It was frickin’ COLD this morning, as in low-thirties, and before any of you northern types roll your eyes, please remember that I live in the Deep South, and the reason that I live in the Deep South and endure the summers here is because I Hate Being Cold.

But despite it being frickin’ cold, I managed to run three miles this morning, which is the farthest I’ve run in a while. I’d taken a bit of a hiatus from running/exercising/eating right/anything healthy at all during the combined crush of the holidays and the house-buying hell. As a result many of the pounds that I had shed prior to going to World Fantasy managed to find their way back onto my not-so-svelte frame. (Hence the reason I forced myself to go running at insanely-early o’clock in frickin’ cold temperatures.) One thing I really love about our new neighborhood is that it’s sprawling enough that it’s easy to map out a nice variety of running routes of varying distances. Plus, I don’t have to get in the car and drive anywhere to go run, which is what I had to do in our old subdivision. The only negative about this neighborhood is that there are no streetlights, so any light on the street comes from people’s porch lights which may or may not be on. And, since I run at insanely-early o’clock (when the stars are still out), I’m often placing a lot of faith in the quality of the roads. (I’ve considered running with some sort of light, but I can’t think of any method that wouldn’t be more trouble than it’s worth.)

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I watched New Amsterdam last night. (Stop reading if you don’t want any spoilers.) I had high hopes for the show after seeing the previews, but I ended up being pretty disappointed. The basic concept is cool—homicide detective in New York who’s been around for several hundred years and can’t die—but the execution of that concept had some major flaws. I thought that the “finding the one true love” angle placed a big whopping limitation on the series as a whole. Okay, so he spends his time looking for this chick, and what happens when he finds her? He either starts aging, which would mean the end of the series, or he loses her again, which would bring the whole darn thing back to square one. But more importantly than that, I was severely disappointed in the police procedures, which were Heinously and Egregiously Inaccurate. Oh holy shit but can anyone else see the many problems with the whole business of allowing the suspect-in-custody to get away in order to “reveal the true killer?” Okay, so the gun wasn’t loaded, but what if he’d started beating the crap out of the guy? Or pushed him off of the balcony? (Which is what I thought was going to happen!) Plus, any sort of admission made by the “real killer” would never in a billion jillion years be admissable since it was pretty darn clearly under high duress. (Hello, gun pointed at my head!) By this time in the show I had a headache from all of my eye-rolling. Anyway, I guess what bugged me the most about it was the fact that it IS a good concept, and they could have done some seriously neat stuff with it, and instead they made it stupid. Bummer.

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And, Gary Gygax has gone to the great gaming table in the sky. Thanks for giving us the chance to live so many adventures.