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Ghost in the Shell
I like work; it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.
-- Jerome K. Jerome
Sunday, December 13, 1998
What a pleasant, relaxing day! Jack dug around and found on his shelf the orignal manga version of "Ghost in the Shell," which we'd watched last night as an anime video. I lounged around reading that, before and after reading the Sunday paper. Jack made ham salad sandwiches and heated up some soup. He said he was taking advantage of his daughter's absence by making the ham salad exactly the way he likes it! I don't have any strong preferences in that area, and it's so nice to have someone making food for me that I'd likely not complain if I did. Now if it had been tuna salad, well....there is a definite way I like my tuna prepared.
It rained steadily all day. I decided to miss the Bob Dylan Holiday Choir (though last year's version was great fun!), and didn't even mention it to Jack until after it had started. I hope they got a good crowd! I'll bet they did, since it was listed in the "Scene" section of the paper.
Jack had a more frustrating day than I did. He was using the command line ftp program that comes with Win95, and it doesn't do all the things he wanted to do. (I pointed him to winfiles.com and said there were many ftp clients there, and some perfectly decent ones are free!) There was water appearing on the kitchen floor, so he had to empty the cabinet under the sink and try to find where the leak was coming from. (I couldn't help him with this one.)
Even though it was raining and cold, there were piles of leaves in the backyard that needed to be put in the bin for the city to haul them away. I helped with this to some degree, but was limited because there was only one rake. Just picking up handfuls of leaves wasn't the most efficient way of gathering them. I did make Jack give me a turn with the rake. All that bending over isn't the best thing for his back. He said several times, "You don't have to help with this!" but I just couldn't picture myself sitting inside, warm and cozy, and watching him get gradually soaked. We didn't really do that much, since the bin got filled up and we had to stop after about half an hour. I didn't have any problem lying on the couch and watching him do the laundry, though!
Here's some geeky sweetness for you: Jack and I were cuddling, and he started telling me about an idea he's had for a shareware tool that could provide an index or search on a personal website. He knows that there have been times I've wanted to find something in the archives here, and haven't been able to do it! I don't think he'll do this just for me, though, unless he decides that there is a market for such a tool.
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I'm about halfway through with "Ghost in the Shell." I like it! The variety of drawing styles, depending on the subject, is an interesting technique. Little footnotes from the author are tucked between some frames or in the margins. Is the heroine a cyborg or a robot? The powersuits that the special forces team ride around in have AI of their own. I'll just have to overlook the big-eye syndrome that permeates all Japanese popular art. But where does this come from?
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Jack was frustrated again when, on the way to take me home and go fetch his daughter from her mom's, the fast food place he had a hankering for, Taco del Mar, was closed. I suggested we should go to the one near my house instead, and luckily, that one was open. He got his taco salad, and I had nachos. Yum! Then off he drove into the night.
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