Pedestrian bridge over Charles River in Watertown Center.

Archive for November, 2007

On the Wing by Eric Kraft

Friday, November 30th, 2007

[amazon] [MBLN]
Book two of Flying: A Trilogy. (Book one is Taking Off).
Peter Leroy and his wife Albertine embark on their trek in the one-of-a-kind Electro-Flyer to recreate Peter’s cross-country journey he made with his home-make aerocycle, Spirit of Babbington, when he was 15. The book chapters alternate between Peter’s teenage journey in the aerocycle and [...]

Hero / Ying xiong

Friday, November 30th, 2007

[IMDb] [netflix]
The King of Qin (Daoming Chen) has the goal to unite the seven warring regions of China under his rule. He has three main enemies: Broken Sword (Tony Leung Chiu Wai), Flying Snow (Maggie Cheung), and Sky (Donnie Yen). Nameless (Jet Li), a low-level sheriff of a remote region, defeats them all. He is [...]

Research finds proof of the blindingly obvious

Friday, November 30th, 2007

Study Finds a Lack of Health Insurance May Roadblock Some Diabetes Patients From Seeking Critical Treatment

Cha-ching

Monday, November 26th, 2007

A message seen today on one of the mailing lists I subscribe to:
I was surprised to see the rate on HMO Blue Value Plus plan go up $142 per month per person for 2008 under my so called “small group plan”. Evidently the new universal health law has caused BC to combine small groups and [...]

37%

Sunday, November 25th, 2007

Dirty Dozen the 12 steepest hills in Pitt.

Beowulf

Saturday, November 24th, 2007

Saw Beowulf yesterday in Jordan Furniture’s 3-D IMAX theatre
in Reading. I quite liked it. I didn’t find the animation as distracting as others have claimed. While good, there’s clearly work to be done in that area: fingers strumming the lyre didn’t come off well at all, and the horse galloping was pretty lame. Other than [...]

Parental visit

Saturday, November 24th, 2007

The ”rents were here for the last week or so (leaving Thanksgiving Day). It was fun. We spent most of the time going from meal to meal.
Of course, I didn’t get any work done, but frankly, I don’t care.
It occurs to me, I didn’t take a single picture!

Maintenance

Saturday, November 10th, 2007

The cog in my SS has been grinding lately, and it’s been getting worse, so I took it over to Broadway yesterday to see if there was anything that could be done about it. Not much, apparently, as it’s not really serviceable. Plus, he said the thing was only about $15-$16, so really, what’s the [...]

New England Classic

Friday, November 9th, 2007

I’ve got the New England Classic site up and running. I hope it will have a little more participation than the last go around. It’s a WordPress site, so I’m hoping to offload as much of the content stuff as possible. We’ll see if that actually happens. In any case, I hope it recruits a [...]

The plan

Thursday, November 8th, 2007

Basically, the plan is to do nothing for now. The veterinary oncologist called this evening and I asked her about whether we should do anything about the hemangiopericytoma. After talking it over for a while, we decided the course of action would be to give him another chest x-ray around the first of December. [...]

Well, it’s bad news

Wednesday, November 7th, 2007

Dr. Turek from Angell called.
The chest x-rays showed “lesions on the lungs consistent with metastatic cancer.” There is no immediate indication where the primary cancer is.
It could be thyroid related from the lump in his throat but that’s most likely a fat lump. In that case, thyroid cancers move very slowly and aren’t very treatable. [...]

S Day

Wednesday, November 7th, 2007

Got up at 6:00 this morning to deliver my dog to surgery. I had to wake him up. We went for our morning walk, as usual, but didn’t come home and instead hopped on the subway to JP.
Hoping to hear something by 3:00.

Good morning! 6:00 am is very early.
Arriving at Angell

Around back to reception
Last glimpse [...]

The Moving Finger by Agatha Christie

Wednesday, November 7th, 2007

[MBLN] [amazon]
This is billed as a Miss Marple mystery but she doesn’t show up until 3/4 of the way through the book and then is only an incidental character who says “Oh dear” a lot. The dust cover claims this was viewed by Christie as one of her best works. While it’s a good story, [...]

Taking Off by Erik Kraft

Friday, November 2nd, 2007

[MBLN] [amazon]
Manhattanite Peter Leroy gets a note from a former high school classmate in Babbington, Long Island telling him to come back and see what’s happened to the town: it’s become a theme park. The town has re-created 1950 America, complete with period actors and Peter finds himself part of the lore as the “Birdboy [...]