Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 11

New Wheels

My trim line may be slightly different

So after seven years with a Subaru WRX, I’ve gone and bought a new WRX. Upgunned with a 2.2-liter boxer engine that wouldn’t be complete without a ginormous turbocharger sitting on it.

My old car was in good shape, and a used WRX is always in demand, so I got a very nice price for it.

One obvious difference is the giant touchscreen of an entertainment/climate system sitting in the middle of the dashboard. I have only the slightest idea of how t...

Pig and Veg

We’re in a campaign to empty out the chest freezer, which contains a lot of stuff that I don’t remember buying, and the result for tonight was this pork loin roast cooked with potatoes, carrots, and onions. You could think of it as a one-pot meal if it weren’t for the fact that it’s in a pan, not a pot.

If I make this again I’ll cook the vegetables a bit ahead of time, since the vegetables that weren’t in the cooking liquid (mostly apple juice) came out hard, dry, and largely uncooked. ...

Tonight’s Sunset

I know it looks as if I produced this in Photoshop, but this is exactly what I saw from our front porch.

I love the Southwest.

One Way to Get to Pylos

Another picture from my 1980 trip. I’ve fled the freezing rain of Northern Europe for the Med, and here we find me on a rare sunny day. Greece turned out to be cold and rainy as hell, and one night I pitched my tent in a tree-sheltered hollow, only to have the rain start to pour down after I went to sleep. When I woke up at maybe 2am, I found my tent was now pitched in a lake, and I had to haul my belongings out of the water toward higher ground, an experience somehow emblematic of the w...

The Small Rains Down Do Rain

Here I am in the UK in the autumn of 1980. I’m in Greenwich doing research for the Privateer books, and I’m standing in front of the clipper ship Cutty Sark. I seem to be an older and more weathered person than I remember.

I seem to attract extreme weather whenever I visit Britain, and 1980 was no exception. The wool cap and bomber jacket were inadequate for the freezing weather, which usually included freezing rain.

From Britain I went to Germany to visit friends, and from there I ...

Maculate

“Damn.”

Now that’s a word you don’t want to hear from your eye doc when he’s peering through his scope at the interior of your eye. And you really don’t want to hear his next line, which is:

“You really can’t catch a break, can you?”

The vision in my left eye has been deteriorating for a year or more, and last August I went to the doc, and I got dilated and scoped and the doc couldn’t find anything wrong. So I just went on using reading glasses, which worked less and less well as my ...

Down the Gullet

This is the best picture I got of 2024’s solar eclipse, taken by focusing the camera directly into the eyepiece of Kathy’s Astroscan telescope.

What followed was disappointing, because the actual eclipse was clouded out. Totality nevertheless remained impressive, as the moon’s shadow descended with amazing speed. If I were a neolithic tribesman I would have been terrified. The not-quite-night lasted less than four minutes, and then the rooster started to salute the new dawn.

Mss.

I haven’t been visible much online because I’ve been buried up to my eye sockets in submissions for Taos Toolbox. Because of the weeks of radiation and other treatments last year, I was late in getting notices out, and as late as a couple weeks ago I was wondering if we’d get enough applications to keep the workshop in the black. (I run this workshop for a lot of reasons, but losing money isn’t one of them.)

But with the 1 April deadline approaching, a tsunami of manila envelopes began to ...

La. La.

The big residuals check from Hollywood came in! Imagine the fun I could have with all this money!

Because Some Days You Just Damn Well Want To Be Uplifted

I can’t quite believe that Mariza is performing on a freaking talent show, but that doesn’t make her any less awesome.