Last weekend, spouse and I went to see "Mr. Holmes," the new Ian McKellen movie. First impressions: 1) it was excellently done. Excellent acting, scripting, and directing. 2) It was hard to watch in spots, as my mom (who is just before turning 80) is having serious memory issues--Holmes' similar issues struck rather close to home. 3) Did I ( Read more... )

...turned in an *interesting* direction. Not sure about the reactions from the RAH-is-the-BEST-AUTHOR-EVAR crowd, though.

Today is my 55th birthday. All in all, I'm not in too bad a shape, though if anyone knows a good place to trade in spines, knees, elbows, and shoulders drop me a line, OK? Spouse very kindly baked me a sour cream/poppy seed layer cake. It's in the oven now, and will eventually be decorated with lemon curd (not really decorated, as such--more ( Read more... )

This was pretty good. Rachel Silber was the moderator; she's in a position of some authority at Arisia [1]. Other members were Jennie Devereaux-Weber (on harassment policy team for WisCon [2]), kalmn (similar position for Minn-STF), and Emily Wagner (from ReaderCon). I didn't take notes, so this is going to be a disjointed collection of mostly poorly ( Read more... )

Will be leaving for WisCon shortly. Son A. is coming with me; daughter J. and spouse can't leave until they're both done with work, so probably won't get in until kind of late tonight. One of A.'s friends was supposed to come with but canceled at the last minute--back problems, AIUI, and the idea of several hours in a car and three days on ( Read more... )

Great tweet from @cstross: "The ultimate trending topic on twitter must be a German cannabis legalisation protest day: #hashtag"

In the year or so that I didn't post anything to LJ, many things happened that I would have posted about had I not gotten out of the habit. Here's one of them.

My niece ( whom I mentioned here, when I was talking about getting a great-niece) did manage to escape her teenage years without having a baby. She was, in fact, 21 when her son was born ( Read more... )

So children_of_lir has declared this to be a day for posting to your old LJ. I anticipated that, though, and have actually posted several times in the past few weeks. It's clear that my flist is far more active, though I owe that mostly to james_nicoll. I also have a few webcomics that I access through LJ, one of which (Phil & Kaja Foglio's Girl Genius) still has a pair ( Read more... )

A few weeks ago, the neighbors across the street had a stray cat walk into their garage while a couple of them were outside. It was quite friendly, approaching them and generally acting well-socialized, so they took it in and fed it. It was quite hungry. Very interesting markings, though--tawny gold base coat, with black stripes on its legs and ( Read more... )

In order to do the Win7 installation, I'd had to take the machine back upstairs, where I could plug it into the router. Just in case there was something weird about the wireless adapter, though, I decided to leave the computer upstairs so I could plug it into the internet if need be. Back to install the adapter software, which goes fine. Time to ( Read more... )