Back in the Land of the Living

I got sick while I was in New York at the end of September.  A cold, allergies, "The Crud", as local doctors name it.  It's been going around Tallahassee in a big way lately.  Only this week have I begun to really feel better, apart from a lingering cough.  Sitting on the front porch with my coffee this morning, with the rising sun shining through the pines, I was thankful for the new day.

With the two new library branches opening up, promotions have meant a round of interviews for positions vacated.  I am on the hiring committee for a part-time Sunday IP position in Youth Services.  We interviewed three candidates today, and will interview another three on Wednesday.  We are fortunate to have some good applicants.

Sitting at the reference desk with MK this morning, I heard  a strummed guitar from the first floor.  It was the Story Time Halloween Parade, led by Gary C.!  I called M. to the stairwell to watch as moms & tots processed.  We saw a monkey, a bee, a princess.

I have been reading through Barbara Cleverly's Commander Sandilands mysteries.  They are set in the 1920's, in India at first, and moving to England and the Continent.  They are very well written, with an impressive depth of background and strong characters.  I found I would have to wait for Folly Du Jour, and I had "cannibalized" a dog-chewed copy of Patrick O'Brian's H.M.S. Surprise, applying its bar-code and cataloging label to a donated copy.  So I took the old copy home to read again.

I read the whole Aubrey/Maturin series a few years ago.  What a pleasure to revisit O'Brian.  I used to have a patron, a man who would only read Louis L'Amour westerns, over and over again.  Maybe this is a particular pleasure for old people?

In a similar vein, I was rereading my Winged Chariots: The Popular Art of Early Flight post, which continues to get hits, and I thought it was time to revisit Red Baron 3D, a flight-sim game I played some years ago.  I fired up my old Windows 98 Athlon PC, which I had fitted with a Voodoo 5 graphics card specifically to accommodate RB's Glide graphics, whereupon I lost interest in the game around 2006.  The sound and modem didn't work, and I had to re-seat the sound and modem cards to get them working.

Red Baron 3D opened fine.  There was was my last campaign, just as I left it.  Of course, I've forgotten the keyboard commands, but I tried a "Fly Now" mission, flying a Nieuport 17 against a German Halberstadt D-II.  Oh well, I am no better a pilot than I ever was...