Just testing our new home. Actual posts later?

Book Log 2009 #34: Agincourt by Bernard Cornwell

This one-off about the famed battle of the Hundred Years' War follows the same structure as most of the Cornwell books I've read, what with its troubled young protagonist taking up arms as a way to escape enemies and seek revenge, meeting powerful figures and an almost equally troubled woman along the way.

But like those other Cornwell books, the story is told in an entertaining enough way to help keep the repetitive aspects from bothering me too much. I don't think it's a book that needs to be sought out, but if you like Cornwell or historical fiction and are looking for something to read, you'd do worse.

Book Log 2009 #33: Death and Restoration by Iain Pears

Another in the Jonathan Argyll-Flavia di Stefano series, this time centered around a rumored theft in a monastery whose only painting of value is of disputed origin and currently undergoing the ministrations of a controversial restorer.

A solid mystery as always, with an added dash of subplot related to the art theft squad and Flavia's boss that will set up some stuff in the next - and final - book in the series.

If you've checked in over at the Bruce's blog, then you know that this will be among the last posts here at the attemptedchemistry.com location. As with most moves, there's a sense of nostalgia with an underlying understanding that it's for the best.

In any case, I'll be moving this to a Blogspot location at some point. I should also start cross-posting things to Facebook, I suppose. I'm not as social network/Web 2.0/buzzword of choice savvy as I should be, so it's not like this will turn into a random assortment of links and tweets any time soon. Though that may be more entertaining.

Book Log 2009 #32: World War Z by Max Brooks

I'm not much of a zombie fan, unlike some people. I have nothing against zombie movies and the like, more that I'm not much of a horror genre person generally. But Greg suggested this book as it does venture into the alt-history genre, sort of, so I gave it a go.

And I have to say that I may have misjudged my affinity for the walking dead. I really enjoyed the story, and using an oral history framework made the thing seem a little less bizarre for me. I suppose there's some sort of parable in here as well about how to win a war against a foe that's non-state, but really, it's the sort of book you do read for the zombies.

Book Log 2009 #31: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J. K. Rowling

Honestly, I don't have much to say here. Liked it, and appreciated the shift to a darker tone, and was a little surprised about the real lack of typical Hogwarts stuff (Quidditch and the like) until I thought about the fan base. The kids who started with the first book are, I think, old enough to want to move beyond the walls and get more involved in the impending war against Voldemort.

I still don't think the romantic parts work particularly well, at least where Harry's concerned. Still seems too rushed, but that could be my comparing him to the slow build with Ron and Hermione.

Typically I've read the books just before the movies, but I don't think I'll be able to do so with the last one. I nearly took the last book out of the library the day after finishing this one, which certainly instills a desire to see how it all turns out. Which, I imagine, is just what you want from the next to last book in a series.

Book Log 2009 #30: Enclave by Kit Reed

A former Marine officer, spinning a story of imminent world collapse to the wealthy, opens a school in an isolated and abandoned monastery, and takes in 100 students whose parents are as anxious to be rid of them as they are hoping to save them from the anarchy to come.

Ironically, that anarchy comes to the school when two viruses - one computer, one biological - threaten the survival of both the school and its inhabitants. The officer falls back on SOP (standard operating procedure) to work through the crisis, but when the Lord of the Flies instinct kicks in with both the students and the staff, SOP is SOL.

I did like the book, though I never quite bought that the guy in charge was so blind to the need to adapt to the situation at hand (he clearly never watched Heartbreak Ridge). Still, it was an entertaining diversion.

It's also worth noting that when I read the book there was only one review on Amazon for it, from the notorious Harriet Klausner. The review, and the comments it inspired, were almost as entertaining as the book itself.

Book Log 2009 #29: Capturing Eichmann by Neil Bascomb


I knew a little about the Eichmann case before picking up this book, but quickly found myself drawn into its presentation of things. I was especially interested in how Israel, a young country still fighting for existence, mounted this operation in a country where it had few official connections.

The book reads well, and it quite recommended. I'll also recommend The Perfect Mile, the story of the race to break the four minute mile. I thought I'd read it after I started doing the Book Log, but apparently not.

One clear oversight in talking about turning 40 is that I didn't mention the surprise party the wife threw. Well, it was more of a 75 percent surprise party, as the night before the event the wife got on the phone with my sister, and the first couple of minutes of the conversation (from my end) went something like this:

"Yes."
"No."
"Yes."
"Yes."
"No."
etc.

It might surprise you that this is not how they normally converse. So I did have some idea that something was going to happen, but didn't realize the scope of things. At least until I got to Salem Beer Works and spent the afternoon with a variety of family, friends and co-workers. I'm assuming a good time was had by all, given the easy access to beer and a birthday cake shaped like beer.

So a belated thanks to the wife for making 40 that much less scary.

So, 40.

It's been a few days, and I can't say that I've had any life-changing revelations, or had the urge to go out and buy a sports car. I have talked to a few people who got to 40 before me, and the consensus is that the transition to 30 was more of a big deal, apparently as it's the age where people really start thinking that they're adults.

I can't say my 30th birthday was a big deal, either. The only thing I remember doing on my 30th was seeing Eyes Wide Shut. By that measure, 40 beats 30 hands down.

Additionally, I think that adding a kid to the mix has a way of refocusing things. Granted, I'll probably wind up being one of the oldest parents among the boy's class/team/playmates, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

Not that the age thing matters greatly, as 40 is the new 30. Or the new 20. Or perhaps the new 25? 40 should not be the new 15. And it just may be the new 60. Actually, that last one may explain how CBS improved its ratings. Heck, I'll just be happy to make 41.

This week marks a bit of a milestone for us, as the boy started at day care on Monday. For all of the concern about how he'd react to being in unfamiliar territory with people he doesn't know - most of them other, somewhat larger, kids - he did fine. No crying, no fussing, slept and ate fine. We should have expected that, as he's never put up a fuss when interacting with any of our family and friends, and will pretty much take a bottle from whoever is holding it.

Us parents, though, didn't do as well. The wife actually did very well in the morning, keeping the drop off quick so the emotions wouldn't build up. It helped that many of her co-workers are moms themselves, and those that aren't are certainly sympathetic.

Come the afternoon, though, plans fell awry. After dropping off the boy, the wife takes a bus from the Wonderland stop to her office, and does the trip in reverse after work. Going in, the bus went by the stop a few minutes early, so the wife had to wait for the next one. Not that big a deal, she got to work less early that she would have otherwise.

The problem came when the bus didn't show in the afternoon. This is apparently very rare, and the wife's fellow riders gave the driver an earful when the next bus came along. But by this time, it was clear that the wife was going to be late. So she called me.

I, as luck would have it, was at North Station having just missed a train. I'd have made it except the other train sharing the platform started boarding, and I couldn't fight through the swarm of passengers to get to my train. In any event, it gave me a chance to take her panicked call and plan on taking the Blue Line out to Wonderland, with the first one of us to get there to pick up the boy and then drive to the station to get the other person.

Turns out I was the first one there, so I hoofed over and got the boy. He was sleeping in his car seat ready to go, thankfully only 15 minutes later than planned (the day care provider was very understanding, I suppose she's used to this sort of thing at the start). The only snag after that was the parking ticket we got - the parking in that neighborhood is apparently resident only (which, given its proximity to Wonderland, makes sense in retrospect).

It probably shouldn't be a surprise that the transition to day care is harder on us than it is on the boy, but there it is. I'm just happy we don't have to go through this every day.

I find it hard to belive that the Arena Football League is going out of business, but it looks like that's the case. The league finally seemed to turn the corner in the last couple of years, what with the NBC deal and relative stability in franchise locations.

While I can't say that I know anything about the underlying financial causes of the collapse (other than blaming "the economy"), I tend to think the league was a victim of its own success (so to speak). I know I found myself less interested as the league became more mainstream, and once the Elway Rule brought in free substitution, the league lost the ironman image that was such a key part of its identity. What you had, then, was NFL Lite, and who wants to watch that?

Perhaps the more amusing aspect of this is that af2, the AFL's minor league, never shut down and appears to be going one place its parent league isn't - 2010. While I assume this has somethign to do with the relatively lower cost of running the league, it should also be noted that there's no Elway Rule in af2. Coincidence?

Book Log 2009 #28: Flashforward by Robert Sawyer

Two scientists at CERN are trying to find the Higgs boson, and when they run an experiment designed to do that it instead plunges everyone in the planet into a two minute vision of their futures. While this leads to world-wide catastrophe in the immediate moment (from people having their vision while driving, flying a plane, etc.), in the longer term it leads to questions about why this happened, and if the visions of the future can be changed.

It's an interesting premise, and it plays out among the characters at CERN in various ways, though not always smoothly. There's also a subplot involving a very old man in Toronto that winds up impacting the end of the book in an unexpected way. One that I didn't quite care for, to be honest.

I'd not have sought the book out except that it's the basis for one of ABC's new show next season. Promos aired during Lost even before the new show was officially picked up, which is unusual. And as the concept tied in with the way Lost has played with time, I'm likely to watch the new show as well. I just hope it's done better than the book. The link for the book above is to another review, which I usually don't do but it better addressed some of the specific problems than I could this far past reading it.

Book Log 2009 #27: The Whiskey Rebels by David Liss

Liss crosses the pond for this novel, set during the early years of American independence. The story moves between a disgraced ex-spy surviving on the margins in Philadelphia as a sort of detective and a brilliant widow whose frontier experiences have brought her back to that city to seek both revenge and fortune.

It's another well-written historical/financial thriller for Liss, who's found a pretty original niche for himself. He's also staked out some territory by including Jewish characters in his book, providing insight into the lives of Jews at the various times and places he'd written about. In this case, though, the Jewish character is more of a supporting player, so we don't get much of a picture of what life was like for Jews in early America, which is an unfortunate change from the earlier books. Still, worth a read.

There are things we take for granted that are simple yet serve and important function. Witness the aglet, the plastic or metal cap at the ends of a shoelace. It has no intrinsic value, but if you ever lose one, it makes it next to impossible to relace the shoe. On the other end of things, we have things that are, in some fashion, so complex that it's easier not to think of them, like the electrical grid or gravity.

In between these points, we have the human back. Muscle, bone, nerves and connective tissue, all critically important to a variety of processes. Walking, standing, sitting, lifting, turning, there's not much by way of human movement that doesn't, at some stage, involve the back. But, like aglets or gravity, it's something we tend to take for granted.

Usually.

I stopped taking it for granted last weekend, when my lower back decided to remind me just who was in charge. I have no idea what caused the problem (the wife thinks it was an awkward movement while separating car seat and stroller, which sounds about right), but the results were not long in coming:

Friday afternoon: Felt a twinge, took two Aleve. In past moments of back and hip discomfort, this usually takes care of things.

Friday night: Twinge is still there, maybe even a little worse. Took another Aleve, put a couple pillows behind me for support when sitting, but no other changes.

Saturday morning: Getting out of bed requires a variety of hand holds on any furniture within arm's length. I can walk - barely - with a fair amount of pain and over short distances, using the wall for support. When upright, I can feel the muscles in my lower back seize up, which is a new experience for me.

We try a heat pad to loosen things up, but it doesn't work. So it's off to spend our Saturday morning at the hospital. But when we get there, we discover that they're running some sort of disaster drill. We're stopped as we turn into the road that leads to the hospital, and asked if we're there for the drill or actual care. We reply the latter, and are given a green tag for the dashboard. This allows us to get by the next two checkpoints, but we do have to weave through a variety of first responders, volunteers and emergency vehicles to actually get to the Emergency drop-off.

Which, of course, is manned by someone who is also checking to see if people are there for the drill or for treatment. The guy asks me to stop at the door, but before he can say anything else a woman comes by and he leaves with her. I think he intended that I'd wait for him to return. I did not. He actually followed me into the ER when he was done with the woman, so if nothing else if we do have a disaster up here, we certainly have the right people to handle traffic flow, if nothing else.

Saturday morning is thr right time to go to the Beverly Hospital ER, as our entire visit was no longer than 90 minutes. It wasn't especially crowded; there was one mother with two kids who spent more time on her cell phone than minding her kids, one of whom apparently needed some sort of medication, and a woman who I know but haven't seen in some time, who chatted with the wife while I was being seen.

(The wife gets this semi-regularly, running into people she doesn't really know but who know me and know that we're married. Though in this case I don't know why the woman just didn't say hi while I was out there.)

Anyway, I get called and spend the next 20 minutes sitting in a room wearing shorts and a johnnie (I think we can all be thankful that they let me keep my shorts on). In this time, the woman with the kids winds up down the hall, and in the 20 minutes I was waiting they managed to get the nurse manager to come in and cause a panic when one of the kids yanked the emergency call switch in the room. Things quieted down after that; I assume the hospital had someone babysit the room from that point.

Once the doctor showed up, he spent about five minutes checking breathing, heart beat and leg movement before deciding it was a muscle problem and not an issue with discs or the like. I got various scrips and was sent packing.

And by that afternoon, I felt pretty good, well enough to hang out downstairs as if nothing happened. Which worked well, for a while. But it wasn't too long before things locked up again, at which point I put myself to bed... for nearly three days. This is the longest period I've ever spent laid up like that, and I don't recommend it. As bad as it was for me, I was also mad that I'd put the wife in a position where she had to do all the work with the baby and take care of me. I tried to minimize the amount of time she needed with me, but it was still hard on her, and I'm grateful - but not surprised - that she managed the situation in fine form. I think she only wanted to kill me once. Maybe twice.

But as the saying goes, time - and drugs - heal all woujnds, and by Wednesday I was able to get around enough to go to the baby's two month check up and into work. I'm still a little tender with some movements (getting into the car, for example), but I'd say I'm 85 percent and rising.

So whatever you plan on doing today, take a second to think about your back, and where you'd be if you were stuck on it for the weekend (and not in a good way).

Book Log 2009 #26: The Lost Army of Cambyses byPaul Sussman

A British herpetologist and an Egyptian police detective independently investigate the killing of an archaeologist (the herpetologist's semi-estranged father), which is apparently linked to a relic he purchased as a souvenir and a major terrorist organization, who want the relic to help find the titular lost army so they can sell the antiquities at the find to finance their operations.

Generally, the book is pretty standard thriller material, another book suited for reading while traveling. The depiction of the police detective is worth noting, as he's one of the rare Muslim main characters I've run across in the last few years who is a regular guy, not all that different from a police detective in any other large city.

I don't know if that makes the book any more worth reading, but it's something.

Book Log 2009 #25: Tsar by Ted Bell

This is apparently the fifth book featuring master spy Alexander Hawke, a Brit who does all the expected spy things while saving the world. He's like James Bond, but prefers rum to martinis and rides a motorcycle rather than drive an Aston Martin. I assume he has a thing for the ladies, too, but in this book he's monogamous (making this the analogue to On Her Majesty's Secret Service, I suppose).

Anyway, it's a perfectly servicable spy thriller about a Russian inventor who wants to revive the monarchy and become the new tsar (I'm also assuming that Bell likes one word titles that are a little on the nose). It's the sort of book you'd read while commuting or on a plane or on vacation, engrossing enough to pass the time. I don't feel particularly compelled to go back and read the previous entries in the series.

Bell is a former ad exec, which may explain why the brand for pretty much every item mentioned is given in the text. That's a little off-putting.

Book Log 2009 #24: Traffic by Tom Vanderbilt

Subtitled "Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us)," this book takes a look at how a variety of factors impact our driving behavior, with the emphasis on behavior, at least in the first 100 pages or so of the book. I note that page amount as I didn't get past there, as I never really engaged with the book. Don't know why exactly, and I was a bit disappointed as it is a subject that I find interesting. Maybe you'll have better luck.

Book Log 2009 #23: The Chicago Way by Michael Harvey

After reading the second book featuring Chicago private eye Michael Kelly (The Fifth Floor), I went back and read this introductory novel, which didn't quite measure up to the second one but is still quite good. The jacket blurbs try a little too hard to put this into classic noir territory, which could disappoint as it's really not up to the Hammett/Chandler standard. Still, it's about as noir as you can get in 2009, and it's got the requisite inside dealing and grit.

The story itself involves a cold case (not surprising, given Harvey's connection to Cold Case Files) that Kelly's old partner wants to revive, even though he was officially ordered to forget it. This leads to more bloodshed, and the involvement of the Chicago police, judiciary and media to link up the old crime with the new ones.

As expected, you should read the two books in sequence, as there are aspects of this book that are spolied by reading them out of turn. Both would be fine reads for your summer vacation.

It's back to work tomorrow after six weeks off to transition into being a family of three, and I'll admit to feeling a little anxious. Less so about the baby, who I'll miss but know will be in good hands with mom (mother? mommy? not sure how I'll make the reference here). More so about going back to a job after six weeks away without knowing what's been done to change things. I do expect there will be changes - my boss isn't one to let things stand pat, which is overall a good thing - but won't feel completely comfortable until I learn about them.

You would also think after that much time at home with a new baby that I'd have stories to share (but just haven't gotten to, given the lack of posting about the baby). But I don't, as something like 98 percent of a newborn's time is spent doing three things: eating, sleeping, or filling diapers (and not necessarily each in turn; multitasking is apparently an inborne trait).

Which isn't to say that there's nothing remarkable. Getting to see the little bundle grow and develop, even in these early stages, is something I'd not trade for anything. Well, I'd trade the periods of screaming we seem to be into now, but not the times where I get an actual smile and a little "goo"-like noise. I'd not trade watching him sleep, or his grabbing at my finger, or watching him flip himself on to his back (though that seems to be done more to get off of his tummy, which he's not fond of yet). Or any of a million little things that make up the other two percent of what he does, things that in and of themselves aren't notable in the abstract, but are vital when they're done by one small human.

So I really have to go back to work tomorrow?