June 26, 2014

Today was a fairly uneventful day. At work I ingested and transferred a bunch of trailers and movies. Much like I did yesterday. As far as I know, everything should have been good for tonight and everything will be good for the next week. As far as I know. It all started looking the same after awhile.

More importantly, I finished reading 11/22/63 by Stephen King today. Another one of his giant books. I wish he would be less verbose. It verges on Ayn Rand at times. Even though it was over 800 pages and took me forever to finish, I liked the book. I even liked the ending for the most part. A lot more than I tend to like his endings. I was not a fan of the ending for Under The Dome. I really enjoyed the book but then when it came time to explain the reasoning for the Dome, it was a big letdown. I was pretty much expecting the same from 11/22/63 but I liked the alternate future and the reasoning behind what was happening with the time travel and the effects of changing the past. I would have liked a happier ending, though. This is one case where the ending was not made better with sadness. I don't like sad endings but sometimes they just make sense and make a story better. And often that ending seems to be the obvious choice and then they go with happy and it just throws everything off. 11/22/63 was a story that would have been perfectly good with a happy ending. The main character devoted so much of time and effort into trying to do good and in the end he pretty much gets shafted. After the length, that is my main complaint about the book.

I also read an article in National Geographic but with all the actual work I had to do at work and my determination to finished 11/22/63, I didn't get around to writing with my left hand. I wrote part of a sentence and spent a long time holding and playing with a pen in my left hand just to work on it feeling more familiar, but no real writing practice took place. I will need to make up for that tomorrow. Or at least write more than part of a sentence.

Even with having my mom double-check my recording of the United States game this morning, it had disappeared by the time I got home. I thought it was a space issue and didn't record one of the afternoon games just in case, but that didn't matter. I was annoyed. It is really dangerous searching for a stream of a soccer game and not finding out the score of that game. I spent most of my day at work in silence because around two o'clock one of the DJs on the radio had watched the game and started to talk about it. I have never moved so fast as I did when I got up to turn the radio off. I don't know if he was going to spoil the ending but I wasn't going to take any chances. And then I had to Google the game when I got home to find the stream of it. I got lucky.

The United States ended up losing to Germany one to zero but they still advance to the next round due to points and the score of the Portugal v. Ghana game. I want nothing more than for the United States to get further and further in the World Cup, but the further they get, the more people will become interested, and the harder it will get to avoid spoilers.

I didn't have a visit with the new volunteer kid tonight because I couldn't get a hold of him. Last week he moved in with his grandparents and I didn't get a phone number for them. I am going to keep trying his cellphone and I emailed my supervisor to see if she had a number for the grandparents. If not I will have to just call the hotel and hope I get one of the grandparents or someone that knows who the kid is, because I don't know the grandparents' names. Maybe by next week I'll have things figured out.