My Then Favorite Separatist

I got good news yesterday when I visited my latest doctor (no, Dr. Fennern didn't regenerate into Dr. Albertson, she just opened a practice of her own that is still covered by Blue Cross Blue Shield, so I could have gone there, but I don't think my report would be as good!) so that pushed out my original main character of the day. And I guess Wat Tambor (one of the fictional Separatists in the prequel Star Wars trilogy The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, and Revenge of the Sith) was SO nine years ago, considering when he met his on-screen end at the lightsaber of Anakin Skywalker -- or Darth Vader, depending who you are. But of all the "villain" characters who led the Separatists, I loved his design the most even though he looked/looks like a green sausage stuffed into a blue and steel case. True, you needed subtitles in the film to understand what he was saying AND he didn't say much anyway, but he had/has presence that others only aspire to.

And my opinion is like a nose, everyone has one. (Out of the suit I don't think Tambor or any of his race does, but I digress.) I finished one of Scholastic's Star Wars novels, Elizabeth Hand's A New Threat about a younger Boba Fett (ISBN 9780439339315) with him being dispatched to hunt down Tambor and running into General Grievous -- the cyborg who kills Jedi and uses their lightsabers and commands the Separatists' droid army --  after Jeffrey had had me check it out under my name, the only card I had with me at the time. I finished reading it because he was getting busy enough with school and I'm ok with that. When I brought the kids to school this morning we found Sarah's inhaler (she has asthma) in the front office where she left it Friday yet she thought she had picked it up, and she'd been getting raspy since Monday. Martha's already ordered another inhaler so we'll be able to keep one at home and one at school, but something you want to hang it around someone's neck!

I'm not THAT grisly, trust me. After dinner which Sarah and I went out to get for our family (by the time I got home Martha was just finishing her final lap mowing the backyard so now our family's yard is just as high as our neighbors' on both sides) the youths got ready for bed ... without too much fuss. And then Martha and I settled in for the night and actually for our post-9 pm level of activity got a lot done! Laundry started, books finished that I had started days and weeks ago. Not books I have written, alas; I've got a notice on my wall calendar at work where I've written in the box for September 29 "book or die!" in reference to my unfinished story "Victory" -- it doesn't get out of quotes until it's DONE AND LIVE! I've let the denouement sit untyped even though it's running again and again in my head; I just haven't gotten off my "but" long enough to finish the work. And it will be eight years in the making, so I think it is just right enough now!   

Martha and I says our kids are the king and queen of stalling when it's bedtime ... as I said, I got two books I'd started to read a time ago finished last night. I think I read, or at least I'd heard of, Luigi Pirandello's play Six Characters in Search of an Author (Dover Thrift Edition ISBN 0486299929) when I was in Mrs. Hooten's drama class in high school -- where I also got "denouement" but I digress. Six characters that an author had written up but then left to languish appear on the stage of another of Pirandello's plays (what delicious irony) and ask the director to write their story. Then I finished Randy Alcorn's novel Lord Foulgrin's Letters (ISBN 9781576738610) which like C.S. Lewis' seminal "The Screwtape Letters" is purported to be the letters of a senior devil to a junior tempter assigned to his first "vermin" (the rather flattering term devils in this book have for human beings) interspersed with what's happening in the tempt-ee's life.

Spiritual and physical warfare are both very real things, David