Notes from the Cave

Another dry spell on the blog.  Sorry 'bout that.  I was on vacation in mid-July, then upon returning home I started working 2nd shift at the hospital.  The transition from first has been difficult.  I've essentially been staying up until 3 and 4 o'clock in the morning, then sleeping til noon, laying around for an hour, then going to work.  As a result, I've gotten a ton of late night reading (and Olympics-watching) done, but hardly anything else.  I'm trying now to get on some sort of normal routine so I can have time in the mornings, before work, to take care of the things that need my attention.

The Summer Olympics are over, and not a bit too soon.  That's not to say I don't enjoy the Olympics, but after a while, it gets a bit overwhelming.  Furthermore, the Summer Olympics isn't nearly as entertaining as the Winter Olympics.  I would guess I probably could care less about 75% of Summer Olympic sports, while I like virtually all of the Winter Olympic sports (with a few exceptions, of course).  Like everyone else I enjoy the gymnastics, but the swimming and diving get old after the 546th event, and the "I'm King of the World" attitude of the runners in Track and Field gets tedious after a while.  I did enjoy seeing a few of the more obscure sports, like archery and fencing, but you can only take so much of that before it's dull - sort of like reading Notes from the Cave, actually.

My parents are here this weekend from Texas, and we went yesterday to the tomb of William Henry Harrison, the 9th president of the United States.

He lived much of his life, and was buried, in North Bend, Ohio, which today is a suburb of Cincinnati right at the river (during Harrison's life, it would have been the boondocks outside of the Cincinnati).  It's in a geographic region where three states come together - Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana, right at the northernmost bend of the Ohio River as it passes between Ohio and Kentucky (and thus the northernmost spot in Kentucky).  On the banks of the Kentucky side of the river at that spot, one is actually farther north, geographically, than downtown Cincinnati, which is a few miles to the east.

Buried in the tomb with Old Tippecanoe are a number of his family members, including his son, J.S. Harrison, a U.S. congressman and father of 23rd president Benjamin Harrison.

J.S. Harrison's body was stolen a few days after his burial in 1878, despite a guard at the tomb, and was later found at a medical school in Cincinnati, naked and hanging upside down in a drainage chute in the anatomy lab.

Other than that, we have just enjoyed the nice weather, eaten out a bunch of times, and gone to the bookstore.  M has been gone most of the weekend getting her room ready for school, which starts Wednesday.  Tonight is Open House, and they were not able to get into their rooms for the first time until late Friday night.  Three days, basically, to set up an entire elementary school classroom.  Utterly ridiculous.  It's a brand new building, which is the cause of the delay in gaining access.  M has been understandably stressed out and has probably put in 45 hours since Friday evening.  No joke.  Both Saturday and Sunday she was there from about 9 a.m. to 1 a.m.

Not much else to report other than sheer trivialities, but I will resist boring you with that stuff.  I am currently working on a new short story, set in the 14th century, which I had hoped would be done by the beginning of August, but which still needs a ton of work (as in, like, I've only written about 2 paragraphs of it).  Possibly going to be trying a new marketing strategy for my books in the coming weeks.  Reading a book right now on how to market yourself.  We'll see how that pans out.