It has been brought to my attention that there is no Neil on my banner. This is obviously a grievous oversight and will be corrected. Soon.

So other fantasy geeks will doubtless already know this, but Robert Jordan's latest book--the 11th in his Wheel of Time series--came out earlier this month. Like any good little fantasy geek, I promptly bought it and read it (an action helped immensely by my lovely wife's patience and generosity). :) It was good (better than the last two, certainly), but this isn't so much a book review.

I'm too lazy to type it into Amazon.com and check, but IIRC the first book in the series came out when I was a wee lad in high school; probably around 1993 or so, as I recall seeing the hardcover version of the second book in the school library and passing it over as probably bad (so much fantasy is...). It wasn't until a few years later, just before I went off to college, that I got into the series; I don't recall exactly how it happened, but I do recall that I was a member of the Science Fiction Book Club for a while, and I have the first 5 hardcovers in the series from the club. (I know that, because they're the size of all my other SFBC purchases.) It might have been a case where I included the first book on a whim as part of my first 6 books for 1¢ or something, and liked them enough to buy the rest; I can't recall. What I do recall is that the books make up a formative part of my college experience. I had a Wheel of Time book with me when I arrived at college a weekend early to take part in the advance Campus Culture class, where I met several people who would be some of my closest friends for the next two years. I was reading a different Wheel of Time book in the university cafeteria when I met another close-friend-to-be. I remember long and involved conversations regarding exactly how Jordan's system of magic worked--the kind of long, involved conversations you pretty much only have when you're an undergraduate just discovering really intellectual discourse, in between the 4 a.m. discussions of morality and religion. ;) The Wheel of Time was part of another formative experience as well; one of my first inroductions to the conglomeration of people and software that would become the Internet (including my own waxing and waning addiction to a series of online communities) was the net newsgroup rec.arts.sf.written.robert-jordan--which I still occasionally post to, whenever a new book comes out and there are new things to discuss. I'm even quoted, briefly, in the official group FAQ. ;)

It's kind of funny to me that this series of 11 books (so far) has stretched back over the last 10 years of my life; I'm not at all the same person I was when I started reading it, and yet it's a thread of constancy, something otherwise largely lacking in my life. I don't have the same friends, or live in the same place, or think many of the same things--but I still love the world Jordan has created, and reading the books through again takes me back a little bit, to a time when my biggest worry was getting my physics homework done after the weekly card game.

Or maybe I just have too much time to think these days. ;)

So according to OLN's website, the Tivo channel guide, and the Time Warner channel guide, OLN is supposed to be showing hockey from 7-9:30pm EST tonight. The first hockey that I will get a chance to watch after an entire season without, so I've been looking forward to it for... a while. Of course, I don't get home until 7pm Central, but my lovely Tivo will get the first hour for me anyway.

Except I get home and the Tivo has faithfully recorded an hour of OLN... which is showing a show about a family of utter geniuses who sailed their boat into a bleeding hurricane. Gee, thanks!

I am often described as "easy going". I suppose in a lot of ways I am, but at this point I don't think it's a term I'd ever really choose to describe myself. I am remarkably anal about some pretty trivial stuff, and I'm sure it doesn't make me particularly easy to live with. Fortunately for me, I am married to the most patient, loving woman this earth ever produced--a stroke of fortune so great I could be unlucky the rest of my life and still come out ahead.

Oh, examples? Okay. Here's the kind of thng you'd have to put up with if you were Jen:

• I cannot abide towels not being hung up after use. I mean, cannot abide like it grinds at my soul for entire days when I think the towels may not have been hung properly. And by properly I mean folded to within 1.0mm of "in half" lengthwise, then hung precisely doubled on the towel rack. I swear. Like nails on a chalkboard. Really.
• If I don't load the dishwasher, it gives me the heebie-jeebies as if someone were not merely dancing, but seriously Lord of the Dancing on my grave. There are glasses that go in the far left row, and nothing else is allowed to be in that row, lest horror and chaos engulf the household. The bottom shelf of the dishwasher must be as symmetrical as possible given the layout; if there's a large plate on the right, there had better be one on the left. Again, horror and chaos.

This is all just so all of you know what Jenny has to put up with on a daily basis. I would bet money that nobody who ever lived with me would ever be wary of my wrath should a towel not be properly folded. Fortunately, none of you have to. :)

This ramble brought to you by Eric and his Extremely Anal Saturday, in which he rearranged the dishwasher before turning it on. For no better reason than it made him feel better. I swear, some nights I'm not half so relaxed as Adrian Monk.

Oh, also, I have the most patient, loving, wonderful wife in the universe. That is all.

No, wait, that's not all. Tonight, we got a pizza stone. It came with a wooden pizza peel. I am so excited I nearly forgot to rearrange the dishes in the dishwasher. Whoever comes over next gets free awesome homemade pizza.