Coincidentally, I also used to deal with acid reflux attacks fairly often. I couldn’t quite figure out why, and eventually they just stopped and I didn’t worry about it much.

Yes. Well. Quarter-past-three this morning I woke up to the nastiest acid reflux I’ve suffered in ages. Oh.

I think that’s it for those French Bread Pizzas, don’t you? Now to stumble through my day on about four hours accumulated sleep…

I dare you to find another photograph featuring a Zentraedi Officer’s Pod, a cast-iron “rubber” duck, and a black LEGO minifig.

Context will arrive in the form of Thursday’s Quacked Panes comic.

I choose here not to excoriate the year we leave behind. Yes, much of it sucked, but regurgitating the reasons won’t help anybody. Instead, I’m focusing on what’s good in my life.

• My loves, who keep me going when nothing else can.
• My children, who make me so proud I can’t even describe it.
• My job, that pays the bills, even if just barely.
• My friends, offline and on, who laugh at my jokes, however terrible they may be.
• My library of books and music, which help me forget the real world for a while.
• My stack of games, which can be played with family and friends to bring amusement to the household.
• My growing collection of ducks, which I use to entertain a couple dozen folks on the Internet every week.

I’ve had a particularly rough time of things lately, hence the lack of writing output. There are plans to improve things somewhat, but I’ve also never been good at making & carrying out plans, so… we’ll see.

Here’s to 2012. May it go better for us all.

When I was thirteen, Mom gave Sis & I to a nice couple from church named Ken and Virginia Savage for the duration of a summer or so. They lived in Soap Lake, WA and made annual road-trip pilgrimages back to Kansas City and to Omaha for the purpose of visiting relatives and important church sites. It was right around the time of that year’s trip when, while we were at the grocery store, I spotted a book cover near the checkout counters and decided that I really wanted that book.

Perhaps you’ve heard of it.

That little story, read out-of-sequence from the rest of its series, helped ruin me for lesser books. If it doesn’t involve friendship, wonder, perseverance against the odds and the bad opinion of people who shouldn’t matter, risk, reward, at least one proper brawl, and considerable doses of humor… then what’s the point of your book, I ask. I read the hell out of that book, and it survived up until just a few years ago… so I replaced it with another from the same printing.

I love quite a few books, but Anne McCaffrey’s “Dragonsinger” will always hold a peculiar and special place in my heart. Only a few others share a similar prominence: Raymond E. Feist’s “Magician” volume, for instance, and Julian May’s “Intervention.”

Folks might look at a guy funny for listing McCaffrey as one of his favorite writers, but I can live with that. And, true, there are things about some of her books (parts of the Pern series in particular) that it doesn’t pay to examine too closely. In later years, I think she lost a bit of her storytelling verve and took to treating bad guys and good guys alike a bit too much with kid gloves; consequences became gentler than one might expect. That was her choice to make, of course, and it’s my choice to leave off the reading of certain novels.

Today’s a sad one, for today we all learned that Anne McCaffrey is no longer with us. This avid reader, at least, is largely so because of her talent and because of a very nice couple who indulged a spoiled little boy all those years ago in Soap Lake.

This morning, however, I woke up the computer and turned on my Altec Lansing 5.1 speaker array and… HSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!

I unplugged the jacks from the computer, no change. I fiddled with the knobs, turned the speakers off and on, no change. I unplugged the power cord and plugged that back in again and… change.

Now they don’t turn on at all. I guess I’m going shopping later. Le sigh.

Somewhat.

Drip drip drip drip drip drip drip … drip drip drip … drip drip drip drip drip … drip … drip drip drip drip … drip drip drip drip … drip drip … drip drip drip …

It wouldn’t have been a problem had it simply managed to keep the beat steady! Instead… quite the opposite. I had to get up and read for a couple of hours until the dripping stopped. (Which means I’m running on about four, maybe five hours of accumulated sleep today. WHEE.)