Day 50: Books! (and not much else)

Today is the fiftieth consecutive day that i have been out of the office. This is the longest I have been away from work since my first child was born in 2012. Even if my administrative leave were to come to an end in the next three weeks, with the birth of kid number four next month, I'll be tacking on paternity leave to extend my hiatus. It's starting to feel weird, and I wonder how things are going to change once we all get back into the office.

What I'm reading today

The Dragon Factory (2010, by Jonathn Maberry) - Ok, there's a lot going on here. This book has pretty much everything: super-soldiers, Nazis, neo-Nazis, super-villains, cryptids, spies, the NSA, and more! To be honest, it's a little bit much. I read the first book in this serice, Patient Zero, several years ago and loved it. This book, however, just kind of wanders around from trope to trope. I will say that the author really does know how to write violent combat and firefights well. The problem is that every single character is flawless. Everyone is beautiful, in perfect physical shape, ultra intelligent, unmatched in their respective field, and so on. It gets a little boring hearing about the supercop, the seemingly omniscient intelligence agent, the hacker that can hack anything, the scientist who singlehandedly genetically engineers new species, the best pilot in the world (who is also a millionaire), etc. etc. Just pick one. If you have a team of people, and they're all from Krypton soaking up our yellow sun's rays, who is going to want to read that?

What I'm doing today

Economically stimulating - A friend suggested that we start an online book club to read Dune together, since the movie is supposed to be coming out later this year. I have never read Dune in spite of the fact that it is one of the bestselling science fiction novels of all time. After looking up prices at online retailers, I decided that I wouldn't be purchasing a new copy of the novel. It seems that the upcoming movie has driven up the price of the book. So I opted for Plan B and emailed the owner of a local used book store inquiring about Dune and the first two Dune sequels. It wasn't long before I got a response indicating that he had all three books in stock and that he was setting them aside for me. So I drove over to the shop and picked up the three books for a whopping $6. It was a cool little bookstore, and I'll definitely be back sometime when I can spend some time browsing the shelves.

Day 91: Cleanliness

73. ✅ Clear out the flower bed in the front yard Two words: scorched earth. Garden hoe: loosen the dirt. (Broke that hoe.) Shovel: remove the dirt. Sieve: Filter out all the crap in the dirt. What was left was a smooth patch of barren soil. I'm sure there are undesirables lurking beneath the surface, so I'll let it lie for a few days before I do anything else with it. 51. ✅ Deal with the shred pile This took days. I've been accumulating junk mail, old bills, and literally anything with my name, a family member's name, or our address on it for several months resulting in a two-foot tall stack of papers. It couldn't be done all at once, because (A) the shredder kept overheating, and (B) I kept running out of places to store the shreds. (They take up considerably more room than the unshredded sheets of paper.) 75 ✅ Clean off the workbench Getting rid of the shred pile was the main roadblock in completing this task, but it's done. And now there's a bike up ...

Lazy Productivity

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