Ninjineer

a Nerd with Delusions of Wonder

Despite assurances to the contrary, the Wednesday flight arrived today unburdened with the weight of my two coolers. Rumor has it they’ve shacked up in a dive on Guam and are busy raising little thermos babies. Their passion has led them to disregard the ham and the pair of Thanksgiving turkeys chilling (or more likely: formerly chilling now decomposing) inside them.

To their credit, the local Continental staff are fully sharing in my annoyance. In fact, the manager was so apologetic he took me to the grocery store and bought me a turkey and a ham. (Hurray, the holiday is saved!) At local prices, that set the airline back about $140. It was really an unexpected gesture, since normal airline policy for perishables would leave me SOL.

Background

Continental is the only airline servicing Pohnpei. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays they have an island hopper flight that starts in Guam, stops in Chuuk, Pohnpei, Kosrae, Kwajalein, and Majuro, and terminates in Honolulu. On Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, the island hopper hits all the same islands going the opposite direction. (Note: these dates are from a Pohnpeian perspective. These flights cross the international date lines which makes the days subjective.) Also, there is a seventh weekly flight commonly called the night flight. On Sunday evenings, it goes Guam - Chuuk - Pohnpei - Chuuk - Guam.

The Plan

I needed to assist my brother-in-law with some computer upgrades in Kosrae and Chuuk. Since this wasn’t for my regular job, I needed to minimize my time away from work. The schedule that best met this requirement had me leave for Kosrae on Friday, catch the Saturday flight to Chuuk, and return to Pohnpei on the Sunday night flight.

meltinyourmouth:

Awww…how sad!!

I keep hearing how nothing rhymes with ‘orange’, but to my ear ‘range’ seems to. Maybe my understanding of rhyming is missing some vital component.

Tumblr Theme: Parchment Under Glass — Archeologists laboring at a dig in an undisclosed location recently unearthed a remarkably well preserved collection of scrolls. With pain-staking focus on preservation protocols, they extract each scroll and ship it via armored caravan to their sponsoring museum. There, the curators gently untie the binding ribbon and unroll the parchment. They then place the document under a glass sheet to keep it from curling and to protect it from the environment. Thus protected, researchers may peruse the contents at their leisure…

For those interested, here also is the Theme Garden link.

• Aliens in the Attic — Watch the trailer and save yourself a couple hours.

• Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince — I greatly enjoyed the broomstick’s-eye-view opening sequence. It would make an awesome theme park ride. However, I was ultimately disappointed. The entire Half-Blood Prince thread of the book was so diluted that what little remained was confusing and incoherent.

• G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra — While I do have fond memories of watching G.I. Joe after school, I was not a devotee. Thundercats was far cooler to my adolescent mind. So, I only went into the movie hoping for a couple hours of mindless escapism. In this I was not disappointed. I just have to be careful not to think too hard about it.

• G-Force — I’m trying to recall something redeeming about the gerbil spies, but I’m drawing a blank. Honestly, while watching it I kept hoping the diabolical industrialist would just toss aside his glasses, sprout fangs, and berate the rodents for being abominations a la Underworld. Then Selene could then have dropped in and started blasting the gerbils for being lycan wannabes.

• Furies of Calderon, Academ’s Fury, Cursor’s Fury, and Captain’s Fury by Jim Butcher — Another long business trip gave me the time I needed to chew through the first four books of the Codex Alera, Butcher’s other series. They were good, even if they were completely different than the Dresden Files.

• Jhegaala by Steven Brust — Another in the long line of Vlad Taltos books.

• My Own Kind of Freedom by Steven Brust — It was not unlike discovering a lost Firefly episode. And that is a precious thing indeed.

• The Stepsister Scheme by Jim C. Hines — Its fairy tale roots reminded me of Shrek, but with a much healthier dose of realism.

• Medusa by Clive Cussler and Paul Kemprecos — I was excited to pick up this book, because I had heard parts of it take place on Pohnpei. They did their research right—all the names and dates were correct, but obviously they had never been here—the modern details were way off. However, since not all that many people have been here, I doubt there’s an abundance of people who noticed the problems.

• Norse Code by Greg van Eekhout — After a good build up, the end of the world came and went way too fast.

• Staked by J. F. Lewis — This author got it right. When his vampires are exposed to sunlight, they burst into flames. None of this namby-pamby sparkling crap. His vampires also actually kill people, often messily.