Coming out of the Otherland

I just recently finished the Otherland series by Tad Williams.  I have to give the man credit in two big areas.  First he wrote an amazingly complex story that intertwined and stayed cohesive over thousands of pages of an imaginary world.  Secondly, he wrote it in a way that kept me interested to follow his writting through that journey even when at times it felt like it would never end.

I honestly had no idea how the book would end until I got there, even during the last 100 pages of the saga I was unsure where things were leading.

But now that I’ve resurfaced and recalibrated my brain with a few murder mysteries and teen romance novels I’m unsure if the Otherland world is any more believable than the one in Twilight that I just tore through in a day.

In the past week i’ve dealt with data coruption on solid servers for no apparent reason after 4 years of running perfectly, my own computers having the most bizarre and annoying bugs where the mouse or keyboard would just stop working despite swapping out parts like it was a wholesale mouse/keyboard junkyard and just so many random glitches in computer software and hardware that the idea of a working virtual reality universe that mimics real life is completely insane to me.

Today I honestly believe it is more likely that vampires, werewolves and psychics exist than that humankind will find a viable virtual reality that passes the turing test in my lifetime.

So after all the great storytelling in the Otherland series which made for a great sci-fi read, I am accutely aware of the fiction part of that genre, no matter how much I wished I could believe again…. in anything.

What happens when the internet goes down….

Last night I got home and I had no internet connection… it was one of those things that happens so rarely I just sat there for a minute not quite believing what had happened.

So my night went something like this… sit down, stare at the monitor for a while… go check the other computer and stare at it for a while.

Then I restarted all the internet related hardware after letting it sit unplugged for a while.

Repeat the shocked disbelief and staring at monitors.

Then I checked all the wires to make sure a cat hadn’t chewed them… then went back and tried the previous restart step again.

Repeat the shocked disbelief and staring at monitors…

After that i got all new wires and rewired my stuff to bypass the router.. maybe my router was bad.

Repeat the shocked disbelief and staring at monitors.

Then I just stared at the modem for a while willing the little green “online” light to go solid instead of blinking.

After a good hour and a half, I finally found the phone number for my cable company, called them up and after an easy to navigate series of choices (which shocked me) I was told that my whole area had lost internet connection and there was no ETA.

I finally got over my disbelief, and put away the desire to keep calling the company up to see if the status had changed, or get through to a real person to complain.  But that brought up my own memories of work when a service is down.  And I finally decided I’d rather be the customer than the person dealing with the problem.

Overall I had a pretty enjoyable night, I read lots, played some non-internet computer games and fell asleep watching on of my favorite shows on TV…. but this morning when I woke up I was SOO happy that my little online light was solid

Women In Literature

I’m about 200 pages into Tad William’s last novel in the Otherland series. I was reading it today on my lunch break and something started bothering me about the whole presentation of women in the novels I’ve read lately… and no I’m not PMS’ing.

Women don’t seem to menstruate unless it’s a significant plot factor. Tad covers cathetars several times for men and women and how they handle all sorts of other bodily functions. I started thinking about other books I’ve read lately.. The Wheel of Time series, The Sword of Truth series… mystery and vampire novels by the dozens, William Gibson and Neil Stephenson and some Kin Stanley Robinson sprinkled in. I’ve read about graphic carnal acts, detailed castration and a ton of stuff I’d rather forget about, especially while I’m eating.

But nothing I’ve read lately recognizes that women spend a significant amount of their post-puberty life wrangling with cycles that seem way more mysterious than moon phases. Even if you are on the pill or other type of controlling substance for your period there is a ton of “break through bleeding” and “spotting” that are side effects. Those terms are about the best way to express the really annoying problem of blood coming out of parts of your body you can’t just put a band-aid on.

I don’t think periods are something that is a wonderful thing women should embrace and enjoy as a gift of life. Barring actually cutting parts out I’d do a lot of stuff to get out of having to deal with the bleeding and discomfort (ie pain). But I’m annoyed that this basic part of human life that half of us have happen to us, and the other half have to deal with the consequences, seems to be limited to literature that is specifically targeted to address it (feminist or what you’d find in a Women In Literature class in college) or finds it convenient to base a plot around while ignoring for the rest of the time line.

My First Family Reunion

This past labour day was a whirlwind of travel and people.

On Friday I said goodbye to my kitties and my San Diego apartment and flew up to Vancouver, BC.  I met up with my immediately family there for dinner and slept over before we took off on Saturday.

Saturday morning started out a little later than we had hoped.  I ran into the coffee pot with coffee that was already brewed… that is not a normal occurance for me since I’ve been living on my own for a while and I blame it for my 30 minute break on the couch before getting ready for the day.

My sister and I then took off for our very first road trip together.  We were doing pretty well until we hit some absolutely horrible traffic,  we were absolutely stopped not even crawling.  While we were trying to figure out what to do we turned on the radio to see if they had any news and sure enough the #1 Highway was closed due to a massive accident.

This caused us quite the dilema and we deliberated for a while until my sister had a revelation.  Somewhere not too far in our past we had made a wrong turn.  We weren’t on the highway at all but in the line for the US/Canada border crossing, which was of course insanely long due to the holiday weekend.  It also turned out we wanted to take the #5 not the #1 so the highway closure didn’t affect us at all.

So off we went up to our first stop, a quick visit with our Grandparents in Chilliwack.  We only got about 30 minutes there as we had a long drive ahead of us even if we stayed on the right roads.

The one thing I found out on this trip was that I had forgotten how absolutely gorgeous BC is.  We got up to Salmon Arm and stayed in a very nice Inn accross from Shuswap lake.

While I was searching for some pictures to give the area justice I came accross this website that had some nice ones:

http://www.worldisround.com/articles/19098/index.html

I got to meet up with family I hadn’t seen in ages and met some new ones that had married into our family since the last time I had been up there.  We had dinner and chatted and looked at pictures, all in all a very nice experience.

The next morning was breakfast and then we hit the road to head back to Maple Ridge where I spent the night and hopped on the plane the next day to fly back to San Diego!

I think that’s more traveling than I’ve ever done in one weekend and before I left I was really leery about the whole thing, but I am absolutely sure that I’d do it again to get to spend time with family!