Bureau-Tuesday

The BRS has Doubled!

I’ve been conspicuously absent from the electro-magnetic spectrum for the past couple days as we had a team of Federal bureaucrats descend on us for our triennial review. Every three years the feds send a team out to audit transit agencies to see if they are complying with the library worth of federal regulations. It actually sounds more fun than it is but we survived and received some nice kudos from the customer on our results.

Her Mother - the Beautiful ABFA

The BRS confirmed the visual evidence that she has been growing like a weed. The ABFA reported that she had grown to 13 pounds and 9 ounces, so in effect doubling her size since arrival. She’s a happy baby who only seems grumpy when my son comes home from work – punishing him for being away all day. We’ll be heading back up there on Saturday for some more wall work. I also sent the ABFA this picture of her at nearly the same age as the BRS. We had only brief contact with the FBR last night as she called when we were on the way to the movies. She’s into one of the phases where she doesn’t talk to us and just stares at the screen waiting to be entertained. That’s usually half the fun but we couldn’t avail ourselves of the opportunity last night.

I finished the latest in my trek through RW Peake’s excellent Marching with Caesar series with Final Campaign. This is the last in the series featuring Titus Pullo who started the series as a raw recruit of Julius Caesar. In the subsequent books he worked his way up through the ranks to a Centurion and eventually appointed as a Camp Prefect by Augustus Caesar. In this last book he is a legend around the Roman world and called upon for one last campaign as a pampered patrician looking for glory embarks on an invasion into what is now Bulgaria with Pullo as the military expert. He subsequently falls into trouble with Rome as the campaign was unauthorized and he is literally fighting for his life against class conscious patricians. I preferred the times he spends hacking away at barbarians but this was a fitting conclusion to his storied life and I truly enjoyed the time I spent with Pullo. I was prepared to move onto the next in the series featuring Pullo’s adopted son but when I opened my Kindle I found a newly published book by the Master – Stephen King waiting for me.

Keene Friend joined my wife and I for date night last night as we saw one of my most anticipated movies of the year – Deadpool 2. This sequel was going to be difficult to pull off because the first movie was so innovative, irreverent, and funny. That’s a difficult formula to repeat and to the filmmakers credit they didn’t. Deadpool is still hilarious and continually shatters the fourth wall but this played as a more straight forward superhero action flick, albeit with hilarity liberally spread throughout. Ryan Reynolds continues to own the title role and once again proves to be a master of the one-liners. He decided to explore how many ways he could dismember himself and the resulting regrowth periods were all too funny. Zazie Beetz was a very welcome addition to the cast and James Brolin again ably handled a semi-villainous role as a Soldier from the future having to deal with Deadpool’s insanity. I will never forgive them however for limiting the contributions of Morena Baccarin – that should be a chargeable criminal offense. Julian Dennison was a miss in the part of the mutant child targeted by Brolin for death, he got the adolescent annoying part down but not much else. There are some absolutely stunningly funny cameos which I’ll have to see the movie multiple times to catch completely along with the one liners I was laughing too hard to hear. It was, in other words, a Deadpool movie – a glorious mish mash of laughter, gore and inappropriateness. I loved it.