Blech.  This is like the North Carolina summers of my youth. I didn’t handle hot weather very well then and I don’t handle any better now. Double blech.

Awfully Hot Out Isn’t It © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

1. If the weather looks worse than you feel comfortable driving in, then don’t.  Stay home and save the rest of us some headaches.
2. When the weather is affecting visibility, turn on your headlights.  Yes, this means you mister white SUV speeding down the road with no headlights during blizzard-like driving conditions.
3. Clean as much of the snow and ice off your car as you can reach.  This does include the roof & hood of your car as well as the windows.  Failure to clear these areas tends to cause the snow/ice to migrate from them to your windows once you get moving, so all that time you spent clearing the windows suddenly has gone to waste.
   • And you were carefully clearing off all your windows and not just a tiny viewport in the front & back windows, right?
4. Unless the road is 100% clean and clear, double everybody’s stopping distance and not just yours.
   • When you’re thinking about cutting through a yellow light (or red if you have a death wish), just imagine what will happen if your tires lose traction and somebody is coming the opposite way².

¹ My area is currently under a Winter Weather Advisory and a Blizzard Watch.
² For those of you lacking in imagination, it’s called a car accident.

Winter Weather Driving Tips © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

¹ You can view the flood plain area via Google Maps.

The Great Cedar Rapids Flood © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

What sucks worse is while I’m doing it, the weather “reporter” announces that there is no warning for my city but there is for my county and doesn’t clarify WTF she’s talking about.  Never mind I’ve been exhausted all weekend from sinus issues and would love to be asleep in bed, nope.  I’m stuck in a sauna in a basement during a tornado warning with an idiot broadcasting nonsense.  *sigh*

On the bright side, the sauna is small and my lovely wife is with me.  Now if we actually get a proper latch on the door so I don’t have to hold it shut next time this could be kind of cosy.  *grin*

Side note: We brought the cat down with us as well and he’s getting petted by the wife at the moment.  I mostly know this because he’s twitching his tail in bliss and smacking my arm with the tail.

Fraking Weather and Fraking Weather “Reporters” © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Bloody Weather © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

If so, you better have your towel with you today! As today, is Towel Day.

For those not familiar, Douglas Adams was one of the funniest writers of our time. He wrote a wonderful series of radio plays which were converted in a a series of books and a TV show and later into a really awful movie. This was The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. In this, Mr. Adams wrote:

A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitch hiker can have. Partly it has great practical
value — you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you — daft as a bush, but very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have “lost”. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

After Mr. Adams’s death some lunatics decided to create Towel Day as a tribute to his genius. I only heard about it this year (about a week ago to be more precise) and decided to join in on the fun. And the fact that I’m telecommuting to work today had absolutely nothing to do with that decision. *grin*

Are you a hoopy frood, like me? © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

• We survived the tornados and hail that hit our area a week ago. Our apartment and cars were not even get damaged by the storm. Below are a few links to some of the stores online about what happened.
  • Press-Citizen.com | Tornado Coverage
  • USATODAY.com — Iowa tornado damage tops $12 million
  • Radio Iowa: Emergency calls from Iowa City tornadoes released
  • CNN.com — Tornadoes rip through eastern Iowa, killing one — Apr 14, 2006
  • FOXNews.com — Funnel Clouds Reported in Iowa Tornado Threats — U.S. & World
• Last weekend, we replaced Ariesna’s car (1992 Ford Escort, aka Ghost) with a 2002 Volkswagen Golf (aka Grace, aka Gracie). The really odd part about getting the new car? Even though it’s a replacement for Ghost; Ariesna has been letting me drive it the most. Apparently, this is at least partly due to the amount door dings her old car suffered through in her office’s parking lot but it still seems strange to me. Then today, the dealership called me back asking me to come in and sign a new finance contract on the car. Why? Because they found me another offer which would drop the interest rate by 1.25 points! Now that’s what I call service. So a big thanks goes out to Carousel Motors for the excellent service.
• Last weekend, Ariesna and I looked at a house. But it was too expensive for the amount of work required to make it a home we’d want to live (namely a musty basement and some bad remodeling in the family room, dining room and kitchen). We showed up about 15 minutes early for the showing and the realtor showed up just short of 15 minutes late. He did eventually call to let us know he was running late… 5 minutes after he was supposed to be there. I was initially a bit underwhelmed by the guy. But when he finally got there and let us into the house; he let us do our own looking around without trying to pressure us and listened to the comments we had about the house to get a better idea of what we were interested in.

Real Life Recap © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Sick © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Threads of Malice
My rating: 4 out of 5.

I read Threads of Malice last week¹ and wowsers! If you’ve read Ghosts in the Snow then you need to be warned before reading Threads that Ghosts is a much lighter book than Threads. The villian in Threads is far more evil than the one in Ghosts and this gives the book a much darker tone. Still with that being said, Threads is a great read.

This time around Mrs. Jones takes us out of the castle and up into The Reach. Young boys have been disappearing throughout the region for the past couple of years. When Dubric arrives in the area; he’s greeted by dozens of ghosts all at once. It’s quite the unexpected & draining experience for him. Additionally, we get to see Dien’s family and Lars learns what real family life is like.

I don’t really know what else about the story I could tell you without giving away either the mystery or the good non-mystery bits. This is a problem that I’m not the only one has. I say this because at ICON this past weekend, I attended a panel where Mrs. Jones read some passages from Threads; as well as a few pages from her third Dubric book². One of the passages she read from Threads was included one of my favorite scenes in the book, though it turns out we visualized it somewhat differently. The scene takes place as Lars along with 2 of Dien’s daugthers are walking into town to buy some supplies³.

He hurried after them, their names hovering in his throat, but he halted after a few steps. Aly climbed onto the head of a massive stone rabbit, then slid down its back, laughing all the while. Jess leaned against it, her hand on its nose, regarding him with mirthful eyes.
“Lars, Hargrove, I’d like to introduce you to your geandfather’s rabbit.” She bowed with a flourish and grinned at him.

That’s just a fragment of the scene, but it’s the important part to me. When I first read this scene, my mind drew up a picture of a rabbit sitting up on its hindlegs wearing a waistcoat (like something you’d expect from Alice in Wonderland). The rabbit was made of a “mostly” white marble, with bits of grey scattered about here & there. The weather had caused a small crack to form near the top of the rabbit’s head, just above the left eye. Some moss had begun to grow in that crack, looking something like a scar and giving the rabbit a certain roguish appeal. From speaking to Mrs. Jones at ICON, I found out she had imagined the stone rabbit looking like a rabbit you’d see in nature. Ok, so maybe it’s not all that important but I found the scene very endearing.

I’m feeling a bit out of it; so I’m going to wrap this review up. The book was excellent but didn’t quite grip me like Ghosts had. On the other hand, the intense evil and darkness in this book was somewhat balanced out with Lars getting his first real taste of what family life is like. It’s a highly enjoyable read and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it to any adult readers⁴. Mrs Jones, good job and I look forward to the next book!

¹ Since then I’ve read through Equal Rites, Wyrd Sisters and Witches Abroad. I just didn’t feel like writing up reviews for those books.
² Currently, the third book is titled “Valley of the Soul”.
³ Taken from pages 144–145 of Threads of Malice.
⁴ Given the forms that the evil takes in this book; I would not recommend this for younger readers.

Review: Threads of Malice © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Of course, staying home to fix my computer means I missed another Mindbridge meeting but I doubt they’ll really miss me there as usually I just sit there silently. Hopefully next month, I’ll be able to make it to a meeting again And come to think of it, I probably won’t make it to next month’s meeting as that’s awful close to my wedding day. *shrug* You win some, you lose some.

¹ Usually, it’s up & running either grabbing new, fansubbed anime via BitTorrent or transcoding video files for burning to disc.

Back in Business! © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.