There is mixed news on the automotive front, but it appears in sum that I have a better than even chance of getting to Ubercon.

The truck will not be ready until early next week; this makes our efforts to get trash to the dump considerably more complicated, but we’re working on it. However, the new old car that was being repaired to give us is ready; the previous owner is a bit embarrassed that she had not already sent us the paperwork for it, so it’s being overnighted by FedEx and is promised to be here by noon tomorrow. Mercifully, we can get through Motor Vehicles fairly quickly, but then somehow I have to travel to the outer end of Long Island to bring it back, and that has to happen tomorrow afternoon so that I can get home, packed, organized, and off to Ubercon for a four o’clock game on Friday.

I did more Romans editing, and glanced at the Multiverser second edition materials, but otherwise have been really overwhelmed much of today. I also have to figure out dinner, but I’m headed that direction.

–M. J. Young

Things have been a bit odd with the truck off the road. The trash cans did not fit in the trunk of the rented car (let me mention that as a problem with the mid-sized Ford Focus, in case anyone is car shopping), so we’re packing trash a bit tighter trying to make it through to Wednesday (the collection center is only open twice a week) and hoping the truck will be back by then.

Meanwhile, we celebrated the birthday of one of our houseguests–the one who is most one of the family–by going out to dinner and a movie. Everyone seemed to enjoy the movie, and I won’t say it was time or money wasted. I had never been to a three-dimensional movie before, and I had heard that the technology had improved significantly; The Nightmare Before Christmas, however, is a very familiar film to me, one of the household favorites which I have heard playing in the other room four or five times as often as I have actually watched it, which is quite frequently, as I am certain we have gone through two tapes of it and probably purchased a disk. Three-dimensional effects are interesting, but after the first half hour I, short on sleep already, was snoozing in the theatre, up to the climactic moment after which I watched the rest. It’s a good movie well done, but I didn’t really need to see it again, and ten minutes would have been sufficient to show me what the polarized projectors could do.

After that it took quite a few hours to get home, because we had to make a number of stops including a certain chain bookstore where we were to acquire a certain movie loved by my wife but not easy to find. Along with it, we acquired about eighty dollars worth of books–rather, if their pricing is to be taken at face value, a hundred fifteen dollars worth of books for eighty dollars. I might read one of them; I will undoubtedly watch the movie, although not because I choose to.

Topping off a fine weekend, I believe that Red Robin, where we had our birthday dinner, must grill turkey burgers alongside beef burgers. My physical intolerance of turkey is so severe that even exposure so slight as that can make me rather ill, and I’ve spent twenty-four hours with rather disruptive digestive complications. It seems to be passing, thankfully, but I’m fortunate that I did not have to go far for long today.

I’ve a vague notion that I got a bit of work done, here and there. I did some editing on the Romans notes; I did some work on the Multiverser second edition. It isn’t much, but it’s something.

Speaking of something, I should move forward to the rest of today’s work.

–M. J. Young

Last night I got clear of the regular work, but was too tired to delve into any serious writing. My schedule has been hard on me, having me up early and to bed late and trying to make up for it with a nap in the middle, and by the time I was finished with the Corinthians list posting, I was too zonked to think very clearly.

What I did instead was restart that annoyingly dull movie, Primer, and finally watch it straight through. I’ve got something of a sense of the thing now, although it’s going to take a lot of work to unravel it entirely. I do know this much, though:

• The writers are rather clever in misdirecting the viewer. They give the impression up front that they are going to tell the story in order, but ultimately leave out key points and plug in missing information later. Most of the uncertainty about the timeline is created by this technique.
• The characters make some critical mistakes in how they do things, most notably by trying to make as few changes as possible in the AB timeline when it is the CD timeline which should concern them.
• In the end, they create an infinity loop. I have not yet determined whether they can actually get to the end, given the anomalies they create prior to that.

As I say, I’ve a lot of work to do on this, but I’ve gotten a start. I am expecting my wife to take my son back to Delaware tonight, so I might get another run at it. I didn’t time the film or look up the time, but since I started it near nine-thirty and the brief credits were rolling before eleven, it must be under ninety minutes.

I wound up waiting relatively long at a pickup errand last night, and put some of that time into editing the Romans notes. I hit a major disruption when I discovered that I had failed to print (or else misplaced) twenty pages (I print the documents in batches, two-sided, ten sheets at a time, to avoid misfeeds, or at least prevent these from disrupting huge numbers of pages). The notes broke mid-sentence, so I set it aside and took a nap for most of an hour. I’ve got the reprinted pages in the output tray of my printer now, and since I printed the first eight chapters and am editing somewhere in chapter six, I’m thinking that I need to start printing the last eight chapters before I need them.

I got some excellent feedback this afternoon on part of the second edition rules, which I’ve noted for future implementation. I really am working.

–M. J. Young