Recovery

I hate being sick. I knew that it was coming – with 3 or 4 of my close co-workers having some sort of cold last week, but was hoping it would bypass me. No such luck – although I think I missed the major version that they had. Even so, I had to work from home on Tuesday and still felt pretty wiped yesterday.

Part of it was probably the depression over Penn State’s loss to Iowa – I’m still a bit in shock that they allowed their national championship hopes to be dashed like that. It was Minnesota (2001?) all over again. Part of it was probably sheer exhaustion from the endless work I’ve been doing it. Part of it was that my body needed to stop.

I did get out to bird last weekend for a short while, although the birding was less than exciting – the wind and wetness really kept the birds away, for the most part. But I did get a chance to see this young snapping turtle crossing the road at FDR Park (go ahead, make the joke):

I worked around the house some this weekend, too, trying to straighten up with Shari being at a shoot on Sunday (see some of her pix here, here and here), and a photography seminar with Cliff Mautner all week (that is, Cliff Mautner – voted one of the top 10 wedding photographers in the world. Not a bad teacher, I must say). With her away, it gave me a chance to catch up on some reading and movies that she wouldn’t sit through.

Watchin’

I watched “Stargate: Continuum” on Sunday, which wasn’t half-bad. It wasn’t great and there wasn’t nearly the action in it that I would have expected but it was a heck of a site better than the really boring and trite “Stargate: Ark of Truth”, which was really an insult to most fans. I also watched M. Night Shamalyan’s “Signs” again, as I had only seen it once. I still like it, despite most people putting it down, although I can definitely see some of the shortcomings of it compared to his opus, “The Sixth Sense”.

Readin’

I started reading “The Kite Runner” after a long traipse in the shallow end with a trio of Star Wars books: the first two books of the Coruscant Nights trilogy (“Jedi Twilight” and “Street of Shadows”), and the new “Millenium Falcon”. Michael Reeves, author of the trilogy, really irks me with his writing style – he tries too hard to prove how smart he is by a) making 1,001 references back to the movies and his other books, and b) creating parallels cliches, metaphors and sayings to our own. Example, “You know what they say, ‘Don’t count the bantha cubs before they’re born’.”. C’mon, really? The stories themselves aren’t that great, either – trapped between being for an adolescent reader and an adult, they fail at the latter level.

“Millenium Falcon”, by James Luceno, was better. The story idea is pretty cool – two owners of the famous ship, one from the past and Han Solo, are tracking the history to find the secret to a lost treasure. Jadak, a former owner is following the trail of who had the ship after he ‘died’ nearly 70 years ago. Han, on the other hand, is investigating the trail backward before he got the ship from Lando Calrissian. Getting the back-story of the ship was very interesting, but the rest of the surrounding story was a bit weaker. The payoff for the ‘treasure’ was really weak and actually brought the whole book down, making it feel like little more than a filler novel that will lead into the upcoming “Fate of the Jedi” series in 2009.

Linkin’

And now, because I’m tired, are some simple links.

• Functioning Form – Web Form Design: Goodreads Review – hey, that’s my review!
• Early Star Wars Storyboards Flickr set – there are some real treasures in here.
• Facebox – a Facebook-style lightbox script
• Haboob Sandstorm – someone took this video with their cellphone.