13 September 2004

Yesterday's newspaper arrived side-by-side with today's, and Word crashed before I could finish typing a sentence. Strange morning for words, I guess. If I was Jasper Fforde, it would be an omen. I am not, in case you haven't noticed, Jasper Fforde.

So it had better not be an omen. Or else.

Last night, walking down C.J.'s front walk, I smelled the air, and it took me a minute: was that what September smelled like? It took me a minute to get to yes, to find where that smell and feel of air associated: to the first weeks of college, walking back from the caf, where we'd stayed too late talking because there was an entire summer to catch up from. Mark and Ceej and I sat outside at Sebastian Joe's with our cones. It was gorgeous. We didn't have an entire summer to catch up on -- we'd seen C.J. just Thursday, and often before that all summer -- but it was the same smell, the same air quality, the same feel. I haven't had a September in years.

This is my last first month home, if that makes any sense. I arrived in October of last year. Next month I will have done this before. Next month it will start to look more recently familiar. You know what, though? I still think I'll be knocked over by it on a fairly regular basis. I think getting to be home will continue to be a source of wonder for me. I will still be in the right place. And that's a very good thing.

Even when I have to use the stupid phone to get people out here to take care of the tree and what have you.

I finished The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases, and I found the "historical" section, particularly the bits about the year 1967, to be in poor taste. The cute amusing flamboyant fictitious diseases should take the blame for tragedies, not humans' bad decisions! Excuse me. But no. Some of the other stuff in that book made me smile, although a lot of it was awfully taken with its own cleverness, but that section crossed some kind of line with me. Maybe I was in the wrong mood reading it, but...just, no.

Mad Ship is all right, but I'm having some problems with it. The biggest one is that since I know the story isn't going to end on page 850 but rather in some other volume I don't yet own, I have a hard time convincing my brain that it's more reasonable to read through 850 now and then the third volume later when I get it than to just stop here and read the last bit all in a chunk. Aside from that, I'm a little fatigued with Robin Hobb's characters making the same kinds of mistakes all the time. I can see where members of the same family might have traits in common leading them to similar mistakes or classes of mistakes, but they're awfully similar to the ones in the Assassin and Fool trilogies, too.

I think it'll be time for some nonfiction fairly soon. Luckily, I have a stack of that. Also, I need to go to the library to start research for more articles. Soon. Possibly today, but just staying home and writing seems like such a good idea that I don't want to even start the errands, lest I fail to keep it to a reasonable one or two and find myself sitting in the waiting room for the oil change when I both want and need to be working on the book. Or the story. Or the other story. Or....