1. Now that my furniture has arrived (mostly) safe and sound, my new apartment is feeling much homier. One of the ‘fragile’ boxes got squashed and I lost a few dishes, and one of my small bookshelves got destroyed, but other than that everything seems to have come through in proper working order and it’s now mostly set up the way I want it. The only things I haven’t really started on are the pictures, since the walls are of a rough plaster design where I don’t know how well my command strips will work with it, which limits my options.

2. I’m trying to adapt to a new sleep schedule, which is leaving me pretty tired in the evenings, hence why this is a Saturday Flotsam again. Hopefully my body will adjust by the time school starts.

3. My week has mostly been a matter of putting things away and mentally adjusting to my new environment. School starts the week after this coming one (though I have my first teachers’ meeting on Thursday), so I’m shifting toward more class prep work. Yesterday I spent a fair amount of time studying note-taking techniques, since one of the things I most want to instill in my students is the ability to take good notes, especially in history.

4. I happened to open one of my ‘Analogue’ collections this morning to an Orson Scott Card story and, to my surprise, discovered it was actually set in the same world as another one of his stories I read a few months back. Turns out he did a whole series set there, what’s called the Worthing series, about a futuristic dystopia where the elites keep themselves young by putting themselves into suspended animation for years or decades at a time…and which, culturally, feels eerily familiar, like it’s a not-unthinkable exaggeration of the present day. In this one, for instance, the protagonist had spent seventeen years devoting his every waking hour to winning an elaborate massive-multiplayer strategy game (in which, starting in 1914, he took Italy from the Barney Fife of Europe to a world-spanning Empire), sacrificing his marriage and essentially everything else in the process while becoming a minor celebrity for his brilliant tactics. The story tells what happens when someone else buys control of his empire from under him, leaving him resorting to increasingly desperate tactics to try to get it back.

I’d never heard of the series, but now that I’ve read two stories set in it, I’ll admit I’m intrigued. The novel of the series is called Hot Sleep (haven’t read it yet) and the collections are Capitol and The Worthing Saga, if anyone’s interested in tracking it down.

5. I got sucked into re-reading Nicholas Nickelby this week, which is actually my first time reading it as opposed to listening to it. It goes down a lot easier than I would have expected; considering the length and Dicken’s famously dense prose, I was expecting a bit of a slog, but no, it’s a delight, and not just because of the story.

This really is one of his best, I’d say; pure melodrama, but expertly done melodrama. Ralph Nickelby in particular, I think, is one of Dickens’s better villains in that, though he’s a thoroughly reprehensible person, he is capable of remorse and human feelings, especially where his niece is concerned. He’s not an ‘evil to the core’ type of character, like book!Fagin or Monks or Compeyson, which makes his unrepentant villainy all the more effective. And Nicholas himself is a surprisingly engaging hero; he’s your standard uprightly moral young gentleman, but because he’s constantly dealing with the oddball supporting cast he gets to showcase more personality and humor than many of the same type. As I said, he and his sister serve as the eye of a delightfully eccentric human hurricane.

6. I was sorry to learn that the great Bob Newhart, one of the titans of American comedy and master of the deadpan, has finally passed away at the age of 94. In tribute, I offer you a selection of his sketches.

Rest in Peace

Of course, this is one of his signature sketches:

7. And, as a send-off, that famous ending to Newhart: