Wayne and Rebecca Madsen

Birthdays are great as a kid because presents seem to be given to you for free, without any strings attached. As you grow older and have a family, you realize that Birthday presents are being purchased out of your communal funds and, indirectly, you are buying your own gifts. This conundrum has drained some of the magic from birthdays for me. I'm not sure how to clearly explain it, but gifts received for free always seem a bit different than a gift which costs our family. This makes the gift seem less like a gift, more like a present to yourself.

This week, we celebrated our Unbirthdays. Rebecca has been trying for the past year to get anything of interest from Craigslist or freecycle. We haven't been able to get anything for free because of the overuse of these sites in the Bay Area. It almost makes winning the lottery seem more likely. But for our unbirthday week, (which we hadn't even planned) we won two free bookcases. Our books had been overflowing on our shelves (worse than we thought to fill up two complete bookshelves!) and we were glad to get the free bookcases even if they were a bit ratty. That is how our unbirthday started on Tuesday. A friend from church took me in his truck to pick up the bookcases while Rebecca found some more luck and was able to go pick up a free jogging stroller (which we won't be able to use for another year, which is okay because some repairs need to happen to it first). After heavily dusting the bookshelves, we stayed up until well past midnight setting up our shelves and organizing the books into a sensible spacial distribution. Three gifts for free! Call that an unbirthday? Well, it goes on.

I was accepted for residency tuition. This saves us approximately four to five thousand dollars a semester. If that isn't a great free gift, then I don't know what is. And during the next 24 hours we managed to trade company stocks which doubled our investment (another free gift) and our anniversary present arrived in the mail several weeks early and surprised us. Well, things for our unbirthdays were going great. So we topped it off by going to a free movie and watching the Simpsons, courtesy of Discovercard bonus award. Which, by the way, exceeded my very low expectations.

With unbirthdays out of the way, we could focus more on birthdays coming up, including the smallest birthdays. Thursday evening we spent 3 hours in a birthing class, not for free. I tried to come up with as many questions as I could, since there are averages which books don't tell you and expectancies that, although there isn't any normal birth, give us a better idea of what we should be expecting with labor. I would say it was a productive evening. I wasn't expecting much.

Friday night we swam in the pool, after a long hot day. Saturday we went to a free performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream in Cupertino. The San Francisco Shakespeare company puts on free Shakespeare in the park every year and they tour the performances around the Bay Area. We got there about an hour early and the amphitheater was already packed with people and their picnics. For future notice, get to the park by 6pm (the show started at 7:30pm). Our friends brought some bread, crackers, salami, fancy cheeses; this was really the best way to have an outdoor dinner before a fancy show [we brought a salad -- finger foods were a bit easier to deal with]. The performance was so well done, I felt bad leaving without paying -- we dished up whatever cash we had to their donations box after the performance [we never carry much cash on us, so it wasn't much...]. Although Midsummer Night's Dream is one of the more difficult works to follow, this company did a wonderful job of presenting the show. We intend on making this a staple of our summers in the Bay Area; we're excited to see which Shakespeare play they put on next year.

We never watch tv. However, while house sitting this past weekend, we caught a 30 minute show on bread making which astounded us. This recipe is Alton Brown's of the show Good Eats on the Food Network. It teaches how to make a good loaf of bread.

I was reading up on Rick Riordan to see if there was any news of how far away the next Percy Jackson book is from being released, and I came upon the saddest news I've heard in a while.

So, the genius behind such classic films as Fantastic Four, the first two Harry Potter films, Home Alone and Adventures in Babysitting is going to make the Percy Jackson books into a movie. I understand that sarcasm doesn't come through very well in print, so let me clearly reiterate that this is sad news.

Is it because of the stupidity of numbers which keeps Chris Columbus and Michael Bay in Hollywood? I understand that Hollywood isn't the best place to find intelligent film making. But these two directors are the poster children for banal "summer blockbusters" which have as much substance and craft put to them as a dead donkey. Or horse.

Yet, people keep going to their films. And they are still allowed to make them. Maybe it is a conspiracy of the accountants and producers who want a high return investment and fudge the profit numbers. Let's hope that is true, for the humanity of mankind...let's hope.

I have a confession to make. I am terribly in love with the Percy Jackson books. I might moan and gripe about Harry Potter books, but everything bad I see in them, I find the opposite is true in the Percy Jackson series.

We read this book on our road trip to Washington state last month and I wouldn't let Rebecca stop reading it to me. We read every night and every moment in the car and talked about it on our hikes and kept thinking about it all through the night.

This was the best Percy Jackson book so far, completely blowing out of the water both Sea of Monsters and Lightning Thief. While I agree with my sister that I was upset Annabeth wasn't around during most of this book (her quips remind me of being that age), I didn't ever forget about her being out of the picture - she was always on our thoughts and we wanted Percy to proclaim his affection for her.

Oh dear, I'm so wrapped up in Percy-land.

Trying to collaborate on something as complicated as a book is a tough thing to do. I know from the experience of collaborating on art projects that there are a few models to get you through this challenging exercise. They are as follows:

You can be a dictator, and make everyone slaves to your idea.

You can do your part, let someone else do their part and the compile the information into a final piece.

You can really join forces and create an unique beast which is driven not by singular interests, but by collective force. Often this is the most destructive of forces.

Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman opted to write this book using the second method, that of rotating collaboration. What resulted was a disjointed book that highlighted both author's characteristic styles, without being able to get beyond those styles.

Granted, this isn't all bad. I happen to like both authors and I have no complaints about a story which contains elements of both genius. Yet, it was lacking in that I felt cheated that neither author could go beyond what they had to offer.

My critique aside, I enjoyed this story and was impressed with the maturity of its message. We do all have decisions to make with our lives no matter what the fates may say. We aren't controlled by our destinies and we can choose to live our lives how we wish to. A charming novel throughout, Good Omens takes the Apocalypse and turns it into a tale about agency and the redeeming qualities which make us human.

While one of the more suspenseful Terry Pratchett novels I've read, this book doesn't take the cut as being one of his best told stories, along the lines of Men at Arms or Sourcery. I did appreciate the humor of affirmative action in a City patrol made of warring factions of races. I could laugh at the continuing puns that ran rampantly through this book. I even felt for the heartfelt and touching moments at the end of the book with Dorfl.

While not Pratchett's greatest work, definitely one to add to the collection of Pratchett books filling our bookshelves.

Jingo, by Terry Pratchett, is another in the City Watch series with all your favorite characters.

This book, however, was boring. I prefer the Patrician to be a sideline character, and not a principle adventurist. It wasn't as believable to have his character trekking across the known world to save the day when he should be smart enough to get other people to do it for him.

While the parallels between Sam Vimes character and the opposing force's captain were interesting, it made for a poor substitute for an interesting plot. And by this time, I've gotten really tired of everyone commenting on how Carrot is such an obvious leader. It gets silly, and not the kind of silly that made Rincewind a hilarious character to read about.