since we've no place to go

Snow in Vancouver, so of course I came back this week. It's been record-breakingly cold (minus teens, I believe), and the snow from the weekend hadn't melted when it dropped another I'm guessing 15cm last night / this morning. Translink is referring to it as "an extreme travel day" and recommending that people stay home.

I came in to work, mostly because I walked out the door of the coffeeshop where I got breakfast (poached eggs on smoked salmon on toast; not quite an Eggs Halifax but decent) and saw someone getting out of an Evo (Vancouver-based carshare). I was already Not Excited about sitting in my Airbnb and using the work VPN which spent last week being extremely flaky, so I snagged the car and took half an hour to drive the 5km to work.

This is I suppose better than back home, which got ~20cm of snow last Friday morning when we left and was reportedly minus forty degrees this morning.

... and now it's dumping something serious out there, again/still. Definitely time to head for "home".

book book book

Wednesday Reading Meme, for the first time in *mumble* weeks.

What are you reading?

Currently rereading Walter Jon Williams's Metropolitan, because it's been awhile and I have it in ebook. I think I read it once a year from 2011 to 2014 or '15. It's not quite as good as I recall, but it is good, and it moves along well. I still wish he'd write more of them.

What did you just finish reading?

I literally just put down James Ernest's Cheapass Games In Black And White: A Retrospective, after devouring it over the last two nights. This is a history of Cheapass Games, James's game publishing company, including reproductions of the rules to all the games they published, and James's design notes and thoughts on each of them. James's voice comes through very clearly, which isn't a surprise, and it's nice to have, for instance, a bit more background on what happened to Before I Kill You, Mr Bond (after a wholly anticipated and not terribly antagonistic lawsuit threat from MGM it got republished as James Ernest's Totally Renamed Spy Game, and sadly not as What Part Of Doctor No Don't You Understand?). It's also made for a fun trip down memory lane, since I played a bunch of Cheapass Games at Spiel (the Virginia Tech boardgame club: everyone said "that's a stupid name" and I invoked the Come Up With Something Better rule, and, well). Lots of mental images of blue or yellow or orange cards on the nice wood tables in the Cardinal Room with Adam and Emily and Little Jay and whoever else. I don't miss much about Blacksburg but I do miss Spiel.

I also just reread Graydon Saunders's The March North, because Commonweal #5 either is out or will be shortly and I haven't even read #4 yet. On fourth reread it remains fantastic, and there are still bits I'm picking up on for the first time, which is lovely.

What do you think you'll read next?

Immediately next, probably A Succession Of Bad Days (Commonweal #2), but definitely not diving straight into #3 afterwards; I think it's better to break these up a bit. City On Fire (the sequel to Metropolitan), soon. And I picked up my nice hardback of The Shadow Saint, the sequel to Gareth Hanrahan's The Gutter Prayer, this week as well, so that'll slot in somewhere.

Not to mention the vast number of books in Librarything tagged with "unread," or the ebooks I keep accumulating, and I want to reread This Is How You Lose The Time War sooner than later, and and and.

It's good to be reading again.