A Weekend With No Turnpike Traffic

We are back at home after a week with the relations in the DC area. It was great to see everyone, but I have to admit that even with The Mrs doing the bulk of the driving (we took her car), I am looking forward to a weekend where I will not spend anytime on the turnpikes. I drove out to Pittsburgh on the 27th of February, drove back to Michigan on the 3rd, out to VA on the 8th, and back home on the 16th. I think I am free from any turnpike traffic until I head out to Flashback Weekend in Aug, and that will be a different turnpike heading out to Chicago.

Learn from my mistake — don’t schedule your vacation so it overlaps with stupid Daylight Savings Time. Not only will you lose an hour of vacation, you will also get home to a house full of clocks that need to be reset.

While we were gone, the wind did a number on some stuff in the back yard. I have ordered some replacement parts for the curtains that we have around the hot tub. They should be here this weekend. Hopefully it will be warm enough to allow us to replace the stuff that got demolished. It is currently warm enough that I have some windows open to air out the house, but it looks like it could rain any minute. It’s also supposed to get down to 28 overnight. Welcome to Michigan.

I spent some time trying to finish printing all of the material for last year’s taxes. I write “trying to” because the printer shit the bed halfway through the process. I took the bloody thing apart to try and figure out what the paper feed problem was, but it continued to refuse to work properly. Fortunately we have a spare printer that we never took out of the box. It is now out of the box and working properly.

Listening To: Our driving audiobook was Sleep Tight which has an interesting premise but became a bit muddled in the middle. I also worked my way through the rest of the Murderbot Diaries. I’m currently listening to The Case of the Felonious Faire by Drew Hayes.

Currently Reading: The manual for the new printer.

Current Obsession: Taxes. Nothing but taxes.

The body may be on vacation, but the work continues. We worked through the remaining audio files for the Pleasure in Pain audiobook while we were gone and continued to work on edits.

The next appearance will be Thursday, 20 March (tomorrow if you are reading this on release day) on Now Streaming where the panel will be discussing New York Ninja. This film was shot in 1984 (and it shows), but that sat unedited until a few years ago. All of the dialogue was dubbed over by some amazing talent. Find out how we feel about the movie by tuning in to Otherworldly Culture.

To be fair, the problem is really not enough room for more shelves. The den currently holds three 6 foot bookshelves with four shelves each and five Billy bookshelves with three more in the closet. Oh, and a built in holding the Stephen King collection.

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it here before, but we had to hire FOUR men and TWO trucks was partially because of the number of books that had to be moved. (Remind me to tell you the story of the found books sometime.) A large portion of the these books are ones which I have yet to read.

I fully live Tsundoku, the Japanese term which “encapsulates the joy of acquiring books with the intention of reading them, even if you haven't quite gotten around to it.”

I should really add that to my list of tattoos I need to get.

I mention this because of all of the places we visited (including the Hillwood Estate which I might cover next week), many of them were bookstores. I think that this might have been The Mrs’ way of assuaging me for putting up with the fabric stores and quilt shops that we went to. This really wasn’t necessary, as I picked out quite a bit of the fabric which she will be working with in the future, but I’m not one to look a trip to a bookstore in the mouth). I managed to limit my spending to only a couple of books, but still…

If only I can find someone who will pay me to read the books I already own.