PRE-COLLEGIATE PILE

As I've mentioned a few times, I am starting college again this fall. Well, "this fall" is now tomorrow and my first College Algebra class is less than 20 hours away; my first Spanish I class follows about 24 hours after College Algebra finishes. I am already working my new job in the school system and this will be the first full week of school. Luckily, I still have two more weeks before I add in another 6 1/2 hours of teaching swimming lessons at the YMCA. I'm not sure how all this will affect my pop culture intake but I thought I'd jot down some things I still need to read and/or watch, as much to remind myself as anything.

I still have the last 2 books in the Company series to read, Gods and Pawns and The Sons of Heaven. I want to read Lord Tophet and I have Sideways in Crime, an anthology of alternate history crime stories, on my shelf. Coming up in a few months, there will be 4 books from Jeffrey Ford available that I've never read, plus one from Kelly Link. Beyond that, there are tons of books I want to read.

I have 3 trade paperbacks lined up to read - JLA Presents: Aztek the Ultimate Man, Astro City: The Dark Age, and Zot! The Complete Black and White Collection. I still have 2 trades of The Walking Dead sitting in my file at the comics shop and the latest Invincible volume is on the shelves as well. Of course, new single issues keep coming out too and I've demonstrated I can't fully quit those.

The ever-present drawer of SF magazines holds 7 issues at the moment - 3 of Asimov's and 4 of F&SF (and one of those is a double issue). I also have 3 issues of EW that I haven't gone through, plus parts of another, and a new one should arrive in the mail tomorrow. Oh, there's a new issue of Spin too but I usually just flip through those.

What's on the DVD shelves that I haven't gone through? Well, Grant and I are about 2/3 of the way through Superman Animated Season 3 and then we have 2 volumes of Batman Animated and The Simpsons Season 10. I have two seasons of The Venture Bros. and The Darjeeling Limited, not to mention stuff like 30 Rock Season 1 that I've seen most of as it aired but haven't looked at on DVD.

I've got a number of TV shows on the DVR - all 7 episodes of Generation Kill and one each of The Middleman, Californication, Hard Knocks: The Dallas Cowboys, Burn Notice, and Mad Men. And of course, the new fall TV season gets underway very soon.

So, there's plenty to keep me busy in my shrinking spare time and that's not including spending time with my family, being social, and keeping up with my own music. Still, I'm very much looking forward to getting into all of it.