What A Life

Not mine. Mine is great. I mean this poor guy's.

Been working on my Jeep lately. More and more. It all started in October when I started steaming over. Found that the overflow bottle had cracked. I thought I was too busy to fix it, so I kept it topped up; and then Christmas / Wedding / Moving hit and I really was too busy to fix it. Got through the winter pretty much unscathed but after I replaced the bottle, I found a) that nasty random noise was the electric radiator fan tearing apart the heat riser tube, which I "fixed" by removing the fan and duct-taping the tube; and b) I still had overheating problems with the cause apparently shifting forward to a little radiator leak. The best advice is to fix that. Urgh.

I just want to set up my garage and put my tools all in their places but not have to actually use them. Geez.

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In stolen spare moments I Netflixed Valhalla Rising. It was a pretty good film, for being slow-paced and bloody and lacking dialog. The main character doesn't say a word. But it looked realistic to me, a slice of adventure that starts in Sutherland about the time men were converting to Christianity. But when our hero ships with a small gang of them to the Holy Land, their journey goes awry, and they end up dying one by one in a pine-forested land somewhere west of the great western sea. The ending is rather film noir.

Why do I love this sort of thing? I love historical realism, or whatever passes for it closely enough. I love gritty medieval settings much more than that sometimes cartoonish Middle Earth stuff. And if a movie is dark and brooding and makes me think of Bran Mak Morn, all the better.

Speaking of whom, if you read about Howard's Picts from his prehistorical Hyborean Age (the age of Conan), you might learn that they bear striking resemblances to native North Americans, and that this indicates Howard's speculation that they originated across the great western ocean. But this is nonsense. His Picts are similar to Indians because some of his Conan stories were rewrites of Westerns, and not necessarily good rewrites either, if done by someone else.

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Finally starting to read more, or on the cusp of it, and this could lead to some writing. But I can't be sure because, apart from the job I'm ignoring at this moment, I really want to fix this house up for everyone living in it, and for visitors, and for me to start seriously working on some mobile art. If I get to the point of buying a welder, you know I've made it all happen.