Okay... I guess that's an ending.

I read 'The Shiva Option',by Weber and... er... White, I think. It was a fairly perfunctory effort. There were no major surprises or plot twists, except for the introduction of an alien empire to explain why the enemies suddenly morphed from unstoppable doom in 'On Death Ground' to wimpy pushovers whose only effective weapon was suicide gunboats.

The eponymous 'Shiva Option' was the enemy's reaction to having a few dozen billion of their citizens killed, which made genocide an attractive tactical ploy as well as a satisfying revenge. Satisfying for the characters, at least... like everything else in the book, description was beyond minimal -- most battles were summarized ('They'd won, but at what cost! 9 monitors, 12 superdreadnoughts, 47 battlecruisers, and 2,316 fighters had been lost...').

But, really, the enemy just got weaker and weaker as time went on, and never even TRIED a counter-offensive, so the whole thing was an extended anticlimax.

Good Things

Let's see... um...

• I had some strange dreams last night. In one of them, I decided to take a ferry over to Bremerton, but the sound was iced over. Fortunately, it was amphibious, and just drove down the shore through the neighborhoods (looking for a non-iced over section) and eventually took the Tacoma Narrows bridge. The good thing: They served sandwiches. Turkey sandwiches, dripping with mayo and mustard. MMMM.
• Instead of iced coffee, at the cafeteria's Starbucks franchise you can get an 'Oasis Smoothie' with coffee in it instead of fruit. This tastes much like an iced mocha, except that the ice is taken into account when judging the proportions of various stuff to put it in, not an add-in that gradually unflavors the coffee as it melts. It's very tasty. And very expensive.
• I haven't died of any mysterious disease, my car hasn't broken down, my apartment hasn't gone up in flames, all my computers still run, my tape player is working again for the moment, I'm still employed, I'm not being sued by anyone for anything, I haven't been arrested, and no terrorists have destroyed anything within 1000 miles of me in ages.

So I've got food, and tempting fate. Par for the course! }:)