_Hot Item_, Carly Phillips

Third in the trilogy. More of the Same, which is to say, if you are interested in romantic trilogies involving secondary characters from each as primary in another (in this case, three sisters adopted by their bachelor uncle and his one time lover and future wife and employee after the girls parents die in a plane crash), with Professional Sports as a key element, this is for you. It's not so great as a romance trilogy to shine without the Professional Sports -- you're probably safer reading SEP or La Nora or something like that.

I'll continue to read Phillips, at least as long as I can swap for them.

In this particular entry, friend of the family Spencer is outed and there's actually a pretty well developed sports/right wing politicians/homosexuality theme.

ASD and House

I didn't feel like watching the episode of Law & Order, Criminal Intent from 2002 (or was it 2005? does it matter?) that was on at the moment, and nothing on the Tivo or any other channel was all that compelling, so I figured I'd watch an episode of House. I used to find Hugh Laurie moderately amusing Back in the Day (R. was stunned to realize he'd been on Blackadder as Prince George). I persistently confuse Laurie with Fry (not to look at -- to keep the names straight), which is a little unfortunate. But I found the marketing for House to be incredibly off-putting, which is why I hadn't watched any episodes yet (well, and medical dramas tend to irritate me, also).

In any event, the episode I hit upon was the one with the autistic, sand-eating (oops, I guess that would be a spoiler, right?), parasite-ridden boy who only House takes really, really, really seriously. I have Issues (duh, when do I not). Heroic medicine, diagnostic categories that actually map to the real world. Whatever.

Easily the best bit in the episode is the confusion in the discussion between the boy's mom and House in which she says he trusted House (which he did) and House persists in understanding his interaction with the boy in true Aspie/ASD fashion: No Generalizations Allowed. Beautiful. The oncologist twisting the knife (you're really just a jerk) after actually acknowledging that he understands House at the end was entertaining as well. If any of the other episodes are this good, I'll clearly have to start Tivo'ing this and catching up.

house update (our residence, not the show)

Work has begun on the glass slider and, more importantly, on the rotted wood around it. Which, predictably, is worse even than we had expected. Fair enough -- the rot around the front door was less bad than we had expected. The good news is that this is the last door to be worked on, since we've already replaced the kitchen door and the repair work is done around the front door.

It'll probably take a couple weeks for it to be completely finished, since we're getting the work done by someone who has another full time gig. But he has been pretty reliable, and he does good work.