A sunburn in a place that was previously impervious to sunburn is a big hint. Yes, the hairline, she is a-receding… Ah well. I know enough about heredity to have failed to imagine myself impervious to it… All the men on both sides of my family had that going on. I do wonder if a bald spot is on the way up upon the crown? Meh. Hair… whatever.
Sunburns do suck the glee out of things for a while, though. Nonetheless, the trip I made to the beach with a co-worker and her husband was cool and worth it. I’ll put pictures up sooner or later.
But for now, I need to go for my walk and pick up some milk. I cleaned out the espresso machine with some diluted vinegar and tons of water and the coffee is once again tasting like heavenly wonderful stuff. Ours is cheap enough you have to just keep running water and vinegar through it, I don’t see an obvious way to open it, and I guess I’d let it go a bit longer than usual.
(It doesn’t take too long for weirdness to build up inside the pipes. It was an eye-opening experience to see what came out of the machine where there were no beans in the portafilter. I think I’ll be cleaning it out a lot more often from now on, like every couple of weeks or so.)
Anyway, the coffee comes out nice, but we’ve run out of milk, and we usually have nice cappucinos at various points during the day. So I must pick some up, now, at the wonderful hour of twenty past midnight.(1)
Then it’s back to working on my paper. Actually, I’m going to rewatch a movie I’m discussing in the paper — Yesterday , isn’t that an interesting choice of title for a futuristic SF movie? Like so many, it ends up being about a historical schism and trauma, for reasons that may be obvious if you know South Korea well, but which deserve some unpacking in an SFnal context, especially since it actually works well in The Host or Save the Green Planet but not so well in a number of other movies — and write a little more, and then go to bed and read the latest Greg Egan fior a while, till I drop off.
By the way, recently finished Richard Morgan‘s Market Forces and just today finished Cory Doctorow‘s Little Brother. Again, I’ll have something to say about each when I’ve finished getting this paper together. I’m doing for five of six Korean SF movies what I did for The Host here, but in one-tenth the space, with lots of citations and enough smartypants language to make it palatable to academics. You know, it’s actual work.
(1) Er, wait, now that the post is nearly done, it’s quarter to one in the morning. All too much distraction with the cat, who went nuts in the middle of my writing this. She was hissing and swatting when I tried to get her and bring her to my offfice, where her noisy protestations wouldn’t keep Lime awake, as she’s working early tomorrow! But now she’s here, and I shall go for a bit.