We fell back an hour on Saturday night. That’s the second weekend in a row for me. I was on a plane to Germany the previous weekend when Europe switched to “winter” time. Coupled with the jet lag that I didn’t quite get over during my five or six days in Germany and the new jet lag acquired on my return trip at the end of last week and I have no idea what time it is.
I flew into Frankfurt and took the train down to Karlsruhe and another local train to the small town of Ettlingen, which dates back over a thousand years. I got to see a little of Ettlingen and Karlsruhe—enough to find them quite charming. On my return trip, I took the TGV (“train goes vast”!) back to Frankfurt, reaching speeds of 250 km/hr, which is less than half the speed it’s capable of. Spent the evening in the city and caught my return flight the following day. The area between the train station and the river in Frankfurt (the Main) was interesting. It had a middle eastern feel, with Halal restaurants, doner shops, Iranian and Iraqi airlines, money transfer depots, Indian restaurants, bazaar-like grocery stores, etc. However, Frankfurt doesn’t feel like a historical city. It feels more like New York, with lots of high rises and high-end shops.
I ate a lot during my trip. The group I was visiting seemed to like big, full meal lunches, as well as full dinners, and the food was heavy. I put on 2 or 3 pounds in just a few days. Now it’s time to recover.
The second edition of The Stephen King Illustrated Companion has been spotted in the wild. It’s now available at Barnes & Noble stores and at their website. I received my contributor copies of Shivers VII just before I headed off for Germany, too. Looking forward to reading the other tales. I expected I’d have a lot of time to read during my flights, but I watched two movies on the way over (White House Down and Now You See Me). On the way back, I finished Grisham’s Sycamore Row and Elmore Leonard’s short story collection, When the Women Come Out to Dance, which contains “Fire in the Hole,” the story upon which the first episode of Justified is based.
I didn’t do any actual writing while I was away, but I did do the work of writing. I kept dreaming about this story I want to work on, and I’ve developed it more thoroughly than I normally do before I write the first sentence. I still don’t know how it’s going to end, but I have a lot of it. I finished proofing the Cemetery Dance edition of The Dark Tower Companion over the weekend, so I think I’m good to go now. I hadn’t read some parts of the book in a while and it really was like reading something written by another person in places.
I was going to watch last night’s The Mentalist this morning, but it turns out that it was pushed back so late in the schedule that CBS decided to swap out a rerun and air the new episode another week. I guess it’s an important enough part of the Red John end game that they didn’t want it to run at 11:30 pm on the East Coast. Instead I caught up on The Walking Dead. I dropped this series once before and was talked into picking it up again, but it’s suffering from stupid writing syndrome again. It’s boring a lot of the time, and I don’t understand what is motivating the characters at others. I suppose what Rick did at the end of this week’s show was supposed to be a bombshell, but it was a dud as far as I’m concerned.
Haven is shaking things up with the introduction of the two weird guys from Audrey’s cabin. Apparently, it’s also the show where Dexter’s serial killers go. This season there’ve been two of them: first Dexter’s brother and now Vogel’s son shows up.
We saw Last Vegas this weekend. I thought it was pretty good. Funny but not slapstick. It treated people “of a certain age” respectfully rather than making jokes at their expense. It doesn’t have a deep message, but it does address aging issues: marriages that grow stale, loneliness, health issues, adult children treating their parents like kids, embarking on a second life after retirement, having acquaintances die or get sick on a regular basis. The four actors had decent chemistry and I was entertained. A feel good sort of film without being sappy.
