8 September 1998: Fall Has Fell

Tuesday, 8 September 1998:

Fall Has Fell

Boy, where does the time go? I finish The Moon and the Sun, spend some time crunching football numbers, and suddenly it's 11 pm! And I haven't written yet!

But I get ahead of myself.

The weather has changed radically since Sunday. It's cooled off considerably, and we're supposed to have a low of 40 tonight. Should make for a brisk bike ride to work tomorrow! It will be interesting when it gets chilly enough for me to need jeans to bike in.

This did make for a very nice day yesterday, and I went to a cook-out that one of the local SF group had. I baked quite a few peanut butter cookies (some with chocolate chips), which were fairly popular, even among the huge mass of desserts that everyone brought. (I swear, next time I'll make a side dish. Really!) I also unfortunately discovered that uncooked peanut butter cookie dough is really, really yummy.

It's definitely feeling like fall. The cold, the tree outside my apartment window which is turning orange (it changes colors early every year, but still), and some faint sense - smell, the light, or something else, I don't know what - gives me the distinct feeling that summer is over and the year is entering its twilight phase. I also recognized that familiar melancholy that enters me at this time of the year. I love fall in many ways, but I can't really say that I enjoy it.

Maybe I should say that fall is fell.

Things at work have gotten lively. I'm preparing my classes for our User's Group Meeting, and discovered some confusion about what kind of environment I'll have to teach from (in particular, which version of the system I'll be using). We eventually ironed it out, and I discovered that for my purposes I didn't really care what was decided, so long as something was definitively decided. But it was a little hairy there for a brief time.

Well, that's why we have people (like me!) to double-check these things, right?

Well, okay, maybe things aren't so lively. I'm just not really into teaching all that much; I can do it, and I can do a pretty good job at it, but I don't really like it, and I get all wound up about it. I always try to be a good sport about working on UGM since it's an effort that everyone in the company has to contribute to, but it's the sort of work that frazzles me in all the right ways to make my mask slip once in a while.

We got the results for the football pool last week. I finished next-to-last, which means that whoever finished behind me should really feel like a schmuck. Snort!

Actually, more than half the teams I picked won, and they were all my high-point picks, and some of my black sheep picks nearly won (if Chicago had beaten Jacksonville I would have finished in the middle of the pack; they lost 23-24, so I don't feel too badly about that). And I understand that the point totals this week were unusually high - I scored 80 points out of 120 possible points, and last season I understand that people would sometimes collect 20, 30, and 40 points for a week. So I'm optimistic that I'll do better in the future.

I only have to win one week - out of seventeen - to break even for the season, after all.

Tonight I finished Vonda McIntyre's The Moon and the Sun. It definitely got better as it went on, picking up considerably after the halfway point. I think its worst flaw is that it perhaps overdoes the depiction of life in Louis XIV's court; the endless protocol and even-more-endless usage of French names and titles and abbreviations made it difficult to get into at times.

Its strengths - especially in the second half - include some well-realized characters whose personalities are to some degree drawn from the court intrigue, and some excellent dialogue both by people well-versed at court protocol, and by people who are new to the environment.

The basic plot is that brand of alternate history which might be called "shadow history"; it introduces fantastic elements into an historical setting - in this case, a sea monster in King Louis' court - but goes to some lengths to prevent this fantasticality (is that a word?) from intruding on history-as-we-know-it. (I understand that Barbra Hambly's Bride of the Rat God is similar in this regard, and arguably Tim Powers' The Anubis Gates also falls into this category.)

The essence of the plot - that the sea monster is neither what it seems to be, nor what people believe it to be - is carried through well, particularly because we come to believe in the protagonist, Marie-Josephe, a young woman who is a servant to a noble family, and who gains the notice of the King, and comes to care for and learn about the sea monster. And the character interplay is quite touching at times.

I thought this was a good book, though whether it was deserving of the Nebula Award... well, I guess that's not my decision to make, eh?

Election day today. Did you vote?

Michael Rawdon (Contact)