17 August 2003

I spent much of yesterday looking at houses online and reading.

Houses: people are silly. This is what I know: people, in many cases, turn out to be very, very silly.

Books: not so silly, generally. I enjoyed Mairelon the Magician through until the end, and it's tipped the balance for me between "I'll read more Patricia Wrede if someone recommends it" to "I'll seek out more Patricia Wrede." More of her books, that is, although since she's in Edina, I could probably seek her out as well.

(I'm rethinking this Edina business a bit. But not too much.)

Also I read Susan Palwick's Flying in Place. Ehhhh. For a book About Child Abuse, it was disturbing in the right ways: emotionally/psychologically rather than through graphic depiction of the specific acts. But still. It was About Child Abuse, and the main character didn't really have...interests. At all. And it was a short book, so it wasn't too bad that way, but I just -- I wanted the main character to be more than her abuse, is I guess what it was. I wanted to have some reason to care about her aside from the immediacy of her first-person narration. I cared about her enough to want her to get out of the bad situation, but I don't think there's a twelve-year-old I wouldn't care about that much. So...eh. I was interested in this book because I've enjoyed some of Palwick's short stories. But I'd definitely look at the blurb before I picked up another of her novels, if she writes another.

I've now started Robin McKinley's Rose Daughter. I got way behind on McKinley somewhere along the way, and I'm catching up a bit at a time. Now I want to read Beauty to compare the two, since both are McKinley's retellings of Beauty and the Beast. And Beauty is paperback, small, light, unlikely to be needed between September 1 and early October -- so a perfectly good book to take on the plane and leave in Minneapolis. It sounds eerily like a plan.

After yesterday, Mary Anne suggested a quiche as a low-acidity, yummy food item. I approve of quiche. I'm making stroganoff tonight, which should also be easy on my mouth. We had scrambled eggs for lunch, with no salsa or tomatoes or anything of the sort. And I will only put four or five cherry tomatoes in my side salad tonight, instead of my usual six.

Baby steps, right?

Anyway, anyway, anyway. And also: anyway. I'm mostly trying to be productive without going nuts, and also quietly marveling at the people who decided that the best possible thing they could use as a default picture of their house for sale, the best possible foot they could put forward, was a small, white bathroom. Why? I do not know, Sam I am. Truly I do not.