23 October 2003

I dreamed that my cable bill made sense and my alma mater was painting everything hideous colors and handing out guns to the freshmen. Er. Yes. Well.

I've started sending out housewarming party invitations (haven't finished yet), and since many of them are on e-mail, I've gotten some responses. The one that made me just sit and stare at the e-mail and then laugh incredulously is that one of our friends can't come because he will be out of town. And why, you ask, will he be out of town? Why, he will be scouting for deer season, which opens the following weekend! I was...speechless. But it sure ain't California. In California, when people couldn't come to a party, it had nothing to do with shootin' Bambi. Or, uh, preparing to shoot Bambi in the following week.

This is, in fact, the life I've chosen for myself. Not the Bambi-shootin' life. But the one in which some people I care very much about can't make weekend plans in November because it's deer season. I don't regret it. I'm still getting used to it, though.

For someone who sat around reading much of last night, I got a lot of work done. I read Betsy-Tacy and Betsy In Spite of Herself and Between Deep Valley and the Great World: Maud Hart Lovelace in Minneapolis and bits of The Betsy-Tacy Companion: A Biography of Maud Hart Lovelace. Guess which of my encyclopedia entries I was working on. I enjoyed the work, too, so good all around. I'd like to have had the time to reread the entire Betsy-Tacy series for this, but I have enough other things on my plate that a representative sampling is going to have to do, with a note on my reread list for the rest. When I was little, I didn't notice that Lovelace was writing about Minnesota the way an exile does. Now, I could hardly notice anything else. It screamed at me and bashed me on the head. She was living in the New York/New Jersey area when she wrote the Betsy-Tacy books, and it was so clear that she was in love with Minnesota. I don't know how she felt about her new home; maybe The Betsy-Tacy Companion will make that clearer. But the longing was palpable to me, having just felt it not so long ago.

My new spot for loving Minnesota, in addition to all my old spots (which still work), is the Mendota Bridge, heading north. There's the Minnesota River Valley spread down beneath the Bridge, and a clear view of the skyline, and the city out in front of me: yes. It helps that I'm usually on my way to something or someone exciting, fun, and/or wonderful when I'm crossing the Bridge. Most of my tedious errands can happen south of the Minnesota River, although even they aren't feeling entirely tedious at this point.

I finished Paladin of Souls this morning -- guiltily, because there is other work I should have been doing, but I enjoyed it just so much, it was time to finish it. And now I can be diligent and good. This whole not-the-Miles thing: this is all right. I was happy with Bujold for starting new, non-Vorkosigan books, because she couldn't write about Miles forever without pause. I was willing to say, "Oh, well, these few are lousy because she's learning to write non-Miles stuff after all this." But truly, these are just good. Benefit of the doubt is hereby proclaimed unnecessary. Happy me.

I also paged through Nigella Lawson's Nigella Bites, which I picked up at the library because I want to cook new stuff in a new house, and there it was on the new cookbooks shelf. And I had marked dozens of recipes in Moosewood Restaurant Celebrates the day before, and still have to figure out which to copy down and/or try. But this, this Nigella Bites...it was just no good. There was not a single item in it that I both wanted to cook and didn't already have a (better) recipe for making. It had lots of pretty pictures of this rather attractive woman eating and a few of her cooking, but...meh. Who cares? I can invite attractive women to my kitchen to eat in person, if I want to watch them do so. I know several. It doesn't get me any better recipes.

Ah well. I am told that win some, lose some is the usual ratio, and that seems to be approximately accurate. I'm feeling the number of tasks on my list a bit more acutely today. I think it's that there are some things that were bothering me on a low level and crossed over to high-level bothering. There was no particular reason, for example, why I should absolutely have to load up the kitchen junk drawer before lunch today. But having those items on the kitchen counter crossed from the realm of mildly annoying into the realm of unbearable sometime while I was sleeping. It's hard to say when things will reach the realm of unbearable. Hard to plan around them. But as long as it's just things like putting tape in a drawer, it's okay, I guess. I can do that.

Today: bookcases, book holds at the library, reading, working, and poking things from unbearable back into bearable. And breathing. I keep needing to put that on the list....