Uncategorized

When I saw trailers for a Dune related mini-series in the fall, I thought it was time to reread the Dune series of books.  So I went online to get the right order only to find that since I last read the Dune books, their number had increased greatly — there were another nine books!  Fortunately my local library had all but one of the books I did not already have.

So more than six months later, I have finally gotten to the end of the series.  I have come across other sci-fi books which are longer, those in the Dune series are not short reads.  Most of them were over 400 pages and a few over 600.

The initial books were authored by Frank Herbert.  His son, Brian Herbert and his co-author Kevin Anderson were responsible for the later books (which tell parts of the story before, after and in between the original six books.) The writing style between the two was significant.  After this re-reading, I am totally puzzled why Dune was such a big hit.  Page after page is a character thinking or talking about what they are thinking.  It often felt like the Frank Herbert was pushing a philosophy of some sort on his readers.  The other books stick to more normal story-telling principles. With one exception — it seemed like they were writing for a multi-year TV series.  Books didn’t really end with a conclusion, but left the reader hanging for the next book / season.

As I recall from my schooling, fiction often requires a “suspension of disbelief”.  Sci-fi tends to rely heavily on that.  But some of the Dune stories and themes seriously pushed my abilities in that respect.  For instance, the imperial family, the Corrinos, had been in charge of the empire for 10,000 years.  Seriously?  With all the palace intrigue along with normal issues of hereditary rule, that is a bit much to swallow.  And I do not understand how a society with advanced space travel and related tech would be so inclined to no tech for just about everything else.  Even allowing for their fear of machine intelligence which had once enslaved them, the extremes and inconsistencies were awkward at best.  (And I do not understand why the machines would want a bunch of unruly organic human slaves when they also had the ability to have well behaved machine robots.)

Another direction I found my thoughts going I as read through the Dune series was the “compare and contrast” assignments from long ago classwork.  So compare and contrast the Dune empire with that of Asimov’s Foundation and Empire series or else with the Empire of Star Wars.  (And what is with the need for imperial government in a future society???)

Last weekend I got the holiday decorations placed and got our Christmas tree up and decorated. This year the tree is the skinny 7′ one that fits in a corner of the living room instead of the 9′ one that takes up the far end of the family room.  Since I started collecting glass ornaments in the late 1970’s, I have a large enough collection to cover both trees.  The 9′ tree has the larger portion of ornaments — birds, flowers, fruits, and geometric shapes.  The rest, probably about 350 ornaments include the santas, snowmen, musical instruments and everything else and are assigned to the 7′ tree.  Doing the tree was an all day task.  It should have been less than that, but at 3 months post shoulder joint replacement surgery, I still lack enough each and stamina to work as in past years.

It has been a bit over two months since I fractured my arm, seven weeks since the shoulder joint replacement surgery to repair the damage and one week since my right arm was freed from the sling.

So it has been over two months since I was last faceting or gardening or doing routine household chores.

And it will be a while before I am back to doing all those things again as I lack strength and have limited range of motion in the arm. I have been told that most likely it will be another six weeks to get the range of motion, then time to rebuild strength.

Day by day I can do a little bit more. I am hoping that in another week or so I will be able to try faceting again. I need to be able to reach the point where I can inspect the stone, not just work with the machine.

Normally this time of year I would be thinking of what to do about holiday gifts and making plans for Tucson gem shows. Like everything else since the end of August, those making those plans has also been postponed.

The days will be getting a bit longer now.  Spaceship Earth completes another circuit around Sol and in a few day according to our calendars. Likewise, I will mark another year of my personal history between now and then.

The 2023 flight seemed to be a bumpy ride at times.   Many of us will be gathering in the remainder of the year with friends and family among lights and holiday decorations to counteract the cold and gloom.

May the warmth of that fellowship continue to grow into the new year and spread as goodwill to all our fellow passengers on planet Earth.

The holidays are here, some decent rainfall in the past few weeks has resulted in the hillsides turning green again, and Christmas decorations are in place.

For the past two years because the COVID pandemic put a damper on holidays, we set up a smaller tree in the living room instead of our traditional 9 footer in the family room.  A new red rug was added this year in hopes of reducing breakage of ornaments in the event they slipped off the branches.

Having the lights pre-wired on the tree is a great time saver so it only took a few minutes to assemble the tree.

Then time for the ornaments.  I have been collecting glass ornaments for many years.  We have some really nice fabric covered boxes for storing the collection.

At this point I do not use all the ornaments on the tree.  I have decided on bird, flower and geometric ornaments for this tree.  (The Santas, snowmen, clowns, animals, musical instruments, toys and other random items worked out nicely for the smaller tree used the past two years.  )

It took a lot of trips up a ladder to decorate the top part of the tree.  Then the rest is easy.

Ready for Santa.

Happy Holidays, everyone!