23 March 2005

I did not intend to have a new printer on the corner of my desk tonight, but the old printer broke, and it turned out to be more expensive to have them fix it than to buy a new one. So we bought a new one and installed it and it has finished printing everything I wanted of it tonight. Goooood printer. If there was such a thing as a printer biscuit, it would get one.

I also did not intend to have new toilet parts in the downstairs toilet tonight, but Mark has taken care of that. You'd think they'd come up with some cliché to cover the idea that what you intend is not always what happens.

They did? Oh.

Calamity brings out the ridiculous in me. Possibly almost the absurdist in me. I found myself asking, quite seriously, "If my house burned down, would I prefer to have banana bread, apple bread, gingerbread, or Icelandic brown bread?" Then I realized that my friend whose house burned down is not someone whose taste in breakfast I know very specifically, and more to the point, she'll probably be happy to see that we were thinking of her more than she'll be critical of the bread choice: "Banana? She makes that all the time. What, I'm not good enough for the limpe? I mean, banana is just not good 'you lost most of your worldly goods' bread. For that you really want blueberry."

I don't really see how reading Dorothy Dunnett's Checkmate could possibly be to blame for the above line of thinking, but we're going to pretend it could anyway. I finished Checkmate breathlessly this evening. Dunnett's earlier authorial ruthlessness served her in good stead: I was never sure which authorially ruthless things she was going to do at the end. The answer, without too many spoilers, is "some but not all of them." So okay then. I'm now reading Dead Man's Handle, which is the last novel in the Modesty Blaise series. I'll have one more short story collection in the series to read, so it'll be two "lasts" in a row in the same series. Perhaps I should make a theme of it and pick up Robin Hobb's Ship of Destiny next, and hope that by then DDB has lent me the last of the Anthony Price books in that series. And then I can read The System of the World.

Hmmm. Or perhaps not.

I'm going to Minicon this weekend, so don't expect a journal entry on Easter; between religious and convention obligations, I'll have my hands full. Monday there will be con report and whatever else strikes my fancy. Tune in next time etc.