Papa Pat Tiny Devotionals

Well, something has happened which I don't like.  Dave Freer's book, Changeling's Island, has been released as a Baen ARC, but won't be out on Amazon until April 5.  And, since it hasn't been released, it isn't eligible for review on Amazon until then. I'm not organized under the best of circumstances.  And if you knew what I had been experiencing over the past week…  Well, never mind.  I don't wanna get into that.  I'll just use this opportunity to turn a review and a couple of thoughts into a blog post.  That's probably the best thing, anyway. Tim Ryan is a nice young man who has had a string of bad luck.  Part of that luck is having parents who are much more interested in being nice to themselves than being parents.  Another part is that he has fallen under the influence of a glamour-girl of his own age, who uses her feminine wiles to persuade him to make all sorts of bad decisions, the most recent one being shoplifting (rotten little snip...

(another blog post composed using speech recognition) No, I am not going to tell you the name of this book. Don't recall the exact set of circumstances which led me to download this book.  Obviously, I was in-between reading books I wanted to review, but I don't remember which books those were.  And another thing I don't know, is how this particular book came to my attention.  I feel relatively certain that it must have been a recommendation by Amazon.  However, some responsibility is mine; I don't know if I was attracted by the cover or by the title, but something grabbed my attention. After I downloaded it, a particular line in the blurb caught my eye: the 1,000,000 seller.  If that's true, that this book has sold a million copies, it means one thing: over a million people have really, really, bad taste in books.  Because this book is a stinker. It's not a romance novel.  I could understand it being a romance book, and selling over a million copies, ...

(Another post written using speech recognition) As a 20 year old private first class in 1973, I had a fond affection for old-timey things. That was at least partly because of the indoctrination I had received during my first year at college, before I was invited to discontinue my enrollment.  That, plus a desire to be a contrarian, led to my purchase of a different set of shaving gear toward the end of my first full year in the army.  There were two things I wanted: a shaving brush, and a straight razor. If I recall correctly, the shaving brush was pretty easy to obtain:  I think I just picked it up at the post exchange.  I was able to buy the soap and shaving mug at the same time.  However, they didn't carry straight razors, and there's a really good reason for that: nobody wanted them.  Fortunately though, I was a medic, and my job involved inspecting barbershops.  That made it easy for me to arrange a little side transaction was one of the barbers a...

I find myself returning to something I originally tried many many years ago: using speech recognition software.  I can't tell you exactly what it was a dead product for the first time; I do know that it was sometime in the 90s.  I still got the software package over on my shelf where old software goes to die; if it was really important, I suppose I could look up to date from that.  It's not worth it to me, though, because that would involve moving to lots of stuff around, closing drawers, and probably falling into the cat box. The way it started  originally,  was an attempt to record some of the stories I was telling my children at the time.  For Mickey the Moose, my youngest, I told him a series of McGinty stories.  Those were about the illustrious McGinty family, all of whom had unusual names.  There was Tow Truck McGinty, Crowbar McGinty,  Tweety Bird McGinty,  and Phillip McGinty.  Now, each of these people had real names like W...

10,227 days; 1461 weeks; 336 months; 28 years. That's how long it's been since I took my last drink, on January 1, 1988. It's been long enough that I forget the desperation and horror of not being able to control my drinking; and, in a separate issue, it's been a long time since I experienced the gnawing grief and anger that forced me to drink. I can, sort of, prove this second premise in a backwards way. I've got a chronic pain condition, called ankylosing spondylitis. Think of it as arthritis everywhere, and you are on the money. It's because my ancestors were Neanderthals, and I still carry their DNA. HLA-B27, to be specific. And there is nothing that can be done for it. It won't kill me, just chew on me, and the only treatment is pain management with narcotics. I've tried frying the nerves with a microwave, acupuncture, and for almost a year, I had GREAT results with the anti-inflammatory meloxicam. I wish I could take that now, but unfortunately, it...