2 January 2005

Well, and so. Mark and I had nice visits to Omaha and Milwaukee, and now we are home, and I am glad on all counts. It's not the most riding in the car I've ever done, not by a long shot, but it wore me out pretty thoroughly anyway. Sometimes I catch myself saying, "But we didn't do anything -- I shouldn't be this tired!" But one of my resolutions around August was to deal with "is" at least as well as "should," so.

We're getting through the piles of mail and newspapers a bit at a time, and Melvin the Laundry Monster looks to have taken up near-permanent residence. I attack at dawn. So many clothes.

I've heard that you should spend the first day of the year doing things you want to do for the rest of the year, and while it wasn't deliberate, I wouldn't mind reading and hanging out with people I care about and noodling with story ideas all year long. (It seems likely.) I hope nobody says that about the second day of the year, though, because I don't particularly want to spend the year doing laundry and fixing toilets and paying bills, if we can work it out so I don't. Not every day. On the up side, we're going to try out the Roomba today, and having clean floors without having to vacuum them is something I could get behind on a regular basis. Robot vacuum! Christmas of the future!

I'll probably stop being excited about this in a few days, around the time I stop planning what I wear around showing off my new stompy girly boots.

I keep saying this, but it keeps being true: the more I write secret history, the more skeptical I am of historical theories. Things fit so well in a counterfactual framework! Little bits and dabs of history keep looking so darn reasonable in the weave of my lies, lies, lies. Of course the aesthetic movement that most affected early 20th century Sweden would have those particular tenets -- the Swedes are nobody's dummies and would just as soon have what little protection they can get from the magical forces they're smooshed between. ("Smooshed" is a technical term in geography.) Anyway, The Brilliance of Swedish Glass, 1918-1939 is a lovely book in more than one way, but it's rather unwieldy, also in more than one way, so I'm also reading Bear's Worldwired.

The problem with today is that it seems like every item I remove from the to-do list spawns two or three additions to the said list. Meep. So tired. I think the laundry is kicking my butt. Timprov says I should stop making my to-do lists in Spanish, and then he had to explain that "todo" was something like "all" or "everything" in Spanish. Yah, well. Maybe this means I should add "learn Spanish" to my list.

Or maybe that wasn't his point after all. It's hard to tell, some mornings.