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.

BEHIND THE TIMES

I greatly enjoyed Thanksgiving weekend, as previously mentioned. One side effect of the weekend was that I fell a bit more behind on my pop culture intake. I'd gotten myself caught up on my DVRed TV shows and Grant and I had made some headway in our DVRed shows. I only captured a handful of shows over last weekend and I did get some reading done on the trip as well. This week has put me even further behind - I've been at work twice a day all week and am going in this morning for 3+ hours as well.

I mentioned yesterday that I'd read about 90 pages of Remainder. I started it on Tuesday and have really been enjoying it...but I haven't read any of it since Wednesday. I have 4 more books stacked up as well as two issues of SF mags and the new Scott Pilgrim.

I'm still a couple weeks behind on EW. I've read the Springsteen/Win Butler interview in Spin but haven't looked at much of the rest. I have an issue of ESPN the Magazine, an issue of Discover, and I borrowed an issue of The Economist from my dad (why?). Bought the new Previews for the first time in a number of months too.

On the DVR I still have Battlestar Galactica: Razor and episodes of Reaper, Pushing Daisies, My Name Is Earl, 30 Rock, Scrubs, and Friday Lights. A second ep of Legion of Super-Heroes will be captured today, as will the season finale of Torchwood and the second season finale of Doctor Who.

Grant is getting on my case to get through some commentaries of Simpsons Season 9 so we can watch more episodes (I sometimes forget he hasn't seen most of them). I want to watch the extras on Futurama: Bender's Big Score and still haven't gotten around to the extras on Knocked Up either. Our Netflix movie is The Squid and the Whale, which I want to see.

So, I guess I should shut up and focus on getting through some of this. Today's already pretty busy, though. Oh well, I'll get to it all.