Review: Revenant Gun by Yoon Ha Lee

Trade paperback, 427 pages
Published 2018
Acquired November 2018
Read December 2018

Machineries of Empire, Book Three: Revenant Gun
by Yoon Ha Lee

I didn't like Ninefox Gambit, but ended up really enjoying Raven Stratagem when I dutifully read it for the Hugo Awards, so I willingly picked up the final volume of the Machineries of Empire trilogy. This isn't as good as Raven Stratagem, but it is decent. Like Raven, it starts strong but kind of fizzles out, in that the narrative drive seems to dissipate as the novel goes, instead of increasing in intensity. The beginning of the book is strong, but isn't delivered on. I like the idea of one Jedao being used to bring down another Jedao, but there's not much of a reckoning out of this. The beginning also promises much out of Kel Brezan, my favorite character. He's a crashhawk (a Kel without the "formation instinct" that forces them to obey orders) but despite that he's become the leader of a breakaway government of his own. We get a few chapters of him learning to navigate this new situation, but this subplot isn't as prominent as I'd hoped.

The action in this series is always kind of obscure, but what got me invested in Raven was the characters; Revenant's characters aren't as compelling, unfortunately. An okay conclusion to an okay trilogy, but I feel like it could have been a great series. Still, I'll pick up the fourth volume, a collection of short stories, when it comes out.

I Am Steve Mollmann, age 13

To write my recent post on my high school glory days in the Science Fiction Club, I pulled out an external hard drive in the (I thought) vain hope that it contained some stuff from those days. To my surprise it did; in fact, it contains files going all the way back to 1997. I didn't have my own computer until late high school, I think, so these must have been copied from the family computer, and thence from computer of mine to computer of mine until it all ended up on this external hard drive, in about 2006.

I use this external now mostly to story excess Big Finish audio dramas, and so I haven't really looked at parts of its file structure like E:>Backups>My Doc in a long time, but from it you can get a continuous record of my obsessions and interests from junior high up to early grad school. It is kind of fascinating to excavate your earlier self. The oldest thing on the drive is a spreadsheet of what Oz books I had read; I would have been eleven at the time it was last modified. It's amusing to see that it lists the author of one of them as "?"; apparently I came across a reference to Yankee in Oz, but not who wrote it. In 2019, of course, this information is trivially easy to determine. Much less so only a year after the debut of AltaVista.

One of the earliest files is this poem from 1998. I would have been 13, in the eighth grade, following this format:

Thirteen-year-old Steve was clearly not too dissimilar from thirty-three-year-old Steve. Still interested in space and imagining himself there. I guess I've moved from "wanna-be-writer" to actual writer, and I did publish that novel. I didn't know my junior high self was such a peace activist, however.

I'm not convinced he was to be honest; dated two weeks after this is an exhaustive list of every piece of military equipment in Command & Conquer: Red Alert. Young Steve loved his pointless lists every bit as much as old Steve.

Also I've found an essay where Young Steve explains that freedom is a worthy goal that must always be pursued, from Egypt and the Kush to the British and the Americans, but sometimes it fails-- such as when the South attempted to pursue freedom from the North! I think I originally wrote this on the spot for Power of the Pen and then revised it for a school essay contest, which I won. he "War for Southern Independence" myth was in the American educational system in the 1990s.

I also found this masterpiece by my brother:

I can't wait for his novel.

Reading Roundup Wrapup: April 2019

Pick of the month: Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea by Sarah Pinsker. I didn't finish many books this month (I'm in the middle of several I will hopefully finish soon), but I suspect this collection would have won out even in a more crowded month. One of the benefits of Hugo voting has been increased exposure to contemporary short sf, and one of the benefits of increased exposure to contemporary short sf has been discovering Sarah Pinsker. This volume collects a number of her best stories, and I dug many of them.

All books read:
1. Transformers: Unicron by John Barber, with Chris Ryall, David Rodriguez, Brandon Easton, Christos Gage, and Magdalene Visaggio
2. Transformers: Fall of Cybertron by John Barber
3. Transformers Prime: Rage of the Dinobots by Mike Johnson and Mairghread Scott
4. Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea: Stories by Sarah Pinsker
5. Conspiracy of the Planet of the Apes by Andrew E.C. Gaska, with Rich Handley, Christian Berntsen, and Erik Matthews
6. Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi
7. Abbott by Saladin Ahmed

All books acquired:
1. Space Opera by Catherynne M. Valente
2. Conversations on Writing by Ursula K. Le Guin with David Naimon
3. The Sixth World, Book One: Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse
4. Monstress, Volume Three: Haven by Marjorie M. Liu
5. The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal
6. Star Trek: The Fall: Revelation and Dust by David R. George III
7. On Her Majesty's Secret Service by Ian Fleming

Books remaining on "To be read" list: 651 (up 2)
Books remaining on "To review" list: 22 (down 2)

Star Trek: The Destiny Era: Indistinguishable from Magic

Mass market paperback, 483 pages
Published 2011
Acquired September 2012
Read January 2019

Star Trek: The Next Generation: Indistinguishable from Magic

by David A. McIntee

Stardate 60074.2-60214.1 (early 2383)
This is the first novel branded "The Next Generation" that I've reached in my marathon, but though it might be so de jure it has much less claim to that label de facto than several other novels I've read that don't have "The Next Generation" printed on the title page. Events begin on the Enterprise-E with the whole Destiny-era gang-- Picard, Worf, Choudhury, La Forge-- but soon La Forge has joined the crew of the USS Challenger on detachment.

Instead of being a TNG installment, the book feels like the pilot for a slightly retooled S.C.E./Corps of Engineers series (with the exception of how it ties up; I'll get to that later). Scotty, still heading the Starfleet Corps of Engineers, captains the USS Challenger, a Galaxy-class testbed for experimental technologies. The ship is crewed by a bevy of familiar engineers from across Star Trek: in addition to Scotty and La Forge, Reg Barclay and Dr. Leah Brahms are the major ones, plus Nog is chief of security. On top of that, you have some familiar guest characters like Berlinghoff Rasmussen and Guinan, and some new characters, including the Challenger's delightful chief engineer and a very enthusiastic Klingon woman pilot. It reminds one of set-ups for new ongoing series like New Frontier or Titan. It's the kind of thing that could be overly fannish, but McIntee keeps it on the successful side. We would never ever see Barclay, Nog, and Brahms work together on screen, but this is what tie-in fiction is for.

The main plot of the novel begins with the Challenger investigating the mysterious reappearance of the NX-07 Intrepid, fresh out of the era of Enterprise, but with a dead crew far from its last known position. This part has a pleasing technical mystery to it: of course, a lot of it is bafflegab, but as in some Golden Age sf, it's fun to watch a team of highly competent professionals do their thing. Berlinghoff Rasmussen, as a native of the 22nd century himself, is brought on as a consultant, but soon things are disrupted by an it's-so-crazy-it-just-might-work plan from an old villain, and La Forge and Barclay have to save the day while prisoners. It's good, if generic Star Trek fun. Like I said, this is what tie-in fiction is for. Then, as the Challenger investigates the phenomenon that caused the displacement of Intrepid, things get bigger and crazier, and unfortunately, somewhat rushed. There are a lot of cool concepts in the second half of the novel, but I often felt like the characters were rocketing through them. (Though what happens to Scotty, plus his memorial service, are quite nice.)

Characters rocketing through things is actually the big fault of the novel. La Forge goes through a whole lot here, and it's curiously understated; we get very little sense of how La Forge feels about this all, what's at stake for him personally and emotionally. La Forge becomes captain of the Challenger halfway through, in a nice piece of continuity with Voyager's "Timeless," but surprisingly there's no coherent subplot about him adjusting to command or what captaincy means to him or how he has to act differently than he was. Similarly, he gets together with Leah Brahms, but I'm not really sure why: it's like they see each other again, and huzzah, they're back together.

What comes after the climax is disappointing. Indistinguishable from Magic is not the pilot for a new S.C.E. spin-off, because the book ends with the destruction of the Challenger and the return of La Forge to his old post on the Enterprise. It's a little annoying, because it seals that the events of this novel don't actually matter to La Forge. He gets two months of captaincy, and then he's back to doing the same thing he's been doing for the past eighteen years. Sure, he's "captain of engineering" now, but he doesn't really seem happy or sad or anything to lose a ship so quickly. The end kind of confirms all these characters will get rolled back to where they were; Barclay will go to the Voyager fleet again, and I'm very willing to predict Nog will be back on Deep Space 9 (if we ever get to see the station again, that is).

I kind of liked this book, but in the end, it just feels hollow.

Continuity Notes:

• Among the Challenger crew is Alyssa Ogawa, last seen as head nurse on Titan, now a doctor and chief medical officer on the Challenger... just two months after Fallen Gods! That novel, despite being written later, did nothing to set this up. Indistinguishable from Magic tries to paper over how a nurse becomes a doctor in literally moments, but I didn't buy it, and she pretty much could be any doctor character, so I'm not sure why McIntee bothered. Also the Challenger crew spends a lot of time being amazed at gigantic space life-forms, but Ogawa never mentions the time Titan spent exploring the ecosystem of gigantic space life-forms.
• On the other hand, Nog gets a good couple scenes; I really enjoyed it when he flushes information out of a Ferengi underling by implying Grand Nagus Rom (his father) bought the Challenger from Starfleet. But like Ogawa's, Nog's presence doesn't quite line up. Not for timeline reasons (I don't think we've seen Nog for six years, in universe, though Memory Beta tells me he was mentioned as being on DS9 in Rough Beasts of Empire), but career ones. He's obviously there as part of the novel's engineering all-star team set-up, but he's the Challenger's chief of security because that was the only position available. Okay, I buy that, because Nog was interim chief of security on DS9 between Odo and Ro. However, later in the novel, La Forge considers Nog for first officer, but then passes him up so he's not denied the opportunity to be a chief engineer one day, because he'll be a great one. But Nog already was a chief engineer! If that's what he wanted, he could have just stayed on DS9.
• I spent a lot of time wondering why Leah was willing to romance La Forge, given that she's married. It turns out that her husband died in The Genesis Wave novels. But if McIntee mentioned this fact for those of us who remember "Galaxy's Child" but do not remember The Genesis Wave, I did not notice, so I was very disconcerted until I read her Memory Beta entry halfway through.
• You can't expect every thing to reference every thing, but it also jarred me that, when discussing if the Challenger can breach the galactic barrier, no one mentions the attempt of the Enterprise-E to do so in The Q Continuum trilogy.
• Sonya Gomez puts in a couple brief appearances, which is nice given this book's pseudo-S.C.E. status. I don't think any other member of the da Vinci crew rates a mention, though; Mor glasch Tev is seen, but La Forge doesn't know his name, so he's just "a Tellarite."
• Scotty may seem to be dead by the end, but we know from Engines of Destiny that he's still around in 2422, so he must get back somehow. Plus, he needs to invent transwarp beaming and give Spock the equations prior to 2387. Maybe his experience here is how he figures it out...?

Other Notes:

• In the acknowledgements, McIntee praises the cover artist. I can't imagine why, because it is the most generic uninspired thing I can imagine. A Galaxy-class ship with some motion blur, and a swirl. The book has much more interesting imagery that could have made a much better cover.
• McIntee has a weird tendency to let dialogue scenes go on too long. Like, characters keep talking two or three or four lines after the point which the reader has gotten the point, either to just restate something yet again, or to squeeze in an ultimately irrelevant continuity reference.
• According to the novel The Return, the captain of the Challenger in 2371 was a Vulcan named Simm. By the time of Indistinguishable from Magic, the first officer of the Challenger is Tyler Hunt, a man obviously named after the characters Sam Tyler and Gene Hunt from Life on Mars. The actor who played Sam Tyler: John Simm. Spooky.
• There's a joke about how quitting Starfleet was the biggest mistake Scotty ever made aside from bleaching his hair, a reference to how he appeared in early issues of the Gold Key comics. I actually suggested this joke to Dave McIntee, but by the time I read the book, I had forgotten all about that discussion, so I was pretty delighted to discover it.

Review: Black Bolt: Home Free by Saladin Ahmed, Christian Ward, et al.

Comic trade paperback, n.pag.
Published 2018 (contents: 2018)
Borrowed from the library
Read November 2018

Black Bolt: Home Free

Writer: Saladin Ahmed

Artists: Christian Ward & Frazer Irving with Stephanie Hans
Letterer: Clayton Cowles

This is the sequel to Black Bolt: Hard Time, which I expected to hate but ended up ranking first when I voted in the 2018 Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story. Home Free is worth reading, but not as good; with Black Bolt back on Earth and interacting with other Inhumans, and "Crusher" Creel dead, a lot of what made the first volume so good doesn't apply. I still don't care about the Inhumans. Still, the stuff with Black Bolt trying to help out Creel's widow is solid, especially the way the funeral ends up going down, and the art is very nice; Christian Ward will hopefully go on to do great things. The story is a little slow (the six issues probably could have been handled in four), but Ahmed is a perceptive writer, and even though I don't care about Black Bolt's childhood, the parts where he interacts with his wife were actually kind of nice. So, not great, but better than any comic book about an Inhuman has a right to be.

Summer Driving, Summer Reading

One of Hayley's and my concerns about parenting has been screen time. I try to not judge, as someone who has only been a parent for nine months; you can entertain our kid just by dumping him on the floor with some plastic cups. I am sure this gets harder as your kid gets older. But I do judge. Recently we ate out and the two eight-year-olds at the table next to us needed tablets the whole time to make it through the meal. Is that a grim vision of my own future? Or can I forestall that if we follow the WHO guidelines? I would say we've been pretty good about it so far. Sometimes he wakes up when we're watching tv, and so ends up seeing a little bit of it, and sometimes he's been so upset in the middle of the night that Hayley has shown him a couple episodes of My Little Pony when we've been at wit's end.

But you have to occupy the kiddo somehow, right? Especially in situations where your kids are doing boring things for long stretches. Back in the day my parents needed to do this because of the Mollmann propensity for long road trips. We didn't stop places overnight, but trucked on through, my parents just switching off. Infamously, we once drove from Cincinnati, Ohio to Pike's Peak, Colorado, only stopping for gas and bathroom breaks; it took twenty-four hours. It takes a lot of keep a bunch of kids occupied for twenty-four hours, and there were no tablets to be had.

From coast to coast (well, not really) in this!

For the Mollmanns, the answer was books. In fact, books were what kept us occupied all summer. There was a summer reading program at the library, sure, but my mom ran her own. For every ten (I think) books you read, she would buy you one for the trip. We kept track with lists on the fridge. (Maybe this is the seed of my own exhaustive reading tracking? I never thought about that before.) Things got even better, though-- if you were willing to get your books at a used bookstore, since they were half-price, you got twice as many! So I would read library books furiously to get as many books as possible.

I still have plenty of books that must have come from those shopping sprees, because I have plenty of Asimov and Star Trek books with the stamp of the Book Rack on Colerain Ave. in them. The reading of the books was as exciting as the getting of the books.

I didn't have summer reading for a long time after growing up, but I actually have it again now, thanks to my commitment to voting in the Hugos. As the summer kicks off, I know I have six novels, six novellas, six novelettes, six short stories, six graphic novels, six nonfiction books, and six young adult books to read. Plus my new yearly goal of reading a Charles Dickens novel!

I look to see if our local public library had a summer reading program, but apparently you have to be 5 years old! So it will be some time before our little one can participate.

#583: What's on your summer reading list?

Review: Mr. Midshipman Hornblower by C. S. Forester

Hardcover, 310 pages
Published 1950 (contents: 1948-50)
Previously read July 2006
Acquired October 2008
Reread February 2019

Mr. Midshipman Hornblower by C. S. Forester

1794-99
Jumping backward and writing a prequel saved the Hornblower series, I reckon. It's not just that Forester was almost out of plausible career to cover; it's that showing Hornblower at the beginning of his career plays to the strengths of the series premise in a way that Commodore and Lord Hornblower did not. Hornblower works best as an underdog. A midshipman in the British Navy is about as underdog as it gets, no one is rooting for Hornblower, seemingly not even Hornblower. It also returns the focus to individual ships, which is much more interesting to read about than fleet actions or political machinations. Mr. Midshipman even manages to turn some previous weaknesses of the series into virtues: some previous books (such as Ship of the Line and Lord Hornblower) were frustratingly episodic; Mr. Midshipman is a collection of short stories, not a novel, so it ought to be episodic!

Like any collection of short stories, there are good ones and less good ones. Favorites of mine included "Hornblower and the Even Chance" (where Hornblower realizes he's so bad at duelling he's better off just flipping a coin), "Hornblower and the Cargo of Rice" (where Hornblower's first command ends dismally), "Hornblower and the Penalty of Failure" (where we see what a man of honor he is), "Hornblower and the Examination for Lieutenant" (where we discover how awful the Royal Navy promotion system is, with hilarious consequences), and the longest one, "Hornblower, the Duchess, and the Devil" (where Hornblower manages to sail into the middle of an enemy fleet and not know it thanks to the fog, but also proves his honor to its utmost). Like any good prequel, it's neat to see the seeds sown of what we've already read. I didn't bother to keep track if every old Indefatigable shipmate from the previous five books actually turned up on the Inde, but I did enjoy seeing the infamous seasickness incident, as well as Hornblower's captivity by the Spanish (cited in Beat to Quarters to explain why he knew the language).

This was a reread for me, and a highly enjoyable one. In retrospect, I think it's an odd place to begin the series (it worked for me the first time around, but I suspect that's because I'd already watched the tv show), but as a palate cleanser after an underwhelming shift in direction, it hits the spot.

Star Trek: The Destiny Era: Typhon Pact: The Struggle Within

Kindle eBook, n.pag.
Published 2011
Acquired September 2012
Read December 2018

Star Trek: Typhon Pact: The Struggle Within

by Christopher L. Bennett

Stardate 59881.2-59927.6 (November/December 2382)
After its initial four-book run, there were a number of what I guess you might call "supplemental" books in the Typhon Pact series, beginning with this, the series's only eBook novella. Given my reaction to the original set of books, and this book's short size, I wasn't expecting much out of it, but to my surprise, it's the best Typhon Pact story thus far, the first to really deliver on the concept's storytelling potential, even if in a limited way.

Like most of the Typhon Pact series, it falls squarely into one ongoing series despite lacking one on its title page; in this case, it's a Next Generation novella, focusing on the Enterprise-E dealing with some of the political fallout of the formation of the Typhon Pact. In classic Next Generation style, we have A- and B-plots focusing on different characters. Picard, Worf, and Crusher on the Enterprise work to bring the Talarians (from TNG's "Suddenly Human," an episode I've actually never seen) into the expanded Khitomer Accords (the NATO to Typhon's Warsaw Pact), while Jasminder Choudhury and T'Ryssa Chen travel to Janalwa, the capital planet of the Kinshaya, where there's democratic political unrest against the theocratic government of the Pact's most reclusive member.

Each story on its own is interesting, and explores the repercussions of the Typhon Pact in a nuanced way. On Talar, negotiations are disrupted when women begin to demand more rights than the patriarchal government will allow them, which puts Captain Picard in an awkward position: the Federation promotes democratic ideals, but it also needs the Talarian government onside as a signatory to the Khitomer Accords, and so can't be seen to be supporting the rebels, even philosophically. It's a classic TNG-style moral dilemma, that only increases in complexity when Doctor Crusher is kidnapped by the female rebels.

The Janalwa plotline is also interesting. Freedom of movement has increased between Typhon Pact signatories, and Spock's Vulcan/Romulan reunification movement has been legalized on Romulus, meaning a contingent of Romulan reunificationists are travelling to Janalwa in solidarity with suppressed Kinshaya dissidents; the Kinshaya cannot act against these citizens of an ally they way they might against their own citizens, providing something of a shield for the Kinshaya. Choudhury and Chen in disguise join the Romulans, and the story explores some of the complexities of nonviolent resistance with fairly explicit references to both Gandhi and the Arab Spring, in a way that also ties into Choudhury and Chen's emotional development.

I enjoyed this plotline for how it extrapolated some of the political ramifications that might come from the establishment of the Typhon Pact. In creating an "anti-Federation," the Federation's enemies inadvertently enabled some of the Federation's ideals to flourish. In most of the Typhon Pact novels (Rough Beasts of Empire excepted), the Typhon Pact has mostly been evil antagonists without much complexity, so it's nice to see that reversed here.

If there's a complaint that I have, it's that I'm not convinced a novella should have both an A- and B-plot. Either plotline could have been expanded more: I can imagine another version of the Talar plotline where Picard did more, instead of fretting about what to do. And while I appreciate finally getting some insight into the Kinshaya here, we just scratched the surface on them; the set-up of the plot means that it felt like most of the friendly characters we met on Janalwa were Chen and Choudhury's fellow "Romulans." Seeing more of Kinshaya society would be nice-- as would be probing the limits of political resistance more. Bennett specifically cites Egypt as his primary inspiration, but the Arab Spring in Libya, for example, was wantonly violent at times. (Admittedly, the death of Gaddafi happened the same month the book came out, so Bennett couldn't exactly take it into account!) I could also imagine a version of this story where making the choice to be nonviolent is personally harder for Choudhury, as well.

But a novella doesn't give you the space for this, of course; I think The Struggle Within would have been even stronger as a short novel, or as a novella focused on a single plotline. But despite that, it's the best Typhon Pact story to date.

Continuity Notes:

• Choudhury shaves her hair and adopts mourning tattoos when she disguises herself as a Romulan, in the style of Nero and company from Star Trek (2009), picking up on a retcon first established in, I believe, the Countdown miniseries.

Other Notes:

• The scenes of the Kinshaya leaders using Breen troops to fire on their own citizens were very effective.
• Maybe I'm something of a prude, but Picard/Crusher sex jokes just don't sit right with me.

Review: The Monster Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson

Hardcover, 458 pages
Published 2018
Acquired October 2018
Read November 2018

The Monster Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson

It took its time getting here, but at least we have the sequel to 2015's The Traitor Baru Cormorant, the second of four installments in the Masquerade series. It's much less focused than the first installment, for two reasons. The first followed Baru from girlhood as she attempted to obtain a position of power in the Masquerade; in this one her goal is much more amorphous (something something destroy the Masquerade). Additionally, the first book told one complete story despite implying follow-ups; Monster is very obviously the first part of a larger story.

Both of these things made it harder for me to like Monster as much as I did Traitor. It took a considerable time for the direction of the book to come into focus, though the more it did, the more interested in it I was.

I also thought that Baru and her fellow cryptarch, Apparitor, didn't always impress as being the powerful manipulators they ought to. Baru is weirdly naïve at times; Apparirtor weirdly cowardly. I expected Baru to be more proactive, but she's actually more reactive than in book 1, despite possessing more power than before.

Still, I think I liked it. If the story begun in this volume finishes in book 3, it will probably take that book for me to know for sure. Dickinson writes strong characters, great prose, and I especially like his worldbuilding. It's a trend I'm noticing in more sf of late: attention to the particularities of culture and the interactions between them (it's also a key feature of Ancillary Justice and its sequels). Little details and big ideas-- no society is just one way, and the way the societies affect and absorb each other is as important as their existence in the "pure" states. Dickinson has built up a complex, living world, and I look forward to seeing it evolve, and to discovering Baru's place in it.

No No

My son weighs in on if I'm allowed to blog this week.

Last week, I failed to post a Friday blog. this would be the first time I have failed to do* so since I began my current posting pattern in July 2015. that's 192 weeks of regular posting! to be honest, I'm amazed I'd never failed before, but if I was going to fail, now is clearly the time to do so.

My parents came a few weeks ago. When I was driving my dad back to the airport, he asked if I liked being a dad. I said I liked my son, but that being a parent was stressful; I feel like I have half as much time to do twice as much stuff. And it's true. My slack time where I'd catch up (evenings and weekends) has been taken up; my responsibilities have increased beyond lesson planning, grading, mowing the lawn, and blogging.

And my responsibilities are always changing. He's eight months old now, almost nine. Which is pretty crazy to think about. things we used to be able to do to occupy him don't work anymore; we've got baby gates up because that little guy (not so little anymore-- 25 pounds!) sure can scoot everywhere. As soon as he sees one is open, he just takes off on a tear across the kitchen, screaming to himself in delight that he's gotten away with it as he crawls for the cat food bowl or the guest bathroom as fast as he can. He has preferences now, and likes and dislikes and joys in a way that just wasn't true even a couple months ago.

On top of this I have to teach four classes (how do high school teachers do what they do? we may never know), and, somewhat optimistically, maintain a research agenda. I wanted to send out a book proposal months ago, and I am way behind schedule! My dream would be to go back on the job market in the fall and see if I can land a tenure-track job somewhere. But to do that I need a slightly better profile than the one I've got.

And add on top on top of all this that we're coming up on two full weeks without a working fridge or air conditioner. Yes, they both failed the same weekend. the joys of home ownership. I know there are places in the country still buried in snow, but try living in Florida in April sans AC. My son has been spending a lot of time just running around in his diaper, and we've been eating a lot of takeout and fast food.

Back when he was born, I wrote that changes kind of sneak up on me. this one still is. I suspect that if you caught me off guard and asked me if I was a dad, I would say "no." Like, it still feels like parenting, even though it's a thing I do, it's not a thing I am. And I know there are ways in which I could be a better father and a better husband, and it will take some time to keep navigating that. So yes I do like being a dad, and in classic Steve fashion I don't like how it has disrupted my routines, but I do know as I read to him and watch him play in the bathtub for over an hour (he is a water-baby) and cuddle his mother that it is worth it.

We'll see if I change my mind once we try to train him to sleep in the crib, though.

* With the exception of holidays, but that's intentional.