Who knew this job thing took so much time? I've been with the new gig for almost a month now and am starting to kinda know what I'm doing, though there are still mountains of stuff I need to learn. But it's kicking my butt for being good for much of anything else. Hence no posting here or any of my other usual haunts, and very little reading either online or off. Hopefully as I get farther up the learning curve I'll be able to get back to my usual entertainments and endeavors. Who knew I'd be happy to have Shadow Unit on hiatus?

Meanwhile, on the last few weekends I did manage to squeeze in a little fun in the form of a drum party at our house and serving as an assistant while a couple of friends brewed some beer.

Also had a basic energy audit done on our house. Even crawled around under the house for the first time since shortly after we bought the place. Our vents need sealing and insulating (they're partially insulated, but the ends of all the runs aren't. Floors, ceiling, and walls also need insulation. No surprise, but it's good to know the extent of it so we can start figuring out what to do about it.

That's all I've got.

Well, I seem to have gotten a job. It's similar to the old job as near as I can tell. Looks like I'll be starting next Monday. If the pre-employment drug screen comes back okay, anyway. I'm kind of freaking myself out worrying about false positives there. Other than that worry, I'm actually kind of excited at the prospect of doing an organization some good again. Plus, the place is a little closer to home than the last one which puts it a little under two miles.

Since our last episode, all sorts of things have happened...( mad productivity exposed )

You think maybe the new drugs are helping? I do.

As the start date for our trip approached it became clear that the first couple of days were going to be rainy. When Sunday morning dawned partly cloudy, I took it as a good omen. Shows how much I know.

( looooong, hopefully not too boring trip report )

Where did it go?

• Got a warning from a cop for riding my bike without a helmet. Probably shouldn't have ridden right past him while he was directing traffic. :-)
  
• Went to a friend's birthday party and took a bunch of pictures. Fun way to avoid having to talk to strangers.
  
• repaired our broken 20-year-old CD changer with a rubber band
  
• started seeing shrink again, this time with B
  
• took several hikes
  
• didn't get the job
  
• did computer support for friends and non-profits
  
• drummed
  
• repaired refrigerator with spray adhesive (first had to disassemble freezer to get to insulation panel that had come loose and was rubbing on the fan)
  
• drove to Sacramento in one day
  
• Visited and did errands for B's mom
  
• Went to new Academy of Sciences in San Francisco with S&H&R. Looked at fishes and reptiles and birds and insects and plants and simulated stars.
  
• Got all touristy on Fisherman's Wharf (mmm sourdough) and at Ghirardelli Square (mmm chocolate)
  
• drove to Sonora to visit parents
  
• visited friend who was the best man at our wedding
  
• went to 25 year high school reunion and met lots of people I used to know
  
• drove back to Issaquah in one day (about 17 hours)
  
• was interviewed by reporter from local paper about transportation stuff
  
• helped out at B's "Facebook for artists" class
  
• repaired my bike computer (thanks, Dad for making me learn to solder)
  
• went to a meeting of the other non-profit I'm working with (Sustainable Issaquah)
  
• rolled our own art walk in Pioneer Square in Seattle, starting and ending with a friend's show
  
• made most of the house presentable for guests
  
• hosted a party so our friends and neighbors could meet a city council candidate
  
• messed around on the internet
  

Whew!

This coming Sunday marks the start of the long-awaited epic bike journey. E and I are leaving from Issaquah and riding to Idaho. We expect this to take about 7 days with varying mileage. Camping most nights, probably hoteling once or twice. Plenty of room for adventure. Should be fun if we don't die.

Livejournal's "friends page" is a really sucky post aggregator*. Among its many other faults, after going back as far as I can with it, I'm still missing some posts from my recent livejournal vacation. I'm trying to soothe my OCD into accepting this gracefully. In the vanishingly unlikely event anyone was trying to catch my attention with something back before the 15th, you probably failed.

Plus after going back 420 entries I now have 36 tabs of stuff to look at open in Firefox. And should have gone to bed a couple of hours ago.

Hi everybody! A few of you are likely to see comments from me on relatively old posts in the next couple days.

The OCD will probably also make me write a newsy what-i've-been-up-to post in the near future.

* This problem seems so close to the one so elegantly solved by usenet news readers back in the early 1980s that there is obviously something I don't understand about the problem since even the good RSS readers I've tried suck when compared to nn.

But everyone else is, it seems. So what better time to post an update?

When did I update last? Oh jeez, July 21. Let's see...

Phone interview #2 with job prospect was short and sweet so I went in for an in-person chat with half a dozen people. Seemed like that went well, but you never know. My only real misgivings about the place are Windows which is just a fact of life, sadly, and the length of the commute, but I have some ideas for managing that. Haven't heard their decision yet, but they've kept me updated on why not, so that's good.

We took a quick trip down to Ashland, OR, riding down and back with my sis-in-law R (who continued on to Sacto), and meeting up there with bro-in-law S, and his wife and daughter H & R. The trip was all R's idea: she wanted to see a Shakespeare play for her 8th birthday. Yes, her father is an English teacher. We saw "Much Ado About Nothing" and it was almost more fun watching her watch the play than the play itself (which was nicely done, and fun to watch). She had prepared by reading a graphic novel of the play so she knew the story and you could see her getting more and more excited as her favorite bits came up, squirming in her seat and chortling quietly to herself. So. Dang. Cute. What a geek.

Ashland is a nice mix of California hippie culture and Northwest mellow. Too darn hot, but it really is a dry heat and that really does make a difference. We took a couple of little hikes, the most fun was the trail along the creek in Ashland at twilight, the woods alive with the sounds of happy people laughing, talking, and playing. Idyllic.

I've had a couple more sessions of the drawing class that I may have mentioned here. It's based on Betty Edwards's Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. It's hard to tell if I'm making progress, but it's interesting. I missed a couple of sessions that I need to go back and fill in from the book.

We saw the Ditty Bops at the Tractor which was wonderful. They were less high-concept than when we saw them at the Triple Door a year or two ago. More just into the music.

Took a hike to Snow Lake on Sunday with a friend. Very pretty. I need to get the pictures processed and posted. In fact I need to get the pictures processed and posted for everything in this post...

The Bicycle Issaquah map we've been trying to get published since spring finally made it back from the printer on Tuesday afternoon, just in time for the National Night Out event where I had a table to talk about GAIT and walk/bike/bus transportation. Gave out about 80 of them. I can see the second printing on the horizon already. If you're curious, there's a page with PDF versions you can download behind the link at the beginning of this paragraph.

I've done a few long bike rides, gone to a few meetings, had a couple of lunches with friends. The days go by. Remind me where I found time to go to work?

So the running reports have been the thing that's kept me posting lately so I'll start there. Yesterday I finally got out there again. So that's, what, 12 days since the last time? Lame. And hey, look, conditioning decays in that time. I went five miles, but most of it was just a brisk walk. I did run some spurts in there for maybe a mile and a half total. I won't use the heat as an excuse this time.

Life has continued apace in that time. Let's see...

Went to the Puget Sound Regional Council Bicycle/Pedestrian Advisory Committee meeting in Seattle. Too shy to talk to anyone, but got some names for later email contact.

Gave blood.

Went to Sustainable Issaquah meetings.

Saw Inga Swearingen with B and friends in Ballard. Took pictures and video.

Picked up trash.

Watched movies and played Bioshock.

Saw Othello at Intiman.

Had various conference calls and email exchanges with sibs-in-law re: mom-in-law's issues.

Had a phone interview for a job quite similar to the last job but with different tools. Have another phone interview with the same place tomorrow.

Decided to go back to shrink for a while, but this time with B too since my issues and her issues and our issues all sort of blur into each other mostly.

Heading to Ashland tomorrow for a couple of plays and other fun with S&H&R. And B of course.

B came home on Monday morning. And there was much rejoicing. No, really!

Tuesday we went to a Q&A session on Waxman Markey at Sightline. Then had dinner with friends and went to see Cracker at the Crocodile. That looked and sounded pretty much like this and this. And the opener sounded like this. Good, but loud to the point of distortion and B and I stupidly forgot to take earplugs so that was it for sensitive hearing for a day or so. Wanted to be in two places that night since matociquala was reading at University Bookstore. I really would have liked to hear what she read too since it was a sneak peek at an upcoming Shadow Unit episode. Oh well.

Went running on Thursday in the heat of the day. Now I know why I haven't been doing that. Went up the hill again (in the opposite direction from the loop I did last week), but had to walk a few times.

Went to the city council transportation committee meeting to keep an eye on walk/bike/bus stuff. As is occasionally the case, I was the only member of the public in attendance. Looks like we should really be monitoring the land use committee as well, and maybe even operations. It's tough to get people to go to these things when they have the meetings at 5pm.

Finished the first season of True Blood which was pretty entertaining.

It's been about as hot as it gets around here the past few days so we've been spending a lot of time on the back patio and even on a blanket on the lawn in the shade of our birch tree. The heat still feels good to me after this past winter's extended coldness.

With B still in CA, my sleep schedule has drifted farther and farther away from the norm.


I got to sleep about 3am and slept until 3pm on Wednesday. Had my second session of drawing class where we did a couple flavors of contour drawing and some gesture drawing. Mostly fun. Watched A History of Violence from our shelf. B has almost all of Viggo's movies, and I hadn't seen that one yet. It's good mostly. Maria Bello didn't have much to do. Watched all the extra features as well. Cronenberg has a twisted little brain, but he sure knows how to put a movie together. Got to bed about 4:30am after doing an abbreviated shovelglove set.

Of course then I had to go to the second day of my resume/interview class at 8:30am. So there's 3 hours of sleep. Coming after a night of 12 hours made it mostly okay.

Thursday night I watched the last disk of Criminal Minds season 3 from netflix. Boom! Those first three seasons are each better than the last and they start out pretty darn good. The character bits are so great, especially for Reid. He has an arc going on, but it's 95% off-screen with just little hints (a look here, a wince there, a bitchy little meltdown once in a while) to let you know where he's at.

After finishing that (and the extras), I farted around on the computer including brainstorming a list of all the things I actually want to be doing (or at least want to have done) instead of all the random poking at the internets that seems to be all I ever get around to. I came up with 93 things in about 15 minutes. Went to bed at 5am.

Don't know when I got up on Friday. Didn't really do much. Walked around town in the early phase of Artwalk. Posted the last of my picture backlog to flickr. Did some cooking to salvage some of the food in the fridge. Watched Domino on the Roku. The audio track was terrible with the dialogue way down in the mix under all the explosions and music. Other than that, though, it was fun to watch. Then I started watching The Big Bad Swim because it has Paget Brewster in it. I don't know why B put it in our queue. (Today I discovered (by accident) that Emily Prentiss is on Facebook (this is the character that Brewster plays on Criminal Minds) which made me happy, especially when she approved my friend request ;-) Anyway, I stopped it after the first ten minutes because I realized that it was 5am. Then I was waylaid by the internets and finally got to bed about 6:30am.

Then this morning (Saturday) I had to get up at 11:30 for a family conference call to discuss the stuff B went to CA for. So that's 5 hours of sleep. I sat out in the sunshine and worked on C.J. Cherryh's short story collection Visible Light. Took a nap for a couple of hours then made cookies to take to the 4th barbecue of a library friend. That was supposed to start at 5pm. I showed up about 5 hours late, but the fireworks were just getting going and I caught up with my host's alcohol levels pretty quickly. Unfortunately everybody else took off right after the explosions stopped so I didn't get to visit very much. I did get to chat with host and his sweetie while I helped them tidy up a bit while waiting for my alcohol content to go back down so I could drive home.

Got home about 1:30 and did some stuff for B. Then did the usual crap until around 4:30am when I decided I wanted to go running. Yes, I am insane. Thanks for noticing. I went here for almost exactly 4km. Unlike every other run I've done this year, though, this had a hill, so that feels good. Then I spent an hour writing this blathering post and it's 7:15am now. I guess I feel kind of sleepy... Guess I'll go do shovelglove and go to sleep for a few hours.

If nothing else, I'm definitely confusing the hell out of the cat.

Good intentions aren't getting me into the posting form lately.

Let's see. I got totally bored with the whole running thing so a week ago Tuesday I went out with the intention of just jogging 5k and being done with it. Predictably, my legs crapped out at the 2.5k mark and refused to run any farther.

I started a drawing class last Wednesday. It's based on Betty Edwards's Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. I worked through the first few chapters of the book on my own a few years ago but got bogged down in my own anal desire to do all the exercises and quit. Trying again with a teacher in a classroom. Maybe I'll get farther.

Friday I rode my bike around Lake Sammamish with a stop for lunch with a friend in Redmond. Total of 28 miles. Felt fine at the end of it.

Saturday did a GAIT trash walk in the morning (discovering the local taggers gallery and makeout spot in the process). Hung out with my nephew for a few hours in the afternoon.

Sunday made pizza and took it to our friends' house to watch Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus. I can't figure out how a movie like that is financially viable.

Yesterday B flew to CA to help with a family emergency.

Today was the first day of my milestones class with Lee Hecht Harrison which is part of my severance package from the company we do not name. Class was actually quite helpful. The next session is on Thursday and I'm glad of the break.

Tonight I unaccountably felt like running after finishing a disk of Criminal Minds from netflix. I didn't plan my route, but measuring with the gmap pedometer says I ran 3.6k. I probably could have managed the 1.4k to get to 5 if I'd know I was that close. I didn't get out of breath at all, but my legs were starting to poop out when I got home. I need to up my pace a little to get my breath and heart rate back up. I also feel like my form is kind of random. Need to see if anyone I know is qualified and/or inclined to give me some coaching. It's really odd to be in the best shape I've been in since high school (and possibly ever. I wasn't ever in very good shape in high school :-) I've even lost a few pounds in the past month putting me consistently under 200 for the first time in probably 20 years.

Where'd this past week go? Well...

Last Sunday I went hiking with a friend to Annette Lake (1700 feet of elevation gain in 3.5 miles, then back down. Still snow and ice on the lake.)

Also Sunday B and I went to see "Summer Hours" ("L'heure d'été" for you Francophones) which was quite good in a quietly thought-provoking way (all about the ways that stuff passes down through families). Not a lot happens, but it happens in a way that feels almost documentary. Followed that up with a lovely meal at Coastal Kitchen.

Monday we drove to Bend, OR to visit my sister-in-law and her brood of young children. On these visits I generally take the role of rug rat entertainer so B and sis can visit. As the girls get older this becomes more physically taxing. Their primary entertainment now is a zip line (wire strung between trees with a pulley-suspended handle one dangles from while zipping from one end to the other) which is more fun when Uncle Jeff is there to boost you up to the handle (if you're the youngest) or catch you before you smash into the far tree (if you're going backwards (a refinement I introduced)), or just want to be caught), sometimes both (which required running back and forth between the trees in advance of plummeting little girls. We also took a long "walk" which the girls decided they would bicycle on. I foolishly chose to walk anyway which meant repeatedly running to catch up with them before they charged off ahead again. This was much easier than it would have been a few months ago! Lots of fun. (Seriously, they're a gas and their one-year-old brother was fun to play with too.)

Stayed for two nights of that and drove back on Wednesday night.

Thursday morning I had to report to my local WorkSource office to be instructed in how to apply for unemployment (which I had already done), and search for a job (which I'm in the process of). To add insult to injury I had to be there at 8:30am. Blech. And it was basically pointless. After driving back home I was planning to blow off the committee meeting I had for Sightline, but B talked me into driving (the bus wouldn't have gotten me there in time and we rented a car for the week for the Bend trip). It was a meeting.

Afterwards I decided to go to BikeWorks to see if I could get a new bike. Found the place with some navigation assistance from B and R via phone. Kent was working on a bike out in the sunshine and wasted no time in finding an old Nishiki frame and fork that had just come in that day which met my requirements, now all I need are wheels and drivetrain and stem and handlebars and brakes and...

Friday B and I went to an artist friend's place in West Seattle to pick out pieces for his upcoming show at the Sightline offices. Had fun hanging out and looking at art and talking about video (his latest medium) and watching cool stuff on vimeo.com.

B and I proceeded to SoDo with stops at Daniel Smith, Rejuvenation (which we had never heard of, but looked cool from the street and turned out to be even cooler than it looked. Wish our ceilings (and budget) weren't so low), and some commercial paper place whose name I can't recall.

Later back at home we did a run to Staples for one of B's projects, then to Up Front gallery where we caught the beginning of the auction-ending festivities and talked to a bunch of folks.

Even later went to our NWEI Sense of Place class for a couple hours.

Saturday sat around the house poking at the internets until this evening when we had a "Map Your Neighborhood" disaster preparedness meeting at a neighbor's house.

Waaa!

Running is too booring. Went for a 26-mile bike ride today. Which included a stop to register as a bone marrow donor at its farthest extent, then another stop to get three kinds of cherries, asparagus, and garlic at the farmers' market. Cherries. Yum. Love cherry season.

Last night met the folks we're starting a NWEI class with. Should be fun.

Now gotta go make a salad to take to friends' house so we can start The Wire season 3.

Tomorrow promises to be filled with exertion and excitement as well.

Now, salad and shower!

um... ran last night on the middle school track. Gosh that's dull. Even with having to dodge sprinklers.

Of more utility yesterday was finalizing our refinance. That's $300 less a month and a nice low interest rate on a 30-year fixed-rate loan. Win! Plus the little false bonus of getting to "skip" a month's payment.

After we signed (and signed and signed) we had lunch and then went to see Up in 3D since we were downtown anyway. Nice little movie. I think it would take a lot of balloons to float our house, and not just because of the bricks.

Today had my first session at Lee Hecht Harrison who Siemens are paying to show me how to get a job. Seems like it'll probably be useful.

Went to the doc to review my meds. Decided to leave them alone. My doc is a good guy and made the "should be obvious" suggestion to schedule time to work on the tasks I feel like I should be making progress on. And he made it in a way that didn't make me feel dumb for not having had it occur to me.

When I got back from the doc I found that I can has shoggoth! Yay, sourdough! Now I just gotta wrap my befuddled brain around the process.

The heat this week pushed me into putting two days between runs, but I did do all three days' worth in the end. Tonight's was the simplest yet: 5 minute warmup walk, then 20 minutes of jog/running with no rests. It went fine. I probably could have pushed a little harder and still been okay. As it was I did two 10-minute miles which is pretty speedy for me. My timer malfunctioned so I had to kind of wing it resulting in a confusing map to figure out how far I went which I won't bother to post here since I don't imagine anyone cares about them but me anyway and they're in my spreadsheet (anal? me?) Tonight's distance brings me up over 42 miles total so far which is about the point where the hobbits got helped out by some elves, apparently.

In other news, had a phone interview yesterday that seemed like it went well enough. Could actually be a kind of fun job with some interesting challenges and a relatively easy commute. Hmmm.

Today rode the bus in to the city to go to a panel on regional transportation planning. Also stopped by the Sightline offices to see the art by Julia Hensley in their lobby which display is curated by B. Very cool stuff, well worth stopping by to have a look if you find yourself in downtown Seattle with a few spare minutes.

And this evening was Issaquah's Art Walk which was well-attended. This one also coincided with the start of artEAST's fundraising auction 150 Feet of Art in which B's piece is item #41.

Finally we picked up a couple of sturdy home-sprouted tomato plants from friends who live about 5 blocks away yet who we hardly ever socialize with. There's just not enough time in the day.

The neighboring town has declared the first weekly farmers' market of each month this summer as Bike to Market day, so I had to ride my bike to their market today. It's kind of a brutal ride with lots of up, some of it repeated. On the last climb I was going slowly enough that I was in danger of being passed by people walking up the hill. When I got to the market I had to sign in to get the tote bag that was to be my reward for the ride, and I got stuck half-way through writing my last name. I just couldn't remember how to spell it. I wanted to put in a J or something. An hour of hanging out at the market listening to music, taking pictures, and eating baked goods seemed to restore me to my senses and I rode home for a total of about 14 miles. I guess if I want to ride over the Cascades I should do a lot more of this sort of thing.

Got home just in time to shower before we had to pedal to the local theater for their version of Show Boat. The first act was good, but the second could have been dropped completely with no significant loss to story or musical experience.

When we got home I helped B with her latest project. And then I've been sitting here reading my friends list and facebook and the SU boards until I look at the clock and it's almost 3:30am.

I have a couple of job-related contacts to complete tomorrow. ECR.

So I decided to just use the few blocks around my house as a track tonight so I didn't have to think. I forgot that if I wanted to know how far I went (I was running based on time: two sets of 8-minutes of jogging prefaced and separated by 5-minute walks) I needed to count laps. So this is only an approximation of the distance I traveled this muggy evening. The good news is that the 8-minute stretches felt fine as long as I didn't push too hard. And if I did push too hard I could get my breath back pretty quickly by just backing off a little. Pretty sure I never learned that trick when I ran cross country in high school.

What else is going on? Um... Had a couple of cavities filled yesterday which was fortunately painless except for the hour in the chair wearing a dental dam and the attendant minor gum damage which is basically healed now.

I seem to have failed to mention tabling for GAIT at the Sustainability Movie Night last week. It was a lovely evening, the tables were inside, and out in the parking lot were a bunch of electric (and alternative fuel) vehicles, so nobody really came by the table. Which was fine because I was outside too, taking pictures of the people and vehicles. The movie was Who Killed the Electric Car which I'd already seen (mostly dull, but worth watching for any time when Stan Ovshinsky and his then wife Iris are on the screen. There should be a movie just about these two. Stan has 400 patents and invented the nickel-metal hydride battery among many other things. Iris had a doctorate in biochemistry and Stan insists she deserves equal credit for his work (he says she's "too damn modest.") Plus they're adorable.)

I've been trying to anchor my daily activities with a primary goal of fighting entropy. I didn't really have an official primary goal before so I thought it was worth trying it as a yardstick against which to evaluate my various activities for whether they'll have a net positive, neutral, or negative effect on myself and the world. Yes, I'm basically stealing this from Diane Duane. Strangely enough, the act of pinning that goal to the wall seems to be having a positive effect on my productivity. Huh.

I've been sick for most of the past week so I started week 5 of ct5k over again. Went here which went okay from a running perspective. I didn't push real hard, but felt fine with the three sets of 5-minute jog separated by 3-minute rests. (The hobbits have survived their first encounter with the nazgul and are sneaking towards the ferry.)

What didn't go so well was how the trail I tried to use has been interrupted by the stupid construction project at the high school, and the subsequent discovery that all the school yards in that area are fenced and locked except for the way I used to get in (wide open), and one little offset gate in an inconvenient and obscure location. It just seems wrong that public schools should be locked up so kids can't use the playgrounds outside of school hours (and so middle-aged joggers can't use the track).

grump grump grump.

In other news, the weather was delightfully warm and should stay so for a couple more days at least. Ah.

Business (in the sense of having been busy) delayed this week's first run until tonight (too late at night, quoth B) when I went here. This week, instead of having each day be the same hopelessly confusing jumble, each day is simple, but different from the others. Today's run was 3 5-minute runs separated by 3-minute rests. Next one is longer runs and shorter rests and the third is just one long run. I felt slow tonight, but other than that everything seemed fine.

Let's see, what else has been happening... Monday night I went to a practice session with the drum group I started playing with 12 or 13 years ago and haven't played with for like 8 years. That was kind of a trip. They're working on a piece that goes through half a dozen complex 2-bar phrases before repeating so there was no way I was going to just jump into that. But it was kind of fun playing support for a change (a friend and I push leadership duties back and forth between us in our usual group).

Tuesday night was our usual drumming group's first session in a while and it was fun having half a dozen people so we could play some of the pieces with that many parts for the first time in ages. As soon as drumming was over (in fact we kind of had to cut it short) we scampered off to the IMAX theater in Seattle to see Star Trek on the REALLY big screen. Pretty fun. There are some minor annoyances, but it was definitely entertaining.

The other thing that's been going on this week is that B started in on the Curves diet so I've been trying to keep her fed in accordance with that. It's markedly different from our usual fare (vegetables! small portions! variety!) Today I finally managed to do the epic shopping run that I've needed to keep her from having to eat the same thing at every meal. Spent the evening cleaning veggies and pre-cooking all the stuff that can be so she should be good for a few days.

Looks like we're going to go stay with B's sister for a few days. Gotta decide what projects to take along.

Since yesterday was FOC_U day I thought I'd point out a few SF books by writers of color that I've read recently (all after racefail caused kate_schaefer to post a list of books recommended by the Carl Brandon Society)

Sly Mongoose by Tobias Buckell is a shoot-em-up space opera set largely in the upper atmosphere of a gas giant where humans live in floating cities and maintain mining operations on the inhospitable surface. The Mongoose of the title is an enhanced and dreadlocked super soldier spy type guy who's trying to stop some cosmic bad guys. I didn't really get the plot, but I wrote that off for this being a later book in a series. The cultures of the floating cities were interesting and there were sky pirates, so what's not to like?

The Good House by Tananarive Due is kind of a modern gothic romance set between southern Washington State and Los Angeles. There's some nice cultural stuff going on between the African American main characters and the mostly white denizens of the small town where the title house sits. The haunts are interesting for having their roots in Haitian Vodou. I'd have liked it better if it had been about 30% shorter.

Finally, Filter House by Nisi Shawl. I loved this book. It's a collection of short stories, all with some sf-nal element. And there's enough variety in the settings and situations that something in it should appeal to just about any SF fan. The range goes from colonial starships to inner-city magic to post-apocalyptic survival. Added on to all that high-level creativity, Shawl's prose is artful without being showy. I think every story had something in it that made my brain go *ping*, and pointed out just how seldom that happens lately. Highly recommended. (And it just (co-)won the Tiptree Award!)