Vacation this fall consisted of a trip to northern California. Many of Whirl‘s family members live in the area. We stayed in Oakland with Whirl‘s cousin, Ani. Nancy and Ray drove from southwestern Colorado to spend the week, staying with Nancy‘s sister Cynthia in Berkeley. Aside from getting together with family — something that does not happen as often as it once did for either Whirl or me — the trip’s other objective was the retrieval of Whirl’s possessions left behind when she moved to Chicago almost fifteen years ago. When Whirl moved to Chicago she packed up everything she could into a few big suitcases and we boarded a plane. Everything else ended up in a storage shed outside Santa Rosa. Where it waited, patiently, for us to return someday and move it with us. This was the mid-90s. Now it’s almost 2010, and we still haven’t retrieved it.
So, with the storage facility prices growing regularly, the service level declining by equal measure, and the value of the items in the shed potentially diminishing due to pest infestation, flooding, theft or any number of other variables we decided to finally clean out the storage shed, rid ourselves of a regular bill and finally bring those things of value back to Chicago. It is our home after all.
Opening the shed was something like opening a time capsule. Books, collectibles, clothes from the 80s — including a whole wardrobe of bridesmaid dresses Whirl wore for nearly a dozen weddings throughout the late 80s and early 90s. In short order, Nancy, Ray, Whirl, Cynthia and I separated items we wished to keep from those we could do without. The former we packed up and shipped to Chicago. The latter we threw in the back of Ani’s pickup truck and drove to the Santa Rosa Goodwill.
The trip included a lot of games, laughter and visits. Besides the trip to Santa Rosa, we headed across the rickety Bay Bridge into San Francisco for the day to visit the de Young Museum and the Academy of Sciences.
We took a couple cameras to document the opening of the storage shed, and I got some portraits of the family and our trip into San Francisco.
In the end we shipped sixteen fifty-pound boxes back to Chicago, almost entirely full of books — including some rare first editions — and thousands of comic books. The post office worker was bemusedly surprised when we showed up with the shipment. The packages will take up to two weeks to make it across the country, but after fifteen years, another two weeks isn’t really significant. Making our house more of a home is.
I came late to reading Ian McDonald. A couple years ago I read the second of his recent popular science fiction novels, Brasyl. I skipped the book that appears to have put him on the map, River of Gods. I am trying to remember why I did that, and what occurs to me is that I couldn’t find River of Gods in the bookstore and Brasyl had just been released. So maybe I picked it up as a book of opportunity. I remember being underwhelmed by Brasyl. And while I appreciated what McDonald was trying to do, I never felt fully satisfied by the execution of it. It didn’t compel me. It didn’t pull me in to a world like I had expected it to do. At some fundamental level, it just didn’t seem to work.
Tim Schafer loves heavy metal music. He loves the history, the power, the imagery, the scale and the ridiculousness of it all. He has channeled this love into the video game Brütal Legend, released this week: Rocktober 13th. I have been anxiously awaiting this game since I learned of its development a couple years ago. My excitement has two sources: First, I think Tim Schafer’s last game, Psychonauts, was one of the best games for the last generation of game consoles. Second, the particular focus of this game is something I’ve never seen in a game before. Not even the success of the Harmonix Guitar Hero and Rock Band games can approach either the breadth or depth of Brütal Legend with respect to heavy metal. 
I consider myself a well-read, liberally educated man. Few authors have sunk so low in my esteem that I have stricken them from consideration when selecting a book to read. I like to read. I have respect for authors who have suffered the painstaking ordeal of writing a novel. In the vast majority of cases authors deserve a measure of respect for accomplishing that much. Jane Austen is not one of these authors. I know, I know. She’s amazingly popular. Her skills as a writer are transcendent. Her social commentary is sublime; her irony is dramatic, bitter and pointed — all at the same time (something Alanis Morissette was never quite capable of pulling off I’m sad to say). I don’t like Jane Austen books. I don’t. I don’t care for her writing. I don’t like Jane Austen books. So, aside from a compulsory reading assignment in school the only way you would ever entice me to pick up a Jane Austen novel would be to put zombies in it.
The Big Rewind is a collection of autobiographical essays by Nathan Rabin. Rabin is the third author to be featured at the 
Beta|Erinyes 