I finally pulled the trigger on the short story in progress this morning. I read it through aloud last night, made a few minor touch-up changes, keyed them in this morning and shipped it off to the market. I was starting to think that I would never stop tinkering with it. Now, on to a few other stories that I want to get under control this month.
I realized this morning that I can’t remember when I weighed as little as I do at the moment. I’m clocking in regularly at 165. The most I ever weighed was 200, when I was a grad student. I was around 190 when I moved to Texas, I think, back in the late 80s. Then I joined a competition at work and dropped 17 lbs, and for the most part since then I’ve been in the 172-180 range. Any time I close in on 180, I start to take action. I hit that early this year when an injury kept me away from the gym for a few months. Once I started back to the gym, I was soon back down to my fighting weight. However, 170 was a threshold I rarely crossed. Like I said, I can’t remember the last time I did. Not in two decades. I’m certainly not looking to lose any more, but it feels good to see those digits on the scales.
Another Survivor castaway talked himself into eviction. It’s okay, apparently, to sit on your butt and do nothing in competitions, but being a talk-a-matic is unforgivable. Granted, even in small doses the guy was getting on my nerves, but was that really all he ever talked about or were we the victims of selective editing? Still, the old folks might be happier campers with him gone, even though their numbers are dwindling. The preview for next week hints that maybe the age experiment will come to an end. It was an interesting idea. I really thought the older team was going to put up a better show of it, though.
I wasn’t terribly convinced by the logic behind this week’s Criminal Mind. A former serial killer called the Butcher, one of Rossi’s old cases, gets Alzheimer’s and because he can’t remember his most recent kills he decides to start up again after a lengthy hiatus to repeat those final murders with the help of his adult son. It all seemed a little too convoluted to be credible. At the end, the Butcher tells Rossi that he quit killing mostly because of Rossi, without elaborating. Yet, Rossi met the man while investigating the sixth killing, and he went on killing for a long time after that. And, sure, the son was traumatized because of repressed memories, but he was going above and beyond the call of duty by hunting down new victims for his father to torture. Didn’t really buy it.
After a few moderately good episodes of Law & Order: SVU they were back to preaching, lecturing and moralizing this week. I think even the characters were upset by this, based on the way they were all so snarky with each other. When Olivia questioned Warner’s reasons for calling them in the coroner said, “Because I know how to do my job. I was shot in the lung, not in the head.” Oh, snap! And then Warner complained up the chain when her decision to call it a homicide didn’t sit well with Stabler and Benson, so their boss gave them the smackdown. And then when Huang decided he was going to report his findings to his bosses at the FBI, Stabler and he got into a “mine is bigger than yours” match about their contacts in the Agency. It was all pretty hilarious, except when the characters were info dumping horrifying statistics about white slavery. Maybe they won’t take themselves so seriously next week when Olivia apparently gets a whiff of some psychedelic ‘shrooms!
The L. A. version of Law & Order hasn’t really done much to draw attention to itself. A call-back to the Manson murders was an easy device. A little ambiguity thrown in about whether or not the retired cop coerced the woman into confessing. It’s okay, but not ground-breaking.
