Reading, working, and veggie sausages
Apr. 18th, 2014 10:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sawylBad start to the day: waking from a dream that I'd overslept, I got up only to discover that a muscle had settled in my right shoulder — the working one! — and wished to register a complaint about yesterday's treatment. Fortunately, after stretching and dosing up with anti-inflammatories, it settled down enough for everyday stuff, but I decided to skip my afternoon swim and to give serious consideration to skipping my weekend boulder.
I spent most the day listening to Bach and finishing the final novel in Elizabeth Bear's outstanding Eternal Sky trilogy. Having adored the first two books, I'm happy to say that Bear sticks the dismount: Steles of Sky is fitting conclusion to what is probably my favourite series of recent years. The world-building is cracking, drawing on the early modern cultures surrounding the Eurasian steppe, while the characters are fully rounded and beautifully drawn — even the non-human ones. Reading the trilogy felt like I'd finally come home; that this was the epic fantasy I'd been waiting for forever.
Sadly, the rest of the afternoon was written off to work, after a panicky phone call that asserted, without much in the way of evidence, that everything was broken. After making a futile attempt to talk someone through a few diagnostic — from the output, it was very clear they were garbling the commands I was giving them — I logged in, traced a locked GPFS thread, forced some fail-overs, waited out a couple of event timers, and everything promptly spring back into life.
Despite being worried that I was going to be late for F&JC's barbecue, I arrived just in time to see the flames take hold — they'd only just finished the extraction of a particularly tricky tree stump and were running behind schedule. We had a nice evening — although those who'd spent their day toiling the garden seemed to be suffering a range of aches and pains — and the weather held, although I noticed a definite spring chill in the air on my way home.
I spent most the day listening to Bach and finishing the final novel in Elizabeth Bear's outstanding Eternal Sky trilogy. Having adored the first two books, I'm happy to say that Bear sticks the dismount: Steles of Sky is fitting conclusion to what is probably my favourite series of recent years. The world-building is cracking, drawing on the early modern cultures surrounding the Eurasian steppe, while the characters are fully rounded and beautifully drawn — even the non-human ones. Reading the trilogy felt like I'd finally come home; that this was the epic fantasy I'd been waiting for forever.
Sadly, the rest of the afternoon was written off to work, after a panicky phone call that asserted, without much in the way of evidence, that everything was broken. After making a futile attempt to talk someone through a few diagnostic — from the output, it was very clear they were garbling the commands I was giving them — I logged in, traced a locked GPFS thread, forced some fail-overs, waited out a couple of event timers, and everything promptly spring back into life.
Despite being worried that I was going to be late for F&JC's barbecue, I arrived just in time to see the flames take hold — they'd only just finished the extraction of a particularly tricky tree stump and were running behind schedule. We had a nice evening — although those who'd spent their day toiling the garden seemed to be suffering a range of aches and pains — and the weather held, although I noticed a definite spring chill in the air on my way home.
