Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
The stuff about me and my life. The “diary” side of blogging.
Day 295: More of the same. I did rally enough to go to work (from home) today, and will for the rest of the week. I am extremely fortunate in that I have a job where I can easily take sick days when I need, and am also able to work from home on days when I’m not sick enough to take a sick day but still sick enough to not want to risk bringing this into the office. Too many people don’t have those options.
Day 294: Day four of this head cold, and very over it…but it’s obviously not over me just yet. Watching two Marvel movies in one day maybe was a bit much inanity, but it was also right about the level of braining I could manage. Apparently other people at work have been hit with this bug, and it’s nothing more than a doozy of a cold, possibly exacerbated because it’s the first cold I’ve had in around four or five years at this point.
Day 293: Still sick; another day of doing as little as possible. Read a bunch of my current book (Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars), finished season four of For All Mankind (very good), and watched The Last Voyage of the Demeter (not very good). At this point, unless a miracle occurs overnight, I think tomorrow’s going to be a sick day instead of heading back to work.
Day 292: Well, it’s official. I’m sick. This sucks. It’s a cold (or, at least, I haven’t popped positive on my COVID tests), and I don’t like it one bit.
17/2024 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️
More of the same, and so far, my overall opinion remains unchanged. Entertaining enough adventures, just not anything particularly amazing. On the one hand, friends have told me this is where the series really starts to pick up steam; on the other hand, when after three books I’m still just saying, “well, it’s okay…”, this may be the last of these I dive into for now. Maybe curiosity will bring me back later on? We’ll see.
Day 291: Woke up this morning with a bit of a scratchy throat and cough. While it was minor, we didn’t want it to become anything major, and since we didn’t have any real plans for the day, we just decided to “not”. Stayed in bed, read books (I got through most of a Dresden Files novel), watched TV (just one episode of the latest season of For All Mankind to go), napped, and let my body do what it needed to to, hopefully, not develop into anything worse. At the end of the day, I’m still kinda horky and mildly gross, but I’m not any worse, so we’ll just see how tomorrow goes.
16/2024 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️
The final and best of this YA series. The main trio finally end up all adventuring together, as a simple shuttle hop gets sidetracked by mercenaries. Overall, while all of the books have a certain amount of overly-convenient happenstance to get the characters together, they’re a quick entertaining read as one “what if?” version of Kirk, Spock, and McCoy’s Academy days.
A note on the illustrations: Oddly, it kind of felt like the illustrator just skimmed the plot, if that, particularly with this book. Much of the action takes place aboard a shuttle, clearly described as an early version of the TOS “box on two cylinders” shuttlecraft, but the cover and one of the interior illustrations shows a more angular, TMP-style shuttle with warp sled (but the sled is outfitted with the cylindrical TOS nacelles rather than the flatter TMP style). And towards the end, a character described in the text as human (at least in appearance) is drawn as a TOS-style Klingon, complete with gold sash. Odd mistakes to make (and while the target audience for these books might not notice these things, they do stand out to me).
Day 290: “Let’s cuddle and talk about Star Trek”. What better way to spend a Friday evening? ;)
Day 289: An unexpected work conversation:
“Michael! My computer’s on fire!”
“What?!”
“I can’t touch it and it smells like burning!”
The computer hadn’t gone to sleep properly when unplugged and closed before being dropped into its computer bag to sit for an hour while class was being taught…so it just sat in its bag and overheated itself.
Thankfully, after a couple hours of cooling off, it booted, apparently none the worse for wear (or, at least, not enough worse as to prevent it from working).
I’m used to being the office ad-hoc “so we don’t have to call IT” IT person. But I certainly wasn’t expecting to hear “my computer’s on fire” when I came in to work today.
15/2024 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️
A few years after the first book in this TOS Starfleet Academy trio, McCoy is at the Academy’s medical program and ends up being paired with cadet Spock for a disaster relief mission. But somehow these earthquakes don’t seem to be entirely natural…. Not bad, though both McCoy and Spock perhaps felt a bit too much like their adult selves rather than less mature versions.
