22 January 2003

Help, oh, help! Can any of you help me? My grits turned out bad. I salted the water I boiled them in. I adorned them with milk and sugar and a tiny bit of butter. But the grits themselves were just bland and flavorless and nasty. Timprov told me grits are just like that, but I have had good grits before. Is there anything I can do to improve these, or is it just a bad brand of grits that I should avoid in the future?

Otherwise, um, hi. Good morning. I feel like I was beaten with a stick. I feel like I was sent for and couldn't come. This is what happens when I have a midnight airport run and then Mark has to get up for work and I haven't been feeling good already. But at least his plane was early and he had no checked luggage, so we could just come home and collapse.

I am not at all a night person. Not at all, at all. I start the day at top speed and wind down from there. By the time we got back from the airport, I was in stumble mode. And the alarm had to go off this morning, because Mark has a day job he had to get to. Ah well. I think we'll all be a little below par today. Some days are like that.

I finished Viking Age Iceland yesterday and loved it. Very useful, interesting stuff. There was one bit quoted out from a saga where the wife asks her husband what time it is (noon), and then she says, "Morning work varies; I have spun wool for seven ells of cloth, and you have killed Kjartan." Ah, certainly. Definitely a bit varied there, but all in a morning's work. There was also a penalty of lesser outlawry for men who seduced women by wearing women's headdresses. How often that penalty was used, I have no idea, since it was not just for attempting to seduce in this manner, but for succeeding.

I also finished A Dangerous Road (didn't love or hate it) and read most of Philip Pullman's The Shadow in the North, which is a Victorian adventure YA. It's fun stuff, although I'm glad I got it from the library, as there are several things ahead of it on my purchase list. And I did a bunch of editing and some new work. Good stuff.

I'm really amused by Raechel's new project: it looks like fun. It looks like something I could take and run with. So we'll see. When I'm not too deep in the throes of books, I'll probably write and send her something. I'm not even sure what yet. Something light.

Not that a 300 word limit encourages a lot of heaviness, mind you.

Can I just channel Madeleine Kahn for a minute here and sing the song about how tired I am? Can we take that as done? Thanks.

At least I won't be singing "Home Again" as compulsively any more, maybe, if I can keep the tired song in my head. "Ain't it a cwying shame...."