It's still cold

[altivo]

So I more or less stuck to my plan. I had to go out for groceries and to take care of the animals, but that's it. We got all the way up to +2F this afternoon, but it's now -5F and dropping. Tomorrow should be better, they say.

I started reading two books. One is Terry Pratchett's Thud which I hadn't yet gotten around to even though Gary has been nagging me at intervals to read it. He's right, it's pretty good so far. The other is the manual for the Model 100, which turned out to be larger than I expected. I didn't get one with the machine, but I found a used one online for $3.99 and it arrived today. About 230 pages, spiral bound, 8.5x11 paper. A substantial tome.

The woodstove is going, which makes the other end of the house comfortable. My office, alas, is pretty chilly, so I'm going to abandon this computer and go back to reading nearer the stove.

Comments

[gabrielhorse.livejournal.com]

It's cold & rainy here...that's enough for me ;)

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Heh. You should be here this morning. You'd appreciate Florida's "cold and rainy" as "tropical." We're holding at about -7F with wind chill down to more like -20. Even inside the closed barn, I could feel frostbite attacking the minute I slipped a mitten off to measure out grain.

[songdogmi.livejournal.com]

My backyard temperature monitor says it's +8 at the moment. All the NWS stations in southeast Michigan are still over zero, but all in single digits. They've hoisted a wind chill warning, which surprised me, but I guess the wind chill could get to -15 tonight. I don't plan to find out; I'm in for the night. But the skies are clear and the moon is very bright. It's very pretty out, in a bitter way.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

We've been on a "wind chill advisory" for about 36 hours now. Last I looked, it is supposed to lift at noon today. It's nasty out there.

If you have a clear sky right after sunset, check out the combination of Mars and the moon, quite near each other last night and tonight. It's supposed to look really neat, but I couldn't stand to linger last night and see it. We had haze in the sky anyway.

[songdogmi.livejournal.com]

We only got down to +6 overnight. I feel gypped. I'm sure the wind made it cold enough, though.

I'll have to look for the moon-Mars combination. If we ever have clear skies again, which looks kind of doubtful per the forecast. (Well, the next few days, anyway.)

[tinbender.livejournal.com]

Did you hold off the cold or whatever it was you thought you were coming down with?

[altivo.livejournal.com]

"Whatever it is" still hasn't decided whether to attack full force or back off. I've got just enough symptoms to be irritated. Last night I thought it was really going to come on, but it hasn't, so perhaps that was just the extra glass of wine I had at dinner. ;p

[schnee.livejournal.com]

It'll be interesting to hear what you think of "Thud!". I personally thought it was one of Terry's weaker books, but then, I'm not that big a fan of most of his newest works.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

So far (about a third of the way through) I'm liking Thud! pretty well. It may not be his best, but it's not his worst either. I may have non-standard tastes, though. I liked Monstrous Regiment, where Gary did not care for it. My all time faves are the really offbeat ones, like Small Gods, Pyramids, and Thief of Time.

[schnee.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's certainly not his worst. :)

"Small Gods" was wonderful, that's for sure. "Thief of Time" and "Pyramids" were solid, although neither's among my outright favourites; "Monstrous Regiment" is one I honestly didn't really care for.

My own personal favourites are probably the ones starting at "Moving Pictures" - "Reaper Man", "Witches Abroad", the aforementioned "Small Gods", "Lords and Ladies" and "Men-At-Arms". "Interesting Times" was also interesting (heh), and I absolutely loved "Maskerade"; "Feet of Clay" was also very, very good, and so's "The Truth".

(BTW, I may have gotten some titles wrong - I read them in German, of course, and I'm just quoting the original titles from memory now.)

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Yes, I liked The Truth a lot. Feet of Clay is pretty brilliant, but not quite so appealing. I find it rather spooky.

I actually liked Going Postal a whole lot, but that may be because I have first hand experience with some of the things he makes fun of, particularly stamp collecting. His political and social satire is always on target. I haven't read Making Money yet, but since it's apparently a sequel to Going Postal I don't expect it to be quite as good. Soul Music was another that I especially enjoyed. I'm particularly fond of the Librarian, of course, whenever he appears.

The witches are always good, but the books that feature them often seem a little weak to me in terms of plot lines. I tend to enjoy it more when he looks at new aspects of his world and its people rather than revisiting elements that we've seen repeatedly.

[schnee.livejournal.com]

*s* Yeah, the Librarian is definitely one of my favourite character. FWIW, I also think that he embodies the things I missed in novels like "Monstrous Regiment" - the whole spectrum of funny stuff, from the whimsically charming to the iconoclastically absurd.

"Going Postal" was one book I didn't enjoy that much, myself, and "Making Money" was even less appealing. They weren't outright bad, of course, but not books I'd ever read again; like "Monstrous Regiment", they didn't even really seem to be Discworld novels in the stricter sense, but rather just novels that happened to be set in the Discworld (that is, in Ankh-Morpork and the Sto plains), without the Discworld's unique charm.

Ah well.

Yeah, I agree about the witches, too, but there's definitely a progression. They were still developing in "Wyrd Sisters" (I'm disregarding Granny Weatherwax's appearance in "Equal Rites" entirely, since she was pretty much a different character back then); in "Witches Abroad" and "Lords and Ladies", they shone, but after that, in novels like "Carpe Jugulum", it was already showing that they had their 15 minutes of fame and that there wasn't that much to explore about them as characters anymore. Still, "Carpe Jugulum" was a decent book as well.

I actually think the same thing can be said - and to a larger extent - about the nightwatch, too, and particular about Sam Vimes. "Guards! Guards!" was a good start, and "Men-At-Arms" was really good, but in later novels, such as "Night Watch" and "Thud!", the (night)watch and Vimes had really lost its appeal to me. He worked well as a minor character in "The Truth", but then, that was a very good book in general.

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

*sits in front of the wood stove and gets toasty watching the behind the grate*

[altivo.livejournal.com]

We had a cat who used to crawl under the stove and go to sleep. It's a wonder he didn't burn his whiskers off.

He just vanished about a year ago, and I suspect he was eaten by mice. ;p

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

Ack you have those kind of mice? A good name for cats or dogs that sit too close to the fire is "Melba" ;) Crawl under the stove? Gad, my cat does try to lie under the oil heater...I have to keep moving her away so she doesn't get too hot.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

We have some tough mice lately, yes. In fact, yesterday morning when I got up I heard a noise in the kitchen. We use mouse traps that catch the mouse alive, and then we dump them in the woods at the far back of our land. Sure enough there was a mouse in the trap, which is a little black plastic box. He was jumping around so that the entire box was bouncing up into the air and coming back down with a clatter. I had to put a one pound weight from the kitchen scales on top of it to hold him down until we could take him out and dump him.

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

Cripes..not rats are they? O.O

[altivo.livejournal.com]

No, I do know the difference. Anyway, a rat wouldn't fit into one of those tiny traps.

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

Could they have been micro rats? O.O