1 June 2005

I didn't take any pictures at Mark's birthday party, so you'll just have to take my word for it that people showed up and had fun.

He's not having any fun now, poor dear: he has to be off over-the-counter allergy drugs until his allergist appointment. If we had any questions about whether they were making any difference, those questions have been thoroughly dispelled. Yikes. He's sneezing his poor head off, just sneezing for several minutes at a time. It can't be any fun to do. It's certainly alarming to listen to. They had better have good drugs for him.

Yesterday I finished writing "Awake," which was a different short story than I'd intended to finish next. Short stories have been like that for me lately: slippery. Like catching fish from a school with my hands: a short grasp on many of them, very few fish actually extracted. Luckily, I think the analogy ends there, in that having a short grasp makes me more likely to catch that fish again later? Maybe? And fish don't work like that.

Novel Gazing: pushing analogies until they splinter into tiny pieces since 2001.

Anyway, I'm in a novelly mood today, so I'm going to ignore the short stories unless they pounce on me (which fish hardly ever do) and see what the novels have to say.

I've just finished reading Lois McMaster Bujold's The Hallowed Hunt, which I liked, but it didn't blow me away as much as Paladin of Souls did. Very few things blow me away as much as Paladin of Souls did, though. It's just not a standard to which I can fairly hold reading material. Now I'm going to read the Brother Cadfael short stories in A Rare Benedictine, since it feels like a loose end after finishing all the Brother Cadfael novels. (Also, it's a short loose end, so it doesn't represent a major commitment the way some of the things on my pile do.)

Rachel brought cherries to Mark's birthday party, and the remainder of them will soon become cherry chocolate scones, which I love and which I did not expect to get for another two weeks at least.

The things that have been bothering me lately are not fixed -- not even partly fixed -- to the point where few of them feature progress towards being fixed. But I'm in an exceptionally energetic good mood anyway. I think "irrational exuberance in the face of unpleasant things" is one of my finer qualities, right up there with "ability to get the wrong end of interesting sticks." It's good to know one's abilities, I suppose.