jimsjournal
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Blue skies with a few white clouds, temperature around thirty (around minus one for those who speak metric), with northwest winds in the twenty to twenty-five mile per hour range (gusting into the mid-thirties) and the weather bureau has issued a "wind advisory" that says winds could gust above 45 mph this afternoon. Not a bad day for two-thirds of the way through January, but very strange to be this deep into winter without having had to touch a snow shovel, not even once. Not even had a dusting of snow to be brushed away with a broom. Consider the title for this entry. Would you have put a comma after brisk? The Associated Press style guide says to omit the comma in that situation. Some style guides say it is optional; include it if it would avoid confusion as to your meaning, otherwise omit it. The IBM style guide says to use a comma there. I wrote it at first without the comma, but spending so many hours a day editing manuscripts to follow IBM style forced me to go back and insert the comma. This bothers me enough that I would go back and change the title to something completely different had I not just written an entire paragraph about this. *sigh* Nancy and I watched The DaVinci Code last night. Yawn. I usually enjoy Ron Howard as a directory, but this felt like a remake of National Treasure except without the excitement. I do have to confess that I have always been baffled by the sales figures for the novel it was based on. Did all of those people actually struggle through the hundreds of pages of turgid, lifeless prose? I know I gave up about fifty pages in. Nancy was reading it as part of a book club (where they would all read the same book and then get together to discuss it) she belonged to -- so I picked it up and gave it a try but couldn't get past the poor writing and the silly plot. In the course of looking up author Dan Brown's Web page (so I could insert that link) I discovered that he was also the author of Digital Fortress, a techno-thriller about computer encryption and a top-secret supercomputer which shows that the author's knowledge of computer programming, computer encryption, and supercomputers is even weaker than his knowledge of plot, pacing, characterization, and verisimilitude. This entry is brought to you by my foresight in stocking up on essentials. I had thought that we were out of the kind of light bulb used in the track-lighting in our kitchen and that we were out of the liquid hand soap we use in the bathrooms -- and one of the bulbs over my work area in the kitchen had burned out and the soap dispensers in our bathroom and the downstairs bathroom were empty. Thus, my morning agenda would have included a trip to town to replace this missing items, but then Nancy told me she was sure there was a refill bottle of hand soap and she was right -- it was just that packages of Dial soap bars had been piled up in front of it. (Yes, I am not good at finding missing objects.) And then I found a spare light bulb I had missed. Problem solved, no need to go shopping until tomorrow, so I'm using the time saved to write this entry. And after I post this to the Internet, I'm going to get in a good workout before it gets any later and I run out of time. The plans for this evening include actually going out to a movie theatre to see a movie. Imagine that. Haven't done that in many months. We're probably going to see Night at the Museum -- yeah, okay, probably doesn't have any Academy Award nominations and probably didn't appear on any critics Best-of-the-Year lists (couldn't say for sure because I don't remember reading any) but it seems to have had good word-of-mouth about being amusing. The sound of the wind blowing through the trees makes it seem as if it is is much colder outside than it really is.
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