Lance wins!







I've been watching the Tour de France religiously for the last five years, and all five times Lance Armstrong has come through with the win, now joining the elite group of Hinault, Merckx, Anquetil and Indurain as the only people to win five times. The other four all went on to try for six, but none of them could do it, and given Lance's touch-and-go performance this year you can see why. The older you get the harder it is to perform at optimal efficiency, plus people have more time to study your style, looking for weaknesses. Everyone was saying before the tour, "Even Lance will have to have a bad day eventually." Well, he had several this time around, but it didn't matter, Lance on a bad day was still just as good as anyone else's best effort. If Beloki had hung in there and not wiped out, and if Hamilton hadn't broken his collarbone, it would've been a real horserace with half a dozen potential threats to the overall, which is unusual of itself. But Lance came through, not by much, but enough, and continues to inspire everyone who watches him.

It has to be said, parts of Cesar Franck's Prelude Chorale et Fugue sound like they were written by Philip Glass. Specifically mid-way through the fugue, when the fugue subject has been worked through several times and he starts to pull in the themes from the other movements, when the chorale theme is recapitulated in the broken arpeggio style of the prelude, the chord progression and the arpeggios sound just like Philip Glass. I played this piece at my first recital when I was a sophomore in high school, and of course didn't know anything about Philip Glass then (who at that point had just made his first splash with Einstein on the Beach), so I couldn't appreciate it then. I've been listening to Rubinstein's recording lately, and played it through myself a couple of times, and it just struck me. It's as close as you'll get to hearing Rubinstein play something modern.



Won a few more Doc Savage auctions through eBay over the weekend, bringing the total well into the 80's. I had won several auctions from the same person a couple of weeks ago, but it wasn't until after I received the books and was logging them on the spreadsheet that I noticed one was missing. I e-mailed this woman who was the seller, waited a few days to hear back, she was very apologetic, but only offered to credit it (a whopping $1.49) towards something else, although she didn't elaborate on whether she meant another auction or buying something outright. When I e-mailed back to ask, I got no response. And she doesn't have anything up for bid at the moment, either, although there were quite a few Doc Savage and even the Ballantine Tarzan books in her last batch, so it wouldn't be difficult to find something. But what am I supposed to do for feedback to this person, since the transaction isn't over yet, she claims to be willing to make good, but then stops responding. I hate to trash anyone unnecessarily, mistakes happen and all, and it is only $1.49 (and I since won the book from someone else on Sunday), but it's the principle of the thing.



Reminds me of my "favorite" pulp dealer, Ray Bowman, from whom I bought sf paperbacks and digest magazines for several years back in the '90's. My last purchase from him, probably like three or four years ago now, was of eight or nine sf magazines of varying ages, I think containing Algis Budrys stories mostly. The trick with this guy was that he was cheap, but you had to wait, sometimes almost six months for him to get around to shipping the books, because it was only a hobby and if things got busy in his real job then everyone else suffered. This time the turnaround wasn't too long, but he sent me two copies of one magazine and left out one of the others. I sent the duplicate back with a nice letter pointing out his mistake and asking for the other magazine, since I'd already paid for it (like $6 or $7). No response. Months later, I sent a follow-up, again asking for either the magazine or my money back, still no response. So I stopped buying from him. I would've spent a few hundred dollars more on his stuff by now, but screw him, I don't care how busy he is. His catalog would feature letters from readers that particularly annoyed him, most rightly so, people asking to be sent pulps on spec, etc., but I think a little bit of customer service wouldn't have hurt in this case. He even has a website, but doesn't e-mail people. When you deal in sf magazines and pulps, these are the kind of people you sometimes encounter. Most of the more agreeable, accesible ones weren't as cheap, or else you go to eBay and bid $3.50 on a Doc Savage paperback that is neither a first edition nor in mint condition, only to have two other people bid against each other and run it up to $10.50, which is ridiculous, since I ended up buying the exact same one at a later auction for $2.50.



It's a common rant. I don't have any place to put more sf magazines at the moment anyway, but one of these days, hopefully soon, I'll get together some shelving for them all, and it will be quite a formidable collection, and then the gaps will be very obvious, and I will begin to seek out those missing issues. But Ray "Always Leave 'em Hanging" Bowman will not have my custom.

Lance claims to have lost 12 pounds in the time trial stage a few days ago when he got dehydrated. I think I lost a couple myself today, as I spent the better part of the afternoon in the attic installing a new bathroom fan. Not something you would expect to take more than half an hour, but the old fan was about twice as big and was just sitting on top of the ceiling, not attached to anything. The new one would just fall through the hole, so I nailed in some extra framing to have something to attach it to. Looks good on paper, but was fairly time-consuming, plus having to take a break every so often because it was about 120 in the attic. But I got the damn thing hooked up (the electrical part took about 10 minutes) and now we should be good for another 10 years. That fan got pressed into service a lot more than normal because it made good background noise for the kids when they were little and trying to go to sleep. I got to where I'm used to having it on in the evening to help drown out the incessant phone conversations and noisy tv coming from downstairs. But the new fans don't make as much noise, so it may not serve that purpose anymore, and the kids don't need it now, so maybe this one will last longer. It's in there pretty good, so I'd just as soon not have to take it out again in the near future (i.e. ever).



My other project for the weekend was to finish fixing the gas grill, but that would seem to be hopeless, as the tubes for the new burner part don't reach to the knobs, short by about an inch. The alternatives now would seem to be, cut a larger whole in the bottom of the grill (with what, I don't know), figure out some way to extend the tubes (which would seem to require soldering), or just buy a new damn grill. Option c would seem to be the favorite, certainly least labor intensive option at this point.

It was on velonews.com the other day and made the front page of the papers today that the house subcommittee on transportation something-or-other has recommended some humongous spending package that cuts the entire budget for alternative transportation, including rail trails. This does not surprise me, as the government is currently controlled by a bunch of right-wing do-gooders who think what's good for big industry is good for everybody, but it is breathtaking in its contempt of the whole alternative movement, which has a considerable amount of popular support even amongst conservatives. Instead, they actually increase the proposed budget over what GW had requested in order to build more roads. This is comparable to the administration's stance on foreign oil, "let's go get more oil of our own" rather than "let's not use so much of it, since it's going to run out eventually anyway".



The problem with reading something like this is that here in bastion of liberalism, cradle of liberty that is Massachusetts there's not much to be done about it. railtrails.org recommends calling your congressman. Not much point in this state, since every one of them is a democrat and would vote against this bill just on principle anyway. While it's good to have your representative think the way you do, there aren't many national-type causes to rally behind that really end up getting much accomplished when you live here, because the whole Massachusetts delegation already thinks the way you do, and may in fact be more left-leaning than you are. It makes you wish (almost) that you lived in some state of flaming conservatives so you could feel like you were doing your part to shake things up and make your voice heard and your vote count yadda yadda yadda. Even in Illinois there's a fairly fluid oscillation between both parties representation, with Chicago usually being democrats and the rest of the state usually being republican (except for farmers), but it does tend to jump around.



It's also kind of disappointing that railtrails.org doesn't have anything better to suggest than "call your congressman" in the first place. Shouldn't they be asking for extra contributions to fund a major advertising blitz, or organizing a candlelight vigil or something? Maybe its too soon for that, and I'm inclined to think that there are enough level-headed people in the full committee to prevent this from getting any further anyway, but you never know for sure. It would be a sad thing indeed if all these plans for massive linkages of bike paths and rail trails were left to gather dust on the drawing boards, or left under construction and incomplete, while more and more money was spent to repave or widen roads so that more cars than ever can drive faster than ever on them, obviating the need for alternative transportation for a little while longer and forstalling the inevitable just that little smidgen extra, just like the whole oil thing, so that a bunch of clueless republicans can pat each other on the back and congratulate themselves on another victory for the American consumer.

A couple of weeks ago, even before we went to Illinois, I hung around in the city one evening to go to a concert at New England Conservatory given by Stephen Drury, who's on the piano faculty and in charge of something called the "Summer Institute of Contemporary Piano Performance", or SICPP (he likes to call it "Sick Puppy"). There were several recitals to given that week by various people most of them consisting of music written 10 minutes ago, but I wanted to hear this one for Ives' Concord Sonata, one of the great piano works of the 20th century. Drury performed from memory, with the block of wood but without the viola and flute, and it was a very good performance. He didn't schmaltz up some of it as much as I would, but that's okay, it just came across as being a little more cerebral than I think Ives should be credited with.



I finally had a chance last night to play through a couple of movements myself. When I was a senior in college I was particularly smitten with this piece, actually had a couple of movements memorized and was hoping to perform it before the school year ended, but couldn't get it worked up in time to get the sign-off from LD. Playing the first couple of movements used to drive people out of the adjacent practice rooms. When I first played the Alcotts movement for Davis, he said at the end, "you really have an affinity for this, don't you?", which was as much of a compliment as you could ever hope to hear from him. I always thought one of my strengths was the ability to play contemporary music as though it were written in a previous century. Ives, for all the dissonance and rapid changes of mood, is still basically romantic music, and if you play it like that I tend to think it can be fairly accessible even to the average listener.



Drury spoke for a couple of minutes before the program and talked about the chutzpah or audacity or whatever he called it of writing what is essentially program music about philosophers. The evocative nature of this and lot of other of Ives' work gave you a feel for New England, even out in the middle of the midwest, and I was always a fan of the transcendentalists, particularly Thoreau. The misfortunes of bad timing meant that I came to the sonata too late to be able to perform it in college, and once out of college there wasn't enough time to spend on it (the rest of the program would have been my reduction of Milhaud's "Le Boeuf sur la Toit" for Trumpet, wind quintet and piano). Drury's been able to live with it for quite a few years now, and it shows in the performance I think, it must be neat to be able to live with music like that for long periods of time.

Yesterday was too zany, I was trying not to miss a day, but it was non-stop from the moment I walked in the office until the moment I left (which wasn't until 7pm), then when I got home I went to bed about 9 since I needed to get up a 3am this morning to see our London users through their first day on our new application. Kind of a hectic schedule, but the good news is I'm logged in from home and can sign off about 1pm and take a nap!



Haven't finished talking about the trip to Illinois yet. We ditched the kids with Mom on Wednesday evening, our last night in Springfield, in order to have dinner with my one high school pal that I still keep in tenuous contact with, Russ Miers, who came with his bride-to-be, Jaime, and bought us dinner at a Mexican place downtown, the same place we went to with him last year. When last we saw Mr. Miers, he was just finishing up divorcing his wife Jennifer, who he'd been married to for 11 years, only to find that she'd rather be a workaholic than have kids, after he started feeling the paternal pangs as he closed in on the big four-oh. Never one to resort to placing an ad in the personals, he was soon entangled with one of his co-workers, who looks to be a good 15 years younger than he is, and who is gung-ho for kids asap. They've sinced moved in together and the wedding is scheduled for October, and promises to be quite the lavish affair, attended by everyone they've ever met (except us).



Russ and I go way back, we were always in the same grade but didn't start really hanging out together until maybe fifth or sixth grade, initially because he was a neighbor of Jeff Hagen, one of my circle from that era. Jeff eventually became a total wastrel and I didn't have anything in common with him, but Russ and I always had plenty to talk about, since our minds ran in the same circles on a number of subjects, although no one ever accused him of applying himself to much at that point in his life. After high school, he ended up in Chicago briefly going to IIT in the city for a while, and we got together a few times, but then he ran out of money or something and ended up joining the army, doing a tour of service in Germany on the GI bill. Resisting intense pressure from his superiors to stay in the military, he cashed out at the end of his indentured servitude and didn't quite know what to do next. He took his payout from the army and blew it all on a nice car, then after a little while decided there were better things he could do with his life. He trashed the car, collected the insurance, and enrolled at Illinois College, I think, got his degree, went on and got a Masters at Western Illinois (again, I think. Hey, I'm no Simon Schama), and worked at Macmurray College for several years as director of residential something or other. He was trying to break into being a dean somewhere, but couldn't get anywhere with it.



Meanwhile he'd married Jennifer, who was also doing something uplifting but not well-compensating. After several years of hand-to-mouth existence, they decided to go corporate and try working for money instead of for the greater good. Russ ended up at some software company in Springfield, I don't remember where she went. Not long after this, as I said before, Russ started wanting to have a family, something they'd agreed when they got married that they weren't going to do, and Jennifer avoided the subject by immersing herself in her work, to the point that they didn't want to be married any more. That was where we left off when we saw him last year, he was still fairly devastated by the whole thing, but already starting to rebound. Sounds like a in a year or two the Just the Grownups Going out to Dinner reunion will have to be replaced by the Family Cookout at Somebody's House, but that's ok.



Russ and I go way back. One day when we were maybe freshmen in high school we ducked out of school early to avoid some lame school assembly, and decided to head for Jacksonville with two of his older sisters, all four of us crammed in the cab of their pickup truck. As we headed out onto "the hard road", for whatever reason, the truck picked that moment to decide the tires were bald and we slid off into the ditch at 40 or 50 miles an hour and rolled over. Nobody was really hurt, but the truck wasn't in too good a shape.



The first time we met up in Chicago after he started going to school there, we decided to head down to the Museum of Science and Industry, and took the Jackson Park el train all the way to the end. By the time we got there we were the only white people in a five mile radius (or at least it seemed like that). It was the middle of the day and wasn't worrisome or anything, but Russ did suggest if we saw a white guy we should go up to him and say "Doctor Livingston, I presume?" Didn't have the opportunity, though. I don't even remember if we made it to the museum.



We were also part of the class trip to Washington DC when we were juniors. At the time I was lusting after a freshman named Regina Jokisch, who was also on the trip, and was about half way through a six month period in which I was working up to asking her out. Somewhere along the bus ride to DC, she and Russ started dating (as I said, the guy was not a late bloomer), but I handled it fine, and sure enough within a couple of weeks she'd already dumped him.



Oh, I could go on and on.

Can't wait to see this tonght!

So this year was my ninth Readercon, I think, and probably rated about average, since the guests of honor were Rudy Rucker and Howard Waldrop (who I don't think appeared together, and I'm not sure if they even knew each other). Both men are fairly soft-spoken. Waldrop is sort of a low-key Bruce Sterling, although he did get riled up about G.W. at one panel, but just for a few seconds. Rucker, who seems exceedingly mellow, as though still recovering from his last acid trip, speaks carefully and thoughtfully, catching you offguard when he throws in some profanity. Very professorial. The other guest of honor was Hal Clement, sort of the "we'd better honor him 'cause he'll be dead soon" entry, who usually has some good anecdotes about the old days but needs other people around him to constantly feed him questions as his stories tend to be short and to the point.



A lot of panels trod over familiar ground, there were very few special items worthy of note, and a few pros were conspicuous by their absence, particularly James Patrick Kelly and Robert Sawyer. Here's a rundown of what I saw:



Friday:



Adventures in Other Dimensions, with Michael Burstein, Paul Levinson, Rudy Rucker and others. Burstein did a good job of explaining the physics behind other dimensions. The panel flipped back and forth between other dimensions meaning parallel universe and other dimensions meaning those beyond the basic three. Much discussion of Flatland and some of its responses, including Rucker's own "Spaceland", which I picked up later in the dealers' room.



SF's Greatest Generation, with Hal Clement, Barry Malzberg, Andrew Porter, Allen Steele and others. A few war stories from Clement, who said his first few sales to Campbell earned him enough money to make a sizeable dent in the $600 tuition bill from Harvard. Some discussion about how people's view of technology shifted after WWII, so that old-fashioned space opera was no longer sufficient, giving rise to writers such as Clement who were more rigorous in their scientific background.



Saturday:



The Fiction of R.A. Lafferty, with Bryan Cholfin, Darrell Schweitzer, Michael Swanwick, Howard Waldrop and others. I've never read much Lafferty, but Cholfin had cleaned out a closet and brought some free copies of a Lafferty book he'd published about 15 years ago, so I grabbed one for future reference. What I've read is largely inscrutable, and most of the panelists were in total agreement that this was a hallmark of Lafferty's work, that even after repeated readings you weren't always sure what was going on. Lafferty is held up as an example of someone who writes what they want to write with no concern for its salability or the market or the audience or anything. Apparently Lafferty was very conservative in real life, but this didn't manifest itself in his writing, either.



Reversals in Definition of the Term "Space opera", talk by David Hartwell. Subtitled "From Shit to Shinola". Hartwell began by saying that space opera started as a purely pejorative term for the kind of crap that was being published in Amazing back in the 30's and 40's. Hartwell detailed his research for references to space opera through the ensuing decades until in the '70's Del Rey books was marketing space opera as a good thing, such that by the present day authors such as Bujold are proclaiming that they write space opera.



Political Rebellion in SF&F, with Samuel Delaney, Greg Feeley, Howard Waldrop and others. Chip Delaney said, "There is political sf about rebellion and there is political sf about revolution. And then there's Howard Waldrop." Feeley pontificated for a while, lots of polemicizing about politics in general, and the evolution of political agendas. Delaney was interested in how things like civil rights, from his perspective, went from being for something (equality) to being against something (racism).



Has SF Become too Specialized?, with Tom Easton, Scott Edelman, Barry Malzberg, Allen Steele and others. This ended up being the ubiquitous panel about how nobody reads sf any more and which of the various scapegoats is most at fault. Edelman took the opposing viewpoint that those of a young age who want to seek out sf can still seek it out, and find good stuff to read, whether new or classic. Much was made of writers like Greg Egan writing stuff that was so cerebral that it ran the risk of endangering the field by alienating new readers who come into contact with it first (although I thought "Singleton" was pretty accessible). Malzberg provided comic relief as the voice of doom.



The Death and Possible Coming Rebirth of SF, with Judith Berman, John Clute, David Hartwell, Patrick Neilsen Hayden, Allen Steele. Allen Steele was on way too many panels this year. He's never short of opinions but most of them aren't that interesting. John Clute, on the other hand, started this whole discussion with something he wrote about how sf is dead, which is bound to stir up trouble. What he means is that the classic idea of SF arose as a response to the industrial revolution, and now that in this enlightened age industry has been fully assimilated into our society the SF as we know it from the past is no longer viable. People didn't necessarily disagree with this, and no one wanted to extrapolate on what future science fiction would be like.



September 11 and Fiction, with Paul Levinson, Teresa Nielsen Hayden, Howard Waldrop, Gordon Van Gelder. Some personal remembrances of 9/11, and some examination of how it impacted the field, particularly from the editors, based on what they saw submitted shortly thereafter. Levinson spoke at length about how one of his favorite bookstores had been the Borders in the World Trade Center plaza. Some talked about writers' sensitivity to certain subjects in the months after the event, wanting to change existing submissions (which GVG discouraged) or avoid writing about certain things (invasions, assassinations, etc.). The fact that most american publishing is centered in New York they felt almost makes it a hindrance to any near-term examination of 9/11, and that small presses or other outlets further from Ground Zero may be where we first start to see a fictional dialogue come together.



Interviews with Hal Clement and Howard Waldrop, GoH speech by Rudy Rucker. Waldrop recounts his life story, talks about how certain stories got written. I haven't read any of them, so not much of note there. I did pick up an old Ace paperback short story collection of his, have to give it a try some day. Saw the tail end of Clement's interview, he was talking about his artwork. Rucker had visual aids with his speech, which I didn't get a copy of, but he's hoping to publish it somewhere eventually, or put it online. His talk dealt mostly with writing, which is kind of interesting as he's a computer scientist and mathematician.



Kirk Poland Memorial Bad Prose Competition: Glenn Grant wins again, audience comes in second again. Six rounds this time, including two "lightning rounds", which actually helped move things along pretty well. The ubiquitious Lionel Fanthorpe citation, and two rounds devoted to someone's cover letter and synopsis for a novel submitted to some web zine, stretching the definition of "published", but not the definition of "bad".



Sunday:



The Golden Age of SF is now, with Hal Clement, Paul di Filippo, David Hartwell, Farah Mendlesohn and others. Ms. Mendlesohn managed to talk almost as much as di Filippo (no small feat) about the state of SF, supporting the notion that there is more good stuff being published now than ever. Hartwell thinks this is true of short SF, but thinks there's only a couple of really top notch novels being published every year. They harkened back to the old days when people could read everything being published. Clement reminisced about his SF fan group that would get together periodically, and the meetings "consisted of total silence" as everyone just read stuff all afternoon. Mendlesohn said you can kind of still do that if you limit yourself to British sf, although the short fiction market is now basically down to Interzone.



The Career of Rudy Rucker, with Paul di Filippo and a bunch of who-dats. Some people had an association with Rucker from early on (di Filippo said they both had their first stories published in Unearth magazine right around the same time). Others were mere sycophants. Rucker was in the audience, so they couldn't say too much anyway. I left about half way through, not because of the panel, but because it was time for lunch.



Ambizione!, with John Clute, Ellen Kushner, Barry Malzberg, David Alexander Smith, Howard Waldrop and others. From a quote attributed to Italo Calvino that literature was inherently the process of setting a standard that could not be reached. Most people refuted this, and the discussion involved more what the panelists own authorial ambitions were or had been and whether they had achieved them or not. Malzberg said his only ambition was to make a living as a science fiction writer, and he failed. Kushner talked about the notion of doing something that would last, something that would still resonate years later, but said she was writing something that, stripped of its fantasy trappings, was on a topical feminist subject, acknowledging that there was a contradiction there. Malzberg said what difference did it make if you were remembered or not, since you wouldn't be around to enjoy it.

Oh, now it's late again, this is getting silly. It's all the fault of the Tour de France, which is eating into my free time something fierce, but you could hardly turn away from today's stage what with all the attacks on Armstrong all the way up l'Alpe d'Huez. He made it into the yellow jersey, but it's still wide open at this point (except for Simoni, hah!).



Finished up at Readercon today. If I don't get those summaries typed up by tomorrow I'll have forgotten everything (probably too late for some already). Just went to a few panels, nothing too stressful, was back home by 2 pm, but Beth and the kids weren't around most of the afternoon, so I just hung around and didn't do much. I did get the digital camera pictures downloaded onto the computer, so I should be able to put those up in the next couple of days. Sure is easier than scanning them one by one. Also picked up six more Doc Savage books from one of the dealers today, bringing my total to 81 out of 96. Didn't see much else that I couldn't live without. The guy said he had a bunch of doubles and omnibuses too, and I said, "yeah, but they're kinda expensive, right?" and he said, "well, yeah". He was going on about what great condition some of them were in, but I'm not looking for mint copies, just ones I can read someday and not worry about them (plus, since it would be about 10 years before I'd get to them, they'd just as well have some shelf wear when I buy them since they sure as hell will by then).

Oops, it's even later than last night, have to get this in before midnight or it counts towards tomorrow (I think). Spent the day at Readercon, got to meet Rudy Rucker and have him autograph a couple of books. Saw Howard Waldrop, whom I'm really not that familiar with, but I got a book of his short stories to check out, they would seem to be in a vein that I'm interested in. Went to a bunch of panels. Got a few more to go tomorrow, then I hope to write up some short blurbs about each one. No Readercon next year as it's too close to Worldcon, geographically and temporally, so have to make the most of it!

Lots to talk about, but this is Readercon weekend, so it's already late and I'm not feeling particularly verbose at the moment. Haven't finished covering the trip to Illinois yet. We arrived a week ago Saturday, about an hour late since there were storms near Chicago that meant the planes had to take the scenic route to get into O'Hare. They said the extra time at the gate was to take on more fuel because of this, but I think the additional fuel was needed because everyone on the plane (including Beth) was toting a copy of the new Harry Potter book. But we got there and got the car (a Chrysler Concorde) and were finished with lunch by 2 and made it to Mom's house around five. Went out to dinner at Cracker Barrel and called it an evening.



The next day much of the Bartlett clan came over for a late lunch. I got in a run early over at the Lost Bridge Trail, did about 5 1/2 or six miles. Carol and Bob were there, Kay, Donna, Lucas, Kenny, Diane, Grandma B., even Dana and her little girl were in attendance briefly, as they were in town for the weekend. Joyce was supposed to be there but apparently forgot, even though she was bringing the deviled eggs. She was all apologies and invited us over for dinner the next night. Justin wasn't feeling well, having been fighting a bad cold for the last couple of weeks, and actually said he wanted to go lie down in the middle of the party and ended up napping in the bedroom for an hour and a half. Once he fully woke up he was ok, though.



So Monday night we made the pilgrimage to Pawnee and had dinner at Joyce and Don's house, where she insisted on serving beef and noodles, because "it was Jerry's favorite". As a kid I never liked beef and noodles, but as a grownup it's fine, but I wouldn't call it my favorite, and I don't recall Dad ever saying it was his, either. Brenda and her family were there for dinner, but then they were off to a ball game, and towards the end of the evening who should show up but David and his family, just back from a ball game. Played a couple of Poulenc tunes for them (mostly for Don), Joyce went through some her enormous postcard collection with the kids, and gave them each a framed caricature of themselves that she had done, which they were very smitten with and very possessive of. It was a good visit, even Beth was pleasantly surprised that it went so well. That afternoon we'd stopped in a Kay's house for another visit with Grandma, who seems to be doing pretty well for a "1911 model" as Dad would say, although she's about as thin as she could be and everyone has an opinion about what's wrong with her.



Tuesday night we had dinner at Red Lobster with Bob & Carol (now something of a tradition), and went back to their house afterwards for dessert, although we were so stuffed we waited as long as we could to eat it. Got some info on their trip last fall to Niagara Falls, and they're off next month on their postponed trip to Seattle to see Brian and his wife.



In between the family visits we went out to Roselawn and to Camp Butler to see where Uncle Pat is buried. Tried to find Old Cumberland cemetary, but between Mom and me we each only had half the right directions, and it wasn't until Bob put it straight that we were able to find it on Wednesday. We also stopped in at Mom's office that day to see the Judge, who's looking a little more wrinkly these days, but still seems the same otherwise, and he spent several minutes chatting with us. Paraded the kids through the clerk's office, too, although most of the old-timers that Mom knew the best aren't there any more. Beth made the rounds of Springfield's two scrapbook stores, one with Mom near her house and one out on the west side of town with all of us, although only Chloe went inside with her while Justin and I hung out next door at Taco Gringo. I did another run Wednesday morning around part of the lake, about four miles or so, exceedingly humid and pretty hot, but I figured good practice for the upcoming 8K that weekend.



Went through a fair amount of Grandma P.'s pictures and stuff looking for graphics for the diary web site, and found a few things that I brought back and want to scan. Probably won't get much done until after the Tour is over, though. Also took a lot of digital pictures, which I need to figure out how to transfer onto the computer and then I can upload those here, too. Plus Beth has a few rolls of film to develop, which will help illustrate the rest of the trip.

Now why does Blogger look different than it did yesterday? I'm confused. We spend so much time at work agonizing over user interfaces and breaking in our users (who are all internal) to things like changing a color or a font, and most commercial websites just randomly change the whole UI more often than I change my sheets and think nothing of it. There's something to not offering phone support that makes your users a bit less threatening.



So anyway, I wanted to cover my last two road races, the first of which was on June 25, an extremely hot and humid early evening, but not as hot and humid as that race I did last summer in Chicago. Thought it might be a good way to gauge my acclimitization to the real summer weather, since I was planning on doing a Chicago race again this year and those can always be counted on to be in miserable weather. This local one was the same 5K course I've run in two previous races, starting and ending at the Wayside health club, but whether it was the heat or time of day or what, I managed to run it nearly two minutes slower than last time (which was a pleasant Sunday morning). For Marlborough, it's an average run, with a couple of significant but not killer hills, and I felt fine the whole way, but came around the last corner further behind than I thought I'd be.



Last Sunday, Scott, Bob and I ran my first 8K, associated with the Four Bridges of Elgin bike race that was happening later that same day. This was an early morning race, the weather was pretty forgiving, there was one short hill but otherwise flat, and the roads were completely closed off to traffic. The bad thing was there were only about 100 people in the race, so I was afraid of finishing dead last, and that's exactly what I did (only by a few seconds, but still). Not that Bob or Scott faired much better (Scott held off a bit to run with me, Bob finished about 1:15 ahead of us). Leading up to this race I've been running longer distances, since at one point we thought we might do a 10K, and again I felt fine the whole way, and didn't feel like I was going particularly slow.



The annoying thing is that after two-plus years of running on a regular basis, plus the year and half it took to work up to running 3 miles at all, I'm not a second faster than I ever was, and in fact if anything seem to be getting slower, and it's really irritating. For a while I've been content to just run longer distances and challenge myself that way, and it's been a good way to keep things interesting and see some areas of town that I've never been through before. By the end of the fall I'd like to have run from the house in all four directions on four different runs to the border of Marlborough with the next town. Southborough was the easy one, that's already in the bag. Hudson isn't that far, but requires scaling a major hill in both directions to do it. Northborough and Sudbury are both over three miles in one direction (particularly if you avoid Route 20), so those may take a while, but are certainly doable.



But I'd also like to be able to run at least a little faster than I am now. I don't have to finish first (Chloe stopped being interested in watching me race when she figured out that I wasn't going to win), but it would be nice to finish in a respectable time, say 27 minutes for a 5K and 50 minutes for an 8K. I need a program to follow that I can stick with, so I'm planning on scouring my running magazines to find something suitable. I don't need to go further than 10K at this point, it would just take too long, so if I can speed up a a little bit, that would get the same run down in less time, at least a little less time. I shouldn't be so old yet that I can't still improve, I just need to analyze my habits and figure out how to do it. The nice weather will only last for so long, then it's back to the treadmill, so now's the time to do it.

Lots to talk about, since it's been three weeks since I last got up the gumption to post. Where did the time go, I again ask myself? Things were busy at work, so that wasn't a good time for making updates. At home Beth took a few days with the kids up to Storyland, so I was a swinging bachelor and had better things to do in an empty house than type. Then it got up to 95 degrees, and it was too hot in the guest room where the computer is to want to spend any time in there. And then we left for Illinois for 10 days, just returning this past Monday. But first let's get the hang of this new Blogger interface.



OK, that worked, hey this is pretty spiffy. If there was one annoying thing about Blogger, it was that I always had to remember to copy my text before publishing, because every so often it would hang up on me (and occasionally I would click on the wrong thing) and I'd lose my whole entry, which is not a pleasant feeling. If anything improves with this release, I hope it's that.



So the big news before our trip was that our cat, Aurora, died at the ripe old age of 13 or so. The last few weeks she'd been acting sort of weird, wasn't eating much, often seemed to be trying to go to the bathroom at random (without much success). So Beth wanted to take her to the vet, but she hadn't been to the vet in several years, and the one she used to go to was way up in Chelmsford and the one that was recommended to her in town wasn't there anymore. So she ended up at "Compassion" Veterinary Clinic. The name alone should be a tip-off to stay away, I would've looked for one called "Kevorkian Veterinary Clinic", but it's kind of like when you need your car fixed in a hurry and you have to go with whoever can take you and chances are you're going to get screwed.



So the vet took a look and drew some blood and said she'd need some pills and should be contained to one room. This was the day before Beth was taking the kids to Storyland, so she came home full of instructions for me, which I didn't want anything to do with. The whole point of her taking the kids away for a couple of days was so I could be free from responsibility, plus I don't even change the litterbox, I could hardly be trusted to shove a pill down the cat's throat twice a day. So she worked it out to have her boarded somewhere in town by a friend of her Mom's who knew Aurora and could handle the pills and all for a nominal charge, so everyone was happy. This was Tuesday morning, and by Wednesday, Aurora's condition had deteriorated to the point that they had her euthanized. The kids weren't too broken up by it ("can we get another one?" they asked about 10 seconds after getting the news). We agreed that we'd like to be pet-free for a while.



Jill is insanely jealous, as she's been hoping for Bubba's imminent demise for some time now, but he continues to thrive, and throws up on the carpeting just like Aurora would with breathtaking aplomb and elan. Mom thought Jill might try to smuggle him into our luggage, but we arrived home Bubba-less Monday night.



Aurora had her good points, best of which was her ability to tirelessly stalk mice until she'd end up carrying them around in her mouth. She didn't know what to do with them after that, so she'd put them down and try to catch them again, sometimes losing them in the process. So we'd try to trap them while they were still traumatized with the use of a plastic collander and a record album, then flush them down the loo, leaving Aurora trying to figure out where the heck they disappeared to. And she was more like a puppydog sometimes, following people around the house, hopping up on the lap of any cat-haters or cat-allergics that stopped by. But she was at her less endearing when throwing up everywhere, usually on the floor but sometimes on shoes, the furniture, the computer keyboard, etc. Once we had kids, Beth was less enamored of spending extra time cleaning up after the cat, too, so it was with mixed emotions that we received news of her demise. While we mourn her passing, I don't think that moving on will be much of a problem.