Sick by Sick West

When it started becoming apparent on Friday night that I was going to spend the weekend trying to kill off a cold, I was pretty grumpy with the thought of losing the freedom of two non-working, weather-friendly days to illness. But while the cold came, rubbing my nose and throat raw, I think I actually made the best of it.

On Friday night, the exceptionally creepy cover of Monstrous Affections by David Nickle caught my eye. I read the first story in the bookstore and immediately decided it was a keeper. I spent a good part of my waking hours this weekend plopped on the couch reading the collection of short stories, finding nearly all of them compelling, creative, and downright neat. I've been wasting a lot of reading on some fairly bad horror writing lately and recently pulled Clive Barker's The Inhuman Condition off the bookshelf just to restore my faith in the genre. Glad to say, Nickle's work built off my recent Barker read, which I think is fairly high praise.

NCAA Frozen Four: while most of the country is captivated by the basketball tournament, I've been watching the opening weekend of the ice hockey college championship. While we won't be going to the finals this year (after happily seeing the opening games last year in DC), I've been enjoying the games on ESPNU. And if anybody ever wondered just how good the hockey team from Rochester Institute of Technology is, be sure to tune in to ESPN2 on April 8 to see them in the final (that is, frozen) four.

FalconCam: Few things are as fun in life than spying on animals when they don't know it is happening, although for as many times as the birds look straight into the camera, I can't help but think maybe, just maybe, they know we are watching...somehow...