In this last week of this trip, I've chosen to completely overhaul my life off shift. (Yes
Jon, I do have a life off shift, surprising as that may sound. :P) No more circuit training, no more madly rushing down the swaying and teetering non-existant path on a motionless bike, or rowing furiously while being buffeted by the waves that reach me through some n bulkheads... No more staying awake too late to get even 6 decent hours of sleep. Of course there were other circumstances, rather beyond my control, that also contributed to this, but we shall not go into that. At all.
Instead, I've been back to reading a bit more than I usually do here, and managed to finish Eldest. Loved it, and then of course was left hanging on the edge :(. There's a certain sense to reading a trilogy when all three books are out. Now I'm desperately waiting for
two final books to come out, the last
Game World book and the last
Inheritance book :-<. Anyway, with not much choice, and since the the book had been lying bookmarked at page one since I bought it a month back, I picked up
The Inheritance of Loss again.
It probably wasn't the best idea to go straight from Alagaesia to Kalimpong in a space of barely 5 minutes :|. There was a certain similarity in that gloom permeated both, the end of Eldest, and the beginning of TIoL, but the world, stripped of it's fantastic aspect, it's promise of an ultimately happy ending, and of course the magic :), seemed altogether too dismal. Coming across this
article on Kiran Desai the next day did help get me more 'into' the book so to speak... though it might just have been the gap. But I'm beginning to quite like the way she skitters about in time and space with the narrative. I like it, but am wary of letting myself get too immersed into it, afraid that the gloom might somehow seep into me. And that, while still on the ship, is not a very good idea at all :D.
Then of course there's movies! After a sequence of really terrible, not so bad, but still quite missable, and one reasonable movie this side of new year, I'd gone back to old and trusted fare. The Lion King IIIs and the Sinbad- Legend of Seven Seas's and the Titan A.E.s never fail to amuse :). But last night I got somewhat dragooned into watching
Almost Famous. I'm quite surprised how I'd never actually watched it before. I was quite blown away to be honest. It's exactly the fascinating, heartbreaking, out of the ordinary kind that I've come to love. And I was also extremely surprised, and very happy to see
Zooey Deschanel (Trillian in H2G2!) with her sparkling eyes and weird look, and her awesomely funny name :D, though for a very teensy bit role.
And finally Sudoku. >:) Yes, it's back! Though the incidence of this passtime off-shift is usually merely a spillover from on-shift :P. So me and Jon are back at it, and at other vague variants of it that Jon keeps finding every other day! First there was
Kakuro, apparently the monster cousin of Sudoku, which was a bit of a passing phase, but now there's
Killer Sudoku! (Or Addoku, but I find that name disgusting, though it does convey the sense better.) Anyway, now that I've rambled long enough, I'd get back to my latest Killer grid, and leave you to figure out what these are from the Wiki links :D.
Currently: almost lukhha :D
Listening to: Oasis - Stand by me
Started reading up on stars and their evolution and came across the phenomenon of galactic collisions. It's awesome!!! Here we are, worried about some giant asteroid that's supposed to come ploughing into the earth at some point, and there's not a whole lot we can do, except maybe try to blow it up or something! Imagine being part of a galaxy that's about to collide with another! Even if we knew about it gazillions of years in advance, there's absolutely f***-all we can do about it!! Except maybe hope to somehow survive, and watch the stars play out a gigantic game of war where many die, many are born anew, and a few, the supreme warriors, go supernova! Wouldn't that be something?!! :)