Weekend update

 
The past week was busy, but not with anything that requires a lot of detail.

My tour here at Guantanamo may end as much as two months sooner than I had thought, and the possibility of extending seems to have shrunk to nil. Gains and losses: if I get home earlier, I’ll do other things instead.

I’m doing increased focus on language study, and arrangements are being made for me to spend a few days each week in another section, where I can listen to native speakers and converse with some of the linguists here. Good opportunity, and I plan to take full advantage of it.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows finally reached me by mail. I read it in six hours. I was quite pleased by the resolution (though there were a few things I had hoped to see, sadly not there), and consider it — and the rest of the series — to have been well worth my time and attention.

Regrettably, my work on “Queen’s Gambit” has suffered from the focus I’ve been directing elsewhere. I’ll have to find a way to get back into a productive rhythm, it just hasn’t happened yet.

And — ironically — I remain the sole participant in gen_remix who has yet to be himself remixed. I call it ironic because I initially declined to enter, expecting to be too busy, and then entered anyhow; begged off on serving as a pinch-hitter (again, too many other things to do), then wrote a pinch-hit story anyhow. The different things I was dealing with were sufficiently demanding of my attention that I genuinely failed to notice that no remix of me had yet apeared, until it was explicitly pointed out to me … and now I find myself checking periodically, and wondering how long it will take.

Days wind down, and we reach ends and resolutions regardless of whether we desire or even realize the fact. This is me in August; not quite the same as I was in April (when I arrived at Guantanamo), and more to come.