When I installed an ebook reader on my 770 last Thursday, I went looking for books to put on it. Among the ones I found were the first five books of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom series, which I must admit I had never read. I'm currently working my way through the fourth book, Thuvia, Maid of Mars, though I accidentally read the fifth one, Chessmen of Mars, before it.

I've had an idea for a novel of my own floating around in my head for some time now, so tonight I downloaded and installed an opensource word processor on the 770, with hopes that I can work on it whenever a few spare moments come my way, wherever I might be. After doing so, I set to work on the inaugural paragraph of the first chapter.

And then erased it again, because what I had written was unmistakably in the stilted, archaic phraseology of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Gah! Good thing (mien) I hadn't (attar) been reading (demesne) Stephen R. (clench) Donaldson...

My cat has a black eye. Not like a bruise around the eye... like someone afflicted with the Black Oil on The X-Files. Like a telepath exercising his or her powers on Babylon 5. Like the Asgard on Stargate SG-1. A solid black eye: no iris, no white. It's really freaking me out.

It started on Friday morning — fortunately, she was already going to the vet's that day anyway, for a shot to help unfuse her lower vertebrae. An eye affliction has been going around each of the cats in turn this past month or so, but she seems to have something different (or perhaps her advanced age led to more complications). Anyway, while the other cats just had to have a line of antibiotic ointment laid into the afflicted eye, she's got the ointment and two different drops. But she's very good about it.

Poor thing. I'd take a picture of it, but the vet said to keep her out of strong light, so I guess a camera flash would hurt her.

So. I do a good, conscientious job at work, and my reward is even more work to do. Somebody else slacks off, is unreachable more than half the time and doesn't achieve all of his goals, and he gets promoted to supervisor.

With all the old science fiction I've been reading, thanks to the magic of public domain literature and ebook readers, I figured perhaps I would try once more to revisit C S Lewis's Space Trilogy; they'd probably last me most of the way through the flight to England. When I attempted the series before, I made it through Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra, but never did manage to fight my way through That Hideous Strength. Well, I was twelve at the time, so perhaps I could make my way to the end by now.

I don't have the books anymore, I haven't been able to find them in the used bookstores around here, and unfortunately they're not for sale in ebook format. And a trip to the Large National Chain bookstore left me with a case of sticker shock — $13 each for the first two (rather slender) volumes, and $15 for the third! I suspect a large portion of that cost is justified by the phrase "By the author of The Chronicles of Narnia" emblazoned on each cover.

Now, I know I'm dating myself here, but I do recall that at the time I bought the series the first time, $2.50 seemed like an exorbitant amount to pay for That Hideous Strength, given that science fiction novels generally went for $1.25 or $1.50 in those days; if I remember correctly, the third volume equaled or exceeded the cost of the other two combined. So, around $5 for the whole trilogy, as opposed to the $41 of today...

Fortunately, thanks to the magic of the Intarweb, I was able to snag a used (but in good condition) trade paperback containing all three for $12 (plus shipping). Once it arrives, I'll have to avoid the temptation to read it immediately, as I did with the last couple of books I picked up for the trip.

I'm always thrilled when I see something I've made actually being used. For example, the JSL Ancient font used in the first panel of today's PvP guest strip by Tyler Martin.

Karen's mother got a new computer recently, as her old one died. I took the carcass off her hands, replaced the motherboard (leaky capacitors), CPU (slow) and hard drive (many, many bad clusters), and installed Linux on it — which brings the score up to three Windows and four Linux machines.

Karen's reaction to the new addition: "Oh, good. 'Cause we don't have a computer in the bathroom yet."