Homie Bear on Holidays!
Yup, so, I needed a vacation. Because of my four-day shift rotation, taking one set off gives me twelve days of freedom. Pretty good deal. This is already my third day off. Heading to Calgary for Thanksgiving, but until then I'm just hanging out here at home, doing some writing, some reading, some running and some relaxing.
Did I say running? You betcha! Ever since Michelle's half-marathon I have been running pretty steady and I'm loving it. Oh yeah and working out while watching Samurai Jack cartoons on DVD, too.
On the writing front, I'm working on a short story that required me to reread Pierre Berton's Klondike, which was no chore because it is easily one of my favorite books of all time. You should read it- your life will be enriched. Seriously. I finished that up today and now I can go on to something I've been saving for just this occasion- Dan Simmons' Olympos.
Come to think of it, last week at work I read a sci-fi classic that I'd be willing to bet influenced Simmons enormously- Walter M. Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz.
Well, I have some relaxing to do so I'll leave you with a cool, kinda halloweeny excerpt from another classic sci-fi writer, Fritz Leiber (not Leiberwitz!), from his essay "A Defense of Werewolves".

You think that everything that thrill's (sic) been done, that there's no more true eeriness in life, but just a wearisome atomic round, and that the future . . . belongs to some pragmatic, plodding breed who never heard Pan pipe or feared the darkness that's between the stars? That is to laugh! Pass me the wine-skin. And yet that's just how I feel part of the time.
But how untrue! When each new fact, like an old witch, has as familiar some new mystery, when each conquered realm opens a new wilder, wider frontier, when man's about to leap the planets . . .
Open your eyes . . . and you will see wonders undreamed, innumerable . . . Wonder as great as in archaic times made gleaming eyes by rocks like these at Stonehenge and in the darkling woods where satyrs danced.