Well, it finally happened. After over a year of being 'on the list' the Starbucks that Kat used to work at has finally closed. From what we've heard it wasn't that the location was losing money, it just wasn't making *enough* money. I suppose that means another coffee shop could conceivably move in there and survive, except we have plenty of good independent coffee shops in the area which seem to be doing just fine. Oh yeah, we also missed the last day they were open, meh. California now has a 11% unemployment rate, closing that store just added a few more. To Starbucks credit, they did try to place as many people as possible in other locations.

Kathleen is busy getting ready for her trip up to Canada, flight booked, rental car booked. We went to the bookstore to get some books, Kat picked up one by George R. R. Martin and I picked up the latest from William Gibson and Peter F. Hamilton. A day later I'm halfway through Spook Country and Kat has already finished her book. If it was a race to get to the Hamilton book, looks like I lost and she'll be taking that one on her trip. I didn't link the the home sites for Martin or Hamilton, just the wikipedia pages, because the official home pages are UGLY. Why can't authors get good web designers?

Speaking of books, I finished the book Lincoln lent me while I was in the U.K.: 'The Judging Eye' by the Canadian author R Scott Bakker. That man's editors need to clean up his prose a bit. He gets too poetic in some of his descriptions and it puts me to sleep. Of course I'm not huge on poetry so others may find it appealing. He's got great ideas and I'll buy the next few books in the series, but I have to read them sitting up with lots of caffeine in me.

Ending on the fiction theme, I found a nice addition to the car. It's sure to confuse people and annoy religious types, so that's all kinds of good. It's a reference from the movie Serenity. If you haven't seen that movie and you like Sci-Fi or westerns, you owe it to yourself to watch it. Heck, buy the Firefly series while you are at it, brilliant stuff.

Ugh, nothing like phone calls from work on Sunday afternoons. Guess I should go see what they want.