robert jordan, aka james rigney, R.I.P.

well, shit. from nihilistic_kid, who reports that robert jordan has died. i have been a reluctant fan of the wheel of time books since about 1995. someone i was working with at the time loaned me his copy of the eye of the world, and i was hooked. i guess there were 5 books in the series at that time, and i read all of them pretty quickly. i liked the first 3 or 4...and they started frustrating me somewhere around book 5 or 6. i kept reading as each new volume was released, every 2 years or so. i felt like i was too far in to give up on it, at that point. i honestly thought it would end at book 7 or 8...then 9...then 10...then 11. i guess it'll be an even dozen, when/if anyone picks up the half-finished "final" book and finishes it. i also kept hoping it would turn "back" into an interesting series, but it didn't. IMO, of course. particularly problematic to me: the fact that the female characters become completely idiotic as soon as they fall in love, along with the whole treatment of gender relations in the novels.

still, i'm sad to see jordan go. i'm especially sad that he didn't get to complete book 12 before he died--i know how much he wanted to accomplish that, and it's a bummer that he didn't. my heart goes out to his family.

in other news...

i am home from michigan--my plane landed safely just before 11am, and i arrived safely home at around noon. i'm planning to spend today decompressing. it was a really good visit, but also stressful and sad-making. michigan is starting to look downright alien to me, which feels strange...

my return home yesterday morning was lovely, though. glaucon greeted me at the door with a smile and a wonderful hug. we "reacquainted" for a few, then headed out for brunch with evernanon, D, F, and E (not necessarily in that order). i had some delicious swedish pancakes. after that, we went back to evernanon and D's house (not joined by F, though) to watch desk set. yay! it was a perfect afternoon. just what i needed. complete with dog time. (i got lots of that in michigan, too, as each one of my siblings has at least one dog, but one can never have too much--or even enough--dog time!)

:-)

bookstore patronage refund

i'm slightly annoyed. either this is new, or it started last year and i just forgot, but the university bookstore is no longer crediting the patronage refund directly to my UBS credit card. instead, they have sent me a gift card for this year's refund. guess what? the gift card is not applicable to credit card balances. (writing this is ringing a bell...i think i do remember being annoyed by this last year.)

dammit! that's what i wanted to use it for! it would have nearly paid the stupid thing off.

now i have a UBS gift card for just shy of $200, and i don't know what to use it for. should i piddle it away on a book here, a book there? use it to buy a fancy new i-pod? i'm liking the new i-pod touch, because it's got flash memory, wi-fi, and a calendar on it; but the biggest one is only 16G (at $399) which compares very unfavorably with the 80G (at $249) or 160G (at $349) sizes available in what they're now calling the i-pod classic. then again, i could just use it to buy the new version of OSX when it comes out. i believe they're releasing that in october.

well, the card doesn't expire until next june, so i might as well hang onto it for awhile until i decide what i really want to do with it. we'll see if the price of that i-pod touch doesn't come down a bit.