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Sep 16 08: rabbit holes and other entertainments
I didn’t get much done this weekend. It’s my father’s fault. He asked me what I wanted for my birthday, and I asked him for Spore, and he gave it to me, and it ate my brain.
I have spent intermittent periods of the last week or so raising a little carnivorous floater in the primordial soup up into a rapacious carnivorous biped that rules its world with an iron claw-thingy (and also an iron poison-squirting thingy, which is located between its eyes). I fine-tuned its anatomy and its culture; I designed its houses and its factories and its theaters, its cars and its boats and its planes. It is now exploring the local byways of its home galaxy in a little spaceship that looks kind of like it escaped from a ’50s B movie. It arrived last Monday. The following morning I decided to forego the morning swim practice because I figured there was no point on attending it after 15 minutes’ sleep. I left it alone for a couple days and then stayed up outrageously late again; I left it alone until Saturday morning and then… and then suddenly it was Saturday evening. Really really fun, is Spore, but it’s also some kind of electro-hyper-crack for game players with a tendency toward obsessive behavior. You have been warned.
So anyway, after I stepped carefully away from the computer on Saturday evening I went over to Hugh’s house for dinner and Battlestar Galactica. We’re both completely addicted to it and are burning through the DVDs as fast as Netflix will let us. Yes, it’s Stress TV, but it’s also utterly brilliant. Wow. (We’re about halfway through Season 2. Spoil it for me and die.)
And then I went home and thought: Hey, I have an hour or so before bed. Why not turn that lovely skein of Valkyrie into a ball so I can make something with it? Because I just finished my first ever pair of socks last week and I want something new to work on.
And so I untwisted the skein and got ready to hand-wind the thing into a center-pull ball. I turned to lay the skein out on the bed. And then I dropped it. Within four seconds of hitting the floor, the first 6 yards of that skein had turned into an utterly spectacular tangle. I mean, that ox-cart at Gordium had nothing on this. Well, damn, I thought. This’ll take me a little longer than expected, but there’s nothing to do but to start untying it. It can’t be that bad, anyway. Right?
Right. That was fun, and all, and heaven knows I was happy to immerse myself in yet another project, but still: seven and a half hours of my life that I will never get back. Many of them hours during which I should have been sleeping. (Really, I need to just get myself a swift and a ball-winder. Because never again.)
Next thing you know I’m going to acquire an exciting new hobby like matchstick-counting or hand-washing. If that happens, send help.