My Rite of Autumn

One of the great spiritual truths I've gleaned from my Pagan path is that the Wheel of the Year offers a good model for timing some of life's bigger tasks that are not directly tied to religious liturgy or agrarian life. One of the things I have been doing annually between the Autumn Equinox and Samhain is taking stock of my life, cataloguing the wins and losses over the course of the year, celebrating goals achieved and identifying new opportunities for spiritual growth.

OK, New Years' Resolutions are somewhat universal, and in a way, this is exactly that.

(continued)

Bloggery 2009-10-22

1. Pics of Parker from his visit last weekend, as well as Photographic Proof™ of the literary awesomeness of one Seanan Mcguire -- her book, featured on the new paperback rack in the front of the Arden Faire Barnes and Noble.

Oh, and the book itself, Rosemary and Rue, is a terrific read. Rosemary and Rue is to urban fantasy as Lois McMaster Bujold's Shards of Honor (another great book, by the way) is to military space opera: a sharp, witty, very well written first novel with great plotting, crisp dialog, intelligent world-building that will gain a vast following. I think that, like Lois, Seanan's work is award-worthy. I foresee Hugos and / or Nebulas joining the Pegasus awards on her mantle.

2. Weekend WoW: Another weekend, another FAIL Naxx-25, aka, the Floating 1d4 of FAILBOTTERY. Fresh run, started in Construct Quarter. Patchwerk, Grobbulus and Gluth were all one-shotted. I got my hopes up . . . then we hit Thaddius, aka the "White Death Knights Can't Jump" boss. This time I made the jump (about a quarter of the raid didn't) because I tried a couple of tricks to boost my Run speed. but the raid's damage output was far too low to take Thadd down before he enraged and hard wipes the raid. About 1/3 of the raid was not even geared for Naxx-10. One guy had mostly green (low level) gear from the lower end zones of Northrend.

Consensus on being geared enough for Naxx-10 is to have all or almost all Rare ("blue") gear at Item Level 187 - 200. This gear can be obtained through quests rewards, through faction reputation rewards, from crafters and from dungeon loot drops in heroic-mode dungeons. New level 80 toons have little business in Naxx unless they have the gear to survive.

I still managed to get enough heroic dungeon runs in to score my second piece of T8 with badges. The loot from heroic dungeons -- with one exception, namely Heroic Trial of the Champion -- no longer provides me with gear upgrades. The badges, on the other hand, can still buy some upgrades. However, the Emblems of Conquest that drop in heroics and pre-3.2 raids no longer buy me gear upgrades. The higher-level Emblems of Triumph are what buys the Tier 9+ and associated upgrades. I can trade the EoC's down in level, save them to buy other things, just no gear upgrades. I'm five Emblems away from my third pirce of Tier 9.

Gratz!

Seanan McGuire's debut novel is out today!

I've known Seanan since she was a teenager. She has more multimedia artistic talent -- drawing, songwriting, singing and omg writing -- in a single broken toenail than most folks have in their entire circle of Facebook friends.

Two copies are on order for payday . . . one for me and one for Jameece.

What Would Orwell Blog?

Find out here.

This is facinating stuff . . . .



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Listening to: Trifolkal - The Starbucks of County Down
via FoxyTunes

OSC-noxious Book

Standard conversation with friends (edited for simplicity). It happened twice this weekend.

SF- reading friends: "You've never read (fill in the blank author, book, series, etc)??"

Me: "That's right, I haven't read it."

SF-rf: "Oh come on! (fill in the blank author, book, series, etc) is so classic! How can you call yourself a sf fan?"

Me: (pause) "So. Think 4th Edition D&D will be worth the switch?"

Over the years, a lot of my friends have thrown books at me to read. I usually make an honest effort to read them. However, with a small number of exceptions, I've hated the book / author / series. The exceptions (Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar, Harry Potter, The Mists of Avalon, Harry Dresden) are vastly outnumbered by such as Xanth, Discworld, The Wheel of Fscking Time, Belgariad, DragonLance, the entire Forgotten Realms cycle, virtually all Vampire: The Masquerade novels, Fred Saberhagen's Berserker novels . . . .

The point is, once again I listened to a friend's recommendation about an author to try. I even selected a book set in contemporary America as opposed to one set in his peculiar worlds. And, once again, I was disappointed.

Orson Scott Card's Empire has an interesting premise: that the US is so divided between "Red" and "Blue" states, regions, etc. that there can be no compromise. It's a 21st century Second Civil War with hovercycles, 'mechs and EMP death rays . . . nice premise for a book I'd like, and at first OSC seemed to live up to all my friends' hype about what a great author he was.

He wrote about military culture and hardware as though he lived it without sounding trite. He created a wonderful protagonist, a truly sympathetic character with a lovely family right down to the nerdy loner kid who wandered off alone to read Discworkd and Xanth novels . . . Tight plotting, great dialog and some very well drawn characters . . . an enjoyable read until the very sympathetic protagonist is scragged like a dog halfway through the book, at about the point you find out it's evil libruls who are the rebels.

Part of me wanted to scream and another part of me wanted to throw the book at the nearest wolf. I stayed up till 0230, losing sleep but having fun reading this, only to be played like a violin by this asshat of an author! Yes, as Katherine Kurtz once semi-famously said, "Sometimes the hero has to die" Kurtz once killed off nearly a generation's worth of beloved characters (Camber The Heretic, anyone?) over four books, usually heroically (Kai Descantor, Elaine Thuryn) and sometimes not (Rhys Thuryn), but she did it with style.

Between watching the protagonist die from a .22 pistol round fired by his secretary through the eye at arm's reach range while his hands were both full and the extant to which liberals were being demonized for opposing the conservative policies of a president who makes Dick Cheney look like Ghandi, I'm ready to puke. I know, Empire is NOT Ender's Game. I know judging OSC's entire body of work based on this book is dangerous.

Perhaps fscking with the reader is a trademark of his. I haven't finished the book; I don't know if I ever will now. Up till the hero died, Empire rocked.



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Listening to: Leslie Fish - Bring it Down
via FoxyTunes

You read the most interesting things in the strangest places . . .

1. I was perusing my email today and I ran across an ad for an update to a classic RPG system from the mid-to-late 80s -- Twilight:2000. The original T:2k was definitely a product of the Cold War. In this case of WW3, there was a slow-motion nuclear exchange, both battlefield and strategic. The game begins with a last-gasp NATO offensive cut off in Central Poland. Petrolium was a distant memory; the vehicles of what was left of NATO and the Warsaw Pact ran on alcohol (cue Leslie Fish tune here . . . ). The heroes were what I call "military sausage" -- survivors and remnants of units long destroyed in an operational sense, tossed together, fighting to stay alive and, hopefully, get home.

The updated edition will be Twilight:2013. What really caught my eye was the following bit of ad copy / color text:

"If a heroine dies in the forest and no one sees her fall, does her sacrifice matter?

Yes. If the world is worth saving. This is what we need."

That phrase brought tears to my eyes.

This put me in mind of another bit of gaming history I ran across a few years later. The same company that originally produced Twilight:2000, GDW, produced Traveller: The New Era (T:NE). Like T:2k, TNE was a post-holocaust RPG. Unlike T:2K, the holocaust was the result of the species of silicon-based lifeform that happened to run all the computers in Known Space mutating into a race of homocial maniacs. The virus (literally a computer virus) spread via radio from ship to ship to ground to ship . . . Gigadeaths galore, interstellar society collapses, the hammer falls, etc. TNE picks up the story 75 years later. One of the alien races in Charted Space recovefred more quickly than the rest and started sending out cautious feelers toward human-occupied space and made contact with a group of generally idealistic societies along the border between the old Empire and Earth-human space (several strains of humans in Traveller...). The renewed contacts sparked a renaissance, a New Dawn . . . then reality set in. There were forces Out There that liked things just the way they were, sans Renaissance -- Virus-infested starships (Darwinian selection, the smartest ones still lived) and dictators who ruled because they had all the available tech (harvesters, fuel, main battle tanks). The scions of the starry-eyed New Dawn gave way to the better-organized but still flawed Reformation Coalition.

I fell in love with the RC background. TNE hit the hobby at a time when the dominant meme in the hobby was "dark." White Wolf's World of Darkness games were just starting to come out, bringing a whole new breed of gamer into the hobby. Gone were the socially challenged science fiction / fantasy /military history geeks who entered the hobby when I did, to be replaced with black-clad lit / drama geeks who didn't know a guisarme from an arquebus, but did know how to tell a story. It was a generational change in gaming, and I was on the elder side of the gap. I knew a testudo from a tercio and the ins and outs of 20th century armored warfare, but I didn't know jack about Shelley, Dead Can Dance or modern gothic culture. The WoD eventually left its mark on me because I figured out how I could see the Light therein (namely, a silver Phoenix . . . VERY long story!). TNE was to me in those dark days a beacon of hope in a RPG-verse filled with despair.

To make a longer story short, most of my original Miresseia group got its start playing in my Traveller: The New Era game. The crew of the RCS Lez Zeppelin and the men. women, Schalli and Hivers of 3rd Squad, Second Platoon, Dagger Company (Meteoric Assault), 2nd Battalion (provisional), 1st Regiment Reformation Coalition Marine Corps, under the command of Wu "Kung Fu" Li, swiped nuclear weapons form madmen, freed captured Coalition personnel, protected the Secretary-General of the Coalition from assassins, blew pirates out of space, boarded and took down Virus-controlled ships and BattleMechs, and blew one incautious self-proclaimed Empress of All Known Space into dust bunnies.

The RC game was a hit at the Comic Grapevine every Sunday.

Now it looks like the new publisher of T:2k13 is going to go in that direction. The dark-theme games aren't anywhere as dominant now as they were in 1994 . . . and there have been two more generational changes (at least . . .) since: CCGs, CMGs and now MMORPGs. As committed as I am to other games at the moment, I'm not likely to run T:2k13.

Still, it's good to see hope return in this way.

2. Ever read something written by someone whose name you've only heard before, and you suddenly realize just how incredible a writer that person is? In perusing the various tributes to Gary Gygax out on the gaming Web today, I ran across the one posted to Ken Hite's LiveJournal. As with my discovery of Lois McMaster Bujold's Milesverse a decade ago, it was today with Ken Hite.

From Ken's March 4, 2008 LJ post:

But aside from the immense, irreducible professional debt I owe him, I also (and perhaps more importantly) owe him a huge amount of great, good fun. Not just in his co-invention of a game form and a hobby that has consumed thousands of delighted hours of my time, but in the exuberance of his ideas, expressed through his own inimitable vocatory blend of pastiche, pedantry, and pomp. For all that I point to Avram Davidson as my cynosure, it was Gary Gygax (along with his cousin of the soul, Robert E. Howard) who first showed me what you could do by putting history in a Really Big Waring Blender -- or perhaps a Waring-Waring-Cuisinart-Guisarme -- and setting it to "color."

And it was Gary Gygax' work that first pointed me at the works of Jack Vance, for which, again, no words -- not even Gary's words, redolent with pulpy fronds and antiqued thesaurus-hide -- can properly express my debt.

Gary, like all of us in the creative business, rolled his share of fumbles, but his hits were all natural 20s. Somewhere around Elysium's gaming tables, he and Fletcher Pratt are already arguing about flanking bonuses.

OMFG. On a stick. With habrenaro sauce (reader makes whimpering sounds of delight).

"Antiqued thesarus-hide" -- THAT captured EGG's writing style perfectly.

The last sentence of the first paragraph describes exactly how Miresseia was born.

And anyone who can draw the connection between EGG's work and that of Fletcher Pratt is a dangerous dangerous mind.

I...must...have...MORE!

An double IV drip of "Irony"

Another factoid in the current debate on domestic spying:

The US Attorney General has a portrait of Grorge Orwell in his ofice.

He says he admires Orwell's style and clarity as a writer. Yea, and I used to read Playboy for the articles, too.

/bangs head on desk to dull the pain . . .

359 days until those people (to use a favorite phrase of Gen. Robert E. Lee) are outta there and our long long national nightmare ends.

His other office portrait, of Supreme Court Justice, US Attorney General and Nuremburg prosecutor Robert Jackson, is likewise ironic. But not in the way he might think it is.

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Listening to: Green Day - American Idiot
via FoxyTunes

There and Back Again . . .

There's a good reason for the gap in my posting: I was in the hosptial for swelling and infected wounds in my legs. While I had my MB with me, I had no way to connect it to the Internet --I guess we're still a few years from what EarthLink founder Sky Dayton called "packetspace."

Ten days of almost no Internet (I had the browser on my cellphone, and that's it), coffee or TeeVee did not quite leave me a gibbering idiot. I was a near-run thing, though.

The most noteworthy aspect of this stay was that they (Kaiser) transferred me to a Kaiser-run skilled nursing facility (KPPACC) in San Leandro, about 100 miles from my current digs in South Sacramento.

I was not amused.

Highlight of my hospital visit: I successfully suppressed the urge to throttle by roommate at KPPACC. Idjit would have the remote for the one TV set the room had and play the most mind-destroying teevee other than political campaign ads or Fox News Channel: soap opeas and sports. Not only that, he'd read the damned paper with the fscking teevee on!

Whotta asshat. I wanted to stuff that remote down his throat, I was so pissed. I chose instead to employ my iPod -- stuffed with tunage from Leslie Fish, The Elders, Seanan McGuire and Flogging Molly -- and headphones to block out the sound; fortunately I had Civilization 3 loaded on the MB, a perfect non-Internet game for whiling away large blocks of time.

I also had The Sims 2 on my phone, another very good game. I'd never had the chance to play the game much until this trip to the hospital, and I got my money's worth from it during the ambulance ride to San Leandro.

M&D also brought me some spare underwear and Guinness pajama bottoms before I was shipped off to KPPACC. I wore the PJs for most of my stay at KPPACC. The tangerines helped stave off the hungries from the notoriously small (and utterly flavor-free) portions of Hospital Food® and the sugarless Jelly Bellies and Gummi Bears were treats I savored.

I managed to read William Gibson's Idoru as well -- I wouldn't say it was better than Neuromancer but it was better than Count Zero or Virtual Light.

At Kaiser South I encountered some utterly awesome nurses and a wonderful doc.

My daughter, bless her, came to pick me up and bring me home. Our first stop on the way home: Starbucks.


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Listening to: Sun Green & The Imitators with Neil Young & Crazy Horse & The Greendale Chamber of Commerce - Be the Rain
via FoxyTunes

Ever look for something for a long time . . .

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Listening to: Emerald Rose - Four Jacks
via FoxyTunes . . . and suddenly realize that you had it all along?

Case in point: the "Listening to . . " in this post.

A bit of background: I am utterly addicted to David Weber's Honor Harrington novel series. The Honorverse has been described as "space opera as if CS Forrester had written it." It's got exploding spaceships, Byzantine politics, Tech That Makes Sense, Sound Tactics (too much sf/f military fiction does not, sadly), historical allusions, action, adventure, telepathic cats with prehensile tails and opposable thumbs and characters to both admire and revile.

Anyway, back in 2000 or so, Baen Books, publisher of the series, put the whole series onto CD-ROM and distributed a copy of the disc with each hardcover of War of Honor. Anyway, I got that book and the disc, and gleefully synced the entire series' pdb files to three PDAs since then.

Also on the disc was the three Echo's Children filksongs set in the Honorverse. And until yesterday, I did not know it. I've been all over the web looking for "No Quarter!" -- I saw the lyrics on some random filk site last year, and as soon as I realize it was a Honorverse song, I had to have it!

Now I do . . . and it was worth the wait! I just hope the upcoming Honorverse books (three next year, pray to Sharon)

Many SF series get worse for wear as time goes on; this one gets better. I also recommend the books that are not part of the main sequence of the series, like Crown of Slaves and (most especially) The Shadow of Saganami. Also, unlike many series, reading them in publication order is best. My favorite of the whole series? The Shadow of Saganami, without a doubt. Followed closely by Honor Among Enemies, In Enemy Hands, and Echoes of Honor (which is something of a trilogy in terms of the ongoing story).

The song concerns what could well have been a scene in Echoes . . . but in Echoes the actual wording was "To all Grayson ships, the order is: Lady Harrington, and No Mercy!"

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Listening to: Echo's Children - No Quarter
via FoxyTunes

JK Rowling Outs Professor Dumbledore

Slash fanfic writers rejoice!

Conservative heads explode, too.

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Now playing: 3 Pints Gone - Mary Ellen Carter
via FoxyTunes

Ten things that make me smile when I'm a bit down . . .

Right now, as I write this, I'm too damned fragged emotionally to be good company to anyone or to fall asleep.

When I'm in that state, I strive for complete control of my surroundings, what RTS players call "turtleing" -- I fort up, getting the hell away from people because I'm not at my best. My 1337 50ci@1 skillz are not mad enough to deal with social situations when I'm like this.

In Trek terms: shields up, red alert, phasers on desocialize, emoton torpedoes on overload.

When the ick subsides to the point where I'm no longer antisocial, I cheer myself by thinking of, visiting, doing / warching / reading these things (not in order of which has the highest "cheer me up" factor):
1. Michelle, David and Kaia. Hanging out with them helps keep me sane; the cats and I are old friends, and M's veggie cooking is teh r0xx0r.
2. A good book I've read before, any of my desert island books will work as does the 1632 series (alternate early modern history set up by a cosmic accident that drops a West Virginia mining town scirca 1997 smack in the middle of Germany during the height of the Thirty Years' War).
3. Iz. For far too many reasons to list here.
4. World of Warcraft. WoW's good for catharic venting onto poor virtual monsters.
5. Babylon 5. Best. TV. Space. Opera. Evah. Quotes like this one help me cope:

"Then I will tell you a great secret, Captain. Perhaps the greatest of all time. The molecules of your body are the same molecules that make up this station and the nebula outside, that burn inside the stars themselves. We are starstuff, we are the universe made manifest, trying to figure itself out. As we have both learned, sometimes the universe requires a change of perspective."

 -- Delenn to Sheridan in Babylon 5:"A Distant Star"

Firefly is NOT space opera, and is just as quotable.

6. I come up with game stuff. As an immediate example: when I went looking for the above quote, I found another B5 quote from Marcus Cole that will find its way into my "In Hoc Signo Vinces" D&D game. I'm keeping that one to myself for now . . .
7. Hearing songs I havn't heard in a decade or more, and thinking back to where I was then.
8. Reviewing my weight loss so far
9. Looking back on where I was 1, 3, 5, and 10 years ago and comparing then to now. Now almost always comes off better. I've come a long way since then, but in life it's grow or die.
10. A crisp wind, warm sunshine, running water, green grass.

Desert Island Books

Time for a comment game:

How would you answer the following question:
"If you could take ten and only ten books with you when you're marooned on a desert island / planet / plane of reality for the rest of your life, which ones would you take?"

My list:
1. The Fifth Sacred Thing, Starhawk.
2. Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein.
3. D&D v3.5 Core Book I: Player's Handbook
4. D&D v3.5 Core Book II: Dungeon Master's Guide
5. D&D v3.5 Core Book III: Monster Manual I
6. King Kelson's Bride, Katherine Kurtz
7. The Shadow of Saganami, David Weber
8. A Civil Campaign, Lios McMaster Bujold
9. A Distant Mirror, Barbara Tuchman
10. Guns of the South, Harry Turtledove

Back To What Passes For "Normal"

Leading off with some meta-bits:

I am proud to welcome the unique voice of my oldest friend Downstrike to my blogroll. I've known him since our first day of kindergarten at ol' H-R. Our lives have taken a great many turns since then. Thanks to an alert ex-wife #1 and classmates.com, we found each other on the Innerweb. Check out his bloggity goodness here and here.

I also added Catnip and Fionn, aka Michelle and David, to the roll.

SotR: It feels like I'm past the worst of the tummy bug that had me in its evil grip. I actually feel like eating again. I hope this does not hose my weigh-in on Wednesday.

I spent much of the time ill finishing Storm Front
I'm not a big mystery fan, despite an addiction to juvenile mysteries like Nancy Drew / Hardy Boys books when I was seven or so. I dropped mysteries when I found Heinlein and Doc Smith's sci-fi, the science and military history on the shelves in the school library. As for fantasy, I did not read anything remotely fantastic until I started playing D&D in the Navy; Tolkien, the Pern series, Kurtz' Deryniverse and Robert E. Howard's Conan.
Then Iz turned me on to Jim Butcher's series The Dresden Files.
The best way to think of this series is "Harry Potter meets Sam Spade."
All I'm going to say is "if you like either hardboiled detective fiction or modern fantasy, you'll probably like Storm Front."

"I'd rather meet Harry Dresden than Harry Potter"

Now she tells me.

Jim Butcher's wizard-as-detective show The Dresden Files is also a series on Sci-Fi Network.

Something you who read this may or may not know about me: I hate television. I do not own a television, and have not purchased one since my first ex and I bought one (over my vehement protests) in 1984, said set going to teevee heaven in 2001 when said set just would not do for ex #2.

Of course, this means that over the years I've missed missed some really good shows -- one of them being Babylon 5, which is to epic space opera science fiction on TV as The New Yorker magazine was to popular magazines in the 60s, 70s and 80s -- "The best magazine that ever was, or ever will be." Bab5 was incredibly satisfying to me: part military campaign, part political thriller, part conspiracy theory, and all well-written, well-acted human drama. I eventually caught the entire series on DVD, watched the whole story from beginning to end, as it was meant to be watched. Another I missed when it originally aired was Firefly, a series that is every bit as downright awesome as Babylon 5. As with Bab5, I caught Firefly on DVD.

Now along comes The Dresden Files. The mage as detective bit goes back at least as far as the late Randall Garrett's Lord Darcry stories (which are terriffic reads). I'm still reading Storm Front, and it's terriffic. I'd love to see Harry Dresden on the big screen someday.

But even then, I'm not buying a teevee set. Not as long as my computer has a DVD drive!

Item number 27 on my list of reasons Iz Rocks: Harry Dresden.

Storm Front: Book 1 of the Dresden Files

After dinner last night Iz wanted to hit Border's. In the process she turned me on to Jim Butcher's modern wizard / PI Harry Dresden. OK, I'm not a big fan of horror but I really love books where the author works hard to get magic, military tactics / culture and tech right. David Weber (Honor Harrington series), Richard Cornwall (Sharpe's Rifles, etc, British Napoleonic light infantry ), Patrick O'Brien (Master and Commander), and Tom Clancy (The Hunt for Red October is the best modern submarine book ever; only the late Edward L. Beach's Run Silent, Run Deep, set in the Pacific during WW2 is even in the same ballpark) get culture/tactics and tech right -- with a level of detail that some find irksome.

As as lifelong student of military science and technology, I appreciate the details these guys put in their works. I have not been studying magic quite as long -- my first exposure to an author who did it right with respect to magic was only thirty years ago; I've devoted time to more intense study the last fifteen or so. Mercedes Lackey (most especially her Diane Tregarde modern witch books) and Katherine Kurtz (not only the medieval Deryni-verse, but also her modern / WW2 Adept series) are on a very short list that just got longer by one name: Jim Butcher.

I took this book home and figured to give it the "100 pages test" -- if it could hold my interest for 100 pages, then good. Robert Jordan failed that test. Even Terry Pratchett (I know, Iz, I know! TPs a GAWD, but I.just.can't.get.my.brain.around.Discworld. Sorry! I've tried!) did not make the cut. My standards for holding my attention for the first one hundred pages are tough; the masters of the first-sentence grab-of-attention are guys named Heinlein (Starshp Troopers: "I always get the shakes before a drop.") and Howard (something about a guy named Conan being chased across a river, cannot quote it) trained me early.

I stopped on page 168 because I was ready to go to sleep . . . and not because the book was boring. Anything but! Plenty of action, tight plotting, very nicely drawn characters, enough wizard-lore to satisfy this Background Freak, and, yes, Jim Butcher Gets It when it comes to magic and explains it.

Thanks, Iz, for turning me on to a whole 'nother Harry.

Serenity NOW? Tomorrow fer sure!

Rather than rant about St. Patrick's Day, I turned my attention to my Serenity RPG run tomorrow.

I'm ready. I planted a few "Cortex Bombs," and came up with a fun scenario or three, all within the span of about a day. There's plenty of room for me to improvise; I love on-the-fly GMing. As West Point teaches that "No battle plan survives contact with the enemy," the RichO School of GMing teaches that "No pre-written scenario remains both fun and survives contact with the player characters."

My version of the Firefly/Serenity 'Verse has some distinctions. The Unification War is to me a historical event with real people involved in planning and executing it. I name the high commanders on both sides, the units involved. Things like ship class names add a lot of color. I write news for my games from a player-character prespective. I like sketching out events that may impact the heroes, but to which the heroes are not central figures. This is something I've been doing for most of my games since about 1989-90, when I wrote a BattleTech mercenary unit's newsletter from the PC point of view.

There is a time and a place to vary from plan and a place to avoid freelancing. I'm doing pretty good adhering to my daily caloric plan. I'm expecting a very good day come Wednesday when I weigh-in. I won't go ape if it isn't a good week. To paraphrase a character in one of Harold Coyle's excellent military novels: "Fsck it, drive on."