks is Doomsday Book by Connie Willis. I first heard about this book five or six years ago when I spotted it in a library’s used book sale, then again just over two years ago when a classmate chose it as the basis for her semester-long project for a publishing class. (I should have posted my paper on James Michener’s Alaska from that class on a sub-page for this blog.) The basic plot for Doomsday Book is that a young scholar studying history at Oxford is sent back to 1320 for research, but something goes wrong at both ends. Both the scholar and her friends and associates in the book’s Present/Now have to figure things out before she can be brought back. I’m roughly a third of the way through the book at this point, and I’m enjoying it.

Not dead, just postponed …

So my dream of becoming a librarian has been postponed for now. I’m not giving up on becoming a librarian in something other than name at some point in my life, I just need to put that particular dream on a back burner for the time being. I’m near the end of my second week at this office job, and I’m enjoying it so far. I like my co-workers, they seem to like me, and I’m told I’m doing well in picking up the skills they’re teaching me. Two other people in the office also had birthdays this past weekend, and I think it’s a good sign that whoever ordered the communal birthday cake had the bake shop add my name.

I went to see Captain America: The First Avenger with some friends this past Saturday night. I’m not really into comic books and graphic novels, but it was good. Improbable (Steve Rogers started out as a skinny guy I could probably have beaten at arm-wrestling), but good. On the other hand, a friend on Facebook disillusioned me a bit as to how death works in Comic Book Land. I hope he doesn’t mind that I’m quoting his posts here:

You DO know what happens to Really Cool Comic Book Villains when they APPARENTLY dissolve while holding a source of NIGH INFINITE POWER, don’t you? Well, in comics, dead isn’t DEAD … pretty much EVER. At the LEAST you have to see the BODY. And in this case there WAS NO BODY. Which means the Red Skull will come back, probably with Phenomenal Cosmic Power, or at the least he’ll reconstitute HIMSELF through sheer fanatic superhuman willpower — and naturally it’ll take, oh, about seventy or so years to do it… Yeah, and Cap had the most egregious example. Bucky was dead. He’d been dead, gone, shuffled off this mortal coil, gone to meet his maker, joined the bleedin’ CHOIR INVISIBLE for DECADES, and Marvel had always stated that this was the one death that would remain absolutely invoilable, the shining example of deadness that’s dead. Really dead.  …  And then they brought him back. AS A VILLAIN!!!