Star Trek: Enterprise

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I get sucked into television. Much like when I read a good book, I get sucked in so far that I tend to close out everything else going on in the real world. When real life denizens dare to pull me back for whatever reason, important or not, I get irritated. So much so that I don’t want to watch shows or movies that I’m looking forward to until the kids have gone to bed. I want to be immersed in the story. I wouldn’t call it an addiction, but it is something that I have to actively fight when it comes to grander plans, like writing.

So, like some of my other compulsive quirks, I’ll defuse this one by sharing it.

When Star Trek: Enterprise first hit the airwaves, I was lukewarm about it. Starting off with time travel was ballsy, and I’ve never been impressed with the way that it’s been done on TV. Then there’s that infuriating, enraging, pluck out my own eardrums opening theme. Thanks to Netflix, I can skip its aural atrocities every episode. Nevertheless, I abandoned the entire series, and I don’t really remember why.

Could have been the Borg episode. Seriously, the Borg are going to show up before Q sends Picard out into the Delta quadrant? Was this because the Borg episodes in Voyager were the only really good ones? (Not that I’m opinionated.) I neglected to remember the time traveling Borg in the First Contact movie. The wreckage from the sphere had to go SOMEWHERE. So, in the end, the Borg episode was forgivable enough for me to relax and enjoy it.

The entire series is on Netflix streaming, so I added it to my queue. I’ve been watching it. I’ve been enjoying it. I’ve been awed and horrified at the amount of damage dished out to both the Enterprise and its crew. They tear the shit out of both. Just so much hull damage, system damage, blood of all colors, psychological damage, emotional upheaval… I’m impressed. And I’m enjoying it. The characters are developing (mostly), and to see the initial interaction between Humans, Vulcans, Klingons, and Andorians. Though, I was surprised that the Klingons had the ridged skulls, unlike in the original series.

I would have abandoned the series at the end of Season 3. Instead of getting a well-earned warm welcome home after months and months of hellish reality-warping travel and conflict, with the end of Earth always looming just in the distance, they get punked and sent back in time to World War 2. What, is this the Wheel of Time? Is this an Amy campaign? Am I watching any Spider Man movie ever? The slight was quickly remedied, and even explored some of the emotional and social scars left behind from all of the crazy that went on.

I haven’t yet finished the last season (4), but I’m greatly looking forward to the Mirror, Mirror episodes. I’m also hoping that they can tie up this temporal war crap before they got canceled. I mean, three seasons short of the standard Star Trek 7, so how hard did they have to scramble, and how much notice did they have?

Writing Journal

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From my writing journal on 7 September, 2012:

The prologue is about Adam’s creation. It cannot set up the tension of the story, as the conflict between Adam and Walter is setting, where the conflict between OMGSPOILER is the actual story. Re-ordering the story to put these two closer to the front is a good idea, but am I going far enough? Should the creation myth introduce the Adam POV chapter?

This would allow the reader to get to know Jonah, Julia, and Sol while having Adam be introduced as part of the scenery, as he should be. But would that be too much Adam at once?

The creation myth belongs outside of the main narrative. It doesn’t work inside the story, unless they’d discovered OMGSPOILER. So, it can’t be added to the Adam chapter.

It comes down to whether the prologue helps the reader to understand and get into the story, or if it serves only to confuse the reader.

Also, I need to determine what it is about the minor characters that connect them to Adam and OMGSPOILER. They have to have no strong link to the main characters in their stories, or to the worlds in which the stories are being told.

Or, that’s how they have to start out when they meet Adam. Who knows what will happen between then and when they OMGSPOILER. Running into Adam has all kinds of unpredictable results.

Family Fun – Part 2

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Open, airy beach house. The bath-like warmth and shallow beach of Lake Huron. Kids playing for hours upon hours in the water and sand. Family talks around a bonfire over good beers. Time alone with Nikki in the town – bookstore, coffee house and souvenir shop. Venison burgers and local pizza.

It was only a couple of days, but it felt like a full vacation. It was exactly what I needed.

Family Fun – Part 1

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A weekend back, I had an experience that I’ve been longing for, but wasn’t quite sure that I would ever actually enjoy.  But enjoy it I did.  Cue the sitcom music, because we had a mini family vacation and I loved it.

For the second year in a row, my parents rented a house in Caseville, right on Lake Huron, for a week.  Last year, we weren’t able to make it out.  This year, they rented the same house and despite Hunter’s school year extension, we made it a priority to get our butts out there.  I’m pretty sure that if we hadn’t, grandkid withdrawal would have kicked in and things would have gotten ugly.  Needless to say, we made it.

I took a half day off from work on that Friday, and picked Hunter up from school early.  We went and grabbed gas for the Pacifica, and then headed home to meet up with the rest of the family.  They’d been packing and getting ready all morning, so the loading up went fairly smoothly.  We left later than Nikki would have liked, and inevitably forgot some things, but as my Dad said, we were on fluid vacation time.

Google called it a 3-hour trip (Gilligan?), but we made it in about two and a half.  The two youngest kids were out cold minutes after we hit the highway, and I think Hunter zonked out about halfway there.  The trip started to get exciting when we got off of I-75 in Bay City.  That gradual feeling of excitement and squee began to build, and I can’t remember how many years it’s been since I’ve felt that.  We went down Center Ave, OOOHing and AHHHing at the beautiful houses.  We went through Unionville and Sebewaing and Bay Port, home of the Fish Sandwich Festival.  Finally, at long last, we approached Caseville, home of the Cheeseburger Festival.  It took a bit of looking to find the house’s driveway/parking lot, but we found it!  Just in time to zip into a spot at a rate that would have had the minivan rocking on its shocks.  Okay, maybe I shouldn’t be bragging about that, but I was excited!

To be continued…

Phone Geekery 4

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In which the grand saga comes to a conclusion. I hope.

After my last phone post, I called HTC support.  The hold time was very short, and the tech on the other end of the line was polite, reasonable, and friendly. Kudos to their call center, wherever it’s located. I explained my situation to him, and also explained that I had a friend with the same phone and the same update, but was not experiencing the problem. The tech said that he had the same phone that I did, but it didn’t sound like he used it as much as I did. I let him know that my friend likely doesn’t use hers as much as I do, either. So, he admitted that it might be something that he had not yet stumbled upon, but that he couldn’t verify because it hadn’t happened to him.  I expected this sort of response. I asked if there was a way to remove HTC Sense, and drop back to the default Android launcher.  He said that there was not.  I asked if there was a way to upgrade to HTC Sense 4.0, and he said that there was not, unless I wanted to upgrade to one of their new HTC One phones.  I said that I did not. I liked my phone quite a bit, except for this crashy-crashy stuff that kept happening. (That’s a technical term.) He suggested that rooting the phone was an option.

I was not expecting that response.

I wasn’t ready to void my warranty just yet, and I let him know. He apologized for not having another option (like I said, polite), and I thanked him for his time. T-Mobile was my next stop. The carrier modifies the phone as well, even if it is just to add a few non-removable apps.  So, the next time that I was at the mall‘s T-Mobile kiosk to pay the phone bill, I happened to be dealing with my favorite techy sales rep. Nikki reminded me that I wanted to ask about my phone, and so I popped the question. Er. Asked the question. And then I followed it up with a guess that it might be hardware related, since others weren’t experiencing the same issue that I was. He countered, saying that a hardware problem should be causing more issues than just making Sense crash. I agreed, and was worried that we’d once again come to an impass. I let him know that HTC had suggested the possibility of rooting the phone.

He was not expecting that response.

He asked me if I’d tried a custom launcher. I hadn’t, because I was under the impression that you had to root to replace the launcher. Not so in Ice Cream Sandwich. He asked if he could install an app called Apex Launcher, and spent a minute or so showing me how to customize it.

See, Sense still handles the lock screen, the incoming calls, things like that. Apex replaces Sense as the app that gets called when you press the home key, or when you back out of your apps. So Sense is still handling everything that it was doing right, and is no longer being asked to do the things that were crashing it. It’s still sucking down the memory as it runs in the background, but Apex doesn’t add to that load very much. On top of that, Apex has a snappy response, mimics Ice Cream Sandwich‘s look and feel well, and is far more stable than Sense was.

In the end, I’m just as happy with my selection in phone as I was when it was running Android 2.3, and am glad that I can leave it in its Otterbox instead of having to deal with hardware replacements. With that said, I’ve decided that my future purchases are likely to be the bare-bones Android models. They tend to get their updates first, and don’t have unnecessary add-ons that just get in the way of using the phone.

Do you ever run into problems like this with your phone? Is my experience typical or rare? Do you ever get a solution that lets you be satisfied with the way your pocket tech works, instead of eternally frustrated?

For serious?

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You remember that Glass Crown thing? That sequel to my first novel? Chapter 9 is finished. Did I tell you?

So is Chapter 10.

I have been worried about dropping back into the “I’ll write later” mode that comes when I pick the Glass Crown back up. Instead, as Nikki puts it, I’ve developed a good pace. I am setting aside regular time in which to write, and I am actually putting words down in that time.

And it’s gotten me two chapters closer to a finished draft.

There are a couple of excerpts that I wouldn’t mind sharing. Is that something that you would be interested in seeing here?

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The Collector Gene

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A few nights back, I filled another journal with words. This usually takes anywhere from ten months to two years, depending on the size of the journal and how often I’m writing. They went much faster back when I was writing The Remembrance, but slowed down once I began The Glass Crown.

This one took six months to fill, and is the second one to bite the dust since I picked the Adam’s Name story back up. It was a gift from a friend, back when I was writing the first book. He was bummed, if I remember correctly, because I hadn’t gotten to any of the notebooks he’d given me by the time I finished. I assured him that I had plenty more stories that needed out of my head and onto the page. I wasn’t done, not by a long shot.

As time goes on, my desire to collect things is shifting from Transformers and comic books to unique notebooks and journals. The one that I filled last had pages made out of recycled cotton instead of paper. It had a suede cover and a celtic knot button to wrap the closure cord around. I picked it up from a shop at the Holly, MI Renaissance Fair called Under the Mango Tree. I’ve also got two books, gifted to me by my brother if I remember correctly, that are made out of the fibers of elephant dung. (Oh, wow, those guys are making them with lines on the pages now!) A while back, I was gifted one made entirely out of bamboo, from cover and spine to the pages.

When I’m in second hand stores, I have to restrain myself from picking up the ones with yellowed or wavy pages. Or when a favorite webcomic offers branded notebooks. Or when I go to a Ren Fair.

Yeah, I’m in trouble. :) Well, enough blathering. It’s time to fill the next one!

House Hunting

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So, we’re house hunting. Last week, due to sitcom levels of miscommunication, we looked at seven houses in one evening, with three of the kids along. The irony was thick and hearty, as this was exactly the situation that we were attempting to avoid, thanks to home buying experiences in my past.

I kept it together, tried to corral the kids (new house every 20 minutes, an infinite number of nooks and crannies to explore, so many shiny things to touch, how could they not go crazy?), and rode the roller coaster. There are a few things that I learned along the way that I’d like to share with all of you.

  • Pastels are not always the best choice for every single surface in a home. Yes, that includes the outside.
  • Moth ball smell is an immediate house hunting turn off.
  • Your favorite houses will either have a mold-infested (and probably haunted) basement or be built on a cliff. Neither of these is good for raising small children.
  • The several month long drought will pick that day to end, including the requisite downpours. This is not as bad as it sounds.
  • When it comes to emergency drive-through dinner, McDonald’s will always be loved by the kids and hated by your stomach.

Now that we’ve got a better idea of what we want, what we don’t, and a cross section of what’s out there, it’s time to get pre-approved. Wish me luck.

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