August Recap

 

Well, today is the last day of our first full month down in Texas. Officially we’ve been down here 47 days, and let me tell you, the longer I’m here, the faster things seem to be going.

How are things going?

Glad you asked!

The house is in a good place. We’re about 99 percent unpacked, with about 90 percent of everything in its right place. We bought a sofa and two swivel chairs from a neighbor for our living room. We bought two new bed sets for our daughters, and a new bed frame for ourselves. A table and pictures for the foyer. Everything seems well with the place. The girls have their own “apartment” upstairs, but we all gather from time to time to watch a TV show together after dinner.

Oh, I just had an ADT alarm installed, and can control everything – a doorbell camera, a rear driveway camera, video recordings from both, the alarm itself and the panic button – all from my phone. So we feel safe. Not that we didn’t before: it’s a safe neighborhood. However, that safe neighborhood comes at a price, as we just got a letter from the HOA to replace two dead bushes at the side of our home or be fined. Oh well.

The girls are slowly but steadily adapting to their schools and schedules. We met all their teachers on two separate nights. Little One is taking an astronomy class, and they have star parties every Monday after a New Moon. Guess where I’m taking her next Monday! In the evenings when I’m cleaning up the kitchen they like to take out their bike and electric scooter and zip up and down our quiet streets. We do have two community pools, one of which has a volleyball court, Patch’s latest obsession now that she’s on her middle school team, though we only have been there once. Patch’s first volleyball game is tomorrow night.

Me, I’m getting by. Applied to thirteen jobs to date – lucky thirteen! – and have spoken with two recruiters. Had two interviews with a major soft drink manufacturer down here, but despite me following up, they haven’t reached back out to me. I think I might be overqualified – that’s the message I picked up during the second interview. I am waiting to schedule a phone interview with another company I reached out to, this one in health care, which is more aligned with what I was doing up north. They emailed me stating they were very impressed with my resume, but we’ll see.

To keep from going stir crazy I think I’m going to resume work on my space opera novel. I started outlining it last fall (up to 16 pages worth) and worked on it off and on until the logistics of the move in April took everything over. It’s calling out to me, so I think I’ll break out that outline, fatten it out some more, and start composing some sections in no particular order (ever ambitious, I wrote seven story lines into this novel, so, similar to how movies are filmed, I see no particular importance to write the novel in exact chronological order).

I started off walking and working out religiously, but may have overdone it. I’m not a kid anymore. Indeed, sadly enough, it seems half my daughters’ teachers are young enough to be my children. I took yesterday and today off, but tomorrow I think I should resume walking, maybe a mile or a mile and a half, instead of my usual 2.5, and maybe do some stretching instead of lifting the dumbbells. It helps with the attitude, the mindset.

Speaking of religion, we joined a local church down here. It’s actually a huge church, perhaps three times the size of the church we left up north. But we’re happy with it. We were actually selected to bring up the gifts to the altar two weeks ago, in front of a congregation of probably five or six hundred people. The church itself is new but retains a very reverent vibe, mixing traditional sacred art and design with the southwestern architecture so prevalent down here. Patch is looking to be confirmed this year, so we’ll have to investigate that now that we’re members.

The wife has been steadily growing in her new job. She’s making great coin, so money’s not a worry. She’s been out bonding with her team as well as her boss, and everything seems to be going well for her. Actually, we haven’t had a bad experience down here. The neighbors we’ve met have all been wonderful. Everyone’s been so nice. I think in 47 days I’ve only been honked at once on the roadway – a daily occurrence back north up in Jersey.

Book-wise, I wrapped up Frankenstein a few days ago and am finishing Keegan’s WW2 book on naval warfare this afternoon. I’m still adhering to my reading plan of a few weeks ago (now halfway done, by the way), but I think I’ll supersede Symond’s World War II at Sea with a book about Texas history I picked up for a dollar in a thrift store I went to with the little ones. And maybe chase that with the Asimov book, The Stars Like Dust, I picked up last Saturday.

More to come …

 My two dead bushes. 

Patch’s room making a cameo on the second floor.

Book Review: Little Big Man

 

© 1964 by Thomas Berger

 

According to the date I etched into the inside front page cover, I’ve had this book in my possession since May 18, 2013. Eighth years and three months. Don’t even remember the circumstances in which I bought it. I seem to recall being well into my first Civil War phase back then, so perhaps the Wild West / Indian theme appealed to me. Also, author Thomas Berger (1924-2014) has been on my Acquisitions List for the longest time. As an aside, he also wrote the novel Neighbors, which was made into a 1981 film starring John Belushi and Dan Ackroyd, and that book, too, is on my List.

 

Why so long without being read? To be honest, it probably stayed off the On Deck Circle all those 99 months because I was afraid of it. Afraid of the investment in time – it does clock in at a hefty 445 pages – and afraid of the investment in emotions – I thought it would be an exercise in deconstruction and snarkiness. And as a fairly dyed-in-the-wool Platonist, especially with my literature, I don’t like deconstruction.

 

Well, I breezed through it in ten days, despite all the action going on here getting settled in our new homestead. And it wasn’t an exercise in deconstruction and snarkiness. No; as a matter of fact, it was kinda funny. Occasionally laugh-out-loud funny, but more of a type of witty, wish-I-wrote-like-that funny. Scratch that: more of a how-can-I-ever-write-this-well type of funny.

 

Where to begin?

Little Big Man is a Western tale covering a good chunk of American history. From the 1840s, pioneering with the Westward Expansion, through the Civil War, through the linking of East and West coasts through the great intercontinental railroads, up to the Indian Wars of the late 1870s. Our “hero” is a crusty old hoss name of Jack Crabb, 111-years old at the start of the tale, which is basically him regaling a stuffy academic with his life story. What is true? What is exaggeration? What do we make of a tale where we can’t decide the answers the either question? Well, sit back and enjoy, I suppose.

 

You don’t have to be into Westerns to appreciate the novel. Me, I’ve read about 300 science fiction novels, about 100 horror novels, and about 10 Westerns, yet I loved it. Crabb, despite his lack of book smarts, is complicated and contradictory: smarmy, a hustler, a simple straightforward man, a man of honor, a man on a trail of revenge who ultimately sets it aside, a man thrust into greatness several times in his long lived life but never one who could hold on to it. Crude, rude, and lewd. A man truly a “half-breed” – raised by Cheyenne at the age of 10 through his teenage years, then thrust back into “civilization” – proselytizing preachers, the U.S. Army, scouting, working on the Union Pacific, and, ultimately, fighting with General Custer at Little Big Horn. A man unapologetically of his time. A man who’d drive thousands of Liberal Arts majors screaming into safe spaces.

 

Along with Custer, Crabb has several run-ins with famous figures of history. Most predominantly, Wild Bill Hickok. Wyatt Earp makes a cameo, and Walt Whitman is mentioned in passing. Some of the funniest writing of the book revolves around Jack’s sister Caroline, who herself is mistaken for Calamity Jane.

 

The climax of the novel occurs as Jack stands side-by-side with Custer at Little Big Horn. Eight years earlier Jack was present – living as a Cheyenne at the time – at the Battle of the Washita, in which Custer’s men slaughtered several hundred Indians, including Jack’s Cheyenne family. After vowing revenge and tracking Custer’s movements, only to be sidetracked by the nagging requirement of having to work to keep one’s belly somewhat full, Crabb ultimately winds up trying to dissuade the highly conceited General from walking into the Indians’ trap.

 

The battle on the bluffs in which Custer and his men are wiped out to a man seemed historically accurate to me, at least from what I retained from my three-book study of the event back in May of 2019. Oh, and if Custer and his men of the Seventh Cavalry were wiped out to a man, what happened to Jack? Well, I won’t spoil that, but will only say that a chapter on Little Big Man leads to one of the most touching scenes I’ve read in recent years, and it has something to do with Jack and his foster-father, Cheyenne chieftain, Old Lodge Skins. Well done, Mr. Berger.

 

Grade: Recommended; solid A.

 

PS. In the 60s the rights to the book were purchased by Marlon Brando, but nothing came of it until it was sold and was later made into a 1970 movie starring Dustin Hoffmann. You may have seen it or seen it referenced. Hoffmann is wearing prosthetic makeup to age him to 120 years; state-of-the-art then but dated now. I’ve not seen the movie, and I’m not sure I have any desire to. I feel perhaps Hoffmann may have been miscast, but I could be mistaken.

Rewards of the Job Hunt

 

Treated myself to $10 worth of books at the local used book shop earlier today.

Why?

Well, still unemployed, but I’ve been casting a wide net. Relatively speaking, that is. Because the wife travels unpredictably, I have to work in a 15-mile radius from our new home, mostly for the girls and their school activities. I also want to make the same amount of $ I was making back up north. This limits me somewhat.

With that in mind, I’m still unemployed after a month of searching. I’ve spoken to two headhunters. I’ve had a first and second interview with a local major corporation. I took an online psych evaluation for another job opportunity (and probably failed, because don’t we all, with those tests? Or at least think we do, playing a balancing act between complete honesty and what we think the hiring agent wants to hear?). I’ve applied to nine other jobs on Glassdoor, Indeed, and LinkedIn.

But I’ve given myself a par of 90 days.

So I decided to reward my efforts with a quartet of old, classic SF paperbacks:

 

I’m still adhering to my early reading plan; almost half way done with it in fact. I’m two-thirds done with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and I must admit it’s much more readable than I remembered when I last transversed those pages sophomore year of high school, though it is less philosophically satisfying than adult me was looking forward to. But I’ll save that for a review later on.

Speaking of reviews, I read a great book recently and have to promote it. That will come either tomorrow or Monday.

As far as the new batch of books goes, I don’t have a plan. Three of the four clock in at 200 pages each, so they’ll be fast reads. The fourth, The Proteus Operation, is double that. It’s one of those, would you go back in time to kill Hitler type tales, with a twist. My goal is to put all four away in a single month, maybe November or possibly December, whenever I get through my current reading plan.

Well, continued happy reading! Hopefully I’ll be employed before I get to dust these latest paperbacks off.