The Game Room awaketh. What was once storage space has become the new favorite room of the house.  Complete with a piano, guitars and a table big enough for Zombicide!

We don’t stop playing because we grow old; We grow old because we stop playing. -George Bernard Shaw 

*

Barry B. Longyear's The Second Law builds upon the The Tryouts, mentioned in the previous post.  The newsteller from the fireside chat has incorporated a talent for magic and illusions on his journey to spread his surprising story, culminating in a planet-wide assembly and a promotion that started life as a joke.  The introduction indicates there is a story between The Tryouts and The Second Law; here's hoping Google can help me suss it (and any others) out.


February starts with F. Paul Wilson's To Fill The Sea and Air, setting the bar high for the remaining issue.  Set on the ocean of a distant world, a classic man versus the (corporate) machine tale, under the backdrop of industrial fishing.  Asimov's seems to carry a certain predilection for puns and this volume is no different; Noah Ward's Fit the Crime was predictable in plot, yet perfect in execution, and Mr. Isaac Asimov himself drops an excellent first contact story in Nothing for Nothing.  Overall, a worthwhile 196 pages.

I wanted to do four issues at a time for each blog post, however work and play and life and other books often impede wading through these at the pace one should if truly desirous of such a goal.  Alas, it is as it is and will be as it will be.

*

This week I am taking a crash course in gardening, composting, and perhaps bee-keeping if there's time.  Joining the chickens of things we inherited, the bee box (a bee-arium(?), something to look up) is, against all expectations, surviving through the winter.  Each semi-warm day, the hive is swarming with activity.  The vibrancy of the queen is under some question.  Fingers crossed.

CJ and I have had success with square foot gardening in previous years, so we will be throwing down some partially raised beds, each sixteen square feet with some modifications where needed.  The chicken coop will be moved, modified, and split into two separate runs to rotate flocks.  We have also decided to scale back from the original two thousand square feet of gardening space, to a paltry thousand with and eye toward more.  Me thinks our eyes are bigger than our stomachs.