You remember all that stuff I wrote last night, about how I had so much to do tonight and might not get to post?

Never mind.

Turned out I forgot the Viking Age Society meeting was postponed this month.

And the project at work got finished up on time, pretty much. Essentially. Except for one small loose end over which I had no control. So I should be breathing a big sigh of relief.

I’ve noticed an odd phenomenon overtaking me in the last few years. I seem to have lost all capacity for taking any pleasure in completed tasks, even challenging ones. When I was young I’d mentally pump a fist in the air and allow myself a minute or two of satisfaction before finding a new subject to worry about.

Nowadays it’s just ho-hum. My primary emotional response to “Mission Accomplished” is to wonder idly what I’ve forgotten that’ll come back to bite me.

Maybe it’s a side effect of something I hesitate to call “success,” because I’m far from successful. But I’ve accomplished a number of the things I dreamed of when I was a kid. That raises the bar on everything, apparently. When you’ve reached the point when finishing the writing of a book is no big deal, most other accomplishments mean even less.

The moral: “Squelch your dreams,” I guess.

John Sandford, Minnesotan author of the Lucas Davenport Prey novels, which I like very much, has come out with a new book, Dead Watch, now out in paperback. He’s trying out a new hero in this one, and (oddly) the book isn’t set in Minnesota, but in Washington D.C. and Virginia (as if anybody’d ever want to read about those places).

Jacob Winter is the new hero. He’s a Washington insider, an established expert on what a friend calls “Forensic Bureaucracy.” Supposedly he’s the go-to guy for government problems that nobody else knows how to fix. But, suitably for the hero of a Sandford novel, he’s also a veteran of Afghanistan, a trained fighter who is only slowed down by a bad hip, the result of a combat wound.

The party who needs Jake’s help this time is the president of the United States, by way of his chief of staff. A Republican former senator, Lincoln Bowe, has disappeared under suspicious circumstances, and his wife has been threatened. The president, a Democrat, is worried that somebody in his own party has gotten out of hand, and that there’ll be political blow-back. Jake’s job is to investigate and clean things up.

One of his first visits is to the senator’s wife, Madison Bowe. Madison is a small, spunky blonde, and Jake likes small, spunky blondes, and you’ve already guessed where that leads.

The book is apparently set in the near future, and seems to also be set in an alternate universe—one where socially conservative Democratic senators aren’t a surprise, and most of the homosexuals in the story are Republicans. This is a little disorienting, but a clever tactic on Sandford’s part, allowing him to write a political thriller without alienating elements of our increasingly polarized electorate. I had trouble keeping my bearings from time to time, but I was never insulted, which earns the book a few notches on my tally stick. The fighting and killing part of Jake’s résumé turns out to be more useful than the forensic bureaucracy part in ultimately solving the problem.

I didn’t like it as much as the Lucas Davenport stories, but I have more history with L. D. I recommend it as light summer reading. There’s violence and sex, but they’re not excessive by contemporary standards. Not bad.