Year 50 Day 296

Me in my home office, with shelves full of books and trinkets behinnd me.

Day 296: Good news — improvements are being made! While not at 100%, I’m definitely feeling better, and actually got dressed today instead of spending another day in pajamas. (Though, really, sweats and a t-shirt aren’t that different from pajamas, but still!)

Bad news — it looks suspiciously like now it’s my wife’s turn to go through this. Which is not great, but better to go in series so that we can take turns taking care of each other, instead of both of us being sick at the same time and nobody having the energy to do anything for the other.

Year 50 Day 295

Me with an annoyed expression.

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.

Year 50 Day 294

Me looking bored on our living room couch.

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.

Year 50 Day 293

Me standing in front of a bookcase full of science fiction books.

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.

Year 50 Day 292

Me sitting in my living room chair with a grumpy expression.

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.

📚 Grave Peril by Jim Butcher

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.

Me holding Grave Peril on my iPad

Year 50 Day 291

Me sitting against a pile of pillows in bed.

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.

📚 Cadet Kirk by Diane Carey

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).

Me holding Cadet Kirk