Wreckage

Insert here my customary complaint about the arrival of Monday with the attendant requirement to actually do some work, enough said. As chronicled earlier in the blog I’ve been in a running battle with our technology company who quoted a wildly inflated price for some work that needed to be done. They insisted the work, which included driving around Worcester to map out bus route modifications, would take six days. I told them they must be sniffing some of their favorite chemicals and that we could get the work done in one day.

In an attempt to make their point they had their guy and his techno van show up at 8am on Monday expecting it would take us some time to get organized and at least push us into an additional, billable day. Since I’d made such an ass over myself insisting the work could be done in one day – I was ready for them. It was a true United Nations effort as the tech company guy was Haitian, my driver was El Salvadoran and I’m whatever I am. The guy I’ve been doing battle with called several times to check in on us and seemed genuinely rattled when I told him we were taking a full hour for lunch since we were so far ahead of schedule. We finished with two hours to spare, well short of one day, much less the six they quoted. Life is all about the small victories.

The Baby Robins Were Learning how to Fly Yesterday
Buddy was a Little Freaked Out but Supplied the Necessary Motivation
Nest is Now Empty

Being so busy helped decompress from the fantastic weekend just passed. It prevented me from dwelling too much on how much fun was dispensed changing with some of my favorite people in the world. Since we’re heading back up to Keene tonight for a birthday party the decompression needed to go only so far. Date night was rolled back into Monday and we saw the movie – Trainwreck, one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a very long time.

It’s hard to imagine finding fertile ground in the well-trod subject of girl meets boy but this film takes the traditional rom-com and turns it inside out and sixteen ways from Sunday.

Amy Schumer is so funny in the title role as a New York gal with serious “issues” when it comes to men. The movie is stock full of fantastic cameos and supporting roles including another magnificent turn by Tilda Swinton (does she ever do anything bad?). Bill Hader also finally gets to emerge from his usual background roles to play the guy who may finally be right for Amy. There are too many laugh out loud moments to chronicle and while the film does limp a little to the finish line, that’s almost a relief after laughing continuously for nearly two hours straight.

I also finished off my latest foray into Christopher Nuttall’s Empire sci fi empire series (book eleven) First to Fight. He abandons his ongoing war of the collapsed galaxy wide human empire to look back at the origins of one of the lead protagonists, Colonel Stalker. Nuttall’s brave to take on the basic training of futuristic military since Heinlein set the bar so high in Starship Troopers. Nuttall is up to the task though and delivers a fascinating look at Slaughterhouse, the planet devoted to training the Empire Marines. It was hinted at throughout the other books in the series but he now takes the reader through Stalker’s own experience training there as a young man.

We then follow Stalker through some of his earliest assignments and this is where Nuttall is at his best, with close combat scenes. He has an innate ability to capture the emotions and actions of the warriors as they handle escalating violence against the backdrop of the failing empire that sent them out. This is a fabulous addition to the empire series which was starting to grind down a little as it was forced to focus on higher and higher levels of the military-political spectrum. We’re back in the dirt and blood with the fighting marines which is what drew me to the series to being with.