First Week In

 

Don’t know about you and your resolutions, but so far I’m having a pretty darn good 2023.

For instance, I’m down 3.2 pounds. How? you ask. Simple. I worked out four times this week – that’s a brisk mile walk coupled with two sets of six weightlifting exercises – and avoided pasta. Even eating out twice this week. The five salads I ate since 2022 ended go a long way towards losing weight.

I also clocked about five hours on the new novel too. Not bad, but I need to increase productivity in that department. In fairness to myself, though, it was an eventful seven days, so I did not have much free time on my hands.

I did have enough free time to put away the first book of 2023 – Robert Heinlein’s Between Planets. Yeah, it’s one of his juveniles, but it was packed with childhood nostalgia. True to my resolution, it clocked in at 190 pages. But more importantly, I was able to start it on a Sunday and enjoy a satisfying resolution on a Saturday.

Keeping with that resolution, I went to my favorite used book store and picked up – for a grand total of $11 – five more weeklong paperbacks, to saturate my mind with SF ideas and get back into that wondrous mode of thinking. For the curious, those five are:

 

My Name is Legion (1976) by Roger Zelazny

Syzygy (1981) by Frederik Pohl

The Deep Range (1957) by Arthur C. Clarke

Freddy’s Book (1980) by John Gardner

West of Honor (1976) by Jerry Pournelle

 

Some I’ve heard and read about, some are completely new to me, but all can be devoured in a week. I am looking forward to the next five weeks.

Two more pieces of adventure so far, early in 2023, one bittersweet and one psychotic.

The bittersweet adventure is one I’ve just returned from. I took Little One, beloved Little One, out to the local high school parking lot for her first driving lesson. For an hour she drove my 2015 Honda Accord about, mastering the brake and accelerator, the turn signals, steering, and parking. It was funny because there were two other parent / student combos motoring around the lot with us, and us dads gritting teeth and white-knuckling door handles as we’d pass each other. But she did marvelous. She’s aiming to take her driving test in June.

The psychotic was experienced Sunday night when we met my wife’s sister and her family at the Dallas Zoo for the Festival of Light. Some animal attractions were still open, and we all went into one of them, the “fish” house. But it wasn’t a “fish” house at all – it was a SPIDER house! They lied! Good Lord but I hate those eight legged bastards. And the most psychotic thing of all was in a case holding one of the largest species of spider I have ever seen – it looked like a brown furry lobster! Bigger than the size of my outstretched hands, muscled like the facehugger from Alien, this thing eats birds fer cryin’ out loud! Patch saw my horrid fascination with this abomination, and leaned up to the glass it laid against and planted a kiss on it! The glass, that is, not the nightmarish arachnid. Ugh. I need to cleanse my mental palate now.

Maybe with Zelazny’s book. I can’t wait until tomorrow to start it, so I’ll crack it open now …