posts interesting only to me

Five months

posts interesting only to me
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At Easter last year Sandra was home, things were looking up, the weather was nice and we had my parents over, having lunch in the garden. This year not so much. Yesterday was exactly five months since Sandra died: in one way it feels much longer, in another only yesterday that she died. I’ve only begun to miss her more as the months go by, dream of her a lot too. That’s the worst, because even in a dream I know she’s dead, but within the dream she’s still there.

It’s not all doom and gloom of course, but Sandra is always in the back of my mind and doesn’t show any signs of moving out…

Books read March

books and books review, posts interesting only to me
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I read a lot this month, but a huge part of that reading was pure pulp, as I read no less than seven of David Weber’s Honor Harrington novels in five days or so, pure as escapism.

The Honor of the Queen, The Short Victorious War, Field of Dishonor, Flag in Exile, Honor Among Enemies, In Enemy Hands, Echoes of Honor — David Weber
I swear, David Weber has found a way to embed crack in his Napoleonic Wars in Space series because after finishing Osama last month on my Android phone, I read all the books above in about five days or so. These are not good books, but they read so fast and Weber does always make me want to read on.

Dawkins vs Gould — Kim Sterelny
A short but interesting book about the scientific feud between the two best known evolutionary theorists of their generation.

Charlemagne — Rosamond McKitterick
A fairly recent re-evaluation of Charlemagne and the Carolingian empire, based on a re-examination of contemporary sources. Heavy going but interesting.

Keeping it Real — Justina Robson
Urban fantasy meets cyberpunk. Nicely written, entertaining fantasy novel by an author I’ve long wanted to read something of.

The Empress Theodora — James Allan Evans
A short biography/history of one of the most important empresses in Byzantine history.

At the Edge of the Solar System — Alain Doressoundiram & Emmanuel Lellouch
A lot has changed in the past ten-fifteen years in our understanding of the outer Solar System. This is an historical overview of how Pluto stopped being a planet, the other “dwarf planets” that have been discovered, as well as how the Kuiper Belt went from a theoretical construct to observed reality.

Laurels Are Poison — Gladys Mitchell
One of Sandra’s favourite novels from one of her favourite detective writers, which is why I read this.

Genius, Isolated — Dean Mullaney & Bruce Canwell
The first of a trilogy of books dedicated to the art, life and career of one of American comics’ greatest geniuses: Alex Toth.

Star Hunter — Andre Norton
Another book read on my phone, one of her classic young adult science fiction stories.

Hellflower — Eluki bes Shahar
Currently better known as Rosemary Edghill, this was her debut science fiction novel, the first in a trilogy of adventure science fiction stories that reminded me a bit of Elizabeth Moon’s similar novels, only much darker.

Spring has sprung

Natural World, posts interesting only to me
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Lady Plymouth Eucalyptus

It looks like spring has officially started here in the Netherlands; the last week or so has seen temperatures reaching twenty degrees Celsius, everything in the garden starts to look green and sprouty, our resident family of finches is back and I’ve even seen some bumblebees flying around. Also a lot of mosquitoes when it gets dark unfortunately. Finally, there is the undeniable sign of spring, crows who deliberately take a bath in the guttering just as I come sit outside; no shit, three days in a row five minutes after I’ve installed myself with a book and a drink and there come the first splashes of water. Naughty, naughty corvoids.

Unfortunately the garden has suffered a bit of damage thanks to the false spring and suddenly nasty week of winter we had in late January and early February, which has made quite a few plants that thought they could start doing their spring cleaning suffer for their impudence. Sadly, the plant above was one of them, the Lady Plymouth Eucalyptus we’ve gotten from the botanical garden at the VU hospital during an open day there last April. It wasn’t really for sale, but the kind lady who had grown it gave it to Sandra as a gift; Plymouth being her home town. I had hoped it could’ve survived the winter; it was supposed to be winter hard, but the combo of soft weather followed by a harsh frost seems to have done it in.

I’m not really a gardener myself, but Sandra was and put her heart and soul in our little garden and even after two years of neglect it still looks good, if a bit wilder than it was. In hospital, that botanical garden was her lifeline, a place to espace too when being in hospital got too much, as was the bit of “wild” parkland between the garden and the hospital itself. We actually saw a red squirrel there, as well as a woodpecker and a fair number of other birds and small animals.

All of which leaves me seeing spring approach with mixed feelings; it’s in my top four of favourite seasons, but I can’t get rid of that knot of anxiety and grief in my stomach either, as everything green does remind me of Sandra.

So I end up staying in with the blinds down playing games on my pc.

Stupid internet connectivity bug #firstworldproblems

IT is not magic pixiedust, posts interesting only to me
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So I’ve been having an annoyingly stupid connectivity bug the last day or so, where when I click on a link my browser starts thinking to itself, then gives me an error message that the site ain’t available. Then, when I try again, up it pops. This happens intermittedly, even on pages I just visited and in both Opera and IE. It doesn’t matter whether I connect to my router through ethernet or WLAN, whether both are used or not and doesn’t seem to happen on my other, laptop computer running Vista (work made me use it, don’t judge me.) My own computer is running Windows 7/64 bits. For one glorious moment I thought it could perhaps be the fake LAN network Oracle VirtualBox needs to have internet access, but disabling that didn’t help either.

Any ideas?

(Windows 7 is decent enough as an operating system when everything works, but once something goes wrong it’s pulling teeth to find out what the fsck is going on. Everything is so locked down and hidden from the user’s view and gets in your way when you’re bug tracking.)