Asymptomatic

As we drove to dinner today, we passed through a nearby farm field. Berta remarked that within the past week she's seen that field filled with many grazing deer. It got me thinking about how strangely we treat this wild animal.

Deer are fairly large beasts around here. They're not quite as large, but are almost as tall as a cow. In any case, they're no joke. If you run into one with a car, the car can easily be damaged beyond repair. This is in comparison to many other creatures that we have not hunted into extinction or herded for food that still wander wild in the open.

There really isn't a range of animal between, say, stray dog and deer. There aren't a whole lot of stray dogs around either, but if there were, the deer are on average at least twice as large. There are many, many smaller creatures than dogs out in the "wild", as evidenced by the all-too-plentiful roadkill, but nothing between dog and deer size. What puzzles me is that we just take this deer thing for granted....

For our 10th wedding anniversary, Berta and I stayed over night in Philadelphia. The interesting story is less about what we actually did than what we tried to plan.

Mostly, you wouldn't call it a plan. Friday night, we dropped the kids off at Mom's then raced home to decide what to do. It was still early enough to consider flights out of Philadelphia, provided that they were late enough.

We'd been thinking about getting away for a while, specifically to exercise our passports one more time before they expire. Berta has stamps from Mexico, and I've got stamps from France, and we both have stamps and visas for India. I thought it would be nice to be "world travelers" and add another stamp to the book before it was retired.

It's kind of strange explaining these trips we take. It's like we just need to get away for a while, and it's not about being pampered or being extravagant (although the travel might seem that way), but more about just getting away from home. And so on Friday night we simply looked for a reasonably cheap flight to anywhere that wouldn't keep us away longer than the weekend. This is harder than you might think. more

Over the past weekend, we took the usual summer pilgrimage to Johnstown. This time, Berta's sister Therese was in the process of moving, so while they packed up some of their things, I watched the kids. This turned out not too unpleasant. During the time going out and while the kids were entertaining themselves amicably, I was able to do some more reading.

When last Pat as in town, he loaded up my Kindle with a few sample books. I started reading one by Vernor Vinge called "A Fire Upon the Deep". It was both interesting and strange. We also started listening to an audiobook prequel to the Tales of the Otori trilogy, "Heaven's Net is Wide", by Lian Hearn.

A Fire Upon the Deep is, as I said, strange. It's been a while since I've read true space sci-fi, and this certainly qualifies. It will be difficult to explain some of the many layered characteristics of this book, which set to establish axioms by which Vinge's world operates....

Over the weekend, I visited Columbus, not just to hang out with skippy at ComFest and buy too much crap at Origins, but to attend and lead a session at PodCamp Ohio.

The side dishes to this entrée are actually better than the meat, but the meat was the point of the dinner, so that's what I'll talk about here. I'm all about focus here. Focus.

I showed up right on time for the welcome session on Saturday and checked in. I hadn't been able to show up for the Friday night meetup because of the previously mentioned "side dishes". I checked in and was shown to the "Speaker Lounge", marked off by signs with martini glasses (with olive!). After a brief welcome from another couple of session leaders in the lounge, we all shuffled down to Room A for the introduction.

I'm not going to do a play-by-play of the rest of the day, because that's already feeling tedious. Let me cover briefly a couple of sessions I did attend, and my overall impression of the camp. more

We're trying to get things ready at the house for the BBQ next Saturday (if you haven't RSVP'ed yet, you're almost too late. If you know me and you didn't get an invitation, I must not have your email or it got caught as spam, because I invited everyone, so RSVP anyway.), and although Berta is doing a great job of spiffing things up, we still have the perennial issue with the garage entry area. Between the powder room with the diapers and the litter box for the cats, that area is expectedly a little bit more smelly than I'd like.

Combined with an interest to obtain the usual supplies to take care of that, I also noticed that I was running low on deodorant. Nothing like making the house smell nice and then not smelling very fresh myself. So I decided it was prudent to make a quick grocery run at lunch time to pick up some of these items.

While standing in the deodorant aisle looking for my usual brand, I saw the Axe brand body sprays. I had bought one of these once just to see what they were all about, and it turns out that they're just really, really strong deodorant-smelling perfume sprays. Not really a surprise, given the commercials. But a lack of another product on the shelf led me to recall the following character-building story from my jaded youth....