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My Fall Viewing

My fall rundown of music and books was getting long, so I’d decided to let TV be its own post. And now that I’m almost completely caught up (more on that shortly), it’s a good enough time as any to look at what’s scheduled on the DVR these days and how that’s panning out. Starting with the best and going down to the bottom of the barrel…

30 Rock — We’ve only had one episode so far this fall, but still the funniest show on television. Tina Fey, Alec Baldwin, Tracy Morgan, and the rest of the cast? Golden.

The Chef Jeff Project — So so so so so good. Chef Jeff was in prison for ten years and learned there how to cook. Now that he’s made it in life, he’s helping six disadvantaged and at-risk young adults by teaching them how to cook. You really can see some of them genuinely changing for the better, and blossoming under his care. It’s on Food Network, do try and check it out.

The Office — I have to give them credit, having Jenna Fischer elsewhere while using Amy Ryan as a guest star could have been the kiss of death, but it’s still smart and entertaining. Thumbs up!

Survivor: Gabon — I’d stopped watching Survivor about two years ago when my 8-9pm Thursday slot was triple-booked. That’s no longer the case, so I thought I’d give it another chance, and I must say that absence has made the heart grow fonder. Pretty darn entertaining, with just enough twists and turns this year (coupled with some of the best surroundings I’ve seen on the show… actual elephants charging the camp???) that I want to see more. Thumbs up!

The Amazing Race — Still want to be on this show. Pure and simple.

How I Met Your Mother — I started watching this last season and I’m pretty well entertained. This season has felt a little rushed, like part of this storyline was supposed to have played out last season before the writer’s strike cut everything short. But still good, especially because Neil Patrick Harris is comedy gold.

Continue reading My Fall Viewing→

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Easy to Please

There are many, many reasons why I love making spicy black bean soup in my slow cooker. First, it makes my entire apartment smell like spices and deliciousness and when I come home from work (or running, or anywhere else) and it’s cooking away, I just get all excited. Second, I always have tons of left-overs, the majority of which goes into my freezer in plastic containers so that I can pull one out at a moment’s notice, heat it up, and have tasty homemade black bean soup.

But right now, at the start of the process of making the soup, I’m at another one of the reasons. When I put the dried black beans in a container and fill it up with water, I actually get a little giddy when a few hours later, almost all the water is gone (even though the beans were originally submerged by several inches of water) and there’s just a cascade of beans staring at me. Inevitably I add more water, some more of which will get absorbed. And tomorrow morning, when I dump the remaining water out, it’s going to be indigo colored and make me grin as it goes down the drain.

Easy to please, that’s me. (The recipe is after the jump at the bottom of the post.)

On an unrelated note, with the marathon in three weekends (my ankle feels much better today, by the way!), I’m trying to see how far ahead I can get with my reviews for Read About Comics. Now normally I’m writing a week ahead, so that this weekend I wrote reviews for November 10-14. For this weekend and the two remaining weekends before the trip up to Philly, though, I’m going to try and write one extra review that gets held in reserve. That way, when the marathon actually hits, I’ll be so far ahead that I can take a full week off from writing and there won’t be a blip on the schedule at all. We’ll see how that goes.

Continue reading Easy to Please→

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No Run For Me Today

Well, the plan was to get up this morning and hit my last long run before the Philadelphia Marathon; something in the 20-23 mile range. It’s supposed to be a beautiful day out to boot, and I have to say I was genuinely looking forward to it.

Except… well… on Thursday when I went for my run, I took a slight misstep at one point and my right foot went perpendicular to the ground; you know, that moment where suddenly your foot has rotated over 90 degrees and your ankle says, “Please stop that right now!” I immediately recovered and kept going (I’ve done that a thousand times before!) and I figured that was that.

Well, I noticed at the office on Friday afternoon that the right side of my ankle was starting to hurt a little bit. Uh oh. And it kept hurting for the rest of the day. So, when I got up this morning and it was still hurting? I regretfully decided to scratch the run. 20+ miles on an achy ankle just seems like a stupid plan. So now I’m going to play it by ear. If it’s fine tomorrow I might tackle it then. Or I can do it next weekend (I should be fine with just a two-week taper if I have to), and really give myself a lot of extra healing time. For that matter, on Election Day I’ve been looking into volunteering possibilities, so maybe I could take care of it before that begins. We’ll see.

The irony of this happening right as I finally revamped my old, outdated MarathonGreg website is not lost on me, incidentally. (Some of the content still needs to be moved over—a small selection of photographs for starters!—but I’d say it’s about 90% done.) Ah well.

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Sound-Effect Bonanza

And now, actual sound-effects from the latest issue of The Incredible Hercules (issue #122, to be precise), from Marvel Comics.

Saying that this book doesn’t take itself terribly seriously (and is more than a bit tongue-in-cheek) is, as you’ll quickly discover, the understatement of the century. Boy, is this book fantastic.

  • Kasploooom!
  • Skrrakkkabadooom!
  • Crakkajamma!
  • Sploingbrraahhhm
  • Shrakwash!
  • Skrim! Skraam!
  • Shakaaam!
  • Schmackooom!
  • Gwap!
  • Frmrrrl
  • Aqwooooommm
  • Splurrrgoi
  • Lqwwwrrrggh
  • Kakkakkraakk
  • Obrrrrg!
  • Unlrrqq!

Oh, how I love this comic.

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My Fall Listens and Reads

With everything else going on I forgot to mention it, but I became even more of an Arlington resident stereotype last week; I donated money to WAMU, our local NPR station. I started listening to WAMU around the start of the year on my drive to and from work, and I have to admit that I’ve grown to really love Morning Edition and All Things Considered. And from there, well, I’ve started adding podcasts to be automatically downloaded, like StoryCorps, Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, or NPR roundups of the week’s news relating to specific subjects (my two favorites are Food and Pop Culture), and most Monday mornings at the gym I spend my hour on the rowing machine and the elliptical listening to the weekend’s episode of This American Life.

So yeah, they’ve given me a lot of entertainment, so with the latest pledge drive I finally crumbled. (It does help that I can make it split over 12 months. That’s not so bad.) But it did make me realize that I really have not picked up much in the way of new music this year. There are still a few albums I’m hoping to get for Christmas (new ones from Aimee Mann and Pink leap to mind), but I didn’t feel the need to rush out and get them. The newest album I can think of acquiring was Tod loaning me Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s Trip the Light Fantastic, which was pretty darn good.

Is this a bad year for music? Or merely a bad year for me finding music that I’m interested in?

On the other hand, I’ve definitely done a lot more reading this year; getting those two hours on the bus at least once a week has certainly helped, of course. I’m almost done with Pride and Prejudice and all of you were absolutely right, it’s very enjoyable. At some point I’ll finally tackle Wuthering Heights, but that will have to wait for a little bit. I took advantage of Small Beer Press’s fall sale and ordered the “everything we published in 2008” set (which may sound like some huge crate of books but it’s actually just five).

It helped that three of the books were already ones I wanted; a new Geoff Ryman book is reason to celebrate (Cambodia? Really? I’m in!), I’ve been wanting to read Joan Aiken’s works for a while now, and I’d heard very good things about Benjamin Rosenbaum’s The Ant King and Other Stories. So that made the decision easy; doubly so because Benjamin Parzybok’s Couch sounds entertaining, and I’ve always heard very good things about John Kessel too. (And hey, one of the stories in The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories involves the Bennet sisters from Pride and Prejudice meeting Dr. Frankenstein and his Monster. It’s like it was meant to be.)

Also on my radar (but for 2009) is NESFA Press’s planned six-volume set of anthologies collecting every single Roger Zelazny short story. I cut my teeth on Zelazny’s Amber novels, and from there went to his anthologies (I still vividly remember telling a friend about Unicorn Variations in the sixth grade and wishing that I could write a short story like Zelazny did) and many of his novels. With half of his anthologies out of print and the other half all scattershot and over the place, a complete, definitive edition of everything? Oh yes. Yes yes yes. It’s just as well that it’s a minimum of four months away.

(Oh, and World of Goo for the Wii is one of the coolest games out there, and for $15 at that! A steal and a half. I actually have to stop myself playing it at times because I don’t want it to come to an end. It’s that good. I would talk about wanting an Xbox 360 Pro, here, but I fear that you lot will just egg me on to buy one. And, um, no. I cannot justify one. Maybe next year.)

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150 Words

About a month ago, I got a note from Simon Forward about a contest that the online e-zine Concept Sci-fi was holding, involving stories of exactly 150 words. (No more, no less; no, the title does not add to the word count.) If I remember correctly, the editorial staff of Concept Sci-fi would whittle down the entries to a shortlist, and then award-winning author (and super-nice guy in general) Walter Jon Williams would select the entry.

With about 24 hours until the deadline, I none the less sent in two submissions; one was a brand-new idea (“Instant Future”), the other was an unpublished writing exercise that I’d done a year ago (“Renewal”), but needed to be whittled down to even less words than it already was. (The original version was 289 words, meaning I had to hack out almost half of it. And I’d already thought it was brief!)

If you’ve never tried to write an entire story in 150 words, trust me, it is not terribly easy. My first short story sales back in the day were for an anthology of 750-word stories, and that now seems like a piece of cake in comparison. There’s very little room for filler of any sort. As it is, while I thought “Renewal” still worked in its new length, “Instant Future” is actually begging to be a lot longer.

Well, the decisions are in, and much to my surprise… “Renewal” actually won the entire thing.

What a nice surprise to start the morning. (And to think, I was even just staring at the library in Arlington Courthouse a few hours ago.) And a good way to start my plans of tackling fiction again, to boot. Yay!

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Jailbreak Run! (and other good things)

On Sunday morning, I did something that I’d last tackled in 2005—I ran the Marine Corps Marathon. Well, half of it. Sarah was running her very first marathon on Sunday, and I knew that while she wasn’t trying to show it, she was definitely a little nervous. (Who isn’t nervous right before their first marathon?) So, since I was already planning on going running that day, I came up with a sudden plan. I’d jump into the race at mile 2 (once Sarah got there) and then run with her through the most of the desolate parts of the course.

The plan came off without a hitch; she was surprised (but in a good way) when I hopped in with her, and I tried to keep her company through the parts of the course where you don’t get anyone out cheering you. This year, that was between miles 5-8 (Canal Road and MacArthur Blvd, west of Georgetown in the Palisades neighborhood), and then miles 11-15 (West/East Potomac Parks, and Hains Point). Once we were through all that, I knew the crowds on the National Mall and Crystal City would get her through the rest.

And while I wasn’t doing it for me? I had a great time. It was nice to just not worry about a finishing time, just enjoying the run. I was a tiny bit sad when I hit mile 15 and it was time to stop, but then again, it was also best to hop out while I could. It was a lot of fun, and very much something to keep in mind for the future.

And it was just part of a good weekend. Add in a nice “game day” party (with a lot of really nice people and some tasty food) on Saturday, a short run on Saturday morning (well, until I got rained on), tackling some much-delayed writing, and a low-key dinner with Charlie at California Tortilla… it was nice to have a relatively low-key weekend for me, for a change.

(Oh, that Anthony Bordain show I mentioned before? Not good as I’d hoped, alas. Oh well.)

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Hibernation

I do not understand why I am so tired lately. I’ve been going to bed at a reasonable hour and then… bam. Sacking out hard. As someone who normally wakes up every two hours or so (and then usually falls right back asleep) it is very odd to wake up once, at most, the entire evening.

Now this may sound like a great thing, but the problem is really that it’s a symptom of something else. I’ve been finding it almost impossible to wake up in the mornings; I ended up having to scratch my Tuesday morning run for that reason, and this morning I actually hit the snooze button for a solid two hours before I was able to get up. Maybe I can squeeze the run between work and tonight’s book club, but we will see. At least I’ve done some non-running-exercise since my last run on Sunday; rowing and elliptical for an hour on Monday, and 50 minutes of my spinning class on Wednesday. But yeah, something is seriously kicking my butt this week.

$5.00 a BasketSo far, the best idea I’ve come up with is that I am somehow channeling all the woodland animals and trying to hibernate until spring. It would be sad to miss Thanksgiving and Christmas, but on the other hand, there is a certain appeal to it all. Hmmm. (Stupid autumn weather.)

Not much else going on, really. Last night’s dinner was fantastic; I’d marinated some chicken and put so much chipotle on it that even I found it really hot. Sooo good. Plus some chopped up eggplant that I fried for a minute or two, and then some pumpkin muffins to go with it all. (Most of the muffins will in theory go with me to book club tonight, but we’ll see if anyone eats them or not. I might be living on these for a while.)

Oh, and now my neck is mysteriously aching. I think it is bored and wants some attention. Hmph.

On the bright side, I am starting to get excited about the idea of adding some swimming and biking into my routine after the marathon. Hopefully that excitement will continue long enough into making it an actual routine, and not merely an, “It’s exciting because it’s not actually happening yet” sort of thing. We shall see! Those laps don’t swim themselves, after all.

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Autumn Has Arrived

The definitive moment for me, these past few years, is when I’ve come back from an early morning run and instead of a cool shower, I want a hot one. Yep, the temperature seems to have finally done the big drop; skipping past September and October weather entirely and plunging into late November.

Of course, the other big definitive moment for me is going to the farmer’s market in Arlington Courthouse and seeing how everything is turned over. Now instead of the big items being asparagus and tomatoes and corn, we’re seeing a plethora winter squash, apples, potatoes, cider… definitely a different sort of pickings available, but all still looking delicious.

Winter Squash

In the latest shocking news, operation “get rid of stuff” is going pretty well. Two bags of books went to the library this morning, and two more bags will get evaluated by the local comic store to see if there’s anything they want/need before I either sell off and/or donate the rest. Next up, those two paper ream boxes in the corner of the living room that have review materials that I am clearly never, ever, ever going to get to.

Before then, though, it’s time for another glass of apple cider (so, so good) and maybe fry up one of the little eggplants that I picked up at the farmer’s market. Or alternately the maytag blue cheese and potato tart. Decisions, decisions.

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Television Jackpot

Now, this show could turn out to be a disaster. I may end up angrily turning it off in disgust. But seriously, this sounds like it was made for me—I’m mentioning it here partially for everyone else’s benefit (who is of the same mind), and partially so I remember to set the DVR later tonight.

At the Table With Anthony Bourdain
Tune in Monday, Oct. 20, at 10 p.m. ET (Travel Channel)

As you’d expect from an Anthony Bourdain vehicle, opinions fly and no topic is off limits as Tony hosts a no-holds-barred dinner with four featured guests. Joining Tony around the table are celebrated writer Bill Buford, “Nightlife Queen of New York” Amy Sacco, TV personality Ted Allen, and magazine editor and former gossip columnist Chris Wilson. They’ll debate the ethics of an $1,800 dinner, and Tony will reveal how he always, secretly hopes the waiters like him. Food and travel stories will run wild from Wylie Defresne’s restaurant wd~50 in New York City. Anything goes “At The Table With Anthony Bourdain.”

While I’m thinking about it, I too would like an $1,800 dinner if someone else is buying. Just putting that out there in case someone has a lot of spare cash lying around.

(On second thought, give me the $1,800, I’ll have a great dinner for quite a bit less, and keep the change.)