Downtime

Happy 4th of July! It's been a quiet day today. One oddity of
working for a US-based company in Canada is that I observe US
holidays. So unlike the rest of Canada, I have today off, and am
spending some time reading and catching up on various creative
outlets.

I continue to tinker with my gopherspace. It's good to see the
growing collection of phlogs and gopher content, as others have
mentioned recently. It's become a daily habit to check the
phlogosphere for updates. Long live text!

My kids have shown a renewed interest in playing D&D, so I'm
preparing a session for tonight. We're playing stock Labyrinth Lord
- I started with the adventure in the rulebook just to get things
going, and am moving on to a homebrew setting and adventures. It's
good to get them away from their electronic devices for a while,
even if for just a couple of hours at a time.

I've also been reading Ken Follett's 'The Pillars of the Earth', one
of the better books I've read recently. My gauge for how good a book
is is if it can keep me awake at night. The ones that put me to
sleep I tend not to finish. This one is causing me to lose sleep.

Speaking of books, when we moved to Canada we had to leave most of
our library in storage, some 20 boxes. I did give away a lot of
books that I had no use for - typically old technical books, but I
kept all of my old paperbacks and some textbooks from my college
days, things that I still like to re-read or peruse from
time-time. Many of these I purchased in the 80s and 90s - Heinlein,
Bradbury, Tolkien, Brin, Vance. Some classic technical books like
Aho's 'the dragon book' on compiler design, and Knuth's TAOCP. My
wife was a big fantasy reader back then, so she also has a
collection of trade paperbacks. This past weekend I built some
bookcases (the standard Ikea Billy) and anchored them to the wall in
our living room. That will hold maybe half of them, a good start.