Motion

Well, it's nice when things burst the dam and get moving again. For once I had a busy weekend.

My Earthlink DSL modem finally arrived Friday (after eighteen months of questing for some flavor of broadband), and after three hours of tech-support purgatory, by 10 PM Friday evening I was finally surfing at something like an acceptable speed. Grabbed several QuickTime movie trailers. Bwahahaha. :-)

Saturday morning: connecting the iBook to this firehose of bandwidth, and (ahem) latency and bandwidth testing, courtesy of Hunter and Counter-Strike.

Saturday noontime: dog-walkin', lunch, the beginnings of the Laundry Subplot.

Sat. afternoon & eve: eight blissful TiVo-buffered episodes of Babylon 5, interspersed with twistings and turnings of the Laundry Subplot.

Sat. night: hammered the characters and plot for the novel a bit. Started a Prologue, only to realize I needed to do more fleshing out. Fleshed out. Walked dogs. Slept the sleep of the just. ;-)

Sunday morning: slept in. Yet more laundry. Watched the first quarters of the Redskins/Ravens and Rams/Titans preseason games, prepping for the two-person Fantasy Football thing I do with my brother Matt. The 'Skins appear to be destined simply to suck, and the Rams appear to be getting a slow start to the year, as the Titans did a fine job.

Sun. noontime: while waiting for the NASCAR Michigan race to buffer up sufficiently on the TiVo to blow by all the commercials, read a few short stories from The Year's Best Science Fiction, 2000 edition. Made a point to work body-implanted transmitters into the story.

Sun. afternoon: watched the first hour or so of the race, then skipped out to meet a fellow home-theater enthusiast who needed to borrow a blue filter to calibrate his new 43" rear-projection TV. Human contact! Wow! Chatted for 15 or 20 minutes; said our goodbyes.

Found myself in the Far West End of Richmond with nothing to do. Hey! I can look into broken/extra movie theater seating.

Huh?!?

One of the (ahem) "quirky" things about my theater room is that after filling it with ultra-spiffy A/V equipment I've been too busted to invest in good seating; I've been through steel-tubing lawnchairs, inflatable recliners, the works, but my ideal would be to scrounge some seats out of a local movie theater, refurb and install them. Been done before; I've read stories. It's on the Internet, it must be true. ;-)

So anyway, I drop by my local Regal and UA theaters, and neither has any broken seating they can spare, but the UA manager gives me a lead: a theater just closed on Midlothian Turnpike, and it's good odds they've got oodles of seats they'd love to get rid of. So I hitch up my belt, armed with the vaguest of directions, and set forth for the South Side of Richmond, a 45-minute round trip.

(To make a long [long] story short, I didn't find the place, but on casting about the web for a few minutes later I did come up with a number or two to call, and addresses to look up, for two recently closed theaters. Further bulletins as events warrant.)

Wound my way home as the Sunday sun began to set, did some grocery shopping, and came home to discover that the BLOODY DOGS SHREDDED MY ORTHROPEDIC PILLOW. Wrath of Daddy. Dogs in cages. Pillow shopping at 8:30 PM on a Sunday. Finally found suitably firm pillows at Target. Grabbed a few mints (Certs Powerful, Trident Advantage, Smint) for experimentation. I love mints. :-)

Sunday night: finished drying last load of laundry (bedsheets), folded and put everything away, slept the sleep of the warm, toasty and exasperated.

-Rich