Fall break (day 1)

It's not really a break, of course. The power was out at the office, so I stayed home and dissassembled a heat pump. Then cleaned it with a toothbrush. Party time over fall break!

Very little actual work got done, but a lot of bureaucratic and maintenance tasks were accomplished. Laundry. Cooking a big pile of escarole. Rainy dog walks. Waiting on phone tree queues for customer service agents. Tickets closed.

End of day email tally: personal 87, work 81.

This post's theme word is verisimilar (adj), "having the appearance of truth or reality." The verisimilar dream meant that I actually cleaned the heat pump twice today.

Starter Villain

John Scalzi's Starter Villain is a sweet standalone fiction novel. The protagonist is a down-on-his-luck everyman, currently feeling sad about his divorce and scraping by with substitute teaching. When his longtime-estranged uncle dies, he hears about it first on the news and then in a very real way when his uncle's estate reaches out to ask him to host the funeral... and then sucks him into the wacky, fast-moving world of a series of comedy and action-adventure tropes. It turns out that his uncle was a supervillain, and he stands to inherit a vast empire of cool/profitable/evil(?) companies.

Scalzi is excellent at writing zippy dialog and action scenes. This book was an easy and fun read (it distracted me from three days of migraines). I'd recommend it as summer beach reading, particularly for cat lovers.

This post's theme word is pecksniff (n), "a person who pretends to have high moral principles." The convocation of villains featured many pecksniffs.