Numb

Death on the Nile was entertaining. It was fun watching my wife trying to puzzle out whodunit. I’d read the novel a long time ago and remembered enough of the plot that I knew what was going on, and it was intriguing to see how Christie planted the clues, and how even the structure of the play is a huge hint to the howdunit part of things.

I submitted my current draft of the essay I’ve been working on this morning to see if it’s what the editors are looking for. I spent a lot of time on it this weekend, tweaking, reorganizing, pushing paragraphs around, adding, deleting, smoothing. I was trying to do too many different things at once and feeling a little overwhelmed, so I decided to focus on one thing at a time, get it done and move on to the next.

We watched Breach, starring Chris Cooper and Laura Linney. A good, solid thriller loosely based on the real life Hansen spy case. Cooper and Linney are both reliably fun to watch and Ryan Philippe, an unknown to me, is terrific as the self-assured, upwardly mobile FBI agent-wannabe assigned to cling to Hansen’s coat tails and report everything he sees and hears. The movie makes a nice discussion point about what Hansen’s motives were for becoming a traitor, and his personality has more facets than a diamond, all of them at conflict.

Dustin went the traditional route with his nominations on Big Brother. No big surprises or shake-ups. Maybe one of the nominees will get the power of veto, which would change things up somewhat, but I suspect Kail will be going home this week. I have no idea who I’d like to see win this year. They’re a weepy bunch, and no one really stands out as particularly deserving more than the others.

“Numb” was this week’s episode of The Dead Zone. I had a moment during the first kiss when I thought that maybe they were going to do something sneaky with visions, then I dismissed that idea. Imagine that—I was write. It was all a dream, Bobby Ewing. A little bit of a cheat, I thought, in the name of a happy outcome for everyone. They could have let the brother die and not do a retcon on reality to save him. Liked the ending, though—no more of this flittering and nervous twittering. Put ’em together and see where things go.

This morning I retackled edits on Popup Killer. I found a continuity error no one had noticed before, and I’m daubing in bits of supporting plot to beef up a reveal later in the story. I plan to return the revised manuscript to the editors tomorrow morning.

This week I’m going to tackle Torchwood in my spare time. I’m also scanning family photographs, which is a huge undertaking, but I’ve had them in a box for well over a year and it’s about time I stopped procrastinating and got that job done. Found photos of my grandfathers, both of whom died before I was born, and two different sets of great-grandparents.