22 October 2003

I got spam this morning with the title, "The stories you are about." I hadn't really thought about that before. The stories about me are obvious. The stories I'm about -- that's something else entirely. Unless they mean it in a kind of a fake British accent way, "'Ere, wot are you about?" In which case I'm about the Not The Moose Book, and maybe one of the Toni stories, and "The Beast's Apprentice" when I get back to it.

What stories I'm about. Hmm. Maybe like, "I'm all about that"? Which seems to have replaced "I'm all over that." Which people seem to be...over. All of them. Er. Anyway, I'm all about Paladin of Souls for sure, even though I haven't set aside all of any given day to read it. Or even a few hours, which would probably do. I am all about Bridge to Terebithia and Tam Lin and "Boobs" and "The Evening and the Morning and the Night" and Galveston and, on some days, Cyteen and....

I went to the library yesterday afternoon. Oh. I think the librarians are going to need some time to get used to me. (The desk librarian, worried: "You can renew those online if you want to, but I just don't know how you're going to get them all out to the car." I use the length of my arms as my book limitation; I tried to reassure her that I'm quite adept at doing this. And, in fact, I didn't drop a single one in the library, in the library parking lot, or in the house. So.)

Our library is a smaller local branch, so I'm either going to have to interlibrary-loan like crazy (in which case they'll really get used to me) or wander around the Cities to various other libraries. Both of which have appeal, and I may do some of both. But for now, my main objective in going to the library was to get material for the encyclopedia articles I'm writing. I read some of it in the library -- some of the critical stuff is in reference books they won't let me take home with me. So I took copious notes, and I'll be going back, but today I think I need to look at what I've got and can get and regroup a bit. Maybe set up a few ILL requests. Etc. I still think I'm going to have to appeal to the library at the U or Ham or Mac or Augsburg or somewhere. And that's fine. More libraries for meeeeee!

About half of what I brought home was work-related, and the other half was for fun only. I've already been through one of the fun books -- Moosewood Restaurant Celebrates. I marked interesting recipes. Moving into a new place makes me want to cook new stuff, and this one was just sitting there on the new shelf looking so lonely. But today, much knuckling and buckling down to these articles again. It'll be good.

I also went to Kohl's and got towels and rugs on their buy-one-get-one sale, and I'm much more satisfied with them than I was with the towels and rugs available at Target. Yay, towels and rugs. One step closer to settled in. I have to wash the towels soon, of course. When we first got married, we had blue fuzzies all over everything from the freshly washed new towels, and they kept popping up in my "Haiku Suite for Newlyweds." I hope not to have more fuzzies. I faxed Mark some stuff and then went to Target (the right one this time!) and bought two more bookshelves, which was all they had at that location. So I'm going to have to go back to the SuuuuuuperTarget on Cedar or else to a different Target entirely, but I think we should put together more of the bookshelves before we get the last one or two. One more thing, but I knew it was on the list already. No surprise with it.

The list has not yet eased down to sane proportions. Timprov has expressed doubt that it ever will. That's all right. The response whether the list is sane or insane is really probably about the same: to do as much as I can on it in as reasonable an order as I can manage, and to try not to drive myself nuts fussing about what I can't manage. I'm trying to multitask without driving myself nuts multitasking.

And man, does all this make me feel grateful for modern appliances. I put my breakfast dishes in the dishwasher. I poured in the soap and punched a button. I will go down there and remove clean dishes in a bit. I'll throw the new towels in the wash, rather than taking them down to the stream to beat them on a rock, or cranking them through the wringer, or even running down halfway through to put in fabric softener, because I can do that with dryer sheets. Sometime in the next hour, I'll put my contacts in and have peripheral vision. More -- I didn't have to hem the towels, didn't have to cut the boards for the bookcases or sand them down, didn't have to make the tortilla that held my Nutella, or milk the cow to fill my glass, or squeeze the berries for my juice. I love living in the future so much. If I decide to try to make homemade tortillas, it's a hobby, not a living necessity. If the house is too cold, I didn't have to knit the extra socks I put on, and I don't have to chop wood to make it warmer. And getting here across the Sierras took forever and was bumpy and uncomfortable, but compared to a covered wagon? Paradise.

The future is so fabulous. This is why I feel sorry for T.H. White's Merlin. All of a sudden, no more dishwashers. Sorry! They haven't been invented any more. Poor Merlin.

I just found the state list from our trip out here. We saw license plates from the Mississippi westward, except for Louisiana. Don't know what the Louisianans were doing. We also didn't see Kentucky, West Virginia, New Jersey, Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, or Washington, D.C. We did, however, see Ontario, Quebec, Alberta, and Nova Scotia. (I was surprised not to see any cars from B.C., actually, since we saw them fairly regularly in California.) That's still a lot of states to see. I am mentally approximately seven years old, that I sat there crossing states off the list. But it was a good time anyway.

Okay, I think I'm starting to ramble, so I'm going to go do something useful and probably book-related.