Robin McKinley's Blog

Hiding from Reality*

The ME has been more-than-usually bad since the end of last September, initially for reasons I don’t think I can make into an entertaining blog post.  But I haven’t had to double down on anti-ME obstinacy in a while, & obstinacy as a survival mechanism is a (you should forgive the term) dead bore, & makes me cranky.  Crankier.**  One of the more creative ways I’ve been saying nyah nyah nyah to the ME is by writing the occasional blog post again.  I don’t flipping like social media any more—I was never very far into it, there are too many BOOKS that need reading to want to spend much time panning for pebbles in torrents of sludge***—although I should perhaps remember that news sells newspapers, & even if it’s the NEW YORK TIMES or the GUARDIAN, they may not be viewing the situation as I would, never mind the riffs & gargoyles social media can whack you out on. 

I’ve kicked like fury over my entire professional career about not owing my readers anything but the books, but I acknowledge the wish to know the person behind books you’ve particularly liked†, or in some cases the books you’ve particularly not liked, but we’re not going there (again) right now, & since I have comprehensively bailed on social media, the blog . . . well, it’s the thing I can do to say, yeah, I’m also a person, not just that weird artefact an author, who lives in Scotland with her dog & forty million books.††  It actually cheers me up, writing the blog, telling myself yeah, I’m also a person, not just the thrasher-out of too many of the wrong words†††, & the desperate single arbiter of the right words.‡

It was only last week, when I was befuddledly failing to finish the next blog post, that it occurred to me the reason the ME keeps daily re-grinding me into hamburger is the result of the first Tuesday last November.  I’ve never paid any more attention to the real world than I can get away with‡‡ but even the Haven of Fiction‡‡‡ has been overwhelmed by recent events. ɸ   Now, as a lot of you know, when you turn your computer on & look at the headlines s(t)(c)reaming in . . . however I hope most of you don’t have the ME spike-&-crash evil waldo.  Mostly I’ve just been in denial, but while the headline-registering adrenaline spike is usually pretty WHAM immediate, the timing of the crash varies, influenced, as it may be, by the current level of Jigsaw Frustration ɸɸ or whether I have a clue about what happens next in story-in-progress ɸɸɸ or how many demon-possessed baby seagulls we saw on our last CHAAAAAAAAARGE Ω. 

So it’s taken me a little while to realise that the reason why I never seem to recover from all that evil waldoingΩΩ is . . .

The real world.  How pathetic is that, & I call myself a fantasy writer.

& now I’ve written yet another blog post & I still haven’t told you that approximately the first thing I did, the morning of the first Wednesday of last November, as soon as I recovered a little from the paralysis of shock, is seize THE COMPLETE SHERLOCK HOLMES, which I haven’t read in, oh, forty years or so.

Now maybe I will finally start telling you about the real Haven of Fiction, next post.  Don’t expect any this-week’s headline titles however.

* * *

* They confirmed that raging jerk for Defence Sec?  This is beyond the elasticity of my brain—just as the November election results made all my hard wiring pop.  & now we have Mt McKinley again—I get extra points for preferring Denali, don’t I?—and diversity quotas are why that air crash happened??  POP POP POP.  & it goes on & on.  I’m so out of my real-world depth here—what am I wading in?  Hot lava?—I can’t even, I can’t even, I can’t even . . . ^

^ Although I’m all over the Mexican president’s+ suggestion of North America being rebranded as ‘Mexican America’.  Hey, it worked in 1607.  & it then makes some sense to call that big body of water Gulf of America.

+ The new female Mexican president

** A frightening thought.

*** which is not to say that the links friends who are more plugged in than I am send me don’t frequently make me laugh, since my friends mostly know what does make me laugh, & for which I am grateful, because there are days when laughter feels like something that happens to other people. 

Although of course there are occasions when some deliberately provocative link makes me blow up & splatter, but I usually get over that stage, clean the ceiling, wipe the dog off & change my clothes before I respond.  On bad ME days a nice involuntary explosion has its therapeutic side.

† Although I’m not sure how many of my favourite, or anyway most influential^ authors I would actually want to sit down with for a cup of tea???  Tolkien & I would not get along.  Kipling & I would really not get along.  Mary Ann Evans, aka George Eliot, unfortunately sounds like kind of a pain in the rear, & I dislike Dickens the man so much I get really cross^^ every time I am again forced to realise that he tells great stories.^^^  I could go on.  Some other post perhaps.

There is Peter Dickinson, of course.  He was very nice to have a cup of tea with.  SIIIIIIIIIIIIIIGH. 

& before I fall into the pit of lachrymosity^^^^ let me say that I read THE EDUCATION OF AN IDEALIST recently, by Samantha Power, who, for those of you who are trying to remember which fantasy series involving dragons she’s responsible for, no, she was Obama’s UN rep during his second term, & this is a memoir.  I’d be happy to have a cup of tea with her any time.  Dragons optional.

^ remember how old I am;  my influences are Precambrian.  Not a lot of wokeness around in those days. 

^^ or one might say cranky

^^^ Mostly I think it shows when the author is a jerk, even if they have major plot chops & a writing style to worship.   

^^^^ Nope, this is a real word.  You can look it up. 

†† At last count.^

^ Still failing to decide which books go on my new shelves, & which books stay on the floor in rearranged piles, &, if these books are going on those shelves, what do I do—?+

+ I’m getting very tired of the stepladder in the middle of the front hall.  BUT I STILL HAVEN’T DECIDED WHICH BOOKS GO ON THE NEW SHELVES OVER THE SITTING ROOM DOOR.

††† Story-in-progress is RUNNING LONG.  AAAAAAAAAAUGH.  Sigh.  So what else is new.  A friend in publishing I was moaning to about this said, Is it maybe a series? 

I stared off into space for a luxurious moment or two.  Whereupon there was a loud flapping of wings & a feathery whacking up longside the head with a snarling in my ear:  PEGASUS II, you feckless twit.^  Erm.  Yes. 

No, I said to my friend.  No, I don’t think so.

^ Please note I have now answered several times that YES OF COURSE I AM GOING TO WRITE PEG II.  It’s been a bad decade & a half, okay?  These things happen.

††† AAAAAAAAAAAAUGH revisited.  I know people—other writers—who send out their drafts to 1,000,000 first readers for consideration & response, & I . . . this is another of those I can’t even I can’t even moments.  I hear my stories, the rhythm & pacing in particular are totally aural, & if some other bozo is talking?!?  SHUT.  UP.  Although it would be nice, when all your characters are yelling at you, & they’re yelling contradictory things, if you had someone else to ask for suggestions.  Except that I’m sure that anyone I asked would merely yell some entirely new intractably contradictory thing . . .

Now, what is that squeaky humming sound?  Tinnitus or a very small dragon?

‡‡ I have an accountant.  I have a tiny little scrap of beleaguered brain labelled for answering accountant emails & doing what they tell me.

‡‡‡ I can’t say that writing the stuff is exactly a haven, but it sure as flaming doodah is distracting. 

ɸ  Oooooh!  A trade war!  What a great idea!  That’ll totally solve global economic problems!!  Roll up, roll up & watch the fun!

ɸɸ I’ve told you I’ve morphed into a jigsaw addict, haven’t I?  The embarrassing sins of old age.  I’ve just finished one & am sorting the next one, & I’m all, Sort faster!  Sort faster!  I must put some pieces together NOW!!!

ɸɸɸ Since this is the second draft, I’d better have a clue

Ω ‘Walking’ doesn’t really come into it.

ΩΩ Small Fascination of the Day:  waldo is apparently only slang for a remote-controlled gizmo over here in the UK?  It doesn’t show up in either of my American dictionaries.  Although it comes from a Robert Heinlein story, which is why the only waldos I recognise are evil ones.  Robert Heinlein would have voted for Chump.

The Haven of Fiction*

I was already having a majorly crummy autumn for bad energy-sucking reasons** when the first Tuesday in November happened, & on the morning of the first Wednesday in November I completely freaked out & have remained thus.***  So, what does one do in times of deep distress & fear for the future?  READ FICTION.

I read fiction† anyway, of course †† but there’s a particular ferocity to snatching up a book††† when the world is imploding & you don’t want to think about it or hear the pattering fall of grimy crumbs of world-substance.

The savage choice, as you’re groping among your mostly confusingly semi-arranged‡ books‡‡, is, are you going to read something NEW, that you’ve been looking forward to for, oh, the past twenty years or so?  That finally reading would be the epic culmination of a dream, & will also rescue your credibility with all those better-read friends who maddeningly will insist on mentioning it now & again?‡‡‡  Or are you going to read some very old beloved, probably silly, book, because if you’ve loved it that long you were probably too young to read anything that wasn’t silly, the first time ɸ ?

I’ve been inclining to the latter. . . .

EXCEPT THIS BLOG POST IS ALREADY WAY LONG ENOUGH, SO I WILL START TELLING YOU ABOUT WHAT THIS POST WAS SUPPOSED TO BE ABOUT, NEXT POST. ɸɸ

Um.  Sorry.

* * *

* Including, for those of us lucky enough to write the stuff, working on our own stories-in-progress, although the definition of the word ‘haven’ is a little variable.  Other people’s stories may have teeth, but your own tend to have extra gnashing jaws of double-bladed fangs that crash and slurp louder than Scylla & Charybdis, especially at night when you’re trying to sleep & have several pillows over your head to drown out the noise.

This is still usually preferable to reality.

** When you stand up from a really productive day at story-in-progress & nearly fall over, that’s a good energy-sucking reason, even if it does make hurtling the Mongol Horde problematic. 

*** We’re already beyond many of my most fevered imaginings.  He wants to deny babies born in the USA citizenship if he doesn’t like their parents?  That’s not Making America Great Again, that’s trying to turn America into something it profoundly isn’t & has never been since Benjamin Franklin started spurting aphorisms.^   & this Hogsdeath joker??  What??^^

^ & if ‘In wine there is wisdom, in beer there is freedom, in water there is bacteria’ is apocryphal, as the pundits keep crushingly telling us, I DON’T CARE.  I’m keeping it anyway.+

+ Even if I don’t drink anything but green tea any more.#  ME IS SO BORING.##

# Well, & goat kefir~ & an increasing gazillion kinds of kombucha, because kombucha is now fashionable.  I find it hilarious, having something in common with a lot of celebrities I don’t want to have anything in common with, but this makes kombucha obtainable, so please may they keep drinking it, & flashing it in paparazzi camera lenses.

~ Sic.  It’s a hit, every morning.  Your eyes pop open & your hair stands on end & flails around.  It’s just as well this doesn’t last, very upsetting to any onlookers, but it’s a nice wow in a day that isn’t likely to have any Formula One races or sword duels or rappelling down Burj Khalifa or suchlike in it.=

= Just a lot of Scylla & Charybdis going gnash, snarl.

##  Yes, as readers of the old blog might now be protesting, I used to have a minor champagne thing, especially after good cheap prosecco became reliably available.  But being a cranky old widow who wants to go on living in a household consisting of one human being & at least one dog~, & stairs, & a lot of raw organic food you have to do something with before you can eat it, & piles of varyingly tottery piles of stuff over all horizontal surfaces, & stories to write, you start kind of eyeing your personal not-so-metaphorical perimeter fence & thinking, ooookay, we don’t want you creeping any closer any sooner than we can help.  HAVING NO VICES LEFT IS SO BORING~~.

~ I keep telling him if he’d be willing to get a little less tumultuous, we could have a second dog we could both play with.  & he says, hey, that sounds like a great idea, sure, yes, I’m starting with the calming-down immed—  LOOK!! THAT’S A BABY SEAGULL!!!!!! —wham on the end of the lead.  Sigh.

~~ Fortunately I still buy too many books.  Which is not a vice.  We’ve discussed this recently.

^^  STOPPING NOW.  I can’t stand it.  We’re living in a dystopian novel.  I don’t read dystopian novels because they’re too depressing.  I like novels where the good guys win & the air is clean & sparkly & full of birds+ & the galumphing wildlife thrives in its chosen habitat.++

+ No seagulls.  The presence of seagulls means we’re in something by HP Lovecraft.  Didn’t he write something about seagulls?

++ & where we don’t have 100 mph wind gusts in NE Scotland.  Yes I note the irony of the storm being named Eowyn, but she should be off somewhere knocking Nazgul captains out of roiling grey skies, not ripping tall thin old ladies off their feet as they unsteadily try to keep up with their demon dogs.  I spent quite a lot of today with my hand through his harness, first because maniac weather rouses a similar extreme mania in him, & partly because although he only weighs about a third of what I do, it’s low to the ground, it’s longer than it is tall, & it has four legs. 

† Mick Herron won the Diamond Dagger!  YAAAAAAAAAAY!  I love the Slough House series.  That is, the books.  I keep trying to decide if I want to risk watching the TV series.  Although Gary Oldman in that role is a good start.

††Anyone who doubted this even for the INSTANT between their eyes finishing the previous paragraph & skipping down to the beginning of this paragraph, is hereby suspended from this blog till they’ve read, I mean read, all of LOTR cover(s) to cover(s).^  Or any three McKinleys.  They’re a lot shorter, you know, the McKinleys.

^ I’ll let you off the appendices at the end of KING, but you get extra points against future malfeasance if you do read them.

††† Yes, it’s true, I read ebooks too, & listen to Audible^, but HARD COPY IN YOUR HANDS is the zenith & culmination of human life & . . .

^ pretty compulsively.  When I’m knitting, it’s fine.  When I’m out hurtling the Horde, I tend to miss stuff during baby seagull+ episodes, which is why I need to be able to come home to hard copy, which usually leads to reading on past the missed bit, which means I then have to try to find where I now am when I turn Audible on again, & meanwhile my plague-infested iPhone has decided it doesn’t like gambolling around in Audible & manifests its snit by dropping the sound every other word or so ARRRRRRRRGH.  I love being able to listen to books read aloud!!  Discovering Audible was one of those World Order Overthrow events, like the first Sony Walkperson.  ARRRRRRRRRRGH.  Music & books in your ear any time & any where you choose??++  Is this the nearest thing to heaven on earth technology+++has come up with so far?    So, is technology ultimately worth it or not?  ARRRRRRRRRRRGH.  Discuss.++++

+ etc

++ Your music choice is great, even if you think Spotify is a bad word, & prefer to mainline opera & Vaughn Williams & Steeleye Span.#  Audible, some of the readers-aloud are DIRE. Which is a rant for another post.

# & Stick in the Wheel & all the variations of Lady Maisery & all the variations of Eliza Carthy & a lot of other folks, but as far as I’m concerned, it started with Steeleye Span, like fantasy fiction started with LOTR.~

~ &, speaking of mainlining, Benjamin Britten, who is both opera & folk. 

+++ I want IBM to start making Selectrics again.  I want my IBM Selectric.

++++ I WANT MY IBM SELECTRIC.#

# I live in terror~ that if they do start making them again they’ll decide they have to IMPROVE them first.   AAAAAAAAUUUUGHHHHH

~ Yes, it’s true, I live a very terror-addled life.

‡ & even more confusingly not arranged at all

‡‡ For escapist, haven-ist, comfort reading, it has to be hard copy.  Ebooks are for folly & froth, or testing the water for something you might want . . . in hard copy.

‡‡‡ The nice ones assume I’ve read it, even when they know me well enough to know this is never a safe assumption.  The not so nice ones say, you have finally read it, haven’t you?  Just as an aside, I usually manage to lose the latter type of friend.  Life is short.

ɸ  LOTR.  Yeah.  It’s a great book.  It’s still silly.

ɸɸ Which is also to say, LOTR is a given.  I’ll tell you about other silly things.  Next post.

The passing of time. & passing & passing & passing.

I can’t believe we’re already better than halfway through January.*  I’m still grabbing the 2024 diary—the new one doesn’t look like my diary yet**—opening at random & trying to remember where we are.  September?  No, the days are too short.  The sun’s barely up before it goes down again.  November?  I’m sure I just had a birthday, at my age I don’t want another one this soon.***  & then I get to the end of the last page & . . . oh.  Nuts.†  So I have to use this shiny new object I haven’t spilled anything on yet?††  Oh dear.  Isn’t there another choice?†††

I’ve also been distracted from my usual bumpy & rutted track of semi-awareness-of-time‡ by a month of snow & ice, in this town where they don’t plough or sand‡‡.  I like to make jokes about my sixteen-legged, forty-four simultaneous dimensional blast-off, shoulder-dislocating dog. . . but it gets a lot less funny when you can’t stand up reliably, let alone walk, let alone brace yourself against the next time your rocket-launcher dog sees another [BAD LANGUAGE BAD LANGUAGE BAD LANGUAGE] baby [BAD LANGUAGE] seagull.‡‡‡  & when your daily round includes two hours of this death-defying nonsense, it’s very tiring.ɸ

HOWEVER.  For the moment the roads are clear of the standard winter obstructions ɸɸ so I can maybe pull myself together a little & start taking the new year seriously, including posting another variously ranting blog before another week/month/season/decade passes.

Oh, & no, since I’m sure you’re wondering, I haven’t taken my Christmas tree down yet.  It’s only January, what do you think I am, organised?  —Trees.  One small tabletop & one ittybitty desktop.  I’m still revelling in having got them out of the attic ɸɸɸ & decorated them this year.  Before Christmas. Ω  But, you know, not very long before Christmas?  So I may leave them up a while longer.ΩΩ  Easter, say. ΩΩΩ

***

* I’m starting to write this on the 17th.  We are not accepting bets on how long it takes me to finish it.^

^ All right, all right.  It’s the 20th.  But at least it’s not the 20th of February. 

** Don’t tell me about digital.  Or I will bite you.  Digitally.^  At least on paper I know which errors are mine.

^ Yes I know I mean virtually.  In this context I mean digitally. 

*** Unless there are more PRESENTS involved.  I would reconsider if I were getting two birthday hauls one right after the other.

† Macadamia for choice.  You know how the health fiends keep telling you nuts are good for you?  More or less excepting macadamia, which are chiefly fat & . . . fat.  Which is why they’re so tasty, of course.

†† Macadamia nut butter is very oily.

††† NO NOT digital.

‡ I am very grateful for friends to zoom with^, which requires making appointments & WRITING THEM DOWN in your diary, & then remembering to look at your diary.^^  I also infest my stepson & -daughter-in-law’s house for a few scheduled hours every week.^^^  Without these tethers to reality I would be dangerously unmoored, & would rapidly become debauched & promiscuous in a timey sort of way.  Seven hours straight on a fascinating jigsaw puzzle?  Thirty hours without pause rereading all of LOTR?  Sure.  No problem.  No, wait, Genghis.  THANK YOU GOD OR OTHER APPROPRIATE PERSONAGE FOR DOGS.  Although Genghis telling me he’s hungry would not be a good measure for the passage of that ugly thing, time, because he’s always hungry.  However when he starts doing laps^^^^ it’s a good sign that a walk^^^^^ needs to be next on the, ahem, agenda.

^ or even, gasp, occasionally drop round in person.  At the moment that’s an even less good idea than usual because while the ME has been this ferocious, what available surfaces there are have silted up rather.  Because I feel like mould & fungus doesn’t mean I stop ordering more books, & also things like mung beans for sprouting & cranberry powder for my eye-popping fruit blitzes, & things like organic fruit powder & ditto sprouting beans tend to be cheaper if you buy in bulk+, & . . .

+ which also confuses & deflects the addled brain from trying to figure out just what I’m paying per cranberry or per sprout.  Organic is EXPENSIVE.  No Caribbean cruises in my immediate future.  Fortunately I don’t want to go on a Caribbean cruise.  I’d like to make it to Orkney one of these years however.  Genghis would love Orkney.  I don’t think he’d rate the Caribbean cruise.

^^ oops.

^^^ They are so organised.  It makes me tired.  Sigh.+

+ Most things make me tired.  SIIIIIIIIIGH.#

# & yes, of course I allay my FRUSTRATION at having zero-minus energy by OVERUSING caps, ital, etc. 

^^^^ Symptoms that you’re maybe a little excessively preoccupied with your companion animal probably include that, if your companion animal happens to be a dog, & you’re looking at a house for sale, you notice that the downstairs has a nice lap-providing loop for the hyperactive furry, front hall through kitchen/dining/everything room, into back hall, down main hall, repeat.  Once the builders peeled the truly grim fitted carpet off EVERYTHING here, however, I having decided that there were a lot of things I liked about this house beyond a downstairs dog-loop & therefore bought it, vast reaches of original Victorian tile flooring & original Victorian wood planking were revealed.  I had fitted carpet back at the Hampshire cottage, but while the cottage itself was old, it had been Entirely Renovated by someone who wasn’t going to waste any time on details, & the floor was some kind of pressboard crud.  I was expecting something similar here;  when you hacked up a corner of the less than encouraging substance masquerading as carpet, what you thought you saw was even less encouraging.  Surprise!!  Builders & renovators are not a fun time, so you may kind of obsess over any nice surprises.  My Victorian tile floors & Victorian wood planking are certainly worn & beat up—& getting more so by the day, the hour, the excited prancing paw—but that’s what Genghis & I walk on.  But it’s too slippery for taking satisfactory lap-loops.+  It’s bad enough him leaping in place every morning at the foot of the stairs, in expectation of THE FIRST FOOOOOOOOOD OF THE DAY.

+ Poor Pav was already approaching the end of her line when we moved in, & the only kind of laps she was still interested in was the horizontal-human-thigh variety.  Sigh.  I’ve told you that I’m the kind of total prat who can worry about who would have taken Genghis if I hadn’t, because he is a handful!!!!, & you have to be pretty dog-oriented to cope &, since I’m prone to this kind of idiocy, you will UNDERSTAND that I can extract a germ of comfort out of the fact that I was available to adopt Genghis because Pav died way too young.    

^^^^^ If only WALKING were what happened when we get out there.   I could cope if it were WALKING.

‡‡ Although in their listless, laconic don’t-bother-me-my-nails-need-buffing way^, they got around to a few more of the main roads than usual, probably because the bad weather lasted so long they started running out of excuses not to do anything.^^  The road Genghis’ & my back alley mercilessly deposits us on, however, maintained its unrivalled record for flawless mirror ice.  This town is mostly little back roads, but the one we live on, of course, is the skating rink.

^ I have a friend who Knows Things, who says, no, no, it’s not the town’s fault, they don’t have the money for paltry insignificant things like keeping roads & pavements clean & safe—so their citizens don’t fall down & break themselves irreparably & sue the collective rear ends off every admin body in the entire Scottish government.+  To which my perhaps somewhat intemperate response is, So what the spitting dingdong are they doing with all my & everyone else’s tax money?  Hiring professionals to buff their nails?!?!  We turned to other topics at that point, since the conversation showed signs of deteriorating.

+ & think of all the poor, penned up, frustrated dogs longing for a proper walk.  Genghis & I go out whatever the weather, because of that chandelier-hanging# thing he does if he doesn’t get out. 

# YES OF COURSE I HAVE A CHANDELIER.  What do you think I am, a fantasist?#

# I’ve told you about my chandelier before, haven’t I?  Old-blog readers may remember a photo of a small, confused bat hanging from it, back at the cottage in Hampshire, during the famous~ Bat Season.  & YES OF COURSE I brought it with me.~~  Peter bought it for me because we had this giant~~~ English country house~~~~ & THERE WASN’T EVEN ONE CHANDELIER.  Said chandelier~~~~~ hung in my workroom at the old house, my workroom at the cottage, & now hangs in my workroom in this well-wallpapered Scottish Victorian.~~~~~~

~ Famous to me, you better believe it

~~ The chandelier.  Not the bat.  I hope the bat is leading a fulfilled & satisfying life—bats can live a surprisingly long time, so she—since my house was a bat nursery, she was probably a she—may well still be there, having more baby bats, &, I hope, staying in the roof, & not freaking out the current human occupants.

~~~ ramshackle

~~~~ even ramshackle, it was kind of awe-inspiring, or it was to me, whose entire tiny house in Maine would have fit in the front hall.

~~~~~ which is itself tiny.  The bat probably liked it, except for the bright-light aspect.

~~~~~~ Although the workroom is not well-wallpapered.  It’s a nice dark cranberry red.  But it’s nearly all bookshelves, & I didn’t want to be peering through jammed & creaking bookshelves for glimpses of wallpaper.  See previous post.

^^ How much buffing can fingernails stand?

‡‡‡ WHAT?  Urban blasted-screaming-doodah seagulls reproduce ALL YEAR LONG??^

^ This is almost as dire a prospect as the Chump for the next four years.  Not quite.  Almost.  I have very strong feelings about the reprehensibility of seagulls.

ɸ Also, wearing earnest, authoritative hiking boots every day I miss my All Stars. 

ɸɸ Except baby seagulls, which might be categorised in other better regulated towns as nonstandard.^

^ No, I’m still glad I live here.  I’m merely not a fan of town admin.

ɸɸɸ So, yes, fakes, which live in the attic the rest of the year.  But nice fake.  Fake trees have come a long way since those poison-green-confetti things that shed all over you, and plastic poison-green confetti doesn’t smell evocatively of cold northern woods, although it’s marginally easier to sweep up than pine needles.  For those of you who sweep your floors.

Ω & speaking of things this town doesn’t do, it hasn’t taken its revolting Christmas decorations down yet either.  I could do entirely without the local idea of Christmas decorations.  & with the money saved they could maybe plough & sand the streets when it snows.

ΩΩ I have a lot of really nice ornaments.  It seems wasteful I only see them a few weeks^ a year. 

^ sic 

ΩΩΩ I’m sure I say this every year I get the tree(s) up. Before Christmas. If they ever went up after Christmas, it would probably have to be till summer solstice.

I should have acknowledged that the ME has been using me extra enthusiastically as a punching bag recently & rewritten the following some time when the bits of my brain were stuck together better but it’s already another fracking week since I last posted t

So last Tuesday there was a knock on the door at eleven in the morning.  I was awake & moving by then,* indeed I had been awake & moving for some time but as I have muttered here before, & will undoubtedly mutter in similar fashion again, the fruitful-association genes for responding to the wholly incomprehensible monolith of other human beings & that great gnashing bully time, are missing from my DNA.  My feeling about that knock on the door was that it’s only eleven o’clock in the morning, & the world is pestering me??   However I was UPRIGHT.**  This counts.  & there, upon my opening the top half of my stable door & leaning heavily on the bottom half, toward maintaining the upright, what to my wondering, & nearly focussed, eyes should appear, but my carpenter. 

CARPENTER!!!!!!!  BOOKSHELF MAN!!!!!!

Not that he’d warned me by text, email, phonecall, smoke signals from the next hill***, or any other practical exhibition of the complex & ever-evolving panoply of creative human communications, that he was planning to come today, or yesterday, or next month, or 2027.  We’d had an initial discussion in November, I think, & a down payment had been committed to his bank account for the purchase of sturdy timber.  & then silence.  Quite a bit of silence.  I was reasonably sure he’d reappear some time.  Some time.  Um.  

BUT . . . CARPENTER.  You are always welcoming to a carpenter if you should be so fortunate as to have one standing at your front door.  You shade your dazzled eyes from his brilliance, you kowtow, you break out the champagne.

Because BOOKSHELVES.  YAAAAAAAAAAAY.  MORE BOOKSHELVES. 

Although I’m going to run out of wall space here sooner rather than later.†  Duh.  Don’t damage yourselves laughing here, you blog-familiar readers.  Walls for bookshelves in this†† house is a fractious point anyway, both because I have three walls with active fireplaces or woodstoves††† under them &, even more captious, I like all the fancy wallpaper I had put up.‡ But in the overwhelming inaugural rush of joy & passion of MORE BOOKSHELVES‡‡, I refuse to spoil it by future fret.  However soon that fret is likely to manifest.  Arrrgh. 

The current agony, of course, is deciding which books get picked up off the floor & put on them.  If it were even as straightforward as that:  I now have x new dimensions of bookshelves, wherein x + y ÷ pandemonium & uproar, maybe I should reorganise‡‡‡ my interesting attempts to put books together that might lead the deranged brain to look for them near one another?  There’s no point in Dewey Decimal or Library of Congress or the Terror of AI, none of these would be the least use to me.ɸ  No, sitting around on the floor surrounded by piles of books taller than my headɸɸ is the only practical way.  Unfortunately it’s not, um, very practical. 

It’s not just time & other human beings, you know?  I don’t interact well with ANYTHING.  Except storytelling.ɸɸɸ  So I will get up off the floor, leaving the tall piles of books where they are, waving gently in the wind of my graceless motion & the delicate flexing of the old, much-trodden Victorian floorboards as I lurch to my feet, & go back to story-in-progress.  & the next time I get up to make another cup of tea or fetch another blanket or throw another log on the fire, I will trip spectacularly over a tall pile of books I’d forgotten I was planning the future, safely shelved, of. 

* * *

* There are eras when I am not awake & moving by then, but we won’t go there, since we don’t have to.  I will remind you that I sleep in a dress, not a nightgown, that I have a wide & comprehensive wardrobe of shapeless jersey cotton dresses in mostly lurid colours & patterns, & when the lurid colours & patterns falter I enliven the proceedings with hoodies expressing mottos to live by & aprons of lurid colours & patterns, although I don’t have time to get the apron on if I’m still horizontal when the doorbell goes.  & the dress is all very well, & a good deal better than nothing^, but the hair standing on end & the blurred, slitted eyes kind of give the game away.  But the lurid & the patterns cheer me up when I have to start the repellent starting-the-day procedure.

^ Lurid colours & patterns = distraction.  I’m 73 years old this year, even if my actual birthday isn’t till November, & I look it.  I don’t want to ruin anyone else’s day, you know?

** During the pre-complete-sentence phase I can bark, moan, or grunt, & indeed will have done all of these things in the gruesome process of climbing out of bed, washing my face, clawing my hair out of my eyes, tying my apron on & in this weather wrapping a heavy sweater around as much of me as I can manage^, brewing the first cup of tea of the day, etc.  Mornings.  What a concept.^^

^  Sleeves.  You know.  Integrating the arm with the long tunnel-like hole of the garment you’re staring at, probably upside down.  Arrrgh.

^^ Not that getting up at noon is any better.  It’s the getting up part that is the problem.  Getting out of bed after something resembling+ sleep.  What a concept. 

+  Or, possibly, not resembling sleep.  This may be a clue about the getting up.

*** Semaphore, written note left under a rock on my front step, telegram, private bearer, Pony Express, helicopter drop.  I don’t recommend anyone leaving a message on any of the social media, even those where my name seems to appear.  I haven’t been on social media in YEARS.  & I think I did a comprehensive rant about the Evil that is Facebook when Blogdad & I were trying to pummel the hateful thing into letting us in so I could paste blog post links, because other people still seem to look at it.  Shouldn’t you be waxing the cat or knitting a jumper for a chilly octopus or something useful?

† Here’s another familiar rant:  yes, it is dismaying that I’ve managed to fill a four-bedroom house in five years but . ..  I was, just before sitting down to face trying to write another blog post, burrowing through my extensive collection of fabric remnants for the PERFECT remnant to patch a pair of socks.  I don’t usually patch socks because, socks, all that work & you hardly see them,^ but these have bright yellow pears^^ all over them & I’m not ready to give them up yet.  So in approximately the third large box of fabric bin ends & offcuts I FOUND THE PERFECT REMNANT.  Which I fell upon with gladness.  The point being that I looked through a lot of shreds & vestiges first, & if I hadn’t found the exact-to-requirements wee tiny cloth atom, I’d’ve had to go on line & find more remnants.  So there is method to my madness.  The originating madness I think is past curing.^^^

^ I really have to double down & relearn to darn.  But a small dapper patch with tiny stitches works on ordinary socks.  & my somewhat embarrassing bodge for mending heavy wool socks is to knit the repair & then sew it in.  Works.  Mrs Beeton wouldn’t approve but hey.

^^ Sic. 

^^^ When I was bell ringing several days a week, I had to leave the bells behind in the church tower.  Handbells, now . . . Peter actually consulted Niall about buying me a set of handbells, & Niall advised against.  At the time this was a my-best-interests-at-heart friendly thing to do, but now . . . if I had my own set of handbells would I have started a local change-ringing handbell group by now???  What a very good thing I do not have my own set of handbells.+

+ Although, you know, a set of handbells doesn’t take up that much physical space.

†† large, four-bedroomed

††† one open fireplace, two woodstoves.  & five more non-functioning chimneys, because this is a Victorian house, & that’s how they did it.  ALL EIGHT CHIMNEYS ARE NOW BRISTLING WITH ANTI-SEAGULL SPIKES.

‡ This wasn’t a problem back in the cottage in Hampshire, where I had restricted myself to lurid paint on the walls.^  Narrow crevasses & glimmers of paint through bookshelves is adequate.  This is a much bigger house with, duh, more wall space.  But if you’ve got cabbage roses the size of your head on your walls, you want to see them.  Likewise vast bouquets of lilacs. ^^

It’s always some blasted thing confounding your attempt to lead the perfect life.^^^ 

^ Yes, you perceive a pattern.  Maybe I should try shellacking some of my aprons.

^^ I think I’ve also told you that the bloke who put up my wallpaper was amazing.  His pattern joins aren’t just neat & precise, they’re art.  You can stand in hushed admiration in front of a corner, watching roses or lilacs flow flawlessly around the room as if you’re at the theatre.  You don’t want to cover up masterpieces with bookshelves.  I mean even with bookshelves.

^^^ ::falls down laughing maniacally::

‡‡ My carpenter knows what he’s doing.  Therefore the fact that the ones in the big front guest^ bedroom are crooked is because the wall is crooked.^^  SIIIIIIIIGH.  By the time I get them loaded up I figure it won’t show.  If it shows, I can confuse the issue with Little Noodgy Things, cracked mugs full of fake flowers, dog cartoons, rude buttons, etc.

^ Guests are required to be thin, nimble & entirely free from claustrophobia

^^ Old houses.  Most of the time I find the wonkiness & unpredictability charming—I may be doing a little projecting here—but I like my bookshelves reassuringly horizontal.  This is probably a sign of a weak character.+

+ Buying too many books# is not the sign of a weak character.  HMMPH.

# Define too many

‡‡‡ whatever that means

ɸ I did say deranged brain.  Unless there was a card catalogue involved.  SIIIIIIIIIIGH.  I’m old enough still to be romantic about card catalogues.  You can be as deranged as you like if you are making up your own categories on little white cards.^  It doesn’t work somehow, doing it on your Battery Operated Personal Device.  Somehow derangement stops being fun when it’s filtered through enigmatic technology that you know is secretly tsking at you.  A nice stack of 3×5 cards & a pen with a nib & a bottomless supply of black (black) ink is what is wanted.  Except, you know, TIME TO PURSUE YET ANOTHER UNATTAINABLE PERFECTION?  Time.  That many-taloned fiend of mortal frustration.  At the very teetery top pinnacle of the list of things I don’t have the genes to deal with. 

^ Possibly in piles as tall as your head, see next footnote 

ɸɸ Taller than my head while sitting on the floor, I wish to emphasise.  Not only might Genghis or I suffer major injury should a pile of books taller than my head standing up fall over, the books might get their covers bashed & their pages crumpled.  Perish forfend.^

^  Also.  I’m not that great a stacker.  A pile of books taller than my standing-up head will fall over.

ɸɸɸ I hope.

Happy New Year

So I’m a few days late.  So?  I’m late for everything, including writing books.*  & today is Peter’s & my thirty-third wedding anniversary, & that counts.**

. . . Ugh.  It’s after fracking midnight, I forgot about the way other people, including whoever invented the blog machinery, count time.  I haven’t gone to bed yet so never mind what the clock, & the date at the top of this blog post, says, I’m writing this on the third of January, & I’m talking about the third of January.  Okay?  Thanks.  Yes, I really am this much of an airhead, & my relationship with time . . . Don’t get me started.

So what have I been doing with all that not-to-be-mentioned life fourth dimensional thing since the beginning of November when the world as I thought I knew it ended?***  Besides writing story-in-progress, that is, & bless it for existing, even if how that manifests is it knocking me around relentlessly & shouting, not like that, you overcookedpastabrain†, do it again, & this time remember the . . . ††  Very bruising, a story in progress can be, although the bruises are usually invisible beyond the wild staring look in the victim’s eyes.  The other major player on my life team††† however is the great galumphing hound, the Mongol Horde, the terror of millions, & the particularly acute terror of the little old lady whimpering in his wake when there is snow on the ground, which at present there is.  Genghis-originated bruises tend to be highly visible, although lately the only really purple ones have been caused by tripping over him indoors, where there is very little snow, except what we track in. I’ve mentioned that THIS TOWN DOES NOT PLOUGH OR SAND???  I remember‡ back in Maine that you’d know it was snowing if you didn’t know it already‡‡ because you could hear the snow ploughs.  It’s a very nice comforting noise, snow ploughs, even if it had never yet occurred to you in your short innocent life that there might not be snow ploughs when it’s snowing. 

& of course I’m reading.  Books, magazines, buckwheat flour boxes‡‡‡.  I’ve been thinking, now that I stay home all the time & my idea of an adventure is starting a new jigsaw puzzle or knitting a new pair of wrist warmers, maybe I’ll finally start talking about books on this blog.  I know I didn’t on the old blog, but I had something more resembling a life as other people know it back then, & it seems illicit somehow to talk about books when you write them too.  The life I’ve got now suits me surprisingly well§, but one of the reasons why is that I let myself spend so much time reading, & if I’m trying to restart the blog§§, I need something to put in it . . .

I’m thinking about it.  Happy Birthday, Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon & Merton Professor of English Language & Literature.

Happy Anniversary, Peter.  Sigh.

* * *

*Arrgh.  The current one continues to go well, but I’m pretty sure it’s too long, & it just goes on getting longer.  Which means writing it is taking longer, plus cutting it down will take longer yet.  More arrgh.  HOWEVER.  The important thing is that it’s going.^

^ Of course the end of PEGASUS isn’t the end of the story, but no, current story-in-progress is nothing to do with Sylvi & Ebon’s future adventures, & I’m being hinky about the title only because I’m like that.  I realise it’s taking me so long to write PEG II as to cause consternation on the part of increasingly anxious expectant readers, but anyone who has ever read anything else by me has got to know I wouldn’t leave it there??!?  There’s a mea culpa about this on the web site, but the web site is so unfinished+ I don’t think the ‘search’ works properly.++ 

+ My fault.  Blogdad would fill in any blanks I gave him reasonable filler for.

++ You’re not expecting me to provide a link, are you?!?  ::hysterical laughter::  As soon as I’ve got over this ‘new year’ nonsense a little more I promise to talk to Blogdad/Young Beowulf/Gleaming Tech Wizard about various things, but I really need to write a little more for the poor lame web site before I pester him any more about its shortcomings.

** It’s also, for you sharp-eyed Tolkien nutters out there, of whom I am proud to count myself one, JRR’s birthday.^  I’ve missed the raising the glass at 9 pm local time ‘to the Professor’ but it’s not like I’m going to forget what day it is.  I’m sure I told this story on the old blog:  I moved over here the end of 1991^^, & my fiancée’s^^^ visa was only good for six months.  So Peter had to marry me promptly or the Home Office would boot me out.^^^^  We were looking for a date that looked like it might enjoy being significant, you know?  Peter is the one who found the 3rd of January, & I can’t remember how, except that this was 1991 & the internet hadn’t been invented yet^^^^^, so there would have been books involved, & it happened at home, so not the library or interesting posters on the train station walls or anything.  Peter said, Hey, want to get married on Tolkien’s birthday?  Peter was not a rabid Tolkien fan, but he knew I was.  It’s hard to have more than about fifteen minutes’ conversation with me not to know, & we’d been, erm, going steady for four months or so by then.^^^^^^ 

I said, hey, cool, yes.  Duh.

^ Anyone who thinks LOTR is a film series is hereby banned from this blog forever. 

^^ Hands up anyone who wasn’t born yet

^^^ MISOGYNY ALERT.   YO.  MICROSOFT.  WHY DO YOU AUTO-ADD THE ACCENT FOR FIANCE BUT NOT FIANCEE?  & neither in caps I presently note.  I’ve actually got a short cut insert for most of the French language twiddles, but those particular post-its seem to have fallen off my lampshade+, & heaven, or one of the lesser saints, preferably one who has experience of clothes moths & the way your latest favourite jeans wear through almost before you’ve got them broken in to perfect softness,++ help me if said post-its have fallen into the large heaps of knitting & mending that end of the table.  And therefore at this point I briskly murmur, Life is short,+++ & pass on.

+ What?  You don’t stick post-its to your lampshade?  How do you manage?#

# Of course I clearly don’t manage very well, but I assure you I would manage a lot worse if I didn’t have post-its all over my lamp & lamp shade. 

++ They Don’t Make Denim Like They Used To. 

+++ Ie no I am not going to go tangle with MS Windows ‘insert’ again.  It’s possessed by demons, like pretty much everything else in Windows any more, & meanwhile, upgrade ninety six kajillion is demanding to be downloaded, & I think they’ve stopped supporting the one I’ve got, which is already way too stupidly complicated for me.  I don’t want a three-wheeled Maserati, I want a tricycle that works.  The stupid is not all mine.

^^^^ I will retell stories of getting the visa my marriage license sanctioned at some other time & post.  Suffice that the HO scrutinized me & felt that I was not adhering to the spirit of British law & order as they might wish.  Good thing they didn’t try to make me pledge allegiance to the queen.+

+ Not that crossing the national border in the opposite direction is any better.#  There’s a law common to all human societies that border crossing is a kind of labyrinthine game of chicken.  Except that this explains the warring-tribes thing that is busy burning up the planet, I feel it should give grounds for acknowledgement of congruity.  Hey!  We’re all different!  I’m Other!  You’re Other!  We’re all Other!  Let’s drink to that, especially those of us who missed the 9 pm toast to the Professor!

# & once the Chump is back in office, I’m sure he’ll pass a law that says that fantasy writers~ who have lived overseas for more than thirty years are prohibited from crossing the national borders that now all belong to him.

~ especially female fantasy writers.  Apologies for not embodying any interesting minorities in my list of disqualifying characteristics.=

= Oh, well, um, wait.  ::Long pause::  No, some other blog post. 

^^^^^ Yes, I know, 1983, I just looked it up ON THE INTERNET.+  But it hadn’t been invented for nontechies yet.

+ I don’t use Google.  Just sayin’.

^^^^^^ Yes, all our friends & family were going, They’re doing WHAT????

*** I’ve mostly thought cautiously & caveat-edly pretty well of Joe, but I’ve just stopped, when he let it leak out that he’s sorry he stood down from running a second time, that he would have won.  Bulltiddly, Joe.  Kamala was our chance.  I still don’t know how it got blown out from under us.  I can’t believe . . . no, no, no, no, no, I’m not going there.

† This is a very serious insult in my world, because I don’t eat pasta.  I don’t eat cereal grains, full stop.^

^ Last time I mentioned this here I had a very nice email from someone who said she doesn’t either, & maybe we should exchange recipes.+

+ I just wrote ‘remedies’.  Well, that too, for those of us who’ve found out that our metabolisms are grateful for . . . um, a restraint that makes us impossible to feed by normal human standards.

†† I’m not going to tell you, am I?

††† There are so many blasted self-help books out there I pick up the language even though I wouldn’t read one if the only other thing available was a cereal box, which it wouldn’t be, because see previous footnote, right?  But just reading through this month’s Audible releases it’s like every other title is BE THE BEST YOU CAN BE!  BE BETTER THAN THE BEST YOU CAN BE!!  TEACH YOUR LIFE TEAM TO RAH RAH YOU!!!  EAT DECAYING VEGETABLE MATTER & DIE IN A DITCH!!!!  No, no, oops, I made that last one up.  I’m feeling cranky for some reason.+

+Probably because I’m Robin McKinley.  Goes with the territory.

‡  I remember, quavered the little old lady.  Over thirty years ago . . .

‡‡ If, for example, you’re lying in bed, & the window is at least three feet away, & without your contact lenses^ you can’t see that far

^ I was younger then.  I still can’t see three feet away, but my glasses lie to hand by my bed.

‡‡‡ You are keeping up with the footnotes, aren’t you?  Buckwheat, teff, quinoa, amaranth, doodah doodah doodah, I’ll bore you more about this some other post too.

§ I don’t really do things that suit me.  It took me seventy-plus years to decide to let things that suit me, suit me, if you follow—?

§§ Or re-re-restart the blog, depending on how you’re counting

No Title

This is a small-time, low profile, very personal & mostly frivolous blog by a cranky old woman who lives in the back of beyond with her dog & writes stories for a living.  Even when I’m writing about stuff that really matters to me I try to think of something funny to say about it too.

I can’t think of anything funny to say about the results of the American presidential election last Tuesday.   I’m stupid with shock & half out of my mind in fear of what the next four years will bring.

It may take me a little while to get my sense of humour back.

Unprecedented

I have a new, unique, never-to-be-repeated* excuse for not having written my next blog post in a timely** fashion.  I have had conversations with more than one live human being*** per day for the last fortnight-plus.  This does not happen.  After the first few days my tongue gets chapped.  My brain wrings its hands.  My Converse High Tops start tap-tap-tapping in another direction—any other direction—away†—& then somehow or other because the stars have aligned funny, this people thing goes & happens again.†† What am I, a mingly sort of person or something??  NO.  What hideous lying rumours are going round about me as the life & soul of some party I’ve never been to & wouldn’t attend if I were invited which I wasn’t?  WHAT?

But I want to say that what I am not doing is getting ready to slide out of writing this blog again, the way I did last year.  NOT.  It’s just that–after the first few days of relentless humanity–I’ve had to spend increasing amounts of time curled up with Genghis, reading murder mysteries†††, to recover from all this freaky civic interaction. 

* * *

* Yes, I know, if it’s unique there’s only one of it.^  I am employing literary emphasis.  The advertising—and careless journalistic—habit of using unique every time they want to say Buy me & you’ll be positively ahead of the Joneses for at least a day & a half!!^^, is one of the MANY MANY MANY things that make me cranky.

^ I would be willing to listen to an argument that if a unique thing becomes a series, it merely stops being unique, & you don’t lose all credibility for having called it unique when it still was.  

But not if you’re advertising something for sale, because you know perfectly well it isn’t unique, or if it is, it’s only because the sales ploy failed.#

# I can hear the surly conversation around the computer-era-water-cooler-equivalent= now.  So, guys, what’s the new UNIQUE?  We’re gonna lose money on the Self Rotating Giant Whirling Paw add-on for our new AI canine companion bionic operating system if we don’t get glitzy fast. 

=  Um.  The laptop screen with 67 tiny unidentifiable zoom windows open?  No, no, zoom is so last decade.  Team Integrated Circuit Brain or whatever it is now.

^^ Although of course we are sending the Joneses exactly this same come on, so, you know, you’d better move fast.  You could still maybe get six hours on them, pesky people that they are.

** TIME AAAAAAUGH TIME

*** Ie shouting at idiots^ on my laptop screen does not count^^

^ including, but not exclusively, those misusing unique

^^ Hmm.  There is, however, an important question about whether random conversations with people I don’t know the names of count.

Oh now let’s not get carried away.  All those conversations with people on the street whose names I don’t know# but, in most cases, whose dogs I recognise, they count.  Or sometimes vice versa, the vice and the versa in this case referring to people recognising my dog.  Scary numbers of people know my dog.  & I think I’ve told you about the distressing number of little old people who totter up to say hello to Genghis because they miss having their own dog but they think they’re too OLD??  I will probably tell you again too because it preys on me, with fangs, & these conversations keep happening.  I’m planning on dying quietly## in my sleep in extreme old age with my Yorkie on my lap###.  My only official anxiety is how long I can put off the Yorkie phase.  My grasp of practical physics is limited, but I imagine merely wearing weighted shoes#### isn’t really going to be of much use for prevention of being pulled over by one’s dog, if I decided that Genghis hasn’t been challenging enough & I opt for a Rottweiler next time?#####

# this does not include the people whose names I should know

## Yes!  QUIETLY!  I’m going to have figured out how to go all mellow between now & then!=

= ::falls down laughing hysterically::  If you ever meet anyone who claims that her name is Robin McKinley & she writes books, & she’s mellow, she’s someone else, you must have misheard her.

### which is exactly what happened to one of my neighbours.  The people who subsequently bought her house are very nice, but I still miss her.=

= I even miss the weeny fluffball doggish being.  The new people have a cat.   

#### CLOMP CLOMP CLOMP CLOMP.  People will run away and hide when they hear me coming.  Which will at least solve the superfluous conversation problem.  

##### Large male Rottweiler:  135 pounds=.  Large male Yorkshire terrier:  the freaking breed standard says ‘not to exceed 7 pounds.’== 

= THEY NEED A LOT LESS WALKING THAN A GERMAN WIRE HAIRED POINTER HOWEVER, WHO IS HALF THE WEIGHT.  Or less.  Genghis is about a third of 135 pounds.@  But from what I know of Rottweilers, they’re merely, you know, gruesomely powerful.  They don’t have the true rocket-launcher feature.

@ I did it on my calculator, okay?  We have already discussed long division.

== You’d think something that small would die young of ruptured everything, that there isn’t room in a seven-pound body for the usual canid assortment of heart, lungs, stomach, intestines, liver, bladder, special domestic-canine sub-genomic musculoskeletal-tail-wagging evolutionary adaptation, etc, & the bits would all rub up against each other till friction made them explode in year three or so.  But apparently Yorkies are quite long-lived.  Hmmmmm.  Maybe I could get used to tiny.@

@ Although I am reminded of Dorothea near the beginning of MIDDLEMARCH rejecting a puppy$ her unwelcome suitor has brought her, saying that her sister had had a thimble sized critter with legs, & ‘I am short-sighted, I was afraid I might tread on it.’ $$

$ Maltese.  Another of these palm-sized things that is mostly hair.

$$ I’d’ve taken the puppy.  PUPPY. AWWWWWW.%  I don’t think a puppy counts as a betrothal, even to the Victorians, who were testy about these things.  And it could have learnt to stay out from under my large clomping feet.%%

% Although a Maltese or Yorkie puppy you probably need a magnifying glass to confirm cuteness. 

%% &, you know, WHAT HAPPENS TO THE POOR REJECTED PUPPY?? Maybe it goes to the sister he marries after Dorothea won’t have him? Who already has a penchant for thimble sized critters?

† Which is awkward, if you’re sitting around your own table in your own kitchen.  I’m barefoot indoors anyway.  My 3-dimensional regular visitors are used to me, but when I opened the door last week to someone I haven’t seen since I moved up here, he said, you’re barefoot in late October in northeast Scotland??  Um.  Well, I have a large warm dog & an Aga.  & a woodstove.  It’s almost worth the chilblains to stay barefoot even once woodstove weather has begun^ because of the wild exciting climate wars happening at ankle level.  The assaults!  The rebuffs!  The attacks!  The retreats!  The sly ambushes from behind furniture legs!  The blitzes from above!  All of human history played out on your very own floor between the opposing airy blasts of invading woodstove swelter & resident icy guerrilla draughts.^^

^ So far this non-autumn it has mostly been insanely warm.  We all settled in for real autumn to start happening, dunno, beginning of October?  Bright crisp air, dropping temperatures.  & then Florida arrived.   I keep waking up because I’m frying—I LIKE blankets, okay?—& throw everything off, & then I can’t get back to sleep because there’s nothing weighing me down.

without the alligators. 

We’ve addressed my strange sleep habits previously.  So let’s say, about three hours after I went to bed.

Yet another reason I’m not a big fan of summer, although wearing all my Steeleye Span t shirts during the days is a plus.  & no, in my hierarchy, there is absolutely no point to wearing amusing t shirts under your woollies.

^^ There’s probably a story in there somewhere. 

†† When there were 2 pews of people at compline, I almost turned & ran.  Only I couldn’t, because Genghis had already seen them & he likes people, so he was barging forward in his Genghisian way while I was stumbling along behind him, aghast.  It took me about halfway down the (long) aisle to remember that the people who were Genghis’ friends were Genghis’ friends because they are my friends, & one of the illicit, not-holy reasons for going to flipping doodah compline is in the hope of seeing them.^

^ Yes, I am often my own worst enemy.  Yes, my panic button works a lot faster than my thought processes.  Yes, this is a problem.  Any more questions?

††† One of the conversations I had with one of ALL THESE PEOPLE the last few weeks was with someone who also reads murder mysteries.  Oh, she said, what kinds do you like?  Well, I said, I don’t read serial murderers, & I don’t read anything where the first chapter is the last day or hour of the poor sod who’s about to get offed—the corpse is a plot device, not a human being;  I will just about put up with it that they were a nice person & we have to hear about this while their murderer is being found out;  note singular of the word corpse;  & I really won’t read it when, having accidentaled my way through the Last Day by not realising that was what it was, I the reader is expected to read extensively about the murder from the soon-to-be-corpse’s point of view, & how they struggled, & how desperate they are, & how all the things they’ll now never do flash pitiably before their hopeless eyes—& I don’t read anything where women or children are tortured or imprisoned for long horrible intervals, & I don’t like detectives, police or private or inadvertently involved bystanders, with Burdensome Traumatic Pasts that keep interfering with the detecting so they can make stupid decisions to make the story more interesting which it doesn’t, & . . . & at about this point my interlocutor started to laugh, & said, there isn’t anything left!  & I regretfully acknowledged this is almost true.  Oh, I don’t like cozies either.  Somehow or other I still have several hundred [sic] mysteries sitting unread on my Kindle.  If I read one I like, I buy the hard copy.^  I do this often enough that—with all the hard copies I’d bought before Kindle became a thing—that, yes, my murder-mystery shelves are overflowing like every other literary genre section in this house.

^ I know.  But I like hard copy.  I will continue to like hard copy as this house slowly sinks into the earth from the weight of 1,000,000,000 hard copies.  &, look!  There’s another box arriving right now from Blackwell’s/GUARDIAN bookshop/Topping & Company/Postscript/Bibliophile/Abebooks, BOOK DEPOSITORY CLOSED, SOB, &, yes, I’m afraid, Amazon, my bad, or possibly one box from each.  I’m an equal opportunity it-isn’t-hoarding-if-it’s-books purchaser. 

I’m actually wearing that hoodie today.#

# As I finally FINISH this blog I’ve been making little runs at for several days.  It was still only a fortnight in the first paragraph when I began.

Housecleaning. Or perhaps not.

The wandering mind* went up late because the day before that, when I should have been finishing a blog post, I suddenly discovered I was going to have visitors the afternoon of the next day.**  Visitors, what’s more, whom I’ve known nearly forever, but who haven’t been to Scotland since I moved up here, & so have never seen this house.  YEEEEEEEP.  Whereupon I dropped everything*** & grabbed the nearest cleaning implement† & looked around for what to do first.  There are so many choices.

Most of them painful.  I have a variety of mantras on the subject of housecleaning.  Probably the most important is It would look a lot worse if I did as little as it looks like I do.  If you are going to collect little noodgy things—as a very old friend used to call them, & I still do—to the extent & with the fervour that I apply to their pursuit††, you are going to live a three-dimensionally complex life, full, very full, of small angled surfaces & eccentric bends & folds & curlicues that need dusting &, worse, over time, washing.  WASHING.  Because the dust, eventually, you know, starts to stick.  This is similar to my extreme revulsion against the idea of washing walls.  You don’t do anything on a wall, why should you have to wash it?†††  Why do I have to wash weird funky little objects for no other reason than that they’ve been occupying space on planet earth for a while?  Oh, don’t give me atmosphere, and the effects of respiration, both animal and plant, the sloughing off business all live bodies seem to feel obliged to do, skin flakes, hairs & crinkly brown leaves‡, all the stuff hanging in the air that is missing from the void that is deep space, except deep space is full of stuff too, right?  Including dust.  So little noodgy objects suspended in space also get covered in dust.  It’s a dispiriting‡‡ thought.  I bet they don’t get dusted either.  Like mine.‡‡‡   

And a special additional word about houseplants.  Houseplants are way messy. They don’t just sit there in their pots bringing joy &, cough cough, cleaner air.  They drop leaves & flowers & seeds & pollen & bits of stem & spathe-crumbs & all kinds of things that the houseplant books don’t tell you about.ɸ

ARRRRRRGH.

I have my limits however.  I go back to story-in-progress when the Ratbagging Ill Timed Late Night ME Energy Spike But We’ll Take Our Energy Spikes When We Get Them However Hard This Makes Living in the World, strikes, whatever is happening the next day ɸɸ.  And so only some of the floors were swept, only a few of the windows had the smudges wiped off ɸɸɸ, I never understand why plants are so smudgy;  yes of course if you have some kind of leaky-honeydew bug infestation, but when you don’t?  & you still get smudges on the insides of your windows?  Are they writing secret messages to the very-long-sighted houseplants in the house across the street? Ω  But the smears & smutches that look like, dunno, melted ice cream or baba ganoush or hollandaise sauce?  WHAT?  None of these things happen here anyway ΩΩ, let alone are carried nonchalantly through the house while flinging spoonfuls at the walls & windows.  I know myself well enough to keep all food items WITHIN the big kitchen-utility-living space with the Aga in the middle of it.  I don’t know, I think maybe the contents of any bowl or plate or mug I carry leaps outward, perhaps I inspire a sense of adventure in my ingestibles??  Or possibly my house has a lively social life when I’m not looking.  Okay, I do get very deeply involved when I’m working.  

& after all that, I forgot to remove the dead mouse in the middle of the floor of the potting shed/pantry-for-things-that-don’t-mind-uninsulated-damp ΩΩΩ, where the trap had somehow flung it.  Fortunately my guests didn’t ask for a tour.※

& it was a lovely visit.  I enjoyed it very much.※※

* * *

* . . . post.  The wandering mind is always with us.  Or me, anyway.

** I’m carefully not saying things like ‘Thursday’ or ‘two/three/four days ago’ because it won’t be by the time this post goes up.  I don’t really need any more reminders that I don’t live in time too well, but writing an erratic blog is certainly another one.  I’M MISSING THE TIME GENE, OKAY? 

*** Inappropriate verb choice.  Why did drop everything become standard slang for abruptly stop what you are doing to do something else really fast?  I yanked my hands off the laptop as if the keyboard were burning^, shoved (the front half of) Genghis off my lap^^ leaped to my feet & started clutching my forehead in despair & overwhelmedness.

^ I shouldn’t give this thing ideas.  I can hear it thinking, hmmm?  Burning keyboard?  We could work on that.

^^ moaning noises of protest ensue

† I have a surprisingly good selection of these.  It’s the employing them that’s the problem.  Also, I’m tired of buying the latest 1,000,000 5-star reviews on amazon gizmo that cleans EVERYTHING & finding out ***AMAZEMENT!!!*** that it doesn’t.  The most recent of these is another stiff narrow brush thing that is guaranteed to winkle out the sulky rubbish adhering to the bottom of the cracks in your old Victorian wooden plank floor:  wrong.  All it does is upset the silverfish & emerge, bent & broken, from the experience, adorned with substances you really didn’t need to know any more about beyond that you don’t want them in your house, even at the bottom of cracks in the floor.  What did those Victorians get up to??

†† Note, please, that we are not talking Dresden shepherdesses here, nor large-eyed children embracing larger-eyed cats.^  Anything with roses or dragons on it is in, & I will always make room for something truly exceptional, like my bright orange lobster salt & pepper shakers, which stand on their tails, & their claws are attached with small tight springs, so when you shake one the claws rattle at you.  I probably mentioned these in the old blog, they are too wonderful not to gloat over occasionally.  I mean, would you have passed these up^^ if you saw them on a shelf in a good old-fashioned junk shop, which I don’t think exist any more?  You’re not going to get the same awe-inspiring effect on eBay, even if someone posts a video.

^ Nor even basilisks, although I’d be tempted if it were a basilisk.  But I don’t do kiddies, full stop.  Nor the shepherds to go with the shepherdesses I don’t have.  I don’t do people.  Enough of the noisy, sloppy, mobile self-motivating ratbags around generally, I don’t freaking need freaking representations of them on my shelves.  I’m enough of a sample.

^^ If the answer is ‘yes’ I am very, very disappointed in you.

††† Barring dog-nose & small-child-hand height, which will need washing rather often.  Genghis likes to rub himself along the slightly knobbly inside wall of the tiny back hall, so that wall needs washing at dog-rubbing height too.  Sigh.  That wall is knobbly because it was originally part of the outside of the house before they built two little rooms, one up, one down, to put modern plumbing in.  About a hundred years ago.  Hey, it still works. 

‡ & crumbs, threads, tracked-in dirt, bits of paper & shreds of cardboard & string & incompetently peeled-off bits of tape, broken-off over-sharpened tips of old fashioned pencils which I still use^ & I’ve told you I don’t kill spiders, right?  So if there’s a live, functioning, bug-catching spider in that web, I leave it alone^^ & random effluvia probably better not further specified, like the Victorian detritus at the bottoms of the cracks in the floors.

^ partly because I seem somehow to have accumulated 1,000,000 of them & partly because I’m not a fan of modern mechanical pencils.+

+ what do you mean, why am I still using pencils?

^^ Granted I may leave it alone anyway.  I mean:  dusting. 

‡‡ ‡ DiSPIRITing.  Get it??

‡‡‡ You’ve already guessed that I am greatly attached to the notorious Quentin Crisp quote on not doing any housecleaning:  ‘after the first four years the dirt does not get any worse’.

ɸ I was just cruising a new houseplant site^ & they keep repeating:  ‘studies show that as little as 10 minutes spent in a room with real (not artificial) plants improves your overall mood.’  WHAT STUDIES are not cited.

^ My bad

ɸɸ or for that matter, should have already happened today

ɸɸɸ  yes, dog noses, of course, some of them, I swear, taller than Genghis can reach ^

^ oh, silly me.  Let us not forget that he can jump higher than my head, & regularly does so when I’m not getting his food bowl on the floor fast enough+.  I haven’t seen him leap gazelle-like & give his face a quick wipe along the wall at the top of the arc, but I wouldn’t put it past him.

+ Why he hasn’t yet cracked his head against the lower lean-to ceiling of the utility room, where Dog Food Happens, I have no idea

Ω  I have A Man in a Van with a Large Water Tank & a Rocket-Blast Hose that does the outside of the windows.^  I have a story about him.  Tell you later.

^ This will sometimes finally inspire me to remove some of the old, spiderless webs festooning the corners on the inside.  The best webs are full of corpses, you know?  & they do kind of catch the eye when you’re trying to look at the view.

ΩΩ no cow juice items;  no nightshades;  & hollandaise sauce is too much like work, & what do you do with all the egg whites?

ΩΩΩ I WILL HAVE the shed insulated.  Some day.  Yes.  Some day.  It was one of the things on the original renovations list, but I was tired of living in endless uproar & disintegration^ . . . & now, of course, the blasted shed has filled up with STUFF.  I have no idea how, since I certainly don’t put books back there.

^ & of freaking haemorrhaging money

※ They are so splendidly British.  Also, although they haven’t been to this house before, they are used to me. 

※※ I can’t speak for them, of course, but they did leave smiling.  Maybe they were being British.

The Wandering Mind

Last night I had three sweet potatoes for supper.*  Eh?  I have a thing for sweet potatoes** & I eat a lot of them, but the theory is that I cut up a panful***, & this lasts me two or three days depending on what else is on my exotic & action-packed menu.†  However.  I am often working while I eat††, especially in the evening when the sweet potatoes appear†††, & last night I had hit a particularly exciting bit of story-in-progress & the pan of sweet potatoes was right there, because I was already into the exciting bit when the timer went off & I couldn’t be bothered putting a single serving in a bowl, so I kept absent-mindedly picking up another chunk & putting it in my mouth.  Some indeterminate length of time later, I prodded my chopsticks‡ into the pan & . . . couldn’t find anything.  This roused me from my story-stupor enough to look &, lo, I had eaten all three sweet potatoes, at which point I realised I felt rather full.  ‡‡

Ah, the wandering mind of a writer.‡‡‡  I feel there must be something wrong with a profession where you’re delighted when you discover you’ve lost your mind for several hours.  This is one of the things dogs are for, of course:  Yo, you there bent over that weird flickering flat silvery thing, you with the door key, the harness & lead, the crap bags &, crucially, the biscuits, I haven’t been out in HOURS!  I want to go for a hurtle! I want to go for a flat-out, shoulder-destroying hurtle THAT INCLUDES BISCUITS!ɸ  The important thing about a dog is that they will start nagging you sooner rather than later.  Towards the end of a book I will be losing my mind for longer & longer intervals, as the story takes over, & if, for example, you have ME & you go six hours without eating, you will fall on the floor & need resuscitating by the ambulance crew you’re too weak to hit ‘emergency’ on your phone for ɸɸ, possibly because your phone is still on the table being a thesaurus, or possibly because you’re very old & your ideas of advances in technology have to do, for example, with safety matches that don’t strike on anything to fire up but need that strip of something-or-other on the matchbook or the box, which always runs out before the matches do, which, because of the variability of the strip, is a slightly better idea than practise.  Like much of technology.  But a mobile phone is definitely a technology, or a century, too far, for a little old person with ME who hasn’t eaten in six hours.

I’m better off eating too many sweet potatoes.

& no, of course I’m not going to tell you what the particularly exciting bit is.  Don’t be ridiculous.

* * *

* Gosh!  This post is going to be even more thrilling than the one about central heating!

** ::EXTRA-BORING HEALTH FOOD JUNKIE ALERT [which goes on & on]::  They’re fabulously good for you.  They’re anti-inflammatory^ & full of antioxidants^^ & vitamins & minerals blah blah^^^.  The additional thinginess of my thing, however, is that as a grim, humourless sugar-free harridan, sweet potatoes taste like candy to me, & how about cramming down an entire package of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups followed by the biggest bag of M&Ms you could find, a few Mounds & Almond Joys & maybe a box of Turkish Delight to finish off?  & afterwards feeling SMUG & SELF RIGHTEOUS??  So, you know, yeah, sweet potatoes.^^^^ 

^ ME—I think all auto-immune stuff—comes with a lot of aches & pains & these do not get better with age.

^^ Oh, look it up.  Short form:  they slow down the going-to-pieces thing that all bodies start doing pretty much from the moment they’re born, & actively prop up & improve some of the crumbly bits.  The immune system, for example, which those of us with auto-immune anything tend to be a little obsessive about. 

^^^ beta carotene, for example, which is good for your eyes, & I’ve needed glasses since third grade, & I forget what does this+, but they’re also good for your gut, & you know how the gut biome is big in fashion these days?  Spare me.  I’ve been slogging through this ghastly swamp all my life because I’ve always carried stress & worry in my gut.  Gak urrgh.  At least gut trouble being fashionable makes reading up on it easier.  Yay?

+ You can look it up.  I am not, repeat not, a font of wisdom.  I am a font of fantasy. 

^^^^ Anybody out there struggling either with the idea of making enormous diet changes because their body is saying ha ha ha yeah I could put you in bed or a wheelchair if you don’t, or struggling with making those enormous diet changes . . . listen to me not lie to you here.  It’s not easy.  IT.  IS.  NOT.  EASY.  I’ve done it—I really am this grotesquely holier than thou—but it is not easy.  One of the things that sheds a little light on a dark path, however, is unexpected tangentials, like the startling gosh-wow sweetness of sweet potatoes.  Back in the day I had a fabulous recipe+ for candied sweet potatoes that generally brought oohs & ahhs & occasionally tears of ecstasy from equally-sugar-addicted dinner guests.  This sounds queasy-making to me now.  Fortunately.  Enormous life/diet changes do work.  But getting there is NOT EASY. 

+ I probably still have it somewhere.  I never throw anything out.#

# As I think about it, there will be more than one.  There was the caramelised brown sugar one & the drowning in maple syrup one—at least.=  Back in that day I had a major sweet tooth.  The funny thing is, I still do, I’ve just slid the marker on the chart way far back.

= & no, I’m not going to fish them out & post them for you.  There are a gazillion candied sweet potato recipes on line if that’s your fancy.  I don’t really know where my boundaries are about food & habit & standard practise & society, but I do object to how flapdoodling hard it is to live the health food junkie lifestyle.  Sugar—among other popular foodstuff facsimiles—isn’t good for you;  how bad it is for you depends on who you read, & how your own individual body reacts to it.  Moderation in all things, except when your individual body says nope, not with this thing.  This will start to stray into my hostility to conmed@ if I’m not careful:  I have ME, yeah, but it’s also a kind of dustbin diagnosis that includes all kinds of things, since nobody knows definitively what it/they is/are.  I’d be on a dozen different drugs if I went to doctors, while they patronised & guinea-pigged me & my peculiar muddle of symptoms;@@  no thanks.@@@  I’ve found a way to cope that works for me, & I’ll keep on with it as long as it keeps working.  & that really is yaaaaay. 

@ Conventional medicine:  ie medical doctors & their ilk & their world

@@ & most doctors—not all, but an awful lot of them—still pooh-pooh the idea that nutrition is really, really important.   &—gosh wow—can be life changing.  Or quality-of-life preserving.  Which makes it almost impossible to have any faith in anything else they want to tell me.

@@@ You want to scare yourself silly, go read some statistics on prescription drug use in the elderly.   Listen, I DO NOT KNOW what the answers are.  I’m fumbling along one day at a time here in this one-rat lab experiment.  But I do remember when Peter came out of hospital after his first stroke with a giant handful of prescriptions.  I went home & started looking them up, right?  & some of them were listed as incompatible, because all the up-themselves specialists hadn’t bothered to check anything outside their speciality.$  Fortunately Peter had a good, old-fashioned GP who sorted things out.  What happens if you don’t have a paranoid wife & a good old-fashioned GP?

$ I imagine I did some screaming about this on the old blog.  Or maybe not.  I was pretty worn down, those days.

*** It may reassure you—those of you who have read this far—that there are limits to my holier-than-thou-ness.  Apparently roasting your sweet potatoes is not the most excellent & healthful way to cook them.  But I like them roasted.  Cut them up, drizzle with a little olive oil, and roast till they turn golden & start getting a little brown around the edges.

† They’re maybe even better the second & third nights because when you reheat them they go goldener & browner around the edges.

†† If I’m not working I’m probably reading. The standard family dinner where you sit around & chat is the stuff of nightmares to a cranky introvert.  It’s fine for the occasional special event^ but as a regular nightly ritual??  SHUUUUUDDER.^^ 

^ especially when the food is as good as my local step daughter in law produces.  She’s actually willing to cater for my peculiarities.  Her commitment to family duty is vertiginously high.

^^ Living in a one-human household+ is quite good protection from this cauchemar.    

+ I’ve never met a dog that requires chat. 

††† “)*&(%^$£”}]#???!!!!!! blood-boiling con-ratbag-founded ME energy spikes AT WEIRD TIMES OF DAY OR NIGHT “)*&(%^$£”}]#???!!!!!!  ME has a perversity ratio that puts mere infuriating inanimate objects to shame.  There’s a chicken or egg question here though.  Is my particular case of ME so doolally about time because I was doolally about time already?  I can tell you my doolallitude has got a lot worse since the ME.

‡ Sic

‡‡ Rats!  I was looking forward to my exotic & action-packed hummus!

‡‡‡ OH COME ON.  Microthumpingmoronsoft is telling me that should be minds of a writer.  WHAT?! ^

^ Don’t tell me they know something I don’t know.

ɸ & a real meal in a large bowl when we get back.  With more BISCUITS after.

ɸɸ  Do not, repeat not, say anything to me about the fabulous health benefits of intermittent fasting, because I will bite you.  Fasting only works if your metabolism can put up with it.  Since ME is a many-splendored thing, possibly there are people with ME out there who can fast.  I am not one of them.  But since I’m an alternate-health junkie I kind of keep up, even when I don’t want to, with the latest fashions in ways not to have to get involved with conmed.  & you get idiots with clubs clouting you with the next humungous & spectacular & THE ONE, THE ONLY ANSWER TO EVERYTHING!!!! big thingummy doodah in alternate health like every other field of human endeavour.  Arrgh.

Central heating & applesauce

Well I’ve finally turned the central heating on.*  It’s down in the low 40s** out there, & it was fifty freaking three in my bedroom***, & I’m a middle-class first-world little old lady, & 53 degrees† F is too cold for the room I get dressed in.††  It had slowly sunk down to 65/18 in here, the room with the Aga in it, & 65 despite Aga enhancement is usually when I say, okay, central heating. 

So now I get to listen to the plumbing thudding & growling—if you put your hand on the wall in the downstairs loo you can feel it thudding & growling—which if you’re a fantasy reader/writer it’s very difficult not to translate††† into trolls with hammers about to break into this reality & cause trollish mayhem & consternation.  Sometimes I wish I were an accountant.‡  Where the only things that are really real are orderly numbers in columns.‡‡

It is a little warmer in here though. 

But mostly I’ve spent this week making applesauce.‡‡‡  One of my neighbours has a garden tardis, as opposed to the better-known London police box kind ɸ, & for several weeks every autumn there is a Large Box on the low wall in front of their house full of beat-up green apples with a sign on it saying PLEASE HELP YOURSELF.  Any of you out there who know Bramleys know that the trees usually are overachievers but this is ridiculous.  It’s a large box, & as the word gets round, you see people arriving with enormous bags . . . & the apples still keep coming.  I know how large that garden is, or isn’t, in real land area, & even Bramleys have their limits, so the owners must have done Dr Who a favour ɸɸ  at some point, & having ascertained that they like applesauce. . . . It’s down the hill from us but we walk past nearly every day on our way to say hello to Kinsukey ɸɸɸ.  We’ve had a lot of apples.  We might have had more except for the muscle-scorching effort to stop Genghis eating all of them Ω.  After I’ve loaded up my pockets we bound home, with him trying to get his nose into a pocket & me trying to prevent him . . . sigh.  As I say at least 1,000,000 times a day, it’s a good thing he’s cute.

I don’t know how they produce the Bramleys you see in stores, which are a lot greener & less knobbly than the ones people grow in their gardens & look surprisingly like, you know, apples, instead of green meteorites of uncertain provenance. ΩΩ   But it’s a sort of meditative thing, an epic-ly big bowl of home-grown Bramleys, a peeler & a paring knife, & hours go by ΩΩΩ.  But the resulting applesauce is divine.※

  * * *

* SO EXCITING!!!!  This is what this blog is for, of course.  To tell its readers things of such FABULOUS FERMENT & SENSATION that their hearts will beat faster than running after a GWHP would cause.  Irresistible excitement, furthermore, that you won’t find anywhere else.^

^ Which is true, after all.  You aren’t going to read that Robin McKinley turned her central heating on anywhere else. 

** That’s sort of 4-7 in the new money.  I’m a Fahrenheit girl.  I can do 61 =16 & 50 = 10 in my head.  Anything else, I have to look it up.

*** 11.  Maybe all of you reading this are fluent in temperature numbers, & I’m just wasting blog space^ giving you translations.  HOWEVER I DOUBT IT.  You’re all fantasy readers, right?  There will be some crossover with people who can do long division & even algebra^^ but I’m willing to bet there are a lot of you who would rather be honeyed up & laid over an ant hill than do long division.^^^

^ call that GETTING THE WORD COUNT UP any way possible.  I’m trying to do this blog thing again twice a week, ugh, oops, maybe, & I have delusions of say, three times in a good week, a really good week, & I’m rather strickenly aware there’s only so many times I can use Genghis, who is absolutely my best subject.+

+ Also:  AWWWWWWWWW.  Because I am not the not the brightest bear in the wood,# it took me a day or so to realise that part of what the encounter with the dire wolf was about was Genghis protecting me.  Yes, he was yanking me around so we stayed facing the Evil Thing, but he was also emphatically staying between me & it.  All I was aware of at the time was that my shoulders and hands were starting to hurt, & the adrenaline was blanking out all of my brain except the part that let me shout expletives.  But as I said in the last post, he’s so good natured.  As well as a total goof.  He still spends a lot of time on his back, tummy up, wagging his tail like mad & gnawing—gently—on my forearms.## When he’s belly down like a sensible dog, he’s probably trying to crawl into my lap.  I’ve got pretty good at typing over a dog.  It’s hard to adjust to the Great Fierce Chivalrous Genghis.

# “Those who are clever, who have a Brain, never understand anything.”
—Winnie the Pooh

## Which means I spend most of my life with blue-&-purple polka-dotted hands & forearms.  Have I told you this before?  It’s a permanent grumble.  Little old lady skin is a—well, a nudnick, if one is allowed to say that about parts of one’s body.  It is a NUISANCE.  It makes tissue paper look like chain mail.  & I don’t get any less clumsy with age=, never mind the GWHP with teeth.  So I’m dotted not only with pinhead bruises, but with freaking plasters.==  I look like I’m probably contagious.  The keeping people at a distance aspect would be fine, so long as they don’t report me to Disease Control.

= I CUT MYSELF ON A DOG FOOD TIN TODAY.  I only open dog food tins two or three times a day.  Every day.  

== Including a new one for the DOG FOOD TIN CUT.  Which bled like mad, of course. 

^^ ::shivers violently::, which is very unfair to the junior-high teacher who shovelled me through Algebra I to a ‘B’ grade.  I think I’ve told you this story?  Never mind if you’ve forgotten, I’m sure to tell it again.  If I’d ever got round to being president+ I’d’ve fished her out of retirement & given her a Presidential Medal of Freedom.

+ I’D BE BETTER AT IT THAN SOME PEOPLE

^^^ That would be me, of course.  I can do long division+ but on those occasions I find myself forced to do so, I break out in a rash similar to being chewed on by ants. 

+ I mean without recourse to technology beyond paper, pencil, & screaming

† I have to venture into the diabolical Microdingdongsoft insert tab to get a degree sign, & life is too short.

†† Particularly because as soon as I turn the electric fire on, Genghis lies down in front of it.  GWHPs are very large & absorbent when they’re lying in front of an electric fire.

††† Speaking of translations, & also of fantasy.^

^ Some day I’m going to do some snarling about fantasy being as real as so-called consensual+ reality.  But not today.

+ Define consensual.#

# Nope.  Wrong.  Try again.

‡ Although that probably wouldn’t work either.  I know of at least one accountant who reads McKinley.^  I have no idea what he & his colleagues chat about at the 21st-century water cooler equivalent.  Maybe not trolls?

^ &, for example, Diana Wynne Jones# & Octavia Butler ## & A LOT OF OTHER PEOPLE, BUT THIS BLOG POST MIGHT EXPLODE IF I LISTED THEM ALL

# all the best people read DWJ

## all the best people read Octavia Butler too, but you might want to read your campervan’s instruction manual or something between Jones & Butler, or your head might explode

‡‡ NOOOOOOOOOOO . . . I’ll take the trolls, thanks.

‡‡‡ No fear I’m turning into a domestic goddess.  HA HA HA HA HA HA.  I just like applesauce.

ɸ There’s a pun here about ‘common or garden variety’ but I’m not grasping it.  I probably need more applesauce.

ɸɸ Or a whack up longside the head, depending on your attitude to hard sour lumpy green apples

ɸɸɸ No, I haven’t found another garage yet.  Every time I think about it I go into a kind of Coma of Terror & have to go lie down on a GWHP & read a murder mystery to recover.

Ω In the first place, I have an all-points verboten about him scavenging anyway, which is one of the reasons walking him is such a nightmare, but you don’t have to clean up the kitchen floor^ or get up in the middle of the night^^ to take an abdominally bursting dog outdoors very often to start getting a little pathological about what he eats.  & he doesn’t differentiate.  There’s no way I’m going to put over the concept of ‘apples okay—green & black slimy stinking rotting corpses NOT okay’, aside from the further fact about Genghis & ingestibles, which is that he eats until whatever it is isn’t there any more.  I’ve already told you it’s a BIG BOX, & the wall is plenty low enough for Genghis to get at it, except I have him in the kind of stranglehold that makes little old ladies^^^ who have never walked a dog in their lives, or at least nothing bigger than a Yorkie, tsk at me. 

^ the old Victorian plank floor with CRACKS in it, right?  Where noxious substances can SLITHER & OOZE?

^^ I’ve told you my sleep patterns are a trifle deranged.  Let’s say the middle of the time stretch I would like to be asleep during.

^^^ Littler.  Older.

ΩΩ I think Dr Who might have granted the greener less knobbly kind.  So maybe it was a whack up longside the head, & my neighbours put all the apples in the box out front while wishing they hadn’t said that about his hairstyle or his messianic complex^.

^ I stopped watching several doctors ago.  I keep meaning to try the one with the woman.

ΩΩΩ & the alertly sitting dog is trying to convince me that he’s dying of hunger, specifically apple hunger.  He likes Bramleys!  Green & sour is fine with him!^

^ I actually like green & sour myself, but occasionally for variety I put a few dates in the applesauce, since I’m a sugar-free zone.

※ I put a—decorated—note through their door saying thank you about a fortnight ago.  Apples are fun to draw & I have all these coloured fibre-tip pens . . .